[PHOTO] Three entries from the International Sand Sculpting Competition, CNE

The CNE's International Sand Sculpting Competition is a face-off, where previous winners of the Exhibition's sand sculpting competition face off.

Visible as soon as one enters the Direct Energy Centre is the winner, Ilya Filimontsev's Matador.



My personal favourite was Mélineige Beauregard's It's About Love.



Rich Varano and his Sand Game of Thrones, meanwhile, is gorgeous. Would that my sand castles were as accomplished!

[PHOTO] Spinnaker's Landing, Summerside

Summerside's Spinnaker's Landing is an interesting-looking shopping and restaurant area, built on piers which trace arc out from the land over Summerside's harbour and back onto land again. The place has seen better days, apparently, a Summerside Journal-Pioneer article from this May noting that the area was being relaunched. I did see some signs of wear, paint chipping or missing or wood aging, but the complex was in good shape generally and about as busy as you could expect a tourist-oriented shopping area in Summerside to be late on a weekday.

[LINK] On using stellar spectra to find planets

Forbes' Bruce Dorminey describes an interesting new technique that may give astronomers a hint as to whether stars support planetary systems.

Ivan Ramirez, an astronomer at the University of Texas at Austin and colleagues [. . .] are testing a ground-based terrestrial planet-hunting shortcut. Using the Magellan Clay Telescope in Chile, the team has taken high-resolution stellar spectra from 88 solar twins that lie within 326 light years of Earth. The hope is that they can prove their hypothesis that these spectra contain signatures of depleted metals caused by the presence of unseen rocky planets in orbit around the parent star. In fact, Ramirez says the team has even found the signature of rocky planets in chemical spectra from the nearby star “Alpha Centauri A.”

In a forthcoming paper in Astronomy & Astrophysics, lead author Ramirez and colleagues note that their idea is that they would actually see less metals in a star that has planets. Ramirez points out that our own Sun also has a slightly lower presence of key “metals” necessary for terrestrial planet formation; which Ramirez ascribes to a depletion of elements that “like to stick together to form rocks.”

“That’s how this work started,” said Ramirez. “We saw this effect first in the Sun and we are extending it to these solar twin stars. Our idea is that these missing rocky elements are in the planets.”

Today, says Ramirez, it’s only possible to measure chemical composition with that kind of precision for stellar solar twins that are roughly the same age, mass and chemical makeup of our sun.

“So, instead of calculating how many atoms of titanium are in the target star,” said Ramirez, “we only care about how much more or less there is compared to the Sun. We look for a depletion of rocky elements relative to non-rocky elements.”

[. . .]

“Elements that cover a range of the ‘condensation sequence’,” said Ramirez, who explains that’s the temperature at which such elements change their “phase” from “gas to rock.” For example, Ramirez says our own Sun is depleted in specific elements that indicate that we have a planetary system; such as barium, aluminum, iron, magnesium, titanium, chromium, silicon, and yttrium.

[LINK] "The Rains Of Titan Change When They Hit Underground Reservoirs: Study"

Universe Today's Elizabeth Howell describes a new study imagining how underground reservoirs of liquid methane could form on Titan.

Titan — that moon of Saturn that has what some scientists consider precursors to elements for life — is a neat place to study because it also has a liquid cycle. But how the hydrocarbons move from the moon’s hundreds of lakes and seas into the atmosphere and the crust is still being examined.

A new study suggests that rainfall on Titan changes when it interacts with underground icy clathrates, which are watery structures that can include methane or ethane. This can make it easier for reservoirs to be created.

“We knew that a significant fraction of the lakes on Titan’s surface might possibly be connected with hidden bodies of liquid beneath Titan’s crust, but we just didn’t know how they would interact,” stated lead author Olivier Mousis, a Cassini research associate at the University of Franche-Comté in France. “Now, we have a better idea of what these hidden lakes or oceans could be like.”

[ISL] "Japan’s Medieval Islands of Exile Lure Young Workers"

Bloomberg's Chikako Mogi describes how Japan's Oki Islands managed to reverse a trend of depopulation and economic decline.

This is interesting news, but I don't think this will be replicable more widely across Japan. Why?

1. In Japan more so than in almost every other developed countries, native populations are declining with very few people coming from outside. The number of potential migrants is a shrinking resource.

2. Back in 2010, I noted that while Newfoundland's Fogo Island had managed a revival based on niche tourism, this is an option open to only a relatively few places. Newfoundland's islands and outports couldn't all become niche tourist destinations. The same kind of thing holds for Japan's islands and outlying areas.

The remote outposts that were used for centuries by medieval rulers to banish rivals have become a model for regional revival as Ama, on one of the four islets, attracts economic migrants from the mainland.

Through steps including expanding seafood exports, debt reduction and a revamp of the high school to provide a platform for entry to top colleges, the town found a recipe for countering the plight of demographic decline. With about 900 Japanese local districts at risk of becoming ghost towns in a generation, Ama’s success off the west coast has caught attention from the Abe administration -- and Australian educators.

“Ama got serious because it was in real difficulty,” said Hideaki Tanaka, who teaches governance at Meiji University in Tokyo. “Many places that rely on government support feel comfortable with the status quo but resources are limited and it’s unsustainable.”

Mayor Michio Yamauchi saw the writing on the wall in 2004. With 10.15 billion yen ($100 million) in debt to the national government and less than 5 percent of the money needed to pay that back, Ama was on the road to bankruptcy.

The town’s population had shrunk by two-thirds over the post-war period to fewer than 2,400 people. Two of every five residents were elderly. Even so, Ama still poured money into public works, increasing its debt burden without creating jobs.

“I decided to slash spending and remove waste, even if it meant reducing public amenities,” Yamauchi, 76, said by telephone from his office. “I cut my own salary to convince everyone of my resolve.”

While avoiding fiscal disaster was vital, that’s not the only lesson Ama holds, said Akiyoshi Takumori, chief economist at Sumitomo Mitsui Asset Management Co. in Tokyo.

Just as importantly, the town focused the economy on local specialties, expanded its sales and marketing networks, and attracted young people, according to Takumori.

Ama accomplished much of this with a public-private seafood company, which drew migrants like Toru Fujii, 44, and his wife Yuko, 46.

The pair relocated with two children in 2005 after Fujii tired of his administrative job in Nagano in central Japan and answered an advertisement to help set up the venture, called Furusato Ama.

[LINK] "Europa Universalis IV is The Best Genocide Simulator of The Year"

I meant to link a while ago to April Daniels' Gamemoir essay criticizing historical simulation games like Europa Universalis IV for not accurate representing indigenous peoples in the Americas as groups possessing agency. It's a long read, but good.

It took me a while to figure out what it was, but something felt a little strange about colonizing the Americas. It couldn’t be that I was not comfortable with playing a ruthlessly expansionary state. I mean, have you read the first part of this article?

Perhaps it was my uneasiness with gamifying a genocide that I directly benefit from, even centuries after it started. (Yes, white Americans, you ARE the beneficiaries of genocide. Get used to it.) That’s probably part of it, but a greater part of it, I think, is how the game portrays that atrocity.

When you finally get a ship over to North America, you’ll notice that things look a little different. Europe is crammed cheek to jowl with minor duchies and single-province powers, at least in the early game. There is no square inch of territory unaccounted for. But when you get to the Americas, you’ll see a lot of “empty” territory. The provinces and territories that are not claimed by any power or nation can be colonized.

You do this by sending a colonist to that province, and watch as its population grows. Once it hits a threshold, it becomes a productive city, and you can recall your colonist to do it again elsewhere.

Except that there wasn’t any “empty” territory in real life. There were people who already lived in the Americas, and in Africa, and in Asia. Entire cultures rose and fell, for thousands of years without European involvement. But when you get to where a lot of these people lived in Europa Universalis IV, you are presented with a blank spot on the map, and a suggestion that nobody who matters lives there.

[LINK] "The Story on Urban Newsrooms Is Still Looking for Its Hero"

Bruce Sterling linked some time ago to Ariella Cohen's Next City commentary, with extensive infographics, on Greg Hanscom's article on the troubles facing online journalism. Unless you get grants--and even if you do--prospects seem dire.

In the past six years, since the Great Recession blew another hole in the hull of foundering urban news outlets, American journalists have patched together a ragtag fleet of lifeboats and makeshift rafts, platforms where they can do the work critical to upholding local democracy. A recent survey by the Pew Research Center’s Journalism Project found 438 small digital news organizations nationwide, fully 85 percent of which have popped up since 2005. (Pew did not count citizen bloggers.) A majority of these had three staffers or less, many of them refugees from legacy news outlets. More than half said they focus on local or hyperlocal news, while 45 specialize in investigative journalism. The implications for cities are profound.

“They’re clearly trying to fill some of the reporting gaps at the local level that have been left by legacy media,” says Mark Jurkowitz, the Journalism Project’s associate director, who authored the report. “It’s a new, interesting sector. If you’re focusing on City Hall, or the school system, or a neighborhood, that’s a mission that can be accomplished with just three or four staffers.”

But while organizations like Baltimore Brew have picked up crucial (if unsexy) beats such as schools and police policy, uncovered serious political scandals, and helped communities weather environmental catastrophe, their continued existence is far from certain. Many, but not all, of these outfits are non-profits, and almost without exception, they operate on a shoestring, based out of co-working spaces and staffers’ living rooms. While the creators of these sites are getting more and more business savvy, they continue to struggle to make ends meet.

More than a decade after traditional news outlets began their collapse, and five years into a national experiment in small-scale community journalism, the question remains: Can we find a way to support the media organizations that sustain our cities?

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• blogTO notes that a new Toronto condo building will have separate entrances for the rich and the poor.


• Centauri Dreams has more about our galactic supercluster Laniakea.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper examining the atmosphere of very nearby sub-brown dwarf J085510.83-071442.5.


• The Dragon's Tales notes the deterioration of the Ukrainian military situation in the east.


• Far Outliers notes how, in 1854, the French army was generally better than the British.


• A Fistful of Euros' Edward Hugh notes the critical role of expectations in driving economic growth and change.


• Joe. My. God. notes the recent death of Joan Rivers.


• Marginal Revolution considers whether or not basic minimum incomes will continue to rise in democracies.


• pollotenchegg maps the very sharp population declines across Ukraine's Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts.


• The Financial Times' Gideon Rachman notes France's problems as seen from the perspective of a southwestern French village.


• Torontoist and blogTO both note Ontario's sale of the lucrative site of the Queen's Quay LCBO store.


• Towelroad notes protests over the partial and grudging inclusion of LGBT groups at New York City's St. Patrick's Day parade.


• Window on Eurasia notes that Russian agriculture simply isn't capable of feeding Russia in the sanctions era.