[PHOTO] Grey evening, looking east on Wellesley towards Church

[PHOTO] A T3 Transit bus on Belvedere at Brackley Point Road

I photographed this T3 Transit bus last month. Likely running the QEH and East route described on the company website, the bus is proof of the vitality of the transit system that started up in 2005. A brief CBC interview suggests that the company is having its most profitable time ever.

(For the curious, I've two different photo posts dating from this February sharing photos of buses on the route from my trip last year.)

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• Crooked Timber's Daniel Davies writes about the end of his career as a financial analyst.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper discussing the brown dwarfs of 25 Orionis.


• The Dragon's Tales links to a paper suggesting that Uranus' moon system is still evolving, with the moon Cupid being doomed in a relatively short timescale. It also wonders if North Korea is exporting rare earths through China.


• Far Outliers notes the Ainu legacy in placenames in Japanese-settled Hokkaido.


• Languages of the World's Asya Perelstvaig examines the complexities surrounding language and dialect and nationality in the Serbo-Croatian speech community in the former Yugoslavia.


• Personal Reflections' Jim Belshaw notes the terribly high death rate among Europeans in colonial Indonesia, and how drink was used to put things off.


• The Russian Demographics Blog examines the prevalence of sex-selective abortion in Armenia.


• Torontoist notes Rob Ford's many lies and/or incomprehensions about Toronto's fiscal realities.


• Towleroad suggests that one way to regularize HIV testing would be to integrate it with dentistry appointments.


• Window on Eurasia notes a water dispute on the Russian-Azerbaijan border and argues that the election of a pro-Russian cleric to the head of the Ukrainian section of the Russian Orthodox Church is dooming that church to decline.

[LINK] "Maritime sea life linked to early European explorers"

CBC News' Shane Fowler reports on an interesting finding suggesting that the marine ecologies of the east coast were created unwittingly by discharges of ballast water from early European visitors' ships.

Two major food sources for millions of birds and fish in the Bay of Fundy may have been brought to the Maritimes unwittingly by early European explorers.

​Research from the University of New Brunswick suggests mud shrimp and mud worms are invasive species from Europe carried across the Atlantic in ship ballasts, perhaps that of Samuel de Champlain.

"There's no way to tell for sure," said researcher Tony Einfeldt, "but it very well could have been him."

Einfeldt's conclusion comes from genetic analysis — comparing the genes of the Bay of Fundy populations of mud shrimp and mud worms to those on European coastlines.

"We can tell where they came from because the genetic identity of both species in the Bay of Fundy matches that of those in Europe," he said.

[. . .]

Einfeldt's genetic work has been able to pinpoint several introductions of these species along the East Coast.

"The Bay of Fundy populations most likely came from France and the Bay of Biscay," he said.

"A second introduction that occurred in the Gulf of Maine is more likely from northern Europe, like the Norway, Germany, Denmark area," said Einfeldt.