[PHOTO] Yonge and Eglinton in the rain, evening of 30 April 2014

The fog hid the Minto condo towers south of Yonge and Eglinton effectively past a dozen stories.

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• The Big Picture shares photos of young Russian military cadets training.


• blogTO has a transcript of one of Ford's most recent reported rants.


• Centauri Dreams and D-Brief both note that the giant exoplanet Beta Pictoris b apparently has an eight-hour day.


• Crooked Timber's John Quiggin, focusing on Australia, discusses right-wing tribalism.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper examining various possibilities for orbits of planets in the Gliese 581 system.
  
• The Dragon's Tales links to a proposal (with pictures) for a Io volcano observer space probe.


• Eastern Approaches notes the continuing deterioration of eastern Ukraine.


• Geocurrents' Martin Lewis comments on the geographical illiteracy of the United States and of a very bad Pakistani school atlas.


• Joe. My. God. notes that, today, Brunei is implementing full sharia law.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes an Australian proposal to outlaw civil society-led boycotts.
  
• Marginal Revolution links to a poll suggesting Americans don't care about income inequality.


• The Planetary Society Weblog's Emily Lakdawalla notes that we're getting closer to figuring out which Kuiper belt dwarf planet is larger, Pluto or Eris.


• The Tin Man explains why he prefers Twitter to Facebook. (The former feels more free-form, less of a gated community.)


• Window on Eurasia notes that responsibility for recent increases in birth rates in Russia can't be assigned entirely, or even mostly, to the Russian government.

[URBAN NOTE] "Rob Ford stripped of all power as mayor after taking leave for alcohol addiction"

The Toronto Star's Betsy Powell reports.

All of his power gone. His mother in tears. His brother distraught. His city councillors demanding his resignation. His whereabouts unknown.

Thirteen hours after Rob Ford announced a temporary leave to see professional help for his drinking, Deputy Mayor Norm Kelly announced he was taking over Ford’s last remaining powers.

“I do not see this as a crisis of government,” Kelly said. “Nothing’s changed.”

Kelly, however, said he has taken over Ford’s staff and the powers Ford still had: to represent Toronto, to preside over council meetings, to be the city’s chief executive officer and sit on the executive committee.

Ford lost most of his power in a city council vote in November.

“I have agreed to assume the responsibilities of mayor,” Kelly said. “This transition is effective immediately.

“I am the deputy mayor who has assumed all of the powers that the mayor had.”

Rob Ford submitted a formal notice early Thursday to the city clerk that he has taken a personal leave from his duties as mayor of Toronto after acknowledging he is seeking help for alcoholism .

“No dates were indicated,” Jackie DeSouza, director of the city’s strategic communications, said of the mayor’s absence. Ford promised “further updates to his status,” she said.

[LINK] "Children 404 explores plight of gay kids in Russia"

MacLean's Michael Petrou writes about a new documetary about the plight of non-heterosexual children and teenagers in Russia. Children 404, named after and coordinated with the Russian GLBT teenage outreach group of the same name, is the product of a successful IndieGogo fundraising campaign. The story's unsuprising: claims to want to save children lead directly to hurting them.

“Imagine a child—I am speaking of myself now—a teenager at the age of 14, 15, who always comes to school late because he is bullied there, and before entering recites ‘Our Lord in heaven . . . ’ It’s true. This is not a joke. And it’s not funny.” The boy speaking is Pasha, a gay Russian teenager and one of the protagonists in Children 404, a new documentary about LGBT kids in Russia that is showing at this year’s Hot Docs film festival in Toronto. The film takes its name from an online mutual support group for gay Russian youth, which in turn is a play on the common Internet error message that appears on screen when a page cannot be found. It’s meant to suggest that in today’s Russia—especially since last year’s law banning “propaganda” supporting “non-traditional sexual relationships” among minors—gay youth are similarly banished. “The law states that it protects minor children under the age of 18, but of course no one has asked those under 18 for their opinion,” says Elena Klimova, the group’s founder.

The film is a fragmented but powerful collection of stories about discrimination, ostracism and inner pain. As part of its production, 45 teenagers agreed to be interviewed and to film their daily lives. Most did so anonymously. “The idea was to give these children a voice, because nobody believed that they exist,” Askold Kurov, one of the filmmakers, tells Maclean’s. “We wanted to feel their world, and to see what they see themselves.”

The results are startlingly intimate and at times heart-wrenching. “It was impossible for me to walk down the halls. They spit on me, humiliated me and called me names,” one teen says. “My parents asked about the scratches and bruises. I said that I fell down,” another confesses. As for Pasha, we don’t need to imagine his life in a provincial Russian high school, one he left at the age of 16 to move to Moscow. He returns to the school in the film. The principal greets him warmly. Some students do not. They shout insults at him in the cafeteria, undeterred by the camera filming them.

Part of Vladimir Putin’s efforts to build an inward-looking and nationalistic country involves conflating homosexuality with Western culture in general. It’s striking to see that its effects have reached even young boys. Among the abuses thrown at Pasha in the school is this: “Get the f–k out of here and go to your f–king Holland!” Pasha appears stoic and bemused by this. “Happily enough, they still remember me,” he says. A little later, a school staff member confronts him in the hall and demands that someone call the police.

[LINK] "The false debate over Trinity Western"

Emma Teitel at MacLean's writes about the controversy surrounding the law school of Trinity Western University. A private Christian university in British Columbia, TWU's effort to open a law school nearly came aground on the basis of a covenant barring non-heterosexual students. There were consequences, and Teitel argues that there should be consequences.

The law school, slated to open in 2016, has the support of lawyers in British Columbia and the B.C. government, but the Law Society of Upper Canada believes its sexuality policy is discriminatory. Ontario’s lawyers voted 28-21 against accrediting the school; the Nova Scotia Barristers’ Society followed suit, refusing to accredit TWU unless it amends its covenant’s discriminatory requirements or allows students to forgo signing the covenant altogether. New Brunswick’s law society is scheduled to vote on the issue in June. The consequences for future TWU law graduates are great: they will not be able to article or practise law in provinces where their school is not accredited.

TWU’s covenant isn’t new, but its presence at a law school is particularly controversial. “If you’re going to teach the law,” says Douglas Judson, an Osgoode Hall law student in Toronto arguing against the law school’s accreditation, “you have a duty to propagate Charter values.” A duty: not a legal obligation. Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms may forbid government discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, but TWU is a private, religious institution. It doesn’t have to toe the government line. Besides, there are all kinds of gay-friendly law schools out there, jam-packed with gender-neutral bathrooms and “safe spaces” for every letter in that constantly expanding variegated acronym—so why can’t the Christians have an accredited “safe space” of their own?

It’s simple: we shouldn’t accredit TWU’s law school for the same reason we wouldn’t likely accredit a medical school that treated homosexuality as biologically and psychologically disordered. Like medicine, ethics is a science too; and blind absolutism makes for bad science. Consider the following excerpt from the affidavit of Jill Bishop, a lesbian who attended TWU in the mid-2000s and now supports gay activist Trevor Loke’s constitutional challenge of the B.C. government’s decision to approve the law school. “I observed that the lens of evangelical Christianity was omnipresent. The effect of this was that people did not give opinions in class discussions that did not align with those values … I did not feel able to raise other perspectives on homosexuality. I felt a real risk of expulsion.” This is not exactly a good omen for an accredited institution devoted to the vocation of free thought. (Say what you will about loony leftism on the average secular college campus, but keep in mind that no student at York or UBC ever risked expulsion for refusing to uphold secular humanism.)

TWU president Bob Kuhn has so far framed the case against accreditation as anti-Christian bigotry, the obvious and familiar stance of the religious right. Less obvious and more interesting in this debate, though, is the apparent willingness
of otherwise liberal thinkers to champion the law school, not in solidarity with religionists, but out of sheer annoyance at the triumphalism of gay activists. In the Globe and Mail recently, Konrad Yakabuski, who is in favour of accrediting TWU, argues that gay rights activists in North America “are winning—just not fast enough for some fanatics, who seek to blacklist even those who object to gay marriage based on sincerely held religious or moral grounds.”

According to this philosophy, discriminating against gays is reprehensible if you’re an unthinking brute who is simply grossed out by sodomy: a Tucker Max type or some swashbuckling cast member of Duck Dynasty. But oppose gay marriage, or expel a gay married student from your law school for more refined reasons—because you are a man of God, or you read a compelling sociology study about the inviolability of the heterosexual nuclear family, and you can bask comfortably in your homophobia.

[LINK] "Jupiter's moon Ganymede may harbor 'club sandwich' of oceans and ice"

Via James Nicoll I came across this Science Daily report suggesting that Jupiter's moon Ganymede has a remarkable structure. Ganymede may not have a single water ocean underneath its ice crust, but rather multiple layers of ice and ocean, one on top of another.

"Ganymede's ocean might be organized like a Dagwood sandwich," said Steve Vance of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., explaining the moon's resemblance to the "Blondie" cartoon character's multi-tiered sandwiches. The study, led by Vance, provides new theoretical evidence for the team's "club sandwich" model, first proposed last year. The research appears in the journal Planetary and Space Science.

The results support the idea that primitive life might have possibly arisen on the icy moon. Scientists say that places where water and rock interact are important for the development of life; for example, it's possible life began on Earth in bubbling vents on our sea floor. Prior to the new study, Ganymede's rocky sea bottom was thought to be coated with ice, not liquid -- a problem for the emergence of life. The "club sandwich" findings suggest otherwise: the first layer on top of the rocky core might be salty water.

"This is good news for Ganymede," said Vance. "Its ocean is huge, with enormous pressures, so it was thought that dense ice had to form at the bottom of the ocean. When we added salts to our models, we came up with liquids dense enough to sink to the sea floor."

NASA scientists first suspected an ocean in Ganymede in the 1970s, based on models of the large moon, which is bigger than Mercury. In the 1990s, NASA's Galileo mission flew by Ganymede, confirming the moon's ocean, and showing it extends to depths of hundreds of miles. The spacecraft also found evidence for salty seas, likely containing the salt magnesium sulfate.

Previous models of Ganymede's oceans assumed that salt didn't change the properties of liquid very much with pressure. Vance and his team showed, through laboratory experiments, how much salt really increases the density of liquids under the extreme conditions inside Ganymede and similar moons. It may seem strange that salt can make the ocean denser, but you can see for yourself how this works by adding plain old table salt to a glass of water. Rather than increasing in volume, the liquid shrinks and becomes denser. This is because the salt ions attract water molecules.

The models get more complicated when the different forms of ice are taken into account. The ice that floats in your drinks is called "Ice I." It's the least dense form of ice and lighter than water. But at high pressures, like those in crushingly deep oceans like Ganymede's, the ice crystal structures become more compact. "It's like finding a better arrangement of shoes in your luggage -- the ice molecules become packed together more tightly," said Vance. The ice can become so dense that it is heavier than water and falls to the bottom of the sea. The densest and heaviest ice thought to persist in Ganymede is called "Ice VI."

By modeling these processes using computers, the team came up with an ocean sandwiched between up to three ice layers, in addition to the rocky seafloor. The lightest ice is on top, and the saltiest liquid is heavy enough to sink to the bottom. What's more, the results demonstrate a possible bizarre phenomenon that causes the oceans to "snow upwards." As the oceans churn and cold plumes snake around, ice in the uppermost ocean layer, called "Ice III," could form in the seawater. When ice forms, salts precipitate out. The heavier salts would thus fall downward, and the lighter ice, or "snow," would float upward. This "snow" melts again before reaching the top of the ocean, possibly leaving slush in the middle of the moon sandwich.

[LINK] Two articles comparing the economies of China and the United States

BusinessWeek had two articles up today which examined and compared the American and Chinese economies. What does it mean now that--according to one source--China has the larger economy of the two?

Peter Coy's article "The U.S. Is Big and Rich. China Is Just Big" has its summary in its title.

It doesn’t mean China is rich. All that gross domestic product has to be spread around more than a billion people. On a per-capita basis, the highest-income country in the world in 2011 was the oil-soaked and lightly populated Gulf monarchy of Qatar, at $146,000 per person. The U.S., as this chart shows, was No. 12, at just under $50,000.

It also doesn’t mean that China has the same international heft as the U.S. does. Remember, these figures are calculated according to purchasing power parity, which compares buying power. China looks good by that measure because it has a lower cost of living. A hundred dollars buys more food, haircuts, etc., inside China than it does inside the U.S. But if China wants to buy critical materials from abroad—say, sophisticated electronics or aircraft—what matters is the regular old exchange rate. And by that measure, China’s economy is considerably smaller. It was 47 percent as big as the U.S. economy in 2011 going by the exchange rate vs. 87 percent as big using purchasing power parity.

Dexter Roberts' article "China's Income-Inequality Gap Widens Beyond U.S. Levels" notes very significant income inequality.

The metric used in these studies, the Gini coefficient, would be zero in a society in which all income is equally distributed, while a score of one would reflect a society in which all income is concentrated in the hands of a single individual. Over a three-decade period starting in 1980—shortly after China’s economic reform and opening commenced—the Gini coefficient has grown from 0.3 to 0.55 in 2010.

In the U.S., by contrast, the index reads 0.45. Anything over 0.50 is considered “severe disparity,” says the report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The authors used data from seven separate surveys conducted by a number of Chinese university-affiliated organizations, including Peking University’s Institute of Social Sciences.

“Income inequality in today’s China is among the highest in the world, especially in comparison to countries with comparable or higher standards of living,” said University of Michigan sociologist Yu Xie, who co-authored the report.

The official figure given last year was 0.473, slightly down from 0.474 in 2012, according to China’s statistics bureau. That’s still higher than the 0.4 level that the United Nations has said is likely to cause social unrest. “Unfortunately, for a variety of practical and political reasons, government statistics have not been a reliable source of information on income inequality in today’s China,” Xie said.

[. . .]

“The rapid rise in income inequality in China can be partly attributed to longstanding government development policies that effectively favor urban residents over rural residents and favor coastal, more developed regions over inland, less developed regions,” said Xiang Zhou, a graduate student who co-authored the report with Xie.

TLDR? China has very many people who are well-off by First World standards, but it has a much larger population of people who are very poor by First World standards, too.