[PHOTO] The bridge at Covehead

The coastal road inside the Prince Edward Island National Park passes over a high bridge at the mouth of Covehead's harbour.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• io9 links to an online version of a 1984 text game, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.


• After disproving the existence of Tyche, Centauri Dreams meditates on the rich data provided on the interstellar neighbourhood by the WISE infrared telescope.


• The Dragon's Tales maps the distribution of Russian and Ukrainian military forces.


• Eastern Approaches visits the western Ukrainian village of Chervone, a community dependent on remittances from guest workers that finds itself getting along increasingly well with Poland and Poles. (Russia and Russians, not so much.)


• Joe. My. God. notes that seven billionaires on Forbes' famed list are openly gay.


• Language Log has issues with the reported sensitivity of the new test for Alzheimer's.


• Marginal Revolution follows up on Edward Hugh's suggestion that all Abenomics in Japan has been doing is boosting the Japanese trade deficit.


• Livejournal's pollotenchegg maps the demographics of Ukraine. Despite a significant recent improvements, the west and cities in the center of the country are the only ones avoiding population shrinkage.


• Savage Minds features a post from anthropologist Robin Bernstein talking about how she likes grant writing.


• Strange Maps notes a Dutch doctoral thesis arguing that the portolan charts of the early modern period are much too good to have been done in the medieval period. Are they legacies of Greco-Roman civilization?


• Towleroad notes the testimony of a gay singer-songwriter Justin Utley before a state committee in Utah as to the persecution he has experienced on account of his sexual orientation.


• Transit Toronto's Robert McKenzie notes the expansion of parking at the Pickering GO station.


• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell complaints that his Firefox is crashing repeatedly and with frequency aren't things I've experienced yet, fortunately.

[LINK] "Elephants distinguish human voices by sex, age, ethnicity, study says"

The Los Angeles Times' Amina Khan (via Science NOW) reports on the latest evidence of the uncanny intelligence of elephants. Hunting them for ivory if they're that capable of distinguishing between human beings is seeming like murder now.

“The elephants can’t predict where the people are going to be because they range over these large areas, grazing their cattle,” said Graeme Shannon, a behavioral ecologist at Colorado State University who co-led the study. “So the threat is both spatially and temporally very variable -- and so they have to respond appropriately.”

Voices offer a rich range of auditory cues, and hearing someone from a distance can also give you a key advantage in the survival game if you know what to listen for. Previous research had already shown that elephants can tell the number and sex of lions based on their roaring, and the scientists wondered if the same were true for the elephants' other major predator, humans.

The researchers took a speaker, camouflaged it with a screen woven of palm fronds and placed it about 50 meters away from where they expected wandering elephants to end up. They pre-recorded calls from local villagers, including Maasai men, women, and young boys, saying, “Look, look over there: a group of elephants is coming.”

To compare to the Maasai, they also included calls from people known as the Kamba. Since the Kamba are farmers, not cattle herders, and their clearly defined cropland is easy for the elephants to avoid, they generally come into far less conflict with elephants.

[. . .]

Elephants did, however, react with alarm to the voices of Maasai men -- they quickly huddled, protecting the calves, and raised their trunks to sniff the air for any human scent. Recordings from Maasai women or boys didn’t earn anywhere close to that kind of reaction. Neither did the voices of Kamba men.

That’s because Maasai men are the ones most likely to hunt an elephant down, the scientists said. Women don’t get involved in hunting, the boys are too young, and the Kamba farmers generally don’t need to compete with elephants for resources.

The Kamba men spoke a different language than the Maasai, so it’s likely the elephants were picking up on linguistic cues rather than some underlying, inherited differences in their voices. But the scientists aren’t sure exactly how the elephants could tell the adult male Maasai voices from the women and boys’ voices. When they remixed the men’s voices to sound more like the women’s and vice versa, the animals weren’t fooled. Figuring out that mystery will be the job of future research, Shannon said.

[LINK] "Is San Francisco New York?"

Kevin Roose's New York article suggesting that San Francisco is evolving into a cultural and economic centre outshining New York City is interesting, and worthy a full read.

It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment that San Francisco morphed into bizarro-world New York, when it went from being the city’s dorky, behoodied West Coast cousin to being, in many ways, more New York–ish than New York itself—its wealth more impressive, its infatuation with power and status more blinding. Maybe it was this past November, when New York elected a tax-the-rich progressive as mayor and, two days later, Twitter, a company that had been courted by San Francisco politicians with a Bloombergian combination of municipal tax breaks and mayoral flattery, went public at around a $25 billion valuation. Maybe it was when, after the crash, bonus-starved Wall Street bankers started quitting their jobs and heading to the Bay Area in droves to join the start-up gold rush. Or maybe it was when San Francisco became the new American capital of real-estate kvetching, thanks to supra-Manhattan rents and gentrification at a pace that would make Bushwick blush.

For me, the epiphany came in December, when I attended a party at a seven-story San Francisco townhouse. The house—used as an office and party pad by a young entrepreneur who had sold his start-up for millions a few years earlier—was the kind of bachelor pad Richie Rich might have set up for himself, had he been 23 and a Burning Man regular. The walls were covered in inspirational phrases (FOLLOW YOUR HEART, HOLISTIC MINDFULNESS & WELLNESS), and the party was centered on a split-level pool and hot tub that took up the entire middle section of the house. Five inflatable killer whales floated idly in the water. A bearded man was giving out back massages at water’s edge using a pair of repurposed automotive buffers, one in each hand. And loaner swimsuits—washed between wearings, we were assured—were provided for all.

As the hours ticked on and the booze kicked in, some shed their Louboutin heels and jumped in the pool; others marinated in the hot tub and told start-up war stories. It was the kind of bash you’d have found in Easthampton circa 2006, or West Egg circa 1922. And as if to cement San Francisco’s newfound place at the center of a certain social universe, the person greeting newcomers at the door was Julia Allison, the notorious glam blogger, whose smile had dotted the New York party scene just a few years earlier.

[LINK] "Putin Turns Attention to Eurasian Union"

Of note in Joanna Lillis' Eurasianet article describing the outcome of a recent summit meeting in Moscow of the heads of government of the different countries signed up to the Eurasia Union project is that the smaller member-states are becoming more skeptical of this. Opposition in Kazakhstan, particularly, seems to be growing. (I suspect that the presence in northern Kazakhstan of a large Russian minority, one that is a majority in a couple of provinces and that--like Ukraine's Russians and Russophones--has been a target of Russian irredentism in the past, goes a long way towards explaining this.)

“The project will be pushed with even more fervor and current and potential Customs Union members will be faced with stark choices,” said Nargis Kassenova, director of the Central Asian Studies Center at Almaty’s KIMEP University. “The Cold-War logic of ‘us’ versus ‘them’ is winning the day, and Russian policy is becoming less nuanced.”

Observers generally believe that the Crimea crisis significantly complicates Putin’s Eurasian integration push, making it more difficult for the Kremlin to win hearts and minds elsewhere in the former Soviet Union.

Kazakhstan traditionally has been a staunch Russian ally, and President Nazarbayev has served as a cheerleader for integration, although even he has previously voiced concerns about Russian domination of the Customs Union. Yet early indicators show the Ukraine crisis has galvanized opposition in Kazakhstan to integration with Russia. Putin’s power play has fanned fears of Russian economic domination. Many also believe EAU membership would entail a loss of sovereignty.

“Russia, instead of trying to assure post-Soviet states that it does not have any imperial intentions … showed that it does not consider these states fully sovereign, and its interests override the international law principle of territorial integrity,” Kassenova told EurasiaNet.org. The issue of territorial integrity remains sensitive in Kazakhstan, given that some northern regions of the country are home to a large Russian minority.

Zhanbolat Mamay, an activist in Kazakhstan involved in a campaign opposing the country’s membership in the EAU, offered an even blunter assessment. “[The Eurasian Economic Union] is a revival of the Soviet Union in a new format – a Putin format,” he told a news conference on March 4.

Statements coming out of Moscow about Crimea, such as the denial that the Kremlin has deployed troops on Ukrainian territory but reserves the right to do so, is fueling suspicion in Kazakhstan. “We can’t be in a union with an occupying state,” economist Oraz Dzhandosov told the Ratel.su website.

A commentary published by the Delovaya Nedelya broadsheet said “the current crisis is perhaps the last chance for Astana to put the brakes on the Eurasian tango.” In a possible nod to the vocal opposition in Kazakhstan, Nazarbayev’s March 5 statement noted that the governments of member states should do more to explain the benefits of integration, which is being carried out for the “good of our peoples.”

[LINK] "The Myth of the Orthodox Slavs"

At Transitions Online, Bulgarian Boyko Vassilev writes against Samuel Huntington's famous arguments that Eastern Orthodox Slavs--Bulgarians, Ukrainians, Russians among others--aren't so inherently distinctive from western and central Europeans as is often claimed. At least they aren't so distinctive that Bulgarians don't aspire to the same sorts of things as others.

Different as they are, Ukraine has much in common with Bulgaria. Both are divided in their attitude to Russia – it’s just that in Ukraine the division is territorial, in Bulgaria philosophical. Both have been rocked by protests, although those in Ukraine ended with an explosion, those in Bulgaria with implosion. And both belong to a seemingly unhappy family – the Orthodox Slavs.

These countries of Slavia Orthodoxa (Bulgaria, Serbia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine) top the surveys for fatigue, unhappiness, and pessimism. All have low rates of fertility and high rates of crime. Some fought recent wars – and lost them. There is no spectacular business success here. Only one, Bulgaria, was not a member of either Yugoslavia or the USSR. And only one, Bulgaria again, is an EU member. Still, Bulgaria is the poorest country in the EU and is not known for its stability.

[. . .]

First, not all Orthodox Slavs are hard-line Russophiles. Serbs and Montenegrins are, but from a distance – a luxury Belarusians do not possess. Bulgarians and Ukrainians are at least divided. There, you have many people who are culturally Russophile but politically pro-Western; it is possible to love Dostoyevsky and democracy simultaneously.

Second, not all members of Slavia Orthodoxa are anti-Western; quite the contrary. Bulgarians are more pro-Western even than some fellow EU members. Even Russians have a strong pro-Western tradition. Russian historian Alexander Yanov traces it to Kyiv and Novgorod.

Third, Eastern Christians are not by nature spoiled losers; they also can prosper and flourish. “Byzantine” is not a synonym for tyranny and obedience; it marks one of the cradles of European civilization, a continuation of Rome. Misery is caused by corrupt cliques, not by the blood in your veins or the faith in your soul. Culture is not only what you inherit, but also what you acquire. In this sense, Bulgaria, Ukraine, and Russia could be free, prosperous, and democratic

[ISL] "PEI2014: The Island Web at 20"

Peter Rukavina has a nice post explaining his contribution to getting Prince Edward Island onto the Internet: creating the Island's first website. The whole project sounds so remarkably and amusingly low-tech by our standards.

2014 almost marks the 20th anniversary of the first Prince Edward Island website, one I was happy to midwife during my tenure at the PEI Crafts Council from 1993 to 1994.

The site – www.crafts-council.pe.ca – isn’t around any longer (although its ancestor is) and it’s old enough that’s it’s not even archives in the Wayback Machine. It went live on July 7, 1994, announced with a press release sent out, among other destinations, to Usenet, where it remains archived for posterity. My favourite part of that press release is “For additional information on the World Wide Web, contact Tim Berners-Lee at the European Labratory for Particle Physics.”

The site itself was running on an IBM-PC sitting on my desk at 156 Richmond Street in Charlottetown. It was running Linux, and was connected to the Internet via two 14.4 kbps modems, one on eash end of a leased Island Tel copper circuit, with the other end at PEINet on Kent Street across from the fire hall. That’s about 1500 times less bandwidth than I have running into my office now, but it did the job.