[PHOTO] Purchased at Word on the Street, Toronto

I got the Derek Jarman book for $C5 from the Glad Day booth. The Ke$ha book came free.

[PHOTO] Breakwater at low tide, North Rustico

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• The Big Picture shares images of Syrian Kurdish refugees flooding into Turkey.


• blogTO quite likes the new visitor centre at Fort York.


• James Bow quite liked the Word on the Street festival in the Albertan city of Lethbridge.


• Crooked Timber suggests that French economist Thomas Piketty, with his writings on inequality, has unusually drawing power.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper proposing new methods for studying the atmospheres of gas giant exoplanets.


• The Dragon's Tales notes that scientists have just now developed a new, more efficient method of photosynthesis.


• Joe. My. God. notes that, according to the US Census, a half-million people have entered same-sex marriages.


• Languages of the World's Asya Perelstvaig considers a particular post-1918 orthography reform of the Russian language.


• pollotenchegg considers the institutions Crimean Tatars trust, and not.


• Savage Minds considers the complexities of ethnographic writing.


• Spacing Toronto's John Lorinc considers overpolicing in Toronto.


• Torontoist notes that a copy of Shakespeare's First Folio will be on display at the University of Toronto.


• The Volokh Conspiracy is skeptical of the good sense in pretending Islam is not a religion.

[LINK] "Razr Burn: My Month With 2004's Most Exciting Phone"

It's fall now. In summer, Slate linked to Ashley Feinberg's Gizmodo article describing her experience in 2014 with using the Motorola Razr V3 for one month. Used to using iPhones, Feinberg was surprised by how much less functionality this classic phone had. At least its batteries lasted longer.

In July of 2004, Motorola debuted the Razr V3, one of the most iconic cellphones of all time. Exactly 10 years later, I shed my iPhone for a month to experience the world where apps don't exist and T9 reigns king. Maybe I did it for the nostalgia. Maybe I did it because I hate myself just a little bit. Either way, one thing is certain: Using 2004's hottest phone in 2014 is hell.

It may be hard to remember now—or to believe at all, if you're under 20—but at the time of its release the Razr was the final word in mobile technology. For the first time, you got a sleek, powerful, and wildly expensive bit of metal to call not only your cellphone but your status symbol, too. A couple of years and a few slashes into the $700 price tag later, you could barely go outside without seeing someone flip open a Razr. In four years, Motorola sold 130 million of them, a record that wouldn't be touched until well into the iPhone's run.

That lingering coolness factor only makes it all the more depressing when you realize that, today, the Razr is a barely functional, actively-out-to-sabotage you bit of technological refuse. What was once displayed with pride on a shiny store pedestal, I found on eBay for $36 and sandwiched between a bulk set of broken chargers and discontinued memory cards.

[. . .]

Maps are hard. I am perhaps the most directionally inept person I know. I always assumed that, were it not for my phone's GPS, I would have been forced to settle down in the nearest park to build a new life for myself long ago.

[. . .]

There was a reason we used to carry around digital cameras. As far as the casual consumer is concerned, cellphones today are more than capable of handling our various photo-taking needs. I was quickly reminded that this was not always the case.

[. . .]

We take threaded conversations for granted. And they have made me impossibly lazy. I'm so used to being able to see entire messaging conversations at a swipe that I hardly even bother to absorb the words I'm looking at. Because normally, I can take an absentminded glance (mostly to stave off notification anxiety), and later, when I'm ready to respond, the entire back-and-forth is staring me in the face.

[LINK] "Here's Everything We Know About The Chelyabinsk Meteor"

io9's Lauren Davis linked to and summarized this article by two physicists examining exactly what happened in the Chelyabinsk meteor event last February. (I covered the issue on this blog here.)

David A. Kring, scientist with the Lunar and Planetary Institute, and Mark Boslough, a physicist at Sandia National Laboratories, traced out everything we now know about the rock that disintegrated 100 kilometers above the Russia-Kazakhstan border for Physics Today.

The rock's entry speed gives away its original orbit, out in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Similar to how scientists have reconstructed the collisional history of the meteorite that crashed into a Novato, California home in 2012, researchers have pieced together the history of the Chelyabinsk meteor. It was rocky, metal-poor, and worse-for-wear from rattling around the solar system so long.

The authors write:

The Chelyabinsk asteroid first felt the presence of Earth's atmosphere when it was thousands of kilometers above the Pacific Ocean. For the next dozen minutes, the 10 000-ton rock fell swiftly, silently, and unseen, passing at a shallow angle through the rarefied exosphere where the molecular mean free path is much greater than the 20-m diameter of the rock. Collisions with molecules did nothing to slow the gravitational acceleration as it descended over China and Kazakhstan. When it crossed over the border into Russia at 3:20:20 UT and was 100 km above the ground, 99.99997% of the atmosphere was still beneath it.

Because the asteroid was moving much faster than air molecules could get out of its way, the molecules began to pile up into a compressed layer of high-temperature plasma pushing a shock wave forward. Atmospheric density increases exponentially with depth, so as the asteroid plunged, the plasma layer thickened and its optical opacity rapidly increased. About one second later, at 95 km above the surface, it became bright enough to be seen from the ground. That was the first warning that something big was about to happen.

[LINK] "Building a Gaming Con for an Ostracized LGBT Community"

Wired's Bo Moore has a nice article describing the genesis of the GLBT-friendly GX: Everyone Games gaming convention.

Growing up in rural Vermont, Matt Conn felt like an outcast.

“It was really tough growing up as both geek and gay,” he says. “I remember growing up, being super geeky, and I had to leave schools because I was so bullied and it was just really bad. And that was when I was like 9 or 10. So when I came to terms with my sexuality, I was so afraid: My life was already kinda not great, if I have to deal with being gay on top of that, I feel like I’m condemning myself to a life of shittiness.”

Conn had difficulty finding a community he identified and felt comfortable with. The geeks and gamers he fell in with seemed to be uncomfortable with his sexuality. The LGBT groups didn’t “get the geekiness.” In his college years came a ray of hope, online communities like gaygamer.net and Reddit’s r/gaymers. All of a sudden, Conn had access to thousands of other LGBT geeks like himself—but only online.

He looked, but did not find a gaming convention that hit the intersection of his and thousands of others’ queer geekiness, where LGBT geeks could feel open and comfortable without the fear of harassment, judgement, or any of the social pressures they face on a daily basis. So he made his own: GaymerX.

Now officially known as GX: Everyone Games—Conn wants to be clear that it’s about inclusiveness, not LGBT issues specifically—the convention is finishing up a successful Kickstarter drive today for its third annual convention. The outpouring of support illustrates that Conn’s show is filling a need felt keenly by many gamers.

“There’s a need for certain communities to feel safer,” said Mattie Brice, a game developer, media critic and former GaymerX panelist. “To feel explicitly welcome. And I think a lot of people don’t realize what is needed for people to feel welcome.”

[LINK] "Underwater Victory Squeals Signal a Job Well Done"

Wired's Mary Bates notes new evidence for a high level of intelligence among cetaceans: they celebrate with speech acts.

Sam Ridgway first noticed the sounds he would come to call ‘victory squeals’ in 1963. When three new dolphins arrived at his research facility, an engineer placed underwater microphones in their pool. As the researchers tossed in mackerel for these animals who had not eaten in 36 hours, Ridgway noticed that each dolphin gave a squeal as it seized a fish.

In the over fifty years since that day, Ridgway has heard this sound thousands of times. In echolocation circles, the sound is known as a feeding buzz. Like bats, dolphins and some other cetaceans use echolocation to find their prey. As they close in on a food item, the animals emit more rapid pulses. After a cetacean catches a fish, the clicking becomes so fast that it sounds like a squeal to human ears.

Ridgway, however, thought this squeal indicated more than just the capture of a fish. Unlike bats, cetaceans continue the feeding buzz after they have captured their prey, suggesting the sound may also have emotional content.

“When we train dolphins and belugas, we reward them with fish for correct responses,” Ridgway says. The trainers whistle after the animal performs the correct response, a sound that indicates to the animal that it will get a fish reward. Ridgway and his colleagues were surprised to notice that dolphins and belugas gave the squeal not only after receiving their fish, but after the whistle, as well.

Ridgway started calling this sound a victory squeal after an experiment in the 1960s with a dolphin named Tuffy. To see how deep Tuffy could dive, Ridgway and his colleagues set up a task in which the dolphin had to dive to the bottom of the ocean to turn off a tone by flipping a switch. “Each time the sound went off, the animal would squeal,” Ridgway says. “When he accomplished the deep dive, it certainly seemed to us to be a victory.” On hearing the squeal, Ridgway’s wife Jeanette said it reminded her of a child’s squeal of delight; hence, the victory squeal.

[URBAN NOTE] "The Toronto Eighteen"

Torontoist's Kevin Plummer describes how eighteen Toronto businessmen helped decide the outcome of the 1911 Canadian election due to their common opposition to free trade with the United States.

Torontonians flocked to the streets in jubilation on September 21, gathering outside newspaper headquarters and crowding the streets from Front to Queen between Church and York. Cheers arose as returns were announced for the day’s federal election: Robert Laird Borden had led the Conservative Party to a landslide victory over Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier’s incumbent Liberals.

The Conservatives won overwhelming majorities in all four Toronto ridings, and two of the three York County ridings—the third being won by William Findlay Maclean as an independent Conservative. The national drubbing was so thorough that some observers predicted the extinction of the Liberal Party.

The deciding issue of the campaign was the new Reciprocity Agreement, which secured free trade with the United States. Representing a huge shift in economic policy, the Agreement was anathema to central business interests. The prospect of free trade prompted the Toronto Eighteen, a group of prominent businessmen and entrepreneurs who’d supported the Liberal Party through the boom years at the turn of the century, to publicly chastise the prime minister and abandon the party. Throwing their weight behind the Conservatives, they helped determine the course of the election.

[. . .]

One of the city’s leading citizens, Walker had always kept aloof from active politics at any level. Now, he systematically outlined his objections to the agreement. He worried about lower-quality American goods flooding Canadian markets, and wheat making its way south through Duluth or Minneapolis rather carried by Canadian railways via Winnipeg or Thunder Bay. Moreover, the ardent imperialist worried about American immigrants settling the west and whether the Agreement might re-ignite American ambitions to annex Canada.

“Although I am a Liberal,” Walker concluded, “I am a Canadian first of all and I can see that this is much more than a trade question. Our alliance with the Mother Country must not be threatened. We must assimilate our immigrants and make out of them good Canadians. And this Reciprocity Agreement is the most deadly danger as tending to make this problem more difficult and fill it with doubt and difficulty. The question is between British connection and what has been well called Continentalism.”

[LINK] "From lake to lake and back again: rail trails of southwestern Ontario"

Sean Marshall's Spacing Toronto post describing, with abundant photos, a weekend biking trip in southwestern Ontario beyond Hamilton, makes me interested and envious. I need to get back to doing this sort of thing.

In mid-July, I completed another overnight cycling trip. On a bright and warm Friday, I biked from Hamilton to Port Dover via Caledonia. On an overcast and rather soggy Saturday, I rode back to Hamilton, via a longer route through Simcoe and Brantford. Along the way, I cycled on some of Ontario’s best rail trails, and one of the first bicycle-friendly paved shoulders on a provincial highway. From Hamilton to Port Dover via Caledonia (a 76-kilometre ride) just under half the ride was on off-road trails, while the longer return trip via Brantford was almost entirely competed following rail trails.

Unlike Quebec, which has a comprehensive province-wide cycling program, including the 5000-kilometre Route Verte network, Ontario’s bike routes are organized and maintained entirely by local municipalities and conservation authorities. Networks are only found in a few select regions. In Hamilton/Kitchener/Port Dover, Caledon/Erin, and in the Peterborough/Kawartha region, there are lengthy, connected rail trails which are all suitable for cycling. Niagara Region has a 140-kilometre-long Circle Route beside the Welland Canal and the Niagara River. But elsewhere in Ontario, designated cycling routes are almost non-existent; the few off-road trails that exist do not connect with others. Few highways and county roads have paved shoulders for cyclists’ use. Quebec has understood the opportunities that bicycle tourism provides.

It is time for Ontario to do the same.

As has become my custom on these longer rides, I used GO Transit’s bike racks on its buses to transport my bicycle and myself to and from Toronto. My trip began at Hamilton’s splendid Art Deco GO station, opened by the Toronto-Hamilton-Buffalo Railway in 1933. Nearby, the Escarpment Rail Trail — part of a former Canadian National line to Caledonia and Port Dover — begins its gentle climb of the Niagara Escarpment, ending at a point near Albion Falls, one of dozens of waterfalls found in the Steel City. A footbridge spans the Lincoln Alexander Parkway (whose construction cut through the old CN railbed) and one must take Stone Church Road (thankfully, with bike lanes) to resume cycling south via the rail trail.