[PHOTO] Angus Bernard MacEachern, bishop, remembered at St. Dunstan's Basilica

Erected quite recently on the property of St. Dunstan's Basilica, on the southwest corner of Great George Street and Sydney, is a monument to Angus Bernard MacEachern, the first Roman Catholic bishop on Prince Edward Island.

Scottish by birth, from his arrival in Atlantic Canada in 1790 MacEachern played a leading role in building the Roman Catholic Church in the British Atlantic colonies, a community fragmented by ethnicity as well as by geography. His death in 1835 left an institutionally strong church, one of its legacies being the St. Dunstan's University that eventually evolved into the modern University of Prince Edward Island. Based on his legacy, many locals would recommend him for sainthood.

(See yesterday's photo post to get a better sense of the setting of the monument.)



The plaque for Bishop MacEachern's monument has the below passage in four languages: English, French, Scots Gaelic, and Mi'kmaq.

"Angus Bernard MacEachern (1759-1835), first Bishop of the Diocese of Charlottetown, founded St. Andrew's College, the first post-secondary institution in the colony, on 30 November 1831. In January 1855, the college was re-located and re-opened in Charlottetown as St. Dunstan's College (later University), which has carried on the rich tradition of Roman Catholic education in the province."

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• Beyond the Beyond's Bruce Sterling is not convinced by arguments about radical electronic music.


• BlogTO maps the lost streets and streetnames of Toronto, disappeared in the course of street consolidation and building construction.


• James Bow doesn't like this winter.


• The Frailest Thing's Michael Sacasas has a couple of interesting posts about here and here.


• Joe. My. God. celebrates Michael Sam, a NFL draftee who has come out.


• Marginal Revolution comments on the Swiss referendum victory that will be placing limits on labour migrants from the European Union, Gideon Rachman arguing at the Financial Times that the European Union shouldn't overreact to the unilateral Swiss redefinition of the relationship.


• Peter Rukavina notes a historic ad in the Prince Edward Island press for a New York City hotel, the Hotel Martinique--rooms for two dollars a night!


• Towleroad notes that the star of a Disney TV show featuring a same-sex couple, a girl 5 years old, has received death threats.


• Window on Eurasia notes the arguments of others, one arguing that the absorption of Ukraine into Russia would destabilize that country, another suggesting that Kazakhstan
  

[NEWS] Some Monday links

• io9's link to the eye-catching pictures of spaceships pictured on British science fiction paperback novels remains appreciated.


• The Globe and Mail notes the growing Iranian community in the Toronto suburb of Richmond Hill.


• BusinessWeek observes that video chain Blockbuster, defunct in most of North America, is doing fine in Mexico and on the Mexican border.


• Bloomberg notes that Japan outside of Tokyo is hoping to attract foreign investors to property outside the Japanese capital.


• Der Spiegel points to a new study suggesting that Bavaria's famed mad King Ludwig II wasn't clinically insane at all, and notes evidence of truly massive campaigns of state-sponsored torture and massacre in Syria.


• An older link from the New Zealand Herald: is the large emigration from New Zealand to Australia, driven by the search for a higher standard of living, about to run down?


• The Village Voice critiques the urban myth that sex traficking peaks at the time of major sporting events like the Superbowl.


• National Geographic tracks down the magazine photo that inspired Lorde's hit song "Royals" and observes the ways in which Mexicans of indigenous background immigrate to the United States.


• Jezebel takes a long, hard look at gay male sexism directed towards women.


• Rolling Stone's extended article arguing that Miami is set to drown as sea levels rise is a gripping read.

[LINK] "Earth Won't Die as Soon as Thought"

Science Now's Puneet Kollipara was one person of many to report that the climate of the Earth is somewhat more resilient to a sun growing gradually brighter than expected. Besides having obvious implications for the Earth, this has implications for life on other planets beyond the solar system.

How long does Earth have? Climate modelers disagree. In one recent study, planetary scientist Ravi Kopparapu of Pennsylvania State University (Penn State), University Park, and colleagues used computers to model how Earth would respond to increasing solar radiation. Just 6% more sunlight was enough to send the greenhouse effect into overdrive and vaporize Earth’s water, the researchers found. At the current rate of solar brightening—just over 1% every 100 million years—Earth would suffer this “runaway greenhouse” in 600 million to 700 million years. Earth will suffer some preliminary effects leading up to that, too. After just 150 million years, the researchers found, the stratosphere will warm enough to let some water vapor reach high in the sky, where solar radiation will break it down into molecules that can escape to space. In this "moist greenhouse," the planet would be too hot for complex surface life, but a few hardy marine organisms and microbes could soldier on.

But not so fast, says Eric Wolf, a doctoral student at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Kopparapu’s model is pretty rudimentary, Wolf says: It analyzes what happens in one dimension—altitude. As a result, the model excludes clouds and wrongly assumes that climate factors like humidity are the same everywhere on Earth. Wolf and his Boulder colleague, Owen Brian Toon, simulated Earth’s future using a more realistic 3D climate model from the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Their model included clouds, and a host of other details such as regional differences in moisture, Wolf says. It also assumed that atmospheric CO2 levels would start at 500 parts per million—25% higher than today—and stay there indefinitely.

Then Wolf and Toon cranked up the sun. After they made our star 15.5% brighter than it is today, the simulated Earth had warmed from its current average of 15°C to 40°C. That’s hot, but not too hot for liquid water to survive. The oceans didn’t boil off. The stratosphere also didn't heat up, so no moist greenhouse occurred either. The upshot: Earth has at least 1.5 billion years left to support life, the researchers report this month in Geophysical Research Letters. If humans last that long, Earth would be generally uncomfortable for them, but livable in some areas just below the polar regions, Wolf suggests. Earth warms slower than in Kopparapu’s model, Wolf explains, because clouds and dry regions such as deserts, both of which the 1D study lacked, send a lot of heat back into space.

A similar 3D climate-modeling study, reported last month in Nature, found that a runaway greenhouse wouldn’t occur for at least 1 billion years. The leader of that study—Jérémy Leconte, an astrophysicist now at the University of Toronto in Canada—says his group’s earlier date for Earth’s demise than Wolf and Toon’s stems partly from differences in how the studies modeled clouds.

The 3D models shed new light on how long Earth could potentially support life, says planetary scientist James Kasting of Penn State University Park, who wasn’t involved in either study. Still, they may slightly underestimate how long Earth could support life, he suggests. The studies assume that CO2 levels stay the same, Kasting says, but they may actually fall as Earth warms. That’s because calcium carbonate rock formation and other natural carbon-sequestering processes might speed up in warmer conditions, pulling CO2 from the atmosphere and blunting warming at least temporarily. He also cautions that the studies don’t model life’s response, so they can’t assess how long life actually will survive.

[LINK] On Planck stars

I first saw the Physics arXiv blog's article on Carlo Rovelli and Francesca Vidotto's paper "Planck stars". What are they?

A star that collapses gravitationally can reach a further stage of its life, where quantum-gravitational pressure counteracts weight. The duration of this stage is very short in the star proper time, yielding a bounce, but extremely long seen from the outside, because of the huge gravitational time dilation. Since the onset of quantum-gravitational effects is governed by energy density ---not by size--- the star can be much larger than planckian in this phase. The object emerging at the end of the Hawking evaporation of a black hole can then be larger than planckian by a factor (m/mP)n, where m is the mass fallen into the hole, mP is the Planck mass, and n is positive. We consider arguments for n=1/3 and for n=1. There is no causality violation or faster-than-light propagation. The existence of these objects alleviates the black-hole information paradox. More interestingly, these objects could have astrophysical and cosmological interest: they produce a detectable signal, of quantum gravitational origin, around the 10−14cm wavelength.

Translated into more comprehensible English? Information does not disappear in black holes, but is rather transformed along with the star into something fantastically dense.

[The authors'] key insight is that quantum gravitational effects prevent the universe from collapsing to infinite density. Instead, the universe ”bounces” when the energy density of matter reaches the Planck scale, the smallest possible size in physics.

That’s hugely significant. “The bounce does not happen when the universe is of planckian size, as was previously expected; it happens when the matter energy density reaches the Planck density,” they say. In other words, quantum gravity could become relevant when the volume of the universe is some 75 orders of magnitude larger than the Planck volume.

Rovelli and Vidotto say the same reasoning can be applied to a black hole. Instead of forming a singularity, the collapse of a star is eventually stopped by the same quantum pressure, a force that is similar to the one that prevents an electron falling into the nucleus of an atom. “We call a star in this phase a “Planck star”,” they say.

Planck stars would be small— stellar-mass black hole would form a Planck star about 10^-10 centimetres in diameter. But that’s still some 30 orders of magnitude larger than the Planck length.

An interesting question is whether these Planck stars would be stable throughout the life of the black hole that surrounds them. Rovelli and Vidotto have a fascinating answer. They say that the lifetime of a Planck star is extremely short, about the length of time it takes for light to travel across it.

But to an outside observer, Planck stars would appear to exist much longer. That’s because time slows down near high-density masses. For such an observer, a Planck star would last just as long as its parent black hole.

Universe Today's Brian Koberlein has a still more succinct summary.

Key is the fact that the Planck star theory predicts that detectable gamma rays would be produced. This is a testable thesis.

[BRIEF NOTE] On the controversies of intermarriage in Israel and the dim prospects for peace

The Times of Israel is one of many people reporting on the controversy apparently awakened in Israel by the news that Yair Netanyahu, son of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, was involved in a relationship with a non-Jewish woman.

Yair Netanyahu is “spitting on the grave of his grandfather and grandmother,” Dr. Hagai Ben-Artzi, brother of Sara Netanyahu, said Monday of his nephew’s relationship with a non-Jewish Norwegian woman.

News that the prime minister’s son, who is 23, is dating Sandra Leikanger, 25, was first reported by the Norwegian daily Dagen. The tall, svelte blonde met the younger Netanyahu at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, where the two study.

[. . .]

Earlier on Monday, ultra-Orthodox Shas MK Arye Deri responded to news of the relationship by saying, “If God forbid it’s true, then woe to us, woe to us.”

Deri told the Kol Barama radio station the relationship was no mere personal matter because Netanyahu is a “symbol of the Jewish people.”

“I know friends of mine who invest tens of millions and more, hundreds of millions to fight assimilation in the world,” Deri said.

By contrast, Rabbi Amnon Bazak of the Har Etzion yeshiva defended the prime minister and expressed the hope that should Yair choose to wed his present girlfriend, Leikanger would undergo a conversion to Judaism prior to the nuptials.

[. . .]

The Israeli organization Lehava, which says it aims “to prevent assimilation in the Holy Land,” called on Netanyahu on Sunday “to prevent this relationship.”

“Your grandchildren, as you know, will not be Jewish,” Lehava director Bentzi Gopshtain warned the Israeli premier in a Facebook post.

1. It's worth noting that Netanyahu's failure to defend his son's relationship in public marks him as not a very good father.

2. It's also worth noting that very many Israelis find this abhorrent. To wit:

Yossi Sarid, a former Israeli education minister and onetime leader of the secular-rights party Meretz, called the younger Netanyahu’s love life a “private matter.” But he said the uproar among the religious was “nonsense.”

“It’s not fair. You can’t expect fairness from those people,” Sarid said. “They don’t like non-Jews. They don’t like non-Orthodox Jews. They are behaving as fanatics everywhere behave.”

3. It's also worth noting that this has become a problem that has become more acute in recent years, as immigration has introduced people of multiple religious backgrounds, few of which are strictly Jewish enough to suit the ultra-Orthodox, to Israel.

Noah Slepkov, an associate fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute, said the debate reflects changes taking place within Israel.

While intermarriage has long been a “huge deal” in the United States, he said, where roughly half of American Jews marry outside the faith, it has been a nonissue in Israel because Jews and Arabs almost never marry.

But that has begun to change, due to an influx of foreign workers and the trend of Israelis studying and working abroad in an age of globalization. “It’s certainly a trend that’s at the beginning,” he said, but one that nonetheless can make conservative Israelis feel threatened.

He said the criticism of Netanyahu’s son was counterproductive in a country that increasingly finds itself isolated.

4. It's further worth noting that Israel is the only high-income democratic state I know of that has laws forbidding intermarriage across religious--hence ethnic--boundaries, Greece having abolished its laws giving marriage over entirely to clerics in 1983 and Lebanon not quite counting as a democracy.

5. Imagine, for a moment, if the Norwegian media was in an uproar because the son of the Norwegian prime minister was in an intimate relationship with an Israeli Jewish woman. What would this say about Norway?

6. Here's a thesis: so long as Israel maintains these laws, it's going to be incapable of peace. How is it possible to respect someone if you want to use the state to keep them, or anyone like them from joining your family? How, if you exclude people of other backgrounds from your intimate communities on general principle, can you really empathize with them, truly like them as opposed to tolerate them? And how tolerant are you, really, if you don't intervene as other people force their particular choices on everyone?

7. It won't necessarily matter that Israel does so, since if anything its neighbours--all countries which also ban intermarriage--are even further down the rabbit hole of state-enforced ethnoreligious purity than Israel is.

[URBAN NOTE] On fantasy mass transit maps, particularly (but not only) of Toronto

Wired's Adam Mann wrote an article on maps of imaginary mass transit systems in cities around the world, collected in the Tumblr Transit Maps. (I follow it now, and so should you.)

There’s a whole bunch of daydreamers just like you who’ve considered the additional subway lines, bus routes, and train tracks it would take to bring more people to more places. Some of them have even mapped these ideas out. The internet is full of these fantasy transit maps, where professional transit planners and dedicated amateurs alike imagine how public transit in our cities could look.

“Some are completely imaginary, some show fanciful future versions of real cities (without regard to cost or planning), others show well-considered views of the future, drawing heavily on actual plans laid out by transit agencies and governments,” writes graphic designer Cameron Booth, who collects excellent examples both real and fictional on his tumblr, Transit Maps.

Booth added that people like these fantasy maps because they can spark dialogues about what’s lacking in our real-world transit systems. In the dreamy new movie Her, Joaquin Phoenix’s character is able to travel by train in L.A. from the beach to the mountains. A background transit map in one scene has led to plenty of online discussions.

“It’s definitely got people talking about the role transit plays in L.A.,” writes Booth. “Most people love to comment that this fantasy system has three stations at LAX, while the real world still has none — an issue that hugely affects mobility in such a huge city.”

Just recently, blogTO's Derek Flack shared a thoughtful Toronto transit map, this one hinging on the integration of the TTC and the GO Transit network to make a true Golden Horseshoe network.

TTC fantasy maps tend to be, as their designation suggests, wildly unrealistic visions of transit expansion in Toronto. Typically showing sprawling grids of new subway and LRT infrastructure, one's first reaction in seeing them is less hope than it is mild despair at just how far we have to go when it comes to building a comprehensive transit network across the GTA. That's not necessarily the case with this recent effort from Matthew Canaran of Hogtown Commons. Designed using Jonathan English's CityRail concept, the map envisions an electrified GO Transit network that's merged with the TTC to achieve much wider coverage than what each system currently offers.

Canaran is quick to point out that this is an idealized vision for the entire Golden Horseshoe, not just Toronto -- an important distinction given the pressure suburban commuting puts on our transportation network. You'll also note that there's no Finch West LRT on the map, but the designer confirms that this was an intentional omission. "In designing this map, I decided that any LRT lines that weren't already under construction would be axed, and costs would be diverted to electrifying GO... it's not going to pay for itself."

I like.

[BRIEF NOTE] On the "Got Land" shirts and the First Nations of Canada

This CBC article caught my attention.

A Saskatchewan student was told not to wear a sweatshirt in school that has the words "Got Land? Thank an Indian" on it, although officials have since relented.

Tenelle Starr, 13, is in Grade 8 and goes to school in Balcarres, about 90 kilometres northeast of Regina. She is a member of the nearby Star Blanket First Nation.

"It supports our treaty and land rights ... It's important." Starr told CBC News Tuesday, as the issue over the message on her shirt reverberated at her school and online through her Facebook page.

The front of her bright pink sweatshirt says "Got Land?" The back says "Thank an Indian". The message references the link between historic treaties and land for what would become Canada.

In Saskatchewan, most First Nations have treaties with the Crown dating to the late 1800s. The so-called Numbered Treaties, which cover all of Saskatchewan, are formal agreements that created a relationship between the Crown and First Nations.

The shirts, made by Manitoban Jeff Menard, are available via website and Facebook. Melinda Maldonado's MacLean's article interviewed the man.

Jeff Menard knows first hand the colonial angst his line of T-shirts can invoke.

The message — “Got Land? Thank an Indian!” — has prompted unsolicited complaints about tax exemptions for Aboriginal people, for example. Menard, a member of Pine Creek First Nation, north of Dauphin, Man., says he welcomes the dialogue.

[. . .]

Menard says the sweatshirts, T-shirts and baby bibs celebrate Aboriginal peoples’ “rich heritage,” but also point to history.

“When the Europeans came over, we took care of them. Thanksgiving was actually the first welfare line,” said Menard. “Somewhere along the line the Europeans figured they can conquer us and take over the land and all that. In retrospect, I just want a thank you.”

Menard first saw the phrase on a hoodie in the U.S. He set up shop in 2012 on First Nations land at the Red Sun Smoke Shop and Gas Bar in Winnipeg, Man., and Turning The Tide in Saskatoon, Sask., but stresses he doesn’t care about turning a profit. “I just want everybody to wear the hoodie or T-shirt, because it’s a true statement.”

His immediate goal is to get people to say thank you. “That would satisfy my appetite for now.”

There is one person, however, that he’d like to see in one of his shirts. “By any chance do you know the size of Prime Minister Stephen Harper? What size hoodie he might want to wear?”

I like his thinking.