[PHOTO] Canada Malting Silos

The Canada Malting Silos at the foot of Bathurst Street have an interesting history, as Wikipedia notes.

Located at the foot of Bathurst Street at Bathurst Quay (Eireann Quay), the silos were built in 1928 to store malt for the Canada Malting Company. It was an important work of industrial architecture, grain elevators had long been built out of wood, and thus at great danger of fire. The concrete malting towers were an innovation, and the stark functionalism of the prominent building was an early influence on modernist architecture. A round office was added in 1944 and glass office was built in the original construction in 1928. The main silos, 15 in all, are 120 feet (37 meters) high and additional storage bins built in 1944 are 150 feet (46 meters) high.

It was abandoned in the 1980s and destined for demolition, but it was designated a heritage site by the city of Toronto. A group called Metronome Canada hoped to convert the silos into a music museum or theme park. The city of Toronto is also considering it as a location for a municipal history museum.

Demolition of the germination and kiln buildings began early September 2010. The silos will be left standing, eventually being incorporated into future developments on the site. The municipality has not yet decided exactly what will be done with the space once the demolition project is complete.

See also Jonathan Castellino's 2008 post at blogTO talking about the ways this architecture is noteworthy and can be used.

[URBAN NOTE] On Glad Day Bookstore's Indiegogo fundraiser

Toronto's Glad Day Bookshop is on the final day of an Indiegogo fundraising project aimed at raising 15 thousand dollars Canadian for online expansion.

We need $15,000 to be able to launch and promote a new website with new tools. The most important new element would be an online bookstore that is independent of the mega-corporations. Your support will make it possible for us to list over 2,000 LGBTQ titles and use a platform that meets our needs. The new site would also have other cool functions like a book review blog, an events calendar and an LGBTQ ‘memory project’.

As investors, we have maxed out our available credit and debt to keep the store open. We don’t have a way to access the money needed to bring the store to the next level. Over this last year, so many people have asked us what they can do to keep the store alive and vibrant so we thought this could be a way to make it possible for all our many allies to show their support by funding something that is practical, concrete and strategic.

[. . .]

If we raise all our funds, it would be broken down like this:

$6000 – Website Design, Customization & Coding
$4000 – Extra Staff Time for Data Entry of +2000 Items
$2500 – Online Promotion
$1500 – Online Store Start-Up Costs & Fees
$1000 – Local Promotion & Launch Event

If we get less funds than our goal, we will reduce the number of items we list and the online promotion.

So far, they're at C$9,022. I'll be donating what little I can tonight. You?

[LINK] "Via Rail terror suspect can't find lawyer to argue he be judged against Qur'an"

Diana Mehta's Canadian Press article, hosted at the Ottawa Citizen, suggests that Chibeb Esseghaier--a Tunisian-born graduate student arrested on charges of planning in a plot to bomb a Via Rail train--is continuing his rather eccentric strategy of defense.

Chiheb Esseghaier appeared in a Toronto court via video link on Monday to discuss his attempts to find legal aid representation — a process which has so far been unsuccessful due to the specific and unusual demands he has made.

"I want that the lawyer help me to change the reference of my case from the laws used by humans to the laws of the holy book," he told the court. "I cannot take a lawyer who is not able to fulfil my need."

[. . .]

As the Crown prosecutor told the court the last potential lawyer offered to Esseghaier had been unable to represent him based on his demands, the Montreal man repeatedly asked to be allowed to comment.

"It's not me I refuse the last lawyer," an adamant Esseghaier said.

"He write on a piece of paper, he write and he sign that he is not able to convince the court to change the reference of my case from the Criminal Code to the holy Qur'an.

"He said to me I am not able to fulfil your need, so what I can do? I cannot accept him."

[URBAN NOTE] "Point and shoot cameras, not guns, police say"

Turn in firearms to Toronto police and you can get a camera. Notwithstanding apparent success of a similar program in Winnipeg in December of last year, the idea sounds odd.

Toronto police have launched a guns-for-cameras amnesty in the city aimed at taking weapons off the street that may end up in the hands of criminals.

"We know there are a lot of people who have firearms in their homes that would rather not have them there," said chief Bill Blair. "We want to give them an opportunity to get them out."

[. . .]

During the next two weeks, Torontonians will have the opportunity to surrender their firearms in exchange for an Olympus digital camera with an estimated retail value of $100.

"Our intent is to reduce the number of firearms in this city that aren’t being used by sportsmen or hunters," Blair said. "This is not an amnesty for criminals; it's an amnesty for citizens of the city of Toronto to surrender their firearms safely."

The initiative was first launched in 2008 when Toronto residents surrendered roughly 2,000 firearms and 58,000 rounds of ammunition.

More recently, Winnipeggers surrendered 1,700 guns and 13,000 rounds of ammunition over a one-month period in December of last year.

Anyone wishing to participate in the gun amnesty can call the Toronto Police Service at 416-808-2222 or visit their website to fill out a partial police report.

[URBAN NOTE] "Detroit art collection under threat as city looks to sell assets"

This is a very sad story.

The Detroit Institute of Arts' multimillion-dollar collection is being reviewed by an emergency city manager seeking assets to sell to pay off municipal debt.

[. . . T]he news that the art institute's building and its collection — which includes works by Picasso, van Gogh and Bruegel — could be sold off to relieve debt has shocked both the local community and art lovers everywhere.

“There’s never been a municipal bankruptcy or a manager appointed to oversee a city’s finances on this scale before in the U.S.,” she told CBC’s Q cultural affairs show.

“And there’s never been an asset like the DIA collection involved in something like this. We really are in uncharted waters.”

Michigan governor Rick Snyder recently appointed emergency city manager Kevyn Orr to investigate the city’s crisis. Orr contacted the museum about two weeks ago, demanding that it play a role in solving the city’s debt problem.

Erickson says exactly what that role might be will be worked out over the next month. Though Detroit doesn’t contribute toward the operating costs of the museum, the art and the building are owned by the city.

[URBAN NOTE] "Why Pride Matters"

Wonkman blogs about why it matters that Toronto's mayor Rob Ford has refused, for a third year, to attend Toronto Pride. A decade ago, when GLBT rights were that much less mainstream, suburban conservative Mel Lastman went.

Mel went because he was a tremendous baby-kisser. Mel was never happier than when he was shaking hands and meeting new people and mixing with his constituents. Parades and street festivals were incredible fun.

But more importantly, Mel went because Mel recognized that he was mayor of the entire city.

Not just the parts which voted for him, and not just the parts which he found appealing.

One of Mel’s main goals as mayor was to bring the city together: to promote inclusiveness and mutual understanding, to promote and protect minority cultures, to foster an environment where people from all over the world can feel at home.

And if occasionally he had to something he found distasteful or uncomfortable to reach that goal? Mel would pull on his big-boy pants and get it over with.

[. . .]

This was one of the pivotal moments in Mel’s career as mayor. It set the tone for the rest of his term in office. It was a moment when he proved something important to his constituents: all that talk about “inclusiveness” and “mayor of the whole city” was more than just idle political chatter. He was going to put himself out there, he was going to make a good-faith effort to engage with minority cultures on their own terms, and he was going to use his power as mayor to encourage the values he espoused, rather than cynically ditching them after election night.

Mel was not a perfect mayor—but he got this part right. No matter what you thought about his politics and his policies, we all knew that he genuinely loved this city and its people. It’s part of why he absolutely roared to victory in the 2000 mayoral election.

Mel started with a city split nearly in two along ideological and geographic lines, and he turned it into a unified, cohesive and coherent metropolis. He healed the rifts which he himself had inadvertently created. And he left the city more united, more even and more inclusive than he’d found it.

Would that Ford was a tenth of Lastman.

[LINK] "New Physics Complications Lend Support to Multiverse Hypothesis"

This Scientific American article, by Natalie Wolchover and Simons Science News, makes the interesting case that the universe is just one of a near-infinitude, that our particular universe with its laws and contants is the product of not of inevitable things but of chance events. We're just lucky enough to be living in one that supports our kind of life. (Others, committed to religious explanations of one type or another, might argue this is proof of some agency's planning.)

With the discovery of only one particle, the LHC experiments deepened a profound problem in physics that had been brewing for decades. Modern equations seem to capture reality with breathtaking accuracy, correctly predicting the values of many constants of nature and the existence of particles like the Higgs. Yet a few constants — including the mass of the Higgs boson — are exponentially different from what these trusted laws indicate they should be, in ways that would rule out any chance of life, unless the universe is shaped by inexplicable fine-tunings and cancellations.

In peril is the notion of “naturalness,” Albert Einstein’s dream that the laws of nature are sublimely beautiful, inevitable and self-contained. Without it, physicists face the harsh prospect that those laws are just an arbitrary, messy outcome of random fluctuations in the fabric of space and time.

The LHC will resume smashing protons in 2015 in a last-ditch search for answers. But in papers, talks and interviews, Arkani-Hamed and many other top physicists are already confronting the possibility that the universe might be unnatural. (There is wide disagreement, however, about what it would take to prove it.)

“Ten or 20 years ago, I was a firm believer in naturalness,” said Nathan Seiberg, a theoretical physicist at the Institute, where Einstein taught from 1933 until his death in 1955. “Now I’m not so sure. My hope is there’s still something we haven’t thought about, some other mechanism that would explain all these things. But I don’t see what it could be.”

Physicists reason that if the universe is unnatural, with extremely unlikely fundamental constants that make life possible, then an enormous number of universes must exist for our improbable case to have been realized. Otherwise, why should we be so lucky? Unnaturalness would give a huge lift to the multiverse hypothesis, which holds that our universe is one bubble in an infinite and inaccessible foam. According to a popular but polarizing framework called string theory, the number of possible types of universes that can bubble up in a multiverse is around 10^500. In a few of them, chance cancellations would produce the strange constants we observe.

[LINK] On the optical discovery of planet HD95086 b

Universe Today's Elizabeth Howell writes about the optical detection of a planet orbiting the distant young Sirius-like star HD95086. This planet is detectable only because it is both massive and young.

HD95086 b [is what] astronomers believe is one of only about a dozen exoplanets ever imaged. It’s 300 light-years from Earth. The planet candidate is about four to five times the mass of Jupiter and orbiting a very young star that is probably only 10 million to 17 million years old. That’s a baby compared to our own solar system, estimated at 4.5 billion years old.

We still have a lot to learn about this object (and the observations from the Very Large Telescope will need to be confirmed independently), but so far astronomers say they figure that planet formed in the gas and dust surrounding star HD 95086. But the planet is actually very far away from the star now, about twice the distance as the Sun-Neptune orbital span in our own solar system.

[. . .]

Astronomers estimate the planet candidate has a surface temperature of 1,292 degrees Fahrenheit (700 degrees Celsius), which could allow water vapor or methane to stick around in the atmosphere. It will take more VLT observations to figure this out, though.

The results from this study will be published in Astrophysical Journal Letters. The paper is also available on prepublishing site Arxiv.

[LINK] "On the Nature of the Local Spiral Arm of the Milky Way"

A post by Universe Today's Elizabeth Howell pointed me to a recent paper suggesting that our Orion Arm--the branch of the Milky Way Galaxy where we and almost all of the stars in our night sky lie--may, well, actually be an arm and not a mere spur of another arm. From the abstract:

Trigonometric parallax measurements of nine water masers associated with the Local arm of the Milky Way were carried out as part of the BeSSeL Survey using the VLBA. When combined with 21 other parallax measurements from the literature, the data allow us to study the distribution and 3-dimensional motions of star forming regions in the spiral arm over the entire northern sky. Our results suggest that the Local arm does not have the large pitch angle characteristic of a short spur. Instead its active star formation, overall length (>5 kpc), and shallow pitch angle (~10 degrees) suggest that it is more like the adjacent Perseus and Sagittarius arms; perhaps it is a branch of one of these arms. Contrary to previous results, we find the Local arm to be closer to the Perseus than to the Sagittarius arm, suggesting that a branching from the former may be more likely. An average peculiar motion of near-zero toward both the Galactic center and north Galactic pole, and counter rotation of ~ 5 km/s were observed, indicating that the Local arm has similar kinematic properties as found for other major spiral arms.

And, from the conclusion:

We have studied the nature of the Local arm by measuring parallax distances and proper motions of nine 22-GHz H2O masers associated with star-forming regions. We include previously published parallaxes and proper motions for 21 other star forming regions (from either H2O, CH3 OH, SiO masers or YSO continuum emission). These 30 sources clearly lie between the Sagittarius and Perseus spiral arms and belong to the Local arm. This arm is at least ∼5 kpc in length and ∼1 kpc in width; it is not a spur and may be a branch of the Perseus arm, a bifurcation of the Carina arm, or an independent arm segment. The average peculiar motions of the sources in the Local arm are similar to those of HMSFRs in other major spiral arms of the Milky Way.

[LINK] "Crouching Tiger Hidden Magnetar"

Markus Hammonds' Discovery news post suggests that there may be many more magnetars in the galaxy that previously believed.

Magnetars are a rare type of neutron star, with powerful magnetic fields making them prone to occasional violent outbursts. Only a small handful of these curious beasts have been found in our galaxy, but new research from the Chandra X-ray Observatory implies that they may be a lot more common than previously expected. They may simply be in hiding.

Magnetars are traditionally thought to show intense magnetic fields on their surfaces, reaching thousands of times the strength of the fields found on regular neutron stars. But 6,500 light years from Earth, one magnetar in particular, SGR 0418+5729, seems to buck the trend. On the surface, it appears to be just an ordinary neutron star.

It seems, there may be a lot which we don’t know about these massive stellar magnets. Nanda Rea at the Barcelona Institute of Space Science explained that ”we have found that SGR 0418 has a much lower surface magnetic field than any other magnetar,” elaborating that there may be some important consequences for our understanding of both neutron stars and the supernova explosions which create them.

For over three years, researchers kept a watchful eye on SGR 0418, using some of the world’s best x-ray observatories. By measuring changes in its rotation during x-ray outbursts, they managed to accurately estimate the external magnetic field strength of the neutron star.

Strangely, at least on the outside, that magnetic field appeared a lot weaker than they were expecting. And it’s very likely that there are other neutron stars out there which are hiding their true colors. “We think that about once a year in every galaxy a quiet neutron star should turn on with magnetar-like outbursts, according to our model for SGR 0418,” commented José Pons of the University of Alicante, Spain, who hopes that many more such objects may come to light with further research.

[LINK] "How Boston powered the gay rights movement"

I'd read of Boston's role as an intellectual hub in Edmund White's early 1980s States of Desire, but Leon Neyfakh's Boston Globe article is the first article I've come across which explicitly references that past. Fascinating reading, this.

When most Americans think about the story of gay rights, they look back to New York’s 1969 Stonewall Riots, when gay men in Greenwich Village rose up in response to a police raid and sparked a decade of determined activism. They remember San Francisco’s Harvey Milk, the charismatic leader from the Castro who was elected to the city’s Board of Supervisors in 1977 before being tragically assassinated. Perhaps they remember the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights of 1979, when around 100,000 people from around the country gathered in the capitol to demand an end to discrimination.

Conspicuously absent in that story is Boston, a city more likely to be associated with its Puritanical past than with gay activism. But while it routinely gets overshadowed by New York and San Francisco, where the gay scenes were bigger, louder, and livelier, a closer look at the movement’s early history and tactics reveals that Boston in the 1970s was deeply important in the arrival of gay rights as a mainstream national issue, and home to a sophisticated, nationally relevant, pioneering gay community. The cause of gay liberation was taken up during those years with energy and seriousness by Boston-area college students, intellectuals, journalists, politicians, psychiatrists, and lawyers. Ultimately, the city would be the source for a significant portion of the national movement’s burgeoning intellectual firepower.

[. . . ]

The city served as a farm team for gay-rights forces across the United States—thanks in part to Gay Community News, an influential weekly newspaper with national reach that was considered the movement’s “paper of record” throughout the ’70s, and whose alumni at one point occupied so many leadership roles around the country that they were called the “GCN mafia.” Boston also helped drive the movement’s political and legal development: Not only was it home to the country’s first openly gay state representative, Elaine Noble, it was also one of the first places in the country where antidiscrimination laws were brought up for debate by politicians, and the birthplace of Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders, known as GLAD, whose legal advocacy led to Massachusetts’ groundbreaking gay-marriage decision.

Part of what made the city distinctive in the ’70s was that the gay community, though active, just wasn’t that big, and thus was unusually harmonious. Gay men worked side by side with lesbians—uncommon at the time—and radical gay liberationists found common cause with moderates who believed in working for political reform. But the fact that this compact scene was devoted to advances on the political, intellectual, legal, and journalistic fronts—rather than becoming known for protests or a vibrant gay social scene—meant that Boston’s role in gay life never captured the imagination as did New York and San Francisco. To look back at what was forged in Boston is to realize that sometimes the forces that drive real social change are, on the surface, less dramatic than the transformative moments and individual leaders that come to symbolize it.

“New York was sexier. San Francisco was really sexy. But Boston was smarter,” said Michael Bronski, a professor at Harvard University who spent the 1970s writing for local gay publications and is the author of “A Queer History of the ­United States.” “Boston really generated ideas.”