[PHOTO] Walking to the Victoria University book sale, University of Toronto

I'd forgotten about this Word on the Street photo. Victoria University was so beautiful that day.

[PHOTO] A giant 1864 on the west side of Province House, Charlottetown

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• Bad Astronomy describes the massive flare of young red dwarf DG Canes Venaticorum.


• blogTO gives advice as to what people out for the day at Yonge and Eglinton should do.


• Centauri Dreams provides estimates as to the time it would take to develop technologies for starflight.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to an interesting-sounding paper on SETI and evolution that is unfortunately hidden behind a paywall.


• Eastern Approaches observes the celebrations of Vladimir Putin's 62nd birthday.


• Far Outliers looks at early baseball in the late 19th century Pacific territories of the US, including California.


• A Fistful of Euros wonders if Japan is back in recession.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money analyzes income on education and income in the United States in 1973-2013 to find that, apparently, education becomes less valuable as more people acquire it.


• Peter Rukavina describes how random encounters a decade old have put him on track for an interesting experience, mapping electricity usage and production.


• Spacing Toronto looks at the neighbourhood-specifics of the millennial demographic.


• Strange Maps looks at the number of ways proposed to divide up England.


• Window on Eurasia notes the plight of Ukrainian refugees in Russia, suggests that Russia is trying to compensate for its economic weakness with grand politics, and notes some eccentric people in Tatarstan who want Tatar to be written in Arabic script.

[LINK] Three classics Geocurrent posts at Languages of the World: Birobidzhan, Karelia, Crimea

Over at Languages of the World, Asya Perelstvaig has been reposting some of her old Geocurrents posts. Three I particularly like involve Birobidzhan, the attempted Jewish homeland in Soviet Siberia, the Russian-Finnish borderlands including Karelia, and the history of the Crimean Tatars.

[LINK] "Lisbon Tourist Invasion Seen Threatening Ancient City’s Identity"

I'm exceptionally unsympathetic to the arguments made by tourist-skeptical people in Henrique Almeida's Bloomberg article, not least because I've heard them on Prince Edward Island. Places which have freely staked their economic futures on their successful globalization really have no justification to criticize outsider's curiosities. What are the alternative sources of income, anyway?

The MSC Opera cruise ship was among the first to arrive in Lisbon on Sept. 12. Other vessels, some the size of buildings, soon pulled into the River Tagus, lazily making their way to the heart of the Portuguese capital.

In all, a record seven vessels carrying 15,000 people arrived in the city that day, the Port of Lisbon estimates. As the ships docked alongside the river, tuk-tuk-style taxis lined up in a scene reminiscent of a town in Thailand -- rather than one of Europe’s oldest cities.

“It’s going to be a day to remember,” said Jose Amaral, a 33-year-old tuk-tuk driver who charges about 50 euros ($63) for a one-hour ride. “Forget the tram 28, this is the new way to see Lisbon,” he said, referring to the famous yellow tram that takes tourists to some of Lisbon’s historic hill-top sites.

The more than 1 million euros the tourists spent in less than 24 hours on that day helped Portugal’s economy, and the government heralded the flood of tourists as a sign that Lisbon is the place to be. For some residents, however, such flows risk ousting local inhabitants and traditional stores from the city’s ancient quarters as hostels and shops selling cheap trinkets and imitation handicrafts encroach -- threatening the very identity of a city that traces its history back to more than 2,000 years.

[. . .]

“While the new hotels have helped revamp some of the city’s decrepit buildings, an increasing number of residents in the Baixa are moving out because of the noise from the restaurants and the garbage,” said Antonio Rosado, head of the Association of Residents of the Baixa Pombalina area. “Some residents are unhappy because of the problems caused by the excess of businesses catering to tourists.”

Many of these tourists look to spend as little as possible, said Maria Goncalves, a shop clerk in Lisbon.

“What happens when everything around you turns into shops selling cheap souvenirs?” asked the 62-year-old who has worked at the Londres Salao fine fabrics shop in downtown Lisbon for more than four decades. “Tourists who come to Lisbon will no longer be able to see the best that we have to offer.”

[LINK] "Solar’s $30 Billion Splurge Proves Too Much for Japan"

Bloomberg's Chisaki Watanabe notes the excessive success of solar energy in Japan.

After spending almost $30 billion on solar energy in a single year and installing as many panels as exist in the whole of Spain, Japan is preparing to ratchet back its boom in photovoltaic power.

At least five of the nation’s utilities are restricting the access of new solar farms to their grids. Utilities say two years of rapid expansion has strained their capacity to absorb all the new electricity from sources that generate only when the sun shines.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government offered some of the highest incentives for solar in the world to build PV as an alternative to the nuclear reactors shut down after the meltdowns in Fukushima more than three years ago. That made Japan the second-biggest solar market, balancing a slowdown in sales in Germany and Spain, which once led the industry.

“Everyone was entering the solar market because it was lucrative, and that has strained the market,” said Yutaka Miki, who studies clean energy at the Japan Research Institute.

Japan’s trade ministry has approved plans for about 72 gigawatts of renewable energy projects since July 2012. The country installed almost 7.1 gigawatts of solar capacity last year, more than currently exists in all of Spain, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. A gigawatt is about the size of a nuclear reactor.

[LINK] "You Have Mail a for-profit alternative to Canada Post home delivery"

I share this CBC article on the same day I found out that Canada Post claims to have dropped off a package at my home that I have not yet found. My sympathies are limited.

A new privately owned company called You Have Mail is preparing to fill the niche of home delivery once Canada Post stops delivering mail to individual homes.

“Continue to receive your mail at home,” promises the website of the Canadian upstart. "We know that with busy schedules, retrieving mail is the last thing you want to worry about, and we can help."

The company will start its service on Oct. 20 — the same day several urban communities start losing door delivery, as per Canada Post’s five-year transition plan.

[. . .]

"We expected this kind of situation," says the president of the Montreal local union, Alain Duguay. "Slowly, we are moving towards privatization, market liberalization.”

Canada Post said over the summer that residents with doctor’s notes could continue to receive mail at home, but the union is skeptical that people will do that — either because they find the process degrading, or because the disability is only temporary.

[LINK] "Killer whales learn to communicate like dolphins"

Huh. From Science Daily:

Killer whales have complex vocal repertoires made up of clicks, whistles and pulsed calls -- repeated brief bursts of sound punctuated with silence. The acoustic features of these vocalizations, such as their duration, pitch and pulse pattern, vary across social groups. Whales that are closely related or live together produce similar pulsed calls that carry vocal characteristics distinct to the group, known as a dialect.

"There's been an idea for a long time that killer whales learn their dialect, but it isn't enough to say they all have different dialects so therefore they learn. There needs to be some experimental proof so you can say how well they learn and what context promotes learning," said [research scientist Dr. Ann] Bowles.

Testing vocal learning ability in social mammals usually requires observing the animal in a novel social situation, one that might stimulate them to communicate in new ways. Bottlenose dolphins provide a useful comparison species in this respect: they make generally similar sounds but produce them in different proportions, relying more on clicks and whistles than the pulsed calls that dominate killer whale communication.

"We had a perfect opportunity because historically, some killer whales have been held with bottlenose dolphins," said Bowles. By comparing old recordings of vocalization patterns from the cross-socialized subjects with recordings of killer whales and bottlenose dolphins housed in same-species groups, Bowles and her team were able to evaluate the degree to which killer whales learned vocalization patterns from their cross-species social partners.

All three killer whales that had been housed with dolphins for several years shifted the proportions of different call types in their repertoire to more closely match the distribution found in dolphins -- they produced more clicks and whistles and fewer pulsed calls. The researchers also found evidence that killer whales can learn completely new sounds: one killer whale that was living with dolphins at the time of the experiment learned to produce a chirp sequence that human caretakers had taught to her dolphin pool-mates before she was introduced to them.