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Dec. 4th, 2014
[BLOG] Some Thursday links
Dec. 4th, 2014 03:13 pm- Centauri Dreams considers "mirage" Earths, apparently Earth-like worlds with oxygen atmospheres produced by excessive early heating of their oceans.
- Crooked Timber notes a remarkable new book examining the genesis of Wonder Woman in the avant-garde politics of the 1930s US.
- The Dragon's Gaze notes a paper examining the formation of close-orbiting rocky exoplanets.
- The Dragon's Tales notes evidence that art in the hominid clan predates Homo sapiens, with an apparent artwork.
- Far Outliers notes Burma's complex relationship with its ethnic minorities.
- Languages of the World's Asya Pereltsvaig notes the complexities of Jewish nostalgia, ex post facto and otherwise, for the Soviet era.
- Lawyers, Guns and Money considers the idea of reparations to undocumented workers, for the income they lost due to their lack of status.
- Marginal Revolution considers if Chile is overrated as an economic model.
- Steve Munro notes the complexities and problems with Presto integration into the TTC.
- Why I Love Toronto considers inexpensive options for daters in the Annex.
- Window on Eurasia notes the radicalization of Crimean Tatars under Russian rule, considers the relevance of the Weimar model to contemporary Russia, and wonders if Gagauzia might undermine Moldova's shift to Europe.
io9's Mark Strauss notes in detail proof that pre-Homo sapiens hominids engaged in art.
Archaeologist Stephen Munro nearly fell off his chair when he noticed patterns of straight lines purposefully etched on a fossilized clamshell. The engravings were half a million years old, which meant they'd been made by a Homo erectus—an extinct human species that predated Homo sapiens by upwards of 300,000 years.
In addition to the engravings, Munroe and his colleagues found shells that were carefully crafted into specialized tools. Taken together, these discoveries suggest that Homo erectus was far more sophisticated than previously believed and capable of symbolic thought.
"It is a fascinating discovery," says Colin Renfrew, an archaeologist at the University of Cambridge. "The earliest abstract decoration in the world is really big news."
The shells, which previously had been sitting in a museum, were collected more than a century ago by Dutch archaeologist Eugene Dubois on the Indonesian island of Java. Dubois had obtained the specimens from the same excavation site where, in the 1890s, he discovered the first-known remains of Homo erectus. In 2007, Leiden University archaeologist Josephine Joordens began studying the shells, looking for clues about what the environment had been like for humanity's ancestors. It was then that her colleague, Munro, noticed the etchings.
In the seven years since, a team of scientists led by Joordens have been studying the shells, confirming their age and that the lines had not been made by animals. The results of their research have been published in Nature.
Al Jazeera's Lizzie Presser and Fabian Drahmoune report on the spread of crystal meth addiction in Thailand, as poor workers depend on it to remain active. I'm doubly alarmed: health issues aside, can an economy that depends on this level of suffering and its associated polity actually last?
Cap started taking meth regularly when he was 13-years old.
His father needed help on the family's rubber fields, so Cap pitched in from 1am to 4am, cutting back the bark of rubber trees and collecting the valuable milky-white fluid.
"It's hard work, and taking yaba helped," said the 16-year-old rubber farmer at Wang Saphung Hospital's drug treatment facility, who asked to be identified only by his nickname, Cap. "I just didn't feel tired any more."
Called "yaba", or "crazy medicine", the energy-inducing drug is pouring in from Myanmar and sweeping through the countryside, attracting farmers who are under pressure to work longer hours and harvest at faster speeds.
Cap's school started at 8am, so he began to rely on meth to stay awake through the long days.
"After a little while, I stopped going to school every day. I just didn't have the will or the strength," Cap said, adding most rubber farmers in his area were also using the drug. "I could only go to school when I had taken yaba."
In the rice-growing region of northeast Thailand, farmers are rarely just rice farmers any more. Many also pick up odd construction jobs, grow corn in the evening, tap rubber overnight, and run their own side businesses.
National Geographic's Tina Casagrand notes the collapse of ash tree populations in the United States--and Canada, too?--under the impact of the emerald ash borer beetle. Introduced in 2002, it has since spread catastrophically.
There are seven billion ash trees in North America, and within the next few decades, the beetle could kill most of them—a die-off ten times bigger than the one caused by Dutch elm disease.
In big cities, where ash species account for up to a quarter of trees in public spaces, planners must consider the environmental consequences of the massive die-off—liability hazards, an increase in stormwater runoff, and the simple problem of disposing of millions of dead trees. And officials don't have time to waste.
Eight years after the initial discovery of the beetles in an area, about 50 percent of the ash population will die—all at once. The rest die within another two to three years. In the Kansas City metropolitan area, where Lapointe works, 6.4 million ashes are on track to die as early as 2015—unless they receive insecticide treatment.
Chad Tinkel, who inherited an EAB problem when he became the city arborist of Fort Wayne, Indiana, didn't have the luxury of early identification or a big city budget for prevention. Of the 18,000 ash trees that once shaded Fort Wayne's sidewalks and parking lots, only about 1,300 remain alive. Tinkel now speaks about EAB to municipalities across the country.
"If you know that it's coming, be proactive," he says. "Get your plan in place. Get your budget set. Too few decision-makers realize that trees are infrastructure—just like a city bench, just like a streetlight—and they pay back more than they cost to put in."
From Facebook's Andy I found The Guardian-hosted version of Sudarsan Raghavan's Washington Post article suggesting that the slow certification of Congolese mines as unassociated with conflict mineral mining has wrecked emergent economies throughout central Africa.
When his father could no longer make enough money from the tin mine, when he could no longer pay for school, Bienfait Kabesha ran off and joined a militia. It offered the promise of loot and food, and soon he was firing an old rifle on the frontlines of Africa’s deadliest conflict. He was 14.
But what makes Kabesha different from countless other child soldiers is this: his path to war involved not just the wrenchingpoverty and violence of eastern Congo but also an obscure measure passed by US lawmakers. Villagers call it Loi Obama – Obama’s law.
The legislation compels US companies to audit their supply chains to ensure they are not using “conflict minerals” – particularly gold, coltan, tin and tungsten from artisanal mines controlled by Congo’s murderous militias. It was championed by influential activists and lawmakers, both Republicans and Democrats, and tucked into the massive Wall Street reform law known as the Dodd-Frank Act.
The law’s supporters said it would weaken the militias by cutting off their mining profits. But the legislation, signed by President Obama four years ago, set off a chain of events that has propelled millions of miners and their families deeper into poverty, according to interviews with miners, community leaders, activists and Congolese and western officials, as well as recent visits to four large mining areas.
As it sought to comply with the law, Congo’s government shut down the mining industry for months. Then, a process was launched to certify the country’s minerals as conflict-free. But the process is unfolding at a glacial pace, marred by a lack of political will, corruption and bureaucratic and logistical delays. That has led foreign companies to avoid buying the minerals, which has driven down prices. Many miners are forced to find other ways to survive, including by joining armed groups. Meanwhile, the militias remain potent threats. “The intention of the law was good, but in practice it was not well thought out,” said Eric Kajemba, director of the Observatory for Governance and Peace, a regional nonprofit group. “This is a country where the government is absent in many areas, plagued by years of war and bad governance, where the economic tissue has been destroyed. The American lawmakers didn’t appear to take this into consideration.” Requests for comment were made to former Democratic Senator Russell Feingold from Wisconsin, a key backer of the conflict-minerals measure who is now US special envoy to the Great Lakes region, which includes Congo. But his office said he was not available. The state department also did not reply to several requests for comment.
As of June, the government had certified just 25 mining sites out of hundreds in South and North Kivu provinces as “green”, meaning there were no armed groups and no children or pregnant women labourers, according to UN monitors. As of October, there were only 11 mines out of more than 900 in South Kivu where minerals were “tagged” conflict-free, said Adalbert Murhi Mubalama, the province’s minister of mines.
The Planetary Society's Emily Lakdawalla writes at length of the New Horizons probe, fast-approaching its rendezvous with dwarf planet Pluto and their family. What instrumentation does the probe carry? What images will it take, and when? What will the images look like? All are here.
It's been a long journey, but it's nearly over: New Horizons is just about ready to begin its science mission to Pluto, Charon, Styx, Nix, Kerberos, and Hydra. The spacecraft has spent most of its decade-long trip napping in a hibernation mode that required little energy from either the spacecraft or its human controllers, but this snoozy phase ends this weekend. On December 7 at 02:30 UT ( December 6 at 18:30 PT), New Horizons will wake up for the final time; it will remain awake and alert for two years. The Planetary Society's Mat Kaplan will be hosting a video event during the wakeup, so you can watch with us as we wait for that all-important beep that signals that New Horizons is ready to begin work.
New Horizons' flyby of Pluto happens on July 14, 2015 at 11:50 UT, but it will begin gathering science data in January and will not finish returning all of the data until late 2016.
[. . .]
The mission at Pluto is divided into several phases. In each phase, New Horizons will focus on the kind of science appropriate to its range from Pluto. New Horizons is traveling so fast that the actual close-approach part of the encounter happens in an incredibly short period; nearly all of the most important goals for the mission are met in the time from 2.5 hours before to 1 hour after closest approach. One exception to this is global image covering: Pluto takes about a week (6.4 days) to rotate, so the best global maps will be composed of images gathered beginning a couple of days before closest approach. The science observations for the encounter have been planned with both prime and backup observations and with redundancy among instruments to make sure the mission's goals are met if one observation or even one instrument fails. The observations focus primarily on Pluto, Charon, and Nix: rather than scatter observations across both Nix and Hydra, they chose to characterize Nix well and Hydra less well. The other two moons, Styx and Kerberos, are even smaller than Nix and Hydra (hence, more difficult to observe) and were discovered quite late in the mission planning process; they'll be imaged in group shots, optical navigation imagery and satellite system movies, but don't have science observations devoted to them specifically.
I mentioned last month problems living in the Canadian North with its increased costs of transportation and decreased opportunities. One of these problems involved the very high cost of food, and the failure of a Canadian government subsidy program intended to make it affordable. Just two days ago, the Aboriginal People's Television Network--a Canadian First Nations-run network that has done its share of breaking news stories relevant to the North and First Nations--broke the story that Leona Aglukkaq, Environment Minister and Nunavut MP, was reading a newspaper as a debate on the food subsidy program and her personal reactions to the crisis.
She has later apologized for reading the newspaper--APTN has a screen capture--but has defended her government's actions otherwise.
Environment Minister Leona Aglukkaq was caught on camera reading the newspaper while debate raged around her in Question Period Monday about a food crisis in Nunavut.
Aglukkaq has said she is considering legal action against Rankin Inlet’s deputy mayor Sam Tutanuak who claimed the minister tried to extract an apology during a phone conversation with the Nunavut hamlet’s senior administrative officer.
Aglukkaq has flatly denied she tried to get an apology for Tutanuak’s comments to APTN Investigates that high grocery prices in the community had forced people to scavenge for food at the local dump.
Aglukkaq’s office also denied claims from five different MPs that she yelled ‘that’s not true’ during Question Period last week when the NDP brought up the issue of Inuit searching for food in the dump.
The Auditor General of Canada released a scathing report last Monday on the management of the Harper government’s food subsidy Nutrition North program. Auditor General Michael Ferguson said Ottawa had no idea whether the program was working or if Northern grocery retailers were passing on the government subsidy for perishable foods like vegetables.
She has later apologized for reading the newspaper--APTN has a screen capture--but has defended her government's actions otherwise.
This Saturday, the 6th of December, will be the 25th anniversary of Montréal's École Polytechnique massacre. In this event, a young man named Marc Lepine killed fourteen women at an engineering school associated with the Université de Montréal because they were women. They were "feminists", he said, people who stole jobs from men like him, people who deserved to die. He was very clear about this, both during his rampage through his actions (selecting women to be killed) and his statements (talking about his hatred for feminists, et cetera) and through his abundant writings found after his death.
As summarized by Global News' Amanda Kelly, during Question Period Justice Minister Peter Mackay said that the cause was unknown.
Mackay has written a post at iPolitics defending himself without actually engaging with Mulcair's point.
As summarized by Global News' Amanda Kelly, during Question Period Justice Minister Peter Mackay said that the cause was unknown.
It all began when Marc Garneau, a Liberal MP from Montreal, asked Peter MacKay a question about Bill C-42, the federal government’s new firearms bill.
Garneau said survivors of what’s often been described as the Montreal massacre are opposed to the bill.
MacKay responded by saying that Canadians may never understand why the shooting took place.
“This week, we remember the horrific events that took place in Montreal at École Polytechnique 25 years ago, and while we may never understand what occurred — why this happened, why these women were singled out for this horrific act of violence, we have to stand together.
[. . .]
The head of the opposition, NDP leader Thomas Mulcair later pointed out that because of a manifesto written by the shooter, Canadians actually do know why the women were murdered.
“We know why this happened. We know why these women were singled out,” Mulcair said.
Mackay has written a post at iPolitics defending himself without actually engaging with Mulcair's point.