[PHOTO] Condo construction on Hayden Street

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• blogTO has a visual history of the Toronto Islands up.


• Centauri Dreams looks at GU Piscium b and Beta Pictoris b.


• The Dragon's Tales links to a paper examining two concepts for theoretical nuclear fusion-fueled space drives, one using additional coolant and one not.


• Eastern Approaches examines the disastrous floods in the former Yugoslavia.


• Joe. My. God. reports on a study suggesting church attendance is exaggerated by traditional self-reporting methods.


• Language Log notes the success in the digitization of ancient Persian manuscripts, including of a bilingual Persian/Gujarati Zoroastrian text.


• Registan notes the influence of the Internet and social media in reshaping Islam in Uzbekistan.


• Savage Minds features a post by Nick Seaver talking about the ways in which anthropology can get involved with computer-mediated processes, like the algorithms which recommend tunes.


• Towleroad examines Dolly Parton as a gay icon.


• Window on Eurasia notes Russian academic disinterest in Ukrainian culture and covers the Crimean Tatars' commemoration of their deportation in the context of Russian occupation.

[VIDEO] 501 Queen, from Colborne Lodge Drive to Dufferin Street

"501 Queen, from Colborne Lodge Drive to Dufferin Street" (Watch on YouTube)

Filmed on the afternoon of the 19th of May, 2014, this is a recording of a trip on the 501 Queen streetcar east from Colborne Lodge Drive, at the bottom of High Park, to Dufferin Street. Looking north, you can see the southern ends of the neighbourhoods of Roncesvalles and Parkdale.

[LINK] Three notes on the 50th anniversary of Tim Hortons

On the long weekend, the Canadian multinational coffee and fast food restaurant Tim Hortons celebrated its 50th anniversary. From a converted garage in Hamilton, Tim Hortons has expanded to become a major North American chain.

From CTV News, "Tim Hortons marks 50th anniversary in downtown Toronto with vintage flair":

Tim Hortons celebrated its 50th birthday yesterday by transforming downtown Toronto’s Yonge and Dundas Square into a scene from the 1960s, complete with a replica of its original Hamilton, Ont. restaurant.

Thursday’s installation included a vintage Hamilton street scene with vintage cars, staffed with servers dressed in 60s garb, handing out treats to passerby.

The coffee and donut giant opened its first store on May 17, 1964 and was named after its co-founder, Miles Gilbert “Tim” Horton, who won the Stanley Cup with the Toronto Maple Leafs just weeks before launching the restaurant.

The event, which ran from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., included a performance by Montreal jazz singer Nikki Yanofsky, a Stanley Cup exhibit, and appearances by former Toronto Maple Leafs Johnny Bower and Ron Ellis.

On its actual birthday on Saturday, Tim Hortons will hand out free birthday-cake donuts at participating branches across the country.

(There are plenty of pictures.)

From the Hamilton Spectator's Jim Mahoney, "Tim Hortons celebrates Hamilton’s ‘Store No. 1’ — in Toronto".

Who ever thought when the pilot store opened here on Ottawa Street in 1964, one day Tim Hortons would be bigger than Stelco and that Stelco would get busted down to a few coke ovens and a guard dog?

Who ever thought when Ron Joyce dove into the Always Fresh in 1967, the team Tim Horton played for at the time would not win another Stanley Cup for 47 years ... and counting.

Time is an often cruel and capricious script doctor who can reduce starring characters to minor roles or write them out of the story entirely, on the slightest of pivots. And it can character-arc a guy like Ron Joyce, with inauspicious beginnings, into a billionaire with university buildings named after him.

Tim Hortons Inc. has 100,000 employees, annual revenues of more than $3 billion, 4,400 stores around the world and, now, 50 candles on its cruller.

It celebrates the milestone with a special promotion Saturday — complimentary B'day doughnuts. But it got things rolling earlier in the week, turning the "clock back on Toronto's Yonge-Dundas Square today, transforming the bustling city corner into a scene from 1964, complete with a retro replica of 'Store No. 1,' Tim Hortons' very first restaurant."

[. . .]

But the thing is, if you're going to follow the ivy vine back to the rootstock, you will find yourself on Ottawa Street in Hamilton, not Dundas Square, in the city with the big pointy thing in the middle.

And, from the Canadian Press, "Tim Hortons celebrates 50 years, but faces new challenges beyond coffee":

study from marketing research firm Ipsos Reid found that Tim Hortons ranked as the sixth most influential brand in the country last year, a prominence which is supported by how instilled coffee slang like the “double-double” has become in Canadian culture.

Recently, the company launched a social media campaign where customers could pick which discontinued menu item they’d like to see back in its restaurants. The chocolate eclair won the popularity contest.

And last week Tim Hortons did what few other companies could when it opened a replica of its first restaurant for a single day of celebration. The event, held in the heart of downtown Toronto, included shelves stacked with decades of memorabilia like retro Timbits boxes and desserts that once graced the menu.

While nostalgia runs through the veins of Tim Hortons (TSX:THI), staying true to the company’s famous image won’t be enough to keep it relevant as the $4.6-billion business of Canadian coffee evolves, and competitors vie for a bigger chunk of the market.

Starbucks has spent years focused on an aggressive rollout across most of the country, chasing the high-end coffee drinker who prefers lattees and frappuccino while, more recently, McDonalds began to lure more cost-conscious customers with a cheaper brew and free giveaways.

Somewhere in the hustle, Tim Hortons lost some focus as it dabbled in alternative food and drink items to mixed success.

[LINK] "Syria war death toll tops 160,000"

This Associated Press report carried by the CBC about the death toll from the Syrian civil war is terrible but unsurprising. The only thing I can say is that the civil war might be coming closer to an end, as the fragile opposition coalition loses ground to the government, but the nature of the post-war repression isn't something I'd like to imagine too closely.

The death toll in Syria's three-year conflict has exceeded 160,000, an activist group said Monday, a harrowing figure that reflects the country's relentless bloodletting that appears no closer to a resolution.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said it has documented 162,402 deaths since the uprising against President Bashar Assad's government began in March 2011.

The figure includes civilians, rebels and members of the Syrian military, the Observatory said. It also includes militiamen, such as Lebanese Hezbollah members, who have been fighting alongside Assad's forces, and foreign fighters battling with the rebels for Assad's ouster.

The Observatory remains the sole organization providing a reliable tally of Syria's dead.

The UN has stopped updating its own tally of the Syrian dead, saying it can no longer verify the sources of information. The world body's last count in late July was 100,000 dead.

The Observatory bases its tally on information it gets from a network of activists on the ground in Syria. The figures are based on the names of those killed, collected by activists who document the dead in hospitals, morgues and identify them from video materials.

[LINK] "Life and death in Chernobyl’s ghost forest"

Mitch Potter's Toronto Star article taking a look at the environmental after-effects of the Chernobyl disaster starts with the famously irradiated Red Forest. It turns out that the fungal and microbial life here, in the zone most heavily effected by fallout, has been so badly devastated that trees and their litter simply don't decay.

Very few people understand the radioactive afterglow of Chernobyl as well as Canadian scientist Tim Mousseau, who has dedicated 15 years to unravelling the ecological and evolutionary consequences of the world’s worst nuclear catastrophe.

But for all the impacts he has seen in his more than 30 field trips to Ukraine since 1991, none was so eerie as his close-up encounter with the ghost forest of dead trees that lingers to this day inside the radioactive no-go zone north of Kyiv.

“We were trudging through the Red Forest, the area most heavily contaminated. And we noticed that many of these trees — trees that were killed in the initial blast in 1986 — were sitting there relatively intact,” says Mousseau.

“You squeezed them and they were hard. Trees that died that many years ago, they should be mostly sawdust. They shouldn’t exist. But they do.”

Something else struck him as strange — the leaf litter underfoot was thick. As much as three times thicker than in less-contaminated areas of Chernobyl’s 2,500-square-kilometre exclusion zone. “It was like walking on mattresses,” he says.

[. . ]

After the first year, the leaves in areas with no radiation were 70 to 90 per cent gone. Those nearest the hot zone were still about 60 per cent intact by weight. Moreover, microbes and fungi appeared to make the difference. They, and not insects, played the bigger role in breaking down the leaves and returning nutrients to the soil — and radiation, the study shows, is interrupting the process.

“We were just overwhelmed by the magnitude of the (radiation) effect,” Mousseau said.

“We’re trained to be skeptics and so when you walk through these areas, in the back of your mind you tend to doubt what appears to be obvious but may or may not be the reality. And so we were very surprised at how strong a signal came through.

“When we did the analysis we said, ‘Oh my God. This is huge.’”

This is another entry in the long-standing debate about the long-term effects of the disaster. Some have suggested that Chernobyl, for all its damage, is actually attractive to wildlife, as a place where they can reproduce without worrying about humans. Others suggest that it's actually a place where wildlife encounter worse conditions, that animal populations would die out if new animals didn't come in. Is the irradiated zone in Chernobyl a source of new wildlife or a sink for existing wildlife, or perhaps simply an ecological trap where animals cope but not very well? Potter's article looks at it thoroughly.

[LINK] "Parched: A New Dust Bowl Forms in the Heartland"

National Geographic's Laura Parker writes at length, with photos, about the ongoing severe drought in the American Midwest. Concentrating particularly on Oklahoma, Parker points out that things are bad, with very little rain, rising temperature, and a dropping Ogallala Aquifer water table. With climate change, worse is to come. Will this area become an American desert? The signs aren't promising.

"When people ask me if we'll have a Dust Bowl again, I tell them we're having one now," says Millard Fowler, age 101, who lunches most days at the Rockin' A [in Boise City, Oklahoma] with his 72-year-old son, Gary. Back in 1935, Fowler was a newly married farmer when a blizzard of dirt, known as Black Sunday, swept the High Plains and turned day to night. Some 300,000 tons of dirt blew east on April 14, falling on Chicago, New York, Washington, D.C., and, according to writer Timothy Egan in his book The Worst Hard Time, onto ships at sea in the Atlantic.

"It is just as dry now as it was then, maybe even drier," Fowler says. "There are going to be a lot of people out here going broke."

The climatologists who monitor the prairie states say he is right. Four years into a mean, hot drought that shows no sign of relenting, a new Dust Bowl is indeed engulfing the same region that was the geographic heart of the original. The undulating frontier where Kansas, Colorado, and the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma converge is as dry as toast. The National Weather Service, measuring rain over 42 months, reports that parts of all five states have had less rain than what fell during a similar period in the 1930s.

"If you have a long enough period without rain, there will be dust storms and they can be every bit as bad as they were in the Thirties," says Mary Knapp, the Kansas State assistant climatologist.

Cattle are being sold to market because there is not enough grass on rangeland for large herds to graze. Colorado's southeast Baca County is almost devoid of cattle—a change that Nolan Doesken, Colorado's state climatologist, calls "profound and dramatic."

Elsewhere, drifts of sand pile up along fence lines packed with tumbleweeds, and tens of thousands of acres of dry-land wheat have died beneath blankets of silt as fine as sifted flour. In the vocabulary of Plains weather, this is known as a "blowout." Blowouts often start as brown strips along the outer edges of fields, and then spread with each successive blowing wind like a cancer.

"Once your neighbor's fields starts to blow, it puts your own fields at risk," says Gary McManus, Oklahoma's state climatologist, who toured the blown-out wheat fields outside Boise City last week.

[DM] On how gutting national statistics bureaus harms countries, e.g. Canada 2014

At long last, I've got a post up at Demography Matters making the point, based on the sad experience of Canada and the gutting of Statistics Canada, that we need good national statistics agencies collecting data if we--as individuals, as governments--are to respond accurately to our changing world.

Please, go read.