[PHOTO] Sign for Lightning Bolt Comics, 99 Grafton Street

My attention was caught by the very DC Comics-heavy signboard of Lightning Bolt Comics (99 Grafton Street).

[PHOTO] A green courtyard at Victoria University, University of Toronto

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• blogTO looks at what the Financial District was like in the 1970s and 1980s, recommends things to do in Little Italy, and has ten quirky facts about the Toronto Islands.


• Centauri Dreams notes simulations of how solitary stars like our own Sun are formed.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper noting that evidence of a planetary system outside our own was first gathered in 1917, from a spectrum taken of Van Maanen's Star. It was only a matter of no one recognizing what the spectrum meant.


• Marginal Revolution notes a study of filesharing services suggesting that rich countries tend to see music downloads while poor ones download movies.


• The Planetary Science Blog takes a look at the discoveries of Dawn at proto-planet Vesta.


• pollotenchegg maps changes in industrial production in Ukraine, noting a collapse in rebel-held areas in the east.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer compares the proposed Home Rule that would have been granted to Ireland in 1914 with current proposals for Scotland.


• Torontoist notes that despite population growth nearby, the Redpath Sugar Factory will be staying put.


• Towleroad notes that Estonia has become the first post-Soviet nation to recognize same-sex partnerships.


• Why I Love Toronto recommends Friday night events at the Royal Ontario Museum.


• Window on Eurasia suggests that the collapse of Russian civil society is a responsibility of Russian citizens as well as of their state.

[LINK] "Pride party fills to capacity in Iqaluit, Nunavut"

Gloria Song, writing for Daily Xtra, writes about the vagaries of GLBT identity and history in Nunavut.

Somehow, out of the controversy over a flag came the idea for a party.

It began when the city of Iqaluit raised a rainbow flag at city hall to protest anti-gay laws in Russia during the 2014 Winter Olympics, at the initiative of city Councillor Kenny Bell and Iqaluit resident Anubha Momin. Councillor Simon Nattaq argued that the decision had not been approved by council, and Nunavut Tunngavik Inc president Cathy Towtongie commended Nattaq for speaking out. These events sparked lively discussion among the residents of Nunavut about same-sex issues, including whether it’s within Inuit custom to be gay.

In the midst of this discussion, the idea for a party emerged, specifically, an Iqaluit Pride party, the first of its kind in the capital city of Nunavut.

The woman behind the party is Michelle Zakrison, a newcomer to Iqaluit. “I just moved here in May and started Iqaluit Pride,” she says. “I’ve volunteered with a lot of Prides, and I’ve been in student politics and that kind of stuff for a long time. I thought if I came up, I’d like to support whoever’s doing that, organizing that up here. After I talked to a bunch of people, nothing seemed to be going on. I thought, Well, I’ll create this Twitter [@Iqaluit Pride].”

[. . .]

Maureen Doherty first moved up north in 1983 and later came out as a lesbian at the age of 50. Along with Peter Workman and Allison Brewer, she has been actively involved in the same-sex-rights movement for more than a decade in Iqaluit.

“It started off with a small picnic, and then it grew,” Doherty recounts over the phone. “That particular summer of 2004 or 2005, we had huge Pride picnics. In fact, if politicians weren’t there, they came up to you and explained why they weren’t there, lest it be construed they might be homophobic. It was really quite exciting.”

These events unfolded around the same time that the Nunavut Human Rights Act was passed into law in 2003. During this time, there was much debate about whether sexual orientation should be included as a prohibited ground of discrimination. As a member of the steering committee for the legislation, Doherty recalls the discussions: “As well as there being a lot of support for the LGBT community, there was also a lot of concern and a lot of fear and homophobia. But the good thing is that it came out, because there was discussion all across Nunavut about this act and what it would mean and what human rights are. It was actually heartwarming to hear some of the things people had to say, about how historically there had been a place of acceptance in the Inuit culture.”

[URBAN NOTE] On bigotry and Ford in Toronto and with Olivia Chow

NOW Toronto's Enzo DiMatteo writes about racism in Toronto, both that directed towards Olivia Chow and that evidenced by continuing support for the Ford brothers.

She has the best grasp of the inner workings of City Hall among the top contenders for mayor. She has the most political experience and the resumé to prove it. In the spring she was the overwhelmingly popular option to save the city from Rob Ford.

But for most Torontonians, Olivia Chow just doesn’t fit the bill, according to public opinion polls. Too stiff. Too scripted. Maybe too Chinese. I know you didn’t want me to go there, Toronto. But the racist attacks have been a little too overt to ignore, haven’t they?

The question of race has certainly dominated the campaign discourse of late.

Chow is reluctant to comment on what effect the fact that she is a visible minority is having on her electoral chances. As she told NOW’s editorial board Monday, October 6, she’ll leave that to the pundits. She always says that when she doesn’t want to answer a question directly.

But much like the anti-gay undercurrent that helped kill George Smitherman’s chances against Ford in 2010, disdain for Chow’s foreigner status may carry more weight than we’d like to admit.

It’s an uncomfortable reality to contemplate for a city whose motto is “diversity our strength.” Maybe we’re not so world-class. Just how did a guy like Rob Ford with a track record of racist and homophobic remarks get elected in the first place anyway?

In 2010, voters knew about his Air Canada Centre tirade. They knew about his AIDS comments. His bigotry was no secret. They knew exactly what they were getting.

[URBAN NOTE] "Mizrahi Developments buys Stollerys at Yonge and Bloor"

Via Toronto I've learned of a Toronto Star article noting that a major real estate developer bought Stollerys, on the southwest corner of Yonge and Bloor among the towers. A new tower will be rising.

Just two years after breaking ground on his first condo building, independent luxury developer Sam Mizrahi has vaulted in the big leagues, nabbing the Stollerys store and adjacent lands on the southwest corner of Yonge and Bloor streets.

The purchase sets the stage for a residential-retail development by Mizrahi, who is noted in Toronto for boutique developments such as the nearly completed nine-storey project at 133 Hazelton Ave. and the 12-storey building going up at 181 Davenport Rd.

“It’s really a game changer in a lot of respects and I feel very blessed to be part of it,” said the president of Mizrahi Developments. “This is one of most significant corners in Toronto, if not Canada, and we want to create a pedestrian experience and a destination that we can be proud of as a landmark building and for the future.”

For 114 years, One Bloor St. W. has been home to Stollerys, with its memorable green awnings and now 30,000 square feet displaying “British and European inspired garments for men and women of taste” over four floors.

The establishment is the “longest surviving business that I know of in the area,” said Briar de Lange, executive director of the Bloor-Yorkville BIA.

The owners selected Mizrahi from amongst many suitors, and money doesn’t appear to have been the differentiator.

The deal, estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars, includes One and 11 Bloor Sts. W., as well as properties along the southwest side of Yonge St., but the parties won’t confirm price or scale until the series of closings are finalized.

[LINK] "How the Russian Orthodox Church answers Putin's prayers in Ukraine"

Gabriela Baczynska and Tom Heneghan's Reuters article explores the awkward position of the Russian Orthodox Church in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, at once a quiet actor for the Russian state while trying to avoid alienating its parishoners in Ukraine.

When Russia sent its troops to Crimea, one of the justifications it used was an alleged threat to parishes there linked to Kirill's Moscow Patriarchate. Kirill's full title is "Patriarch of Moscow and All Rus," a reference to a medieval state in Kiev to which modern Russia traces its roots.

In Ukraine, Kirill oversees the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate. It competes against a smaller church of the Kiev Patriarchate that split from Moscow after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Winning applause from those Ukrainians who seek Western integration and scorn Moscow's efforts to undermine it, the Kiev Patriarchate has strongly backed Ukraine's national cause in the current conflict. Its head, Patriarch Filaret, blamed Putin squarely for the violence and said he was possessed by Satan.

The conflict in Ukraine has put strains on the ties between the ROC and the state in Russia; and Kirill, wary of alienating worshippers in Ukraine by being too closely associated with the Kremlin, has increasingly hedged his bets.

He was conspicuously absent from a March ceremony where Putin sealed the annexation of Crimea, and he has not taken over two dioceses from the Ukrainian church in the peninsula even though they sit on territory now controlled by Russia.

Late last month, Kirill told a meeting with Orthodox media that it was “fundamentally wrong” to view the ROC as a vehicle of Russian state policy. But to many in Ukraine that sounded unconvincing, and controversy over the ROC’s role in the OSCE monitors’ case adds to that scepticism.

[LINK] "Closure of South Dakota rural schools sparks fears of the end of an era"

Al Jazeera America's Kayla Gahagan describes how demographic change in South Dakota--specifically, the decline of rural populations as agriculture becomes modernized--is promising to end small country schools.

PEI went through this kind of thing a generation ago. All I can say is that this process is inevitable.

There’s no cafeteria here, much less a teacher’s lounge. So during lunch, the school’s eight students — ranging from kindergarten to seventh grade — gather around two desks and eat in the same classroom as the teacher and an aide.

The students tease and chide one another like siblings. One of the girls admits it’s a lot like family at Milesville School — and that’s perhaps not surprising, since the students have known one another most of their lives.

“I love it here,” says teacher Tracey Hand.

However beloved America’s rural schools may be, many of them face an uphill battle as more school districts across the country face budget cuts.

“It’s not too far away, and it will be a thing of the past,” said Nette Meade, a teacher who was on the losing end of a battle to keep open the doors of Spring Creek School in Custer County in South Dakota. “We fought a good fight. I could see what was coming.”

Meade used to ride to school on a horse. In the 1950s she attended a one-room schoolhouse on the border of North and South Dakota with a barn, an outhouse and no running water.

She became a teacher, working first at North Dakota’s Department of Education but later returning to her roots, teaching at rural schools in several South Dakota communities. But a debate that rages in many rural communities — how to keep small schools open in the face of shrinking budgets — led her to quit her last job, at a remote two-room schoolhouse in western South Dakota. She now teaches at a school on the Cheyenne Indian Reservation.

[LINK] "If the World Started Over, Would Life Evolve the Same Way?"

Wired shares Emily Singer's article from Quanta suggesting that evolution might actually have a direction to it, that the range of all possible organisms is more limited than many might think. Might. Fascinating stuff.

In his fourth-floor lab at Harvard University, Michael Desai has created hundreds of identical worlds in order to watch evolution at work. Each of his meticulously controlled environments is home to a separate strain of baker’s yeast. Every 12 hours, Desai’s robot assistants pluck out the fastest-growing yeast in each world — selecting the fittest to live on — and discard the rest. Desai then monitors the strains as they evolve over the course of 500 generations. His experiment, which other scientists say is unprecedented in scale, seeks to gain insight into a question that has long bedeviled biologists: If we could start the world over again, would life evolve the same way?

Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent division of SimonsFoundation.org whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.

Many biologists argue that it would not, that chance mutations early in the evolutionary journey of a species will profoundly influence its fate. “If you replay the tape of life, you might have one initial mutation that takes you in a totally different direction,” Desai said, paraphrasing an idea first put forth by the biologist Stephen Jay Gould in the 1980s.

Desai’s yeast cells call this belief into question. According to results published in Science in June, all of Desai’s yeast varieties arrived at roughly the same evolutionary endpoint (as measured by their ability to grow under specific lab conditions) regardless of which precise genetic path each strain took. It’s as if 100 New York City taxis agreed to take separate highways in a race to the Pacific Ocean, and 50 hours later they all converged at the Santa Monica pier.

The findings also suggest a disconnect between evolution at the genetic level and at the level of the whole organism. Genetic mutations occur mostly at random, yet the sum of these aimless changes somehow creates a predictable pattern. The distinction could prove valuable, as much genetics research has focused on the impact of mutations in individual genes. For example, researchers often ask how a single mutation might affect a microbe’s tolerance for toxins, or a human’s risk for a disease. But if Desai’s findings hold true in other organisms, they could suggest that it’s equally important to examine how large numbers of individual genetic changes work in concert over time.

“There’s a kind of tension in evolutionary biology between thinking about individual genes and the potential for evolution to change the whole organism,” said Michael Travisano, a biologist at the University of Minnesota. “All of biology has been focused on the importance of individual genes for the last 30 years, but the big take-home message of this study is that’s not necessarily important.