[PHOTO] Looking north along Bartlett at Dupont, towards the rail crossing, at 8 pm

Between the early nights and the lower temperatures, I'm afraid I can say that fall is here.

[PHOTO] Looking out the door of the Confederation Centre art gallery, Charlottetown

[LINK] "Louisiana Loses Its Boot"

Brett Anderson's Medium article about the disappearance of much of south Louisiana as seas rise and shorelines erode, hidden by misleading maps, is a must-read. What actually is the proper coastline of Louisiana? It's rather different from the one we see.

Digital maps have expanded our freedoms to roam, removing much of the fear and hassle inherent in exploring unfamiliar terrain by exponentially decreasing the chances we will become hopelessly lost. But smart phone screens are programmed to spit out the granular information we need to get from point A to B. We don’t look to them to give us the large-scale views of border, land, and water of accurate paper maps. And so it’s becoming harder and harder to communicate the most urgent crisis facing Louisiana.

According to the U.S.G.S., the state lost just under 1,900 square miles of land between 1932 and 2000. This is the rough equivalent of the entire state of Delaware dropping into the Gulf of Mexico, and the disappearing act has no closing date. If nothing is done to stop the hemorrhaging, the state predicts as much as another 1,750 square miles of land — an area larger than Rhode Island — will convert to water by 2064. An area approximately the size of a football field continues to slip away every hour. “We’re sinking faster than any coast on the planet,” explains Bob Marshall, a Pulitzer-winning journalist in New Orleans. Marshall authored the series “Losing Ground,” a recent collaboration between The Lens, a non-profit newsroom, and ProPublica, about the Louisiana coast’s epic demise.

While the kind of state map that might have been useful for navigation or perspective was elusive on the road to Morgan City, the image such maps project — the iconic “boot” shape everyone recognizes as Louisiana — was impossible to escape. The map’s outline was ubiquitous on my drive: on bumper stickers (with the boot standing in for the “L” in “Love”), engulfing T-shirt fronts (my favorite emblazoned with “I drove the Chevy to the levee but the levee was gone”), and glowing on Louisiana-shaped neon beer signs in barroom windows.

But the boot is at best an inaccurate approximation of Louisiana’s true shape and, at worst, an irresponsible lie. It has to be.

[LINK] "Faroe Island Whaling, a 1,000-Year Tradition, Comes Under Renewed Fire"

Jane J. Lee's National Geographic article profiles, with distressingly--but necessarily--graphic pictures, the ongoing controversy over whaling in the Faroes.

One positive sign is that apparently it has become much less an issue of subsistence or economics and more a cultural trait. These can be changed more readily.

The recent arrest of 14 volunteers working to stop whaling in the North Atlantic Ocean's Faroe Islands has focused a spotlight once again on a local tradition stretching back over a thousand years.

Six of the protesters were found guilty this week of interfering with the grindadráp, or grind, as these drive hunts are called, according to a statement released by the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. The remaining eight will appear in court on September 25. The activist group often makes headlines for the confrontational tactics used by some of its members—such as ramming whaling ships in the ocean around Antarctica.

The organization's campaign to end these hunts began in the 1980s, says Paul Watson, founder of Sea Shepherd, and won't stop until the practice disappears.

During a grind, a flotilla of small boats drives whales or dolphins into a shallow bay where they can be easily killed with knives. Grinds are the longest continuously practiced and relatively unchanged whaling tradition in the world, says Russell Fielding, a geographer from the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. He has studied the Faroe Island grinds since 2005.

Other cultures in the Arctic and Europe started whaling long before the Faroese, Fielding says. But they have either stopped or changed their techniques quite a bit.

[LINK] "‘Venus Zone': The Anti-Habitable Area Around A Star That Can Breed Hell"

Universe Today's Elizabeth Howell writes about a new paper, "On the Frequency of Potential Venus Analogs from Kepler Data", that examines the whole question of stellar Venus zones. Where must Venuses--broadly Earth-like but very hotel planets--be located in their planetary systems?

“We believe the Earth and Venus had similar starts in terms of their atmospheric evolution,” stated lead author Stephen Kane, an astronomer at San Francisco State University. “Something changed at one point, and the obvious difference between the two is proximity to the Sun.”

The habitable region around a star is poorly understood because scientists don’t quite know what conditions are necessary for life. It usually refers to the area where liquid water is possible, although this also depends on the climate of the planet itself. Clouds, terrain and atmospheric composition are just some of the variables that could affect habitability.

To better figure out where potential Venus-like exoplanets lurk, Kane’s team used data from the planet-hunting Kepler Space Telescope and examined solar flux — or how much solar energy a planet gets — to figure out where the Venus zone would be. The zone is then defined between two regions: where a planet could have the “runaway greenhouse effect” seen on Venus, and the spot where the planet is so close to its star that energy would wear away its atmosphere.

The first step would be pinpointing which planets reside within these zones. In future decades, astronomers could then examine the planetary atmospheres with telescopes to learn more about how they are composed — and how similar they are to Earth or Venus. Meanwhile, Kane’s team plans to model if carbon in the planet’s atmosphere could affect the boundaries of the zone.

[LINK] "Dogged By Controversy, A Jewish Sect Is On The Move Again"

NPR's Ted Robbins writes about the latest migration of the Lev Tahor, which fled Québec following reports of child abuse first to Ontario then left Canada altogether for Guatemala. They do not fit in well there, apparently.

[I]n a culture of brightly colored clothing and clean-shaven men, the black suits and long beards stood out.

"We are different, very different," Goldman said.

Language is part of the barrier. Almost all of the members of Lev Tahor speak Yiddish, Hebrew or English — not Spanish. But Vice Mayor Gusman Ulpan said the Jews threaten Mayan and Christian traditions, as well as newer social policies encouraging small families.

"The problem is cultural. Their culture is contrary to our culture and traditions," Ulpan says. "They tell our women, 'Why do you only have two or three children? It's a sin. You should have as many children as God gives you.' "

[URBAN NOTE] "Don’t count out Doug Ford just yet"

Spacing Toronto's John Lorinc makes the point that Doug Ford still might win.

In many ways, Tory is trying to rebuild the Lastman coalition, which has as its core centre-of-the-road midtown and suburban homeowners — some on the right-wing of the Liberal spectrum, and some of the centre-left end of the Tory universe. He also had, and was clearly courting, that subset of red-meat conservatives who agreed with Ford’s program but got tired of his antics, probably because they were getting in the way of delivering on his aforementioned program. Lastly, Tory’s camp almost certainly includes some moderately left-of-centre voters who would normally be members of Chow Nation but have opted to cast their ballots strategically so as to ensure that Rob was gone, once and for all.

That coalition, I’m guessing, is a whole lot less cohesive today than it was last week, and here’s why:

For the red meat conservatives who drifted into Toryland, Doug, surely, is the real deal. While he’ll shoot his mouth off and say impolitic things, he’s not going to run into the bushes and drink vodka, nor is he going to show up on pirated cell phone videos with a crack pipe in hand (if such videos existed, they’d have been in circulation by now). In other words, he’s Rob without the blushing, whereas Tory continues to radiate that kind of wishy-washiness one can contract by hanging around Liberals for too long.

Now, for the Tory supporters who are nose-holding progressives (you know who you are), Chow in the past week or so appears to have started to find her voice and show some passion. Moreover, she’s launched a compelling attack on Tory’s Smart Track scheme, and in fact scored big last week when she vividly demonstrated that his preferred route would pass directly through some building parcels on the former Richview expressway right-of-way on Eglinton Ave. In an election where transit is the dominant policy issue, Chow’s critique seems increasingly credible vis-a-vis Tory’s plan and its questionable financing premises, and that fact alone may be changing some minds.

In other words, Tory’s support could begin bleeding both right and left, creating — at least in the interim — a far closer, and tenser, race than we’ve witnessed to date. Whether Chow can turn her slide around remains to be seen. But what does appear likely is that Tory’s double-digit lead may begin to shrink.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• blogTO shares pictures from last weekend's Ukrainian Festival.


• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly started a discussion of the merits of small town life or vice versa, coming down decidedly against.


• Centauri Dreams examines the concept of the Venus zone.


• The Dragon's Tales notes a study suggesting that the Moon's gravity is not high enough for humans to orient themselves.


• Eastern Approaches looks at the elections in Crimea.


• Language Hat examines the story of the endangered language Ayapeneco, apparently misrepresented in an ad campaign.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes that the American left is starting to win on cultural issues.


• Marginal Revolution notes that the collapse of Scotland's industrial sector has led to a certain deglobalization.


• The Planetary Society Blog's Emily Lakdawalla notes the discovery of a potential landing site for Rosetta.


• Torontoist looks at a local model airplane club.


• Towleroad notes the lead writer of Orange is the New Black has left her husband and begun dating one of her actors.


• Window on Eurasia suggests many Westerners haven't taken the shift in Russian politics fully into account.

[BRIEF NOTE] An update on Krasnoyarsk and Russian federalism

Back in 2005, I mentioned that the Russian government was set to engage in some territorial consolidation in Siberia, merging the Evenk and Taymyr autonomous okrugs, creating for northern indigenous minorities, directly into Krasnoyarsk to create a single subnational division. The stated goal was to achieve greater efficiencies of government, the unspoken goal perhaps a desire to renovate the Russian federal system. A Window on Eurasia post suggests that the resultant centralization hasn't worked well for the northern peoples concerned.

[T]he forced marriage of the three, achieved largely as a result of promises by Moscow and Krasnoyarsk that the numerically small nationalities of these regions would be taken care of, has not worked well, with few of those Russian promises in fact kept and many of the numerically small non-Russians suffering from their loss of status.

And those difficulties, which they may seem small given that Dolgan-Nenetsk had only 40,000 people and Evenkia only 18,000, have cast a long shadow and slowed or even stopped one of Putin’s signature plans, the elimination within Russia of all non-Russian republics, including large ones like Tatarstan.

The difficulties that arise when such amalgamation projects are attempted were very much on public view yesterday at a meeting of deputies from these two downgraded areas help in Krasnoyarsk (nazaccent.ru/content/13158-v-krasnoyarskom-krae-obsudyat-osobyj-status.html).

Among the problems the deputies raised were the departure of representatives of federal agencies from these regions, something that prevents residents from getting the aid they need if as is the case for many they cannot afford to travel the often enormous distances from what is now northern Krasnoyarsk Kray to the republic capital.

Gennady Shchukin, the president of a group that represents the numerically small nationalities of the Russian North, said that the status of the downgraded regions needed to be raised in order to resolve some of the problems which their residents now face as a result of the amalgamation effort.

He told the meeting about a member of the Nganasan people who had to sell his deer on whom he relies for much of his livelihood in order to raise enough money to buy medicine in town, a situation that arose, Shchukin said, because there are no drug stores in the tundra now and because there are no officials to help such people get the assistance they need.

In retrospect, these complaints probably shouldn't be a surprise. How else to increase efficiencies but to cut services?