[PHOTO] Playing street chess during the Annex Festival on Bloor

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly comments on her search for belonging.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper that estimates the number of flares among brown dwarfs based on observation of red dwarfs.


• The Dragon's Tales links to a Foreign Affairs article arguing that Eurasian integration has been hurt by Ukraine.


• Joe. My. God. notes that the Pet Shop Boys have called for a mass pardon of Britons convicted of violating past laws banning gay sex.


• Language Log's Victor Mair notes the widely variant translations of different Chinese languages and registers by online translators.


• The New APPS Blog notes that Switzerland would be a good model for the democratic European Union.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer notes that Mexico is on the rise.


• Understanding Society's Daniel Little studies the public opinions towards welfare states and the role of the market in the United States and Nordic countries.


• The Volokh Conspiracy considers the limit of the treaty powers of the American federal government. Could the US sign over Alaska to Russia?


• Window on Eurasia notes that the Ukrainian crisis has reenergized NATO and links to a Russian writer who argues that Russia is set to become a civilizational empire, not a nation-state.

[URBAN NOTE] "Buffalo in the rear-view"

NOW Toronto's Jonathan Goldsbie visits the city of Buffalo in upstate New York and comes back with the story of a city that has hit rock bottom but which is caught up in the penumbra of a booming Toronto.

[Kitty Lambert-Rudd, executive director of Buffalo ReUse] moved to Buffalo from Arizona in 2004, when she bought a house at auction for $3,000. A decade later and after extensive renovation work, it’s now worth $15,000.

“God, Buffalo is such an affordable place to start,” she says. “You can start a business here: there is so much real estate available where you walk in the door and start a factory. Walk in the door and start a retail business. Walk in the door and start a restaurant. Walk in the door and start anything that you can imagine can be done here in Buffalo."

A city with so little is full of possibility.

[. . .]

Buffalo is in many ways the Great Lakes mirror-image of Toronto. Here, our issues are the management of growth and the equitable distribution of prosperity. There, their issue is contraction, dealing with shrinkage and poverty. What happens when your best days are behind you and never coming back?

[. . .]

Remarkably, the city supports an alternative newsweekly, Artvoice, whose cover story is a recap of Toronto's Hot Docs festival. The same issue contains a guide to Toronto neighbourhoods outside the downtown core.

“I probably make the trip up the QEW to Toronto 10 or 12 times a year,” the piece by M. Faust begins, “and every time I do I swear the skyscape seems to have changed: less sky, more buildings.”

It’s a rare glimpse of how Buffalo views us.

"But even as Toronto seems hellbent to become the Tokyo of North America, many non-downtown neighbourhoods are hanging onto their identities, or building new ones that utilize and maintain the city's past."

[LINK] "Marvel, Fox and the fantastic fracas"

MacLean's' Jaime Weinman describes an unfortunate, but plausible, rivalry between comic publisher and movie powerhouse Marvel and 20th century Fox.

It sometimes seems like the Marvel Comics characters from the 1960s are the driving force of the entire U.S. movie industry, what with Marvel Studios’ own films, the X-Men movies from 20th-Century Fox, and the Spider-Man franchise from Sony. Marvel probably wishes it could have the movie rights to all its characters, given how lucrative they are, but the company sold off a lot of those rights in the 1990s when business was bad. Would Marvel actively sabotage its own comics in order to deny free publicity to another studio’s movie? That’s what the comics gossip site Bleeding Cool claimed last week when it claimed that Marvel was planning to cancel its long-running Fantastic Four comic, and had already given orders to some artists to omit the Fantastic Four characters from promotional material. The reason? Marvel sold Fox the movie rights to Fantastic Four years ago, and the studio is going into production with a new, hip and edgy version of the four-person superhero team. Any promotion of Fantastic Four by Marvel will benefit Fox’s attempt to bring the team back to public attention, and make it harder for Marvel to get the film rights back (they revert to the owner if Fox goes long enough without using the characters). So, Bleeding Cool argued — and the Internet, being the Internet, instantly believed — Marvel might not think it’s worth its while to feature them too prominently.

Bleeding Cool sometimes gets inaccurate or only half-accurate scoops, but it’s one of the few sites that has any dirt at all on what goes on in the comic book industry (a business that is infamously cozy with a lot of the sites that report on it). While Fantastic Four may not be cancelled, the idea that it was at least in danger of cancellation was partly backed up by the less gossipy Comic Book Resources. That site checked with some sources and found that “a hiatus for the property is planned, at least as of recently. Plans can change, something that’s potentially more likely now that the situation has been made public.” In other words, the controversy might scare the company out of cancelling the book, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t on the table.

Whether that story turns out to be true or not, the report sparked enough interest that it began to call attention to other things going on with Marvel properties whose film rights are held by Fox. The X-Men comics, unlike the FF’s, are too popular to cancel. But fans of the X-Men books have been complaining that Marvel wasn’t doing very much promotion for the new movie, Days of Future Past, that X-Men characters were rarely at the centre of big company-wide promotions, and that there wasn’t much in the way of official tie-in merchandise for the film — the sort of thing that you normally expect is part of the very reason for doing a big blockbuster movie. (There is official Spider-Man movie merchandise, but that’s because Marvel bought back the merchandising rights several years ago.)

[LINK] "Grant Morrison’s 9/11: New X-Men’s 'Ambient Magnetic Fields'"

Sequart's Julian Darius revisits an issue of Grant Morrison's New X-Men, November 2002's issue 132, "Ambient Magnetic Fields." In a well-illustrated essay, Darius makes the compelling case that this one-issue story, set on a former mutant island of Genosha after it had been devastated by a Sentinel attack, is one of the most thoughtful responses in comics to the September 11th terrorist attacks.

In the wake of 9/11, Morrison raised the fact that he’d already dramatized the limits of violence. But as a writer of stories that prominently featured violent action, violence inevitably continued to appear in his work. Of course, this speaks more to the limitations of the genre than to any inconsistency on Morrison’s part. You certainly can’t devote a full issue to everyone who’s killed, and repeating this device would obviously lessen its impact. Morrison is indisputably aware of the dangers of depicting violence as entertainment, and he’s been quite articulate on the subject. But just as indisputably, widescreen mass violence is part of the appeal of the Genosha destruction sequence.

You can read “Best Man Fall” as an apology for so casually killing people, in order to add drama or make the hero look tough. And given the obvious parallels between the Genosha attack and 9/11, you can read “Ambient Magnetic Fields” as an apology for turning genocide into an entertaining cliffhanger.

A sense of unfathomable sadness permeates “Ambient Magnetic Fields.” The story opens with a full-page shot of the ruins of Genosha, as a character says, “I remember when all this was fields and spires and monorails.” Later, Storms speaks of “charred bones and ashes of children.” The story manages to convey the sort of reverence and hushed silence you might feel inside you at a concentration camp, or on the Normandy beaches, or on a Civil War battlefield. The sense that something terrible happened here — a tragedy too large for a single human brain to comprehend, in its fullness.

That the story is somehow able to convey this owes a great deal to the artwork of Jimenez and Lanning. One of the faults of Morrison’s New X-Men is its frequent artistic changes, and many complained that some didn’t measure up to the others. No one could say this about Jimenez and Lanning. Everything looks beautiful, yet this somehow only enhances the plaintive feel of the devastation. The pages’ black backgrounds reinforce the sense of mourning. The juxtaposition of utopian X-Men technology and debris is particularly effective, as when characters stare out of futuristic windows on what might as well be a ruined planet.

[LINK] "Three regimes of extrasolar planet radius inferred from host star metallicities"

The Dragon's Gaze linked to an important paper on exoplanets, "Three regimes of extrasolar planet radius inferred from host star metallicities". The abstract?

Approximately half of the extrasolar planets (exoplanets) with radii less than four Earth radii are in orbits with short periods. Despite their sheer abundance, the compositions of such planets are largely unknown. The available evidence suggests that they range in composition from small, high-density rocky planets to low-density planets consisting of rocky cores surrounded by thick hydrogen and helium gas envelopes. Here we report the metallicities (that is, the abundances of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium) of more than 400 stars hosting 600 exoplanet candidates, and find that the exoplanets can be categorized into three populations defined by statistically distinct (~4.5σ) metallicity regions. We interpret these regions as reflecting the formation regimes of terrestrial-like planets (radii less than 1.7 Earth radii), gas dwarf planets with rocky cores and hydrogen–helium envelopes (radii between 1.7 and 3.9 Earth radii) and ice or gas giant planets (radii greater than 3.9 Earth radii). These transitions correspond well with those inferred from dynamical mass estimates, implying that host star metallicity, which is a proxy for the initial solids inventory of the protoplanetary disk, is a key ingredient regulating the structure of planetary systems.

Centauri Dreams' Paul Gilster has some interesting discussion of this in his post "Three Regimes of Planet Formation".