[DM] "A brief note on Bricker and Ibbitson's The Big Shift"

I've a post up at Demography Matters referencing a new book, The Big Shift: The Seismic Change In Canadian Politics, Business, And Culture And What It Means For Our Future, by Canadians Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson. Their thesis that Canada is becoming more conservative as immigrants and booming western Canada are drawn to the Conservative Party doesn't strike me as obviously wrong.

[PHOTO] "With man gone, will there be hope for gorilla?"

Well, will there?

[URBAN NOTE] On the Thomson-Ford affair

Last Thursday night, former Toronto mayoral candidate and publisher Sarah Thomson claims to have been groped by mayor Rob Ford at a political event. 680 News reports her allegations that he seemed to be on something.

The she-said, he-said battle between Mayor Rob Ford and Sarah Thomson was taken up a notch Monday, with the former mayoral candidate saying Ford may have been on cocaine when he allegedly groped her and made inappropriate comments at a charity event last week.

In an interview with CityNews, Thomson alleges that Ford was acting “high as a kite” when they met during Thursday’s Canadian Jewish Political Affairs Committee (CJPAC) gala: “I looked up different symptoms and there seem to be a lot of things that he could have been on – it might have been cocaine, it might have been diabetes. It could have been a lot of things.”

The mayor, meanwhile, would not comment on Thomson’s latest speculation regarding possible drug use.

The flashpoint in this war of words occurred Thursday night at a downtown CJPAC fundraiser. Thomson alleges Ford made inappropriate comments towards her and then grabbed her buttocks – both of which Ford adamantly denies.

Thomson says she hasn’t ruled out going to the police regarding his actions and is discussing her options with family and advisors.

I'm strongly inclined to believe Thomson's claim of assault, if not necessarily her claim that Ford was on drugs, or something. As she pointed out, Ford has a history of doing inappropriate things--verbally assaulting a Durham couple during a hockey game while drunk, admitting to multiple DUIs, et cetera--and then denying it.

Sarah Thomson, a former mayoral candidate, released a statement to media on Sunday evening, following remarks Ford made earlier in the day, in which he again denied allegations that he inappropriately touched her at a public event last Thursday.

Summarizing the events of the past three days, Thomson said that she had written a Facebook post on Friday morning alleging that Ford "made suggestive comments" and "groped" her at a Canadian Jewish Political Affairs Committee event the night before.

"Since then, the Mayor, his supporters and conservative media agencies have denied my claims, impugned my character and attacked my credibility," Thomson said in her statement on Sunday.

"I did not make these accusations lightly. I admit I did not handle the press perfectly, but I had just gone through a very rattling experience."

As an aside, if you go to the blogs like blogTO and Torontoist, you'll find people attacking Thomson on a variety of grounds including her looks (her dreadlocks come in for particular criticism).

[LINK]\ "Yasir Naqvi says he didn't endorse controversial book on Islam"

Ontario Liberal Minister Yasir Naqvi is in trouble, deservedly. I rarely agree with Hudak but Naqvi should certainly apologize.

Labour Minister Yasir Naqvi says he didn’t endorse a controversial book on Islam that says it’s OK for men to physically punish their wives.

Naqvi acknowledged that he wrote a letter of support for the book two years ago, but says he didn’t read it.

The former president of the Liberal party says he doesn’t share the views expressed in the book and “in no way” endorsed its contents. He was just recently named to the cabinet of Premier Kathleen Wynne.

“I admire your drive to reach out to the public and promote values of tolerance, understanding and respect,” Naqvi said in his letter to author Suhail Kapoor.

The letter from Naqvi appears in the reviews section of “Islam: Balancing Life and Beyond.”

The book argues in a chapter called Does Islam Allow Wife Beating? that the Koran condones “lightly” striking your wife if she commits “serious moral misconduct.”

[. . .]

Opposition Leader Tim Hudak says it’s disturbing that Naqvi endorsed such “garbage” and should apologize.

[URBAN NOTE] "Analysis of 29 Dufferin for March 2012"

Toronto transit blogger Steve Munro has the second part of his analysis of traffic patterns from the notorious 29 Dufferin bus up at his website; I'd linked to the first part here. It makes for interesting reading, not least since apparently the worst delays occur before peak evening traffic times.

[LINK] "Thailand passes Canada in car production"

This news item, drawing from a Scotiabank report available here, got a certain amount of coverage locally. I suspect that news items like this are inevitable, inasmuch as the rest of the world catches up to Canada in overall industrial development. For all of its political and economic problems, there are still twice as many Thais as there are Canadians; catch-up per capita inevitably would mean surpassing in totals. (Mexico, too, has leapfrogged ahead of Canada.)

Canada's heft as a maker of automobiles is shrinking, and a new analysis of the world's car industry from Scotiabank suggests we're barely in the Top 10, leapfrogged by Thailand.

In his monthly report, the bank's economist Carlos Gomes says concerted efforts by the Thai government to build up production seem to be working, as the Asian nation produced 68 per cent more cars in January 2013 than it did the same month a year earlier.

Unlike Canada, which exports most of its cars, some 60 per cent of Thai-made vehicles are for the domestic market. And booming demand thanks to a new-car buyer's rebate that the Thai government has implemented until June 2013 is pushing the country to make even more cars to keep up with demand.

The Thai Federation of Industries expects vehicle production to jump 43 per cent in the first quarter of 2013, and a government official recently stated that Thailand could build 2.8 million vehicles this year, up from 2.4 million last year.

"This would enable car and truck production in Thailand to leapfrog past assemblies in Canada," Gomes wrote. He suggests the country could be making 3 million cars a year by 2015.

Gomes's assessment jibes with official data from the International Organization of Motor Vehicle Manufacturers, which shows Canada barely held on to its No. 10 overall ranking last year, with 2,463,732 Canadian-built vehicles.

Thailand built 2,483,043 vehicles in 2012, good enough for ninth overall.

[LINK] "First Reconnaissance Of An Exoplanetary System"

HR 8799, a star 49% more massive than our sun and nearly five times as bright, roughly 129 light years away, stands out for a few reasons. For starters, it's only 30 million years old. More interestingly, as I noted in December 2010, it is known to host four gas giant planets, young massive worlds that are still so hot that their radiated heat lets them be directly detected by telescopic observations. Scientific American's Caleb Scharf notes at his blog that the four gas giants of HR 8799 are now the first planets with atmospheres possessing spectra that have been directly imaged. We know what their atmospheres are made of.

There are signatures of compounds like methane and ammonia, but also of things that might be acetylene and hydrogen cyanide – it’s a real mix. To quote Oppenheimer et al. – their analyses suggest that the planets are like this:

• b: contains ammonia and/or acetylene as well as CO2 but little methane.

• c: contains ammonia, perhaps some acetylene but neither CO2 nor substantial methane.

• d: contains acetylene, methane and CO2 but ammonia is not definitively detected.

• e: contains methane and acetylene but no ammonia or CO2.

You might be glazing over with this, so what does it mean? First, it means that these objects look more like planets than they do brown dwarfs. They’re also clearly, and remarkably, distinct from each other – despite (presumably) all being big, hot, gas giants. The only one that looks vaguely familiar is ‘e’ – whose spectrum is a bit like that of the night-side of Saturn.

Exactly how and why these worlds are so varied is a juicy puzzle. The researchers suggest that it might in part be a result of ultra-violet light flooding the system in bursts from the youthful star HR 8799. A thousand times brighter than the equivalent from our Sun, this radiation can drive all sorts of chemical and physical changes in planetary atmospheres.

The process is described by a paper by astronomer Ben Oppenheimer and colleagues.