[PHOTO] Looking up at Broadview from Todmorden Mills

The residential towers of Broadview Avenue rise in the near distance over the buildings of Todmorden Mills, deep in the Don Valley.

[OBSCURA] The most expensive house in Atlantic Canada

The National Post's Shari Kulha reported on the most expensive piece of housing on the market in Atlantic Canada, a mansion on the north shore of Prince Edward Island in the eastern community of Cable Head East.

The property is listed here, with Century 21 Northumberland Realty's Michael Poczynek, and also has a website, cableheadeast.com. The photo comes from Century 21 Northumberland Realty.

On the north coast of Prince Edward Island, this 11-acre property overlooks nothing but the open expanses of the Atlantic Ocean. Built just two years ago, this 13,500-square-foot architect-designed custom home has a long, low profile so it melds with the flat lands around it, while reflecting its maritime location with a spectacular light tower for limitless views.

On the market at $6.95-million, the house has been built with the site’s natural state in mind; the roof is of Western red cedar, the exterior of Pennsylvania field and flag stone and shingle roofing.

[. . .]

The remote location offers the ultimate in privacy. Excellent golfing and sailing is never far away on the island, but for a close-to-home activity, a red-sand beach mere metres from the house offers the option of quiet, contemplative strolls with the dog at your feet.

[LINK] "Black Holes, Fermi Bubbles and the Milky Way"

Universe Today's Tammy Plotner described a theory proposed by two American astronomers to explain the peculiarities of the center of our galaxy. Ten million years ago, the Milky Way may have eaten a satellite galaxy, complete with its black hole.

Deep at the heart of our galaxy lurks a black hole. This isn’t exciting news, but neither is it a very exciting place. Or is it? While all might be quiet on the western front now, there may be evidence that our galactic center was once home to some pretty impressive activity – activity which may have included multiple collision events and mergers of black holes as it gorged on a satellite galaxies. Thanks to new insights from a pair of assistant professors, Kelly Holley-Bockelmann at Vanderbilt and Tamara Bogdanovic at Georgia Institute of Technology, we have more evidence which points to the Milky Way’s incredibly active past.

[ . . . Imagine a night sky illuminated by a a huge nebula, one that covers half the celestial sphere. This isn’t a dream, it’s a reality. These massive lobes of high-energy radiation are known as Fermi bubbles and they cover a region some 30,000 light years on either side of the Milky Way’s core. While we can’t observe them directly in visible light, these particles are moving along at close to 186,000 miles per second and glowing in x-ray and gamma ray wavelengths.

[. . .]

However, our galactic center is home to more than just some incredible bubbles – it’s the location of three of the most massive clusters of young stars within the Milky Way’s realm. Known as the Central, Arches and Quintuplet clusters, each grouping houses several hundred hot, young stars which dwarf the Sun. They will live short, bright, violent lives… burning out in a scant few million years. Because they live fast and die young, these cluster stars must have formed within recent years during a eruption of star formation near the galactic center – another clue to this cosmic puzzle.

[. . .]

To deepen the mystery, take a closer look at our central black hole. It spans about 40 light seconds in diameter and weighs about four million solar masses. According to what we know, this should produce intensive gravitational tides – ones that should be sucking in the surroundings. So how is it that astronomers have uncovered groups of new, bright stars closer than 3 light years from the event horizon? Of course, they could be on their way to oblivion, but the data shows these stars seem to have formed there. That’s quite a feat considering it would require a molecular cloud 10,000 times more dense than the one located at our galactic center! Shouldn’t there also be old stars located there as well? The answer is yes, there should be… but there are far fewer than what we can observe and what current theoretical models predict.

[. . .]

According to their theory, a Milky Way satellite galaxy began migrating towards our core. As it merged with our galaxy, its mass was torn away, leaving only its black hole and a small collection of gravitationally bound stars. After several million years, this “leftover” eventually reached the galactic center and the black holes began to merge. As the smaller black hole was swirled around the larger, it plowed up huge furrows of gas and dust, pushing it into the larger black hole and created the Fermi bubbles. The dueling gravitational forces weren’t gentle… these intense tides were quite capable of compressing the molecular clouds surrounding the core into the density required to produce fresh, young stars. Perhaps the very young stars we now observe at the galactic center?

[LINK] "Men’s Rights Activists: A Letter to Marilena"

I thought on International Women's Day I'd share an old Wonkman post about the misogyny behind the men's rights movement. Positioning the male gender as disadvantaged by feminism is somewhat ridiculous.

It must be understood that MRAs have, at their absolute nuclear core, some useful and practical things to say. (Routine circumcision has a questionable moral basis; the sentencing gap deserves further exploration; we don’t do a very good job of handling male rape victims; etc.) Many of their arguments are actually quite strong and cannot simply be dismissed out of hand.

But there are some damn good reasons why you should want nothing to do with these guys.

Bluntly stated, it is absolutely undeniable that many self-identifying Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs) simply hate women. Some MRAs have no problem with women whatsoever. Some MRAs merely resent women. (“She belongs in the kitchen” and other trash like that.) But large numbers openly, vocally and explicitly hate women. It shows in the language they use, the culture they consume and promote, in their stated attitudes about women, in their own self-image, and most of all in their politics.

And it’s not just that these men are kind of gross. It’s that the MRA movement provides a means by which they can organize and seek legitimacy. Instead of a bunch of isolated cranks writing nasty anonymous letters to women with blogs and newspaper columns, it’s an echo chamber within which the cranks can organize, spread their vitriol more efficiently, and actively work to dismantle anything which offends their delicate, delicate sensibilities.

[DM] "The Great Portuguese Hollowing Out"

Over at Demography Matters, my co-blogger Edward Hugh has a post up on the situation faced by Portugal. One-sentence summary? "With every passing day Portugal has less and less economy left, while fewer and fewer people remain to try to pay down the debt."