Every four years, Torontonians congregate around bars and cafés, glued to live broadcasts of World Cup games. Flags fly from cars and shop windows, and every so often a street fills with fans celebrating their home country’s victory. In the 1960s, such celebrations were still unheard of in Toronto. While the World Cup did warrant some coverage in the local newspapers, it scarcely dominated the local sports sections as it does today.
In 1962, the CBC broadcasted Brazil’s victory in the final over Czechoslovakia—a full two weeks after the game had taken place. CBC aired the 1966 World Cup final between England and West Germany live on the radio at 10:00 a.m. EST, and aired it on television two hours later. Although local newspapers reported the tournament results with some interest, none of the Toronto papers took a special interest in England’s victory, nor reported on any reactions from English expatriates living in the city.
Things started changing in 1970, as the advent of mass communication enabled Torontonians to watch live broadcasts of the matches from Mexico. These live broadcasts were not available on regular television, however; the Toronto City Soccer Club acquired the rights to show games on closed-circuit television, and charged admission for those willing to pay.
On June 7, 1970, a capacity crowd of 5,300 watched a group stage match between England and Brazil at Varsity Arena, while a further 3,000 fans were turned away at the door. According to the Globe and Mail, the decidedly pro-England crowd at the arena “applauded and yelled through most of the contest. Loudest cheers were reserved for the outstanding play of the two goalkeepers, and Bobby Charlton of England and Pele of Brazil.” The same article notes that the game would have been shown at Maple Leaf Gardens—where, indeed, the later matches were shown live in 1970—but the venue was unavailable due to a Red Army Chorus concert.
Tickets at these live, closed-circuit broadcasts sold for between five and seven dollars. One Globe and Mail article predicted a sellout at Maple Leaf Gardens for the Italy-Mexico match. A few days later, the Globe ran a picture of an Italian crowd celebrating in the Toronto streets following their semifinal victory over West Germany, setting the stage for the final against Brazil. A mostly pro-Italy, sellout crowd watched Brazil cruise to a 4-1 victory at the Gardens.
In recent years, investors from Angola, former colony of Portugal, have bought significant chunks of Portuguese companies. Spanish officials are urging their counterparts in South and Latin America to come invest — never mind the conquest. And an exodus of bright young Portuguese is seeking opportunity abroad — often in erstwhile Portuguese colonies like Brazil, Angola and even East Timor.
It’s a significant reversal from decades past, when former colonies went begging their former masters for investment, aid and trade preferences, while stomaching the brain drain of their best-educated graduates. Now the roles have reversed, at least in some quarters. Some former colonies have become emerging markets, logging fast rates of growth, while the erstwhile imperialists are scrambling to stay afloat in the global recession.
Nowhere has the reversal been as dramatic as in Portugal and Angola. The former colonizer expects its economy will shrink 1.8 percent this year, while Angola, fat on diamonds and oil and Chinese love, grew nearly 12 percent annually from 2002 to 2011.
To be sure, the phenomenon is neither widespread nor particularly thoroughgoing. The Democratic Republic of Congo remains mired in terrible conflict, while its former overlord, Belgium, enjoys relative peace and absolute wealth. And for all the Indians snapping up real estate in the United Kingdom, hundreds of millions of Indians still struggle well below the poverty line. Angola’s riches, meanwhile, are concentrated among a handful of oligarchs, including the daughter of President Jose Eduardo dos Santos, who is worth some $3 billion. (She’s got a half-billion-dollar chunk of a Portuguese media company.) Moreover, the country’s relationship with Portugal got testy just last month, with dos Santos complaining that Europeans were casting aspersions on the ethics of Angolan investors.
But nowhere are northern countries’ woes on better display than in the reversal of migration patterns. Migrants tend to vote with their feet. Since widespread decolonization in the mid-1950s, they’ve tended to stream from global south to global north, often to the imperial motherland. After India’s independence from Britain, for instance, Indians tended to immigrate to “Commonwealth” countries, for instance, while Haitians often went to Francophone ones like France, French-speaking Canada or Belgium, and Angolans headed for Portugal.
The flow appears to be reversing — at least in Portugal and perhaps in other places. Since the start of the financial crisis in 2008, young Portuguese have been streaming not only to wealthier European countries but also to former Portuguese colonies like East Timor, Brazil and Angola.
The search for life is largely limited to the search for water. We look for exoplanets at the correct distances from their stars for water to flow freely on their surfaces, and even scan radiofrequencies in the “water hole” between the 1,420 MHz emission line of neutral hydrogen and the 1,666 MHz hydroxyl line.
When it comes to extraterrestrial life, our mantra has always been to “follow the water.” But now, it seems, astronomers are turning their eyes away from water and toward methane — the simplest organic molecule, also widely accepted to be a sign of potential life.
Astronomers at the University College London (UCL) and the University of New South Wales have created a powerful new methane-based tool to detect extraterrestrial life, more accurately than ever before.
[. . .] Sergei Yurchenko, Tennyson and colleagues set out to develop a new spectrum for methane. They used supercomputers to calculate about 10 billion lines — 2,000 times bigger than any previous study. And they probed much higher temperatures. The new model may be used to detect the molecule at temperatures above that of Earth, up to 1,500 K.
[. . .]
The tool has already successfully reproduced the way in which methane absorbs light in brown dwarfs, and helped correct our previous measurements of exoplanets. For example, Yurchenko and colleagues found that the hot Jupiter, HD 189733b, a well-studied exoplanet 63 light-years from Earth, might have 20 times more methane than previously thought.
A combined NASA and ESA-funded study has found firm evidence that the nitrogen in Titan’s atmosphere originated in conditions similar to the cold birthplace of the most ancient comets from the Oort cloud — a spherical shell of icy particles that enshrouds the Solar System.
The hint comes in the form of a ratio. All elements have a certain number of known isotopes — variants of that element with the same number of protons that differ in their number of neutrons. The ratio of one isotope to another isotope is a crucial diagnostic tool.
In planetary atmospheres and surface materials, the amount of one isotope relative to another isotope is closely tied to the conditions under which materials form. Any change in the ratio will allow scientists to deduce an age for that material.
Kathleen Mandt from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio and colleagues analyzed the ratio of nitrogen-14 (seven protons and seven neutrons) to nitrogen-15 (seven protons and eight neutrons) in Titan’s atmosphere.
“When we looked closely at how this ratio could evolve with time, we found that it was impossible for it to change significantly,” Mandt said in a press release. “Titan’s atmosphere contains so much nitrogen that no process can significantly modify this tracer even given more than four billion years of Solar System history.”
The team found that our Solar System is not old enough for this nitrogen isotope ratio to have changed as much as it has. By comparing the small change within this ratio, Mandt and colleagues found that it seemed more similar to Oort cloud comets than to Solar System bodies including planets and comets born in the Kuiper belt. The team is eager to see whether their findings are supported by data from ESA’s Rosetta mission, which will study comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko later this year.
This pulsar, dubbed PSR J2222-0137, was detected by Jason Boyles of West Virginia University in Morgantown using the Green Bank Telescope (GBT). The object is about 900 light-years away and it spins more than 30 times each second.
Further analysis showed that it wasn't alone; this pulsar was gravitationally bound to something. Astronomers figured that it was another neutron star, or more likely a white dwarf. The two were calculated to orbit one another every 2.45 days.
To confirm that it was a white dwarf, the researchers applied Einstein's theory of relativity. They studied how the gravity of the companion star warped space, causing delays in the radio signal as the pulsar passed behind it. Delays in travel times allowed the astronomers to determine the precise orientation of their orbit and the individual masses of the two stars; the pulsar has a mass 1.2 times that of our Sun, while the companion has a mass 1.05 times that of the Sun.
[. . .]
Fascinatingly, the astronomers figured that the white dwarf should be detectable in optical and infrared light. So they tried to use the Southern Astrophysical Research (SOAR) telescope in Chile and the 10-meter Keck telescope in Hawaii to detect it, but those surveys yielded nothing. It's that dim.
"Our final image should show us a companion 100 times fainter than any other white dwarf orbiting a neutron star and about 10 times fainter than any known white dwarf, but we don't see a thing," noted Bart Dunlap, a graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "If there's a white dwarf there, and there almost certainly is, it must be extremely cold."
The current situation is very different from the one John Maynard Keynes contemplated in the 1930s in his General Theory. At that point in the evolution of our economies and our societies the more advanced economies were stuck in a long lasting depression, a depression whose general dynamics are still far from being adequately understood, but one which was at least partly being perpetuated by the ineffectiveness of monetary policy due to the presence of a liquidity trap. The problem at that time was not simply cyclical, and certainly attempts to address it offer pointers to how we can handle our present day one. But the 1930s problem was not not in-principle self perpetuating. Economies really were being held back, as subsequent history has shown.
Today many economies are suffering the effects of a liquidity trap, but this time what we have is not simply a transient phenomenon since that trap is being generated by the impact of long term demographic changes in a way which was not the case in the 1930s - indeed you could speculate that in some countries the liquidity trap is a by-product of being stuck in a low fertility one. So the temporary application of exceptional fiscal and liquidity measures isn't going to resolve the "problem" (if problem - as opposed to inevitable and natural evolution in our economic and demographic regimes - there be) since once the effects of these wear off the economy may simply return to its old lethargy. This outcome I fear is one we will see in Japan if the Abenomics stimulus is ever removed.
Thus we are not simply talking about what Keynes referred to in his Essays in Persuasion as "magneto trouble" (despite this being one of PK's favourite analogies), wherein "the economic engine was as powerful as ever — but one crucial part [the magneto]was malfunctioning, and needed to be fixed". Which, we may ask, is the component which needs to be "fixed" here - I reiterate - could it possibly be fertility?
That's why people are talking about permanent fiscal stimulus, assuming "stimulus" is the appropriate word here. If it is then the definition of "austerity" transits into "failure to apply permanent fiscal stimulus". It's a new and different world, one where there is no "back" to head for, or as the American writer Thomas Wolf put it, "you can look homeward, angel", but "you can't go home again".
[I]t seems clear that a lot of the liquidity which is being pumped into the system by the ECB in an attempt to reflate economies on the Euro periphery is in fact arriving in cities like London, Berlin and Geneva (and specifically their housing sectors) producing all sorts of "bubbly" type activity and distortions in the domestic economies of the countries concerned, distortions which will prove hard to correct later, and may become highly negative in their effect should they eventually unwind.
All this liquidity may not have helped restore the real economies in the intended recipient countries, but it certainly - via "carry trades" and suchlike - made its presence felt elsewhere. Emerging market economies like India, Turkey, Brazil, Indonesia and South Africa saw their economies on the receiving end of large quantities of short term inward fund flows, flows which pushed the values of their currency strongly upwards, overheated the domestic economies with credit and generated long lasting distortions.
Naturally, when the US Federal Reserve started to talk about tapering its bond purchases (in May 2013) the impact was felt in one emerging economy after another across the globe, as funds suddenly began to flow out, and the values of the respective currencies suddenly started to fall sharply.
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