[PHOTO] Inside the Hockey Hall of Fame, Toronto

While my parents were visiting Toronto last week, we got quite a few things done. One thing I'd not done before was visit the Hockey Hall of Fame, at Front and Union. I'd passed by it many times, but until my mother expressed an interest I hadn't thought of going.

We saw quite a few things. I appreciated seeing vestiges of the triumphant Edmonton Oilers and Wayne Gretzky in the 1980s.





Seeing the Stanley Cup was a first for me.





So too was seeing its predecessor.





Both cups were housed in the Esso Great Hall, a building that--besides being the publically visible face of the museum--houses a beautiful stained-glass dome designed by the McAuslands. Jennifer Wells' Toronto Star article covered this nicely.

[Y]ou would be in good company if your idea of passing reverential moments this festive season is to head into the Hockey Hall of Fame and, yes, run your fingers across the engraved names of Richard and Orr, but also simply contemplate, in an awestruck way, what is surely one of the most exquisite works of stained glass in the country.

Centred on the ceiling of what was in its day the largest bank branch in the country rises a 45-foot-high dome, more than 40 feet across, kaleidoscopic in its colouring and rich in its symbolism. The dome was the jewel in the crown of the banking hall of the main branch of the Bank of Montreal, constructed in 1885, and, rather miraculously, with us still.

Twenty-four panels fan along the ribs of the window. Unsleeping dragons in jewel colours guard cornucopias of gold from marauding eagles. Above the dragons, the Dominion, as it was, is represented by the seven spherical emblems of the provinces, an eighth for the Canadian beaver, and, at the epicentre, a blazing sun.

The window helped seal the artistic reputation of Robert McCausland, who would take over the Toronto stained glass studio formed by his father, Joseph. At a time when leaders of church and commerce looked overseas to England and Germany for stained glass artistry, Robert McCausland grew a reputation as a world-class talent.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• Bad Astronomy shares Dawn's first picture of Ceres.


• The Crux considers whether chimpanzees should be considered people in a legal sense.


• Cody Delistraty shares 13 vintage photos of winter in early 20th century Paris.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper examining the current state of research into the magnetic interactions of stars with their exoplanets.


• The Dragon's Tales notes a new generation of brain sensors.


• Joe. My. God. notes that Ireland's Roman Catholic bishops are campaigning against same-sex marriage.


• Livejournaler jsburbidge ruminates on the pitfalls of misreading the past, starting from Jack Whyte's historical novels.


• Language Hat reports on the digitization of old Russian books.


• Languages of the World's Asya Perelstvaig considers what exactly the "Russian world" actually is.


• Marginal Revolution notes falling birth and fertility rates in the United States.


• Livejournaler moiraj mocks Diane Francis' claim that indigenous peoples in Australia benefit from a better land-claims settlement system than their Canadian counterparts.


• The Planetary Society Blog's Emily Lakdawalla reacts to Dawn's first picture of Ceres.


• J. Otto Pohl compares the plights of Crimean Tatars and Palestinians.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer updates us on Panamanian-Venezuelan relations.


• The Russian Demographics Blog shares a projection of the Ukrainian population forward to 2100.


• Towleroad notes how a Latvian politician destroyed her career and is now facing criminal charges by praising Nazi homophobia.


• The Volokh Conspiracy notes that the University of Virginia can't lodge a libel claim against Rolling Stone for its flawed rape report.


• Livejournaler nwhyte notes some interesting long durée patterns--in net reproduction, in family wealth, in residence, and the like--in the families whose DNA was used to identify the body of Richard III.


• Window on Eurasia notes a Russian who defines his country as an empire with rightful claims and argues about the need for non-recognition of Crimea's annexation to be finalized.

[PHOTO] "Yahoo Starts Selling Flickr Users’ Photos"

zibblsnrt, long since departed from Livejournal but now on Facebook, did me and others the kindness of sharing Newstex's Susan Gunelius' article describing how Yahoo! would begin selling Flickr users' photos, without providing appropriate recompense or even sufficient credit, if they had selected insufficiently stringent copyright settings. I altered the licensing on my photos last night, happily. I was one of those users that had not paid sufficient attention to what the Creative Commons licenses I defaulted to did, and did not, allow.

Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that Yahoo! will begin selling prints of 50 million Creative Commons-licensed images uploaded by Flickr users as well as an unspecified number of other photos uploaded by users that will be handpicked from Flickr. Images bearing a Creative Commons licenses that allow for commercial use will be sold as canvas prints for up to $49 each with no payments going to the image owners. Instead, Yahoo! will retain all revenues. However, each canvas print will include a “small sticker bearing the name of the artist.” Handpicked images won’t have the Creative Commons license that allows for commercial use, so owners of those images will receive 51% of the sales revenue with Yahoo! keeping the rest.

There are more than 300 million images on Flickr with Creative Commons licenses. Of course, the missing link here is the question of copyright owner vs. author. The person who uploads a photo to Flickr and puts a Creative Commons license on it might not be the owner of the copyright. In copyright law, the owner and creator aren’t necessarily the same person (or entity) either. In other words, many images on Flickr bearing Creative Commons licenses might not even be licensed correctly to begin with.

[. . .]

Creative Commons licenses were created to foster sharing because some people believed that copyright laws were too stringent. There was no option that made it easy to give large audiences permission to share and use creative works. Fast-forward to 2014, and you can bet that a large number of those 300 million Creative Commons-Commerical licenses on Flickr were applied to images by people who didn’t understand what they were doing. The outcry among Flickr users’ who are unhappy with Yahoo!’s new revenue-generation strategy proves this.

Many Flickr users are changing the licenses on their uploaded images and others are removing their images from the site entirely. As Nelson Lourenco, a photographer from Lisbon, Portugal, told The Wall Street Journal, “When I accepted the Creative Commons license, I understood that my images could be used for things like showing up in articles or other works where they could be showed to the public. [Yahoo!] selling my work and getting the full money out of it came as a surprise.”

Copyright law exists so people can protect their creative work and exploit it for their own commercial gain. If owners of creative works choose to license their works using a Creative Commons license, they need to fully understand what they’re agreeing to and what they’re giving up.

[LINK] "Pastor told gay Christian: Go kill yourself "

Stuff.co.nz's Jess McAllen shared the news that a New Zealand pastor told a gay Christian to kill himself. Later in the article, the pastor appears to cheerfully admit to having sent the message and actually having prayed for this.

A gay man who sent an email about his new book promoting gay-friendly religion was told by a church pastor to kill himself.

Jim Marjoram said he emailed 400 Auckland churches about his book, It's Life Jim, which details his many decades of struggling with being a gay Christian.

The response was "deathly silent" - apart from one email yesterday from Pastor Logan Robertson at Westcity Bible Baptist Church.
"We are not interested in your filthy lifestyle or book," Robertson wrote.

"Romans 1 clearly says God has rejected homos and they are worthy of death. You cannot be saved.

"I pray that you will commit suicide, you filthy child molesting fag."

Marjoram posted the text on his Facebook page. From there, it was also posted it to social forum Reddit, and the image went viral.

[LINK] "St. Louis’ Bosnians demand more policing in wake of brutal killing"

Al Jazeera's Ryan Schuessler, in looking at the aftermath of Ferguson, notes the surprisingly large Bosnian immigrant community in the St. Louis area. The aftermath of the killing of a Bosnian immigrant highlights concerns in the community about worsening law and order in their neighbourhoods.

Bosnians in St. Louis are demanding a stronger police presence in their community after 32-year-old immigrant Zemir Begic, whose funeral is being held Saturday in Iowa, was brutally killed last Sunday.

And early Friday morning a 26-year-old Bosnian woman was attacked in the same neighborhood, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, an incident the FBI is investigating as a hate crime.

Hundreds of people protested on Sunday after Begic was beaten to death with a hammer, returning to the streets on Monday. The demonstrators held signs reading “Bosnian lives matter,” playing off protests in nearby Ferguson, where “Black lives matter” has become a theme of demonstrations over the Aug. 9 shooting of black teen Michael Brown by white police officer Darren Wilson. The Bosnian protesters blocked traffic on Gravois Avenue, a main thoroughfare that runs through southern St. Louis and the heart of the Bevo Mill neighborhood, known as Little Bosnia.

[. . .]

The city’s Bosnian population, which is estimated at nearly 70,000, is largely made up of Bosnian Muslims who arrived as refugees during the bloody civil war that ripped the former Yugoslavia apart in the early 1990s. Many are survivors of brutal ethnic cleansing campaigns.

Since their arrival, they have been largely credited for rebuilding Bevo Mill, a dilapidated industrial-era working-class neighborhood in southern St. Louis. A long stretch of Gravois Avenue is now lined with Bosnian-, Albanian- and Roma-owned businesses, restaurants and cafes.

[URBAN NOTE] On the new TCAF store in the Toronto Reference Library

The Toronto Public Library's new blog has shared the news that the Toronto omics Art Festival had opened up a permanent store at the Toronto Reference Library.

Toronto Public Library is happy to welcome the Toronto Comic Arts Festival (TCAF) / Beguiling Books & Arts to the Toronto Reference Library, where they will open the TCAF Shop on the main floor. The gift shop will open in pop-up mode on the evening of December 3, and the owners will build a full range of merchandise that will be available in 2015.

TCAF has held its annual festival at the Toronto Reference Library for several years. The gift shop is an opportunity to extend this successful partnership, and the books and related merchandise in the shop will complement the library experience. There are plans to develop and sell unique Toronto Public Library merchandise in the gift shop.

This venture will create a new revenue source for the Toronto Public Library Board that will go toward funding library programs and services.

blogTO has more.

I visited the store briefly last week, and I can say it looks inviting. I quite look forward to a later exploration in depth, and to this store's permanent presence.

[URBAN NOTE] "Here Comes the Equestrian Statue"

My most recent photograph of the equestrian statue of King Edward VII in Queen's Park, transplanted from India in the 1960s, was taken in July.



Torontoist's David Wencer wrote a nice post explaining the background for the move to Queen's Park. Apparently quite a few people were left wondering what to do with it.

The origins of the Edward VII equestrian statue go back to July 1910, when the All-India Memorial Committee sought to commemorate the late king with a statue in Delhi. They turned to Thomas Brock, an established English sculptor nearing the end of a very successful career. A 2002 essay by John Anthony Sankey notes that Brock was one of Great Britain’s leading sculptors in the early 20th century, associated with the new sculpture movement which placed a renewed focus on naturalistic representation. Brock’s other notable sculptures include the Victoria Memorial outside Buckingham Palace, and an equestrian statue of Edward, the Black Prince, in Leeds City Square.

Brock worked on the design for the Delhi statue over the next year, electing to depict Edward atop his horse Kildare, wearing a Field Marshal’s uniform and holding his hat in his hand.

The statue took several years to create, and production was further delayed by the First World War, which curtailed bronze casting operations. Although many sources give the year of the statue’s creation as 1919, Sankey’s research indicates it was not actually completed until 1921. In his diary, King George V recorded a 1921 visit to Brock’s studio to see the finished statue before it was shipped to India, and the Times of London reported its official unveiling in February of 1922, an event attended by the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VIII. “The bronze equestrian statue, itself on a high red sandstone pedestal, is distinctly good,” wrote the Times, “and the whole spectacle, with the glittering staffs and double guard of honour of the Seaforths and Gurkhas and the massed spectators, was very striking.”

Toronto’s acquisition of the statue was largely orchestrated by the Indian government and Canadian governor general Roland Michener, but the credit is generally given to Harry Jackman, who financed its transportation from Delhi to Toronto. Jackman, a former MP for Rosedale and chairman of the board of Empire Life Insurance, reportedly paid $10,000 to have the statue disassembled and shipped across the Atlantic. Available correspondence indicates that the statue was in Toronto by late 1968 and stored in a building on Cherry St. owned by the Harbour Commission. In December 1968, Ivan Forrest, the Commissioner of the Department of Parks and Recreation, wrote to Mayor William Dennison, verifying the statue’s present location and acknowledging Jackman’s preference for the statue to be erected in the northern section Queen’s Park, in a location which had previously housed a bandstand.

[LINK] On the trajectory of John Maguire from high school joker to ISIS jihadi

Quickly looking at the news of John Maguire, the Ottawa-area man who has shot to fame as encouraging terrorist attacks in Canada on behalf of ISIS, Sarah Boesveld and Sam Cooley's Ottawa Citizen article "Path of a jihadi: How John Maguire went from a high school joker in Kemptville to an Islamic radical" provides as good an overview of his early life as any. Unsurprisingly, at least at this early stage, while people have some idea as to when the 20-something man converted to radical Islam no one as yet is saying why this happened.

(Where do all the lost and lonely people go?)

On Sunday, a propaganda group linked to Islamic State released a six-minute video featuring a speaker who identified himself as Abu Anwar al-Canadi. The gaunt young man scolded the Canadian government for joining an international military coalition fighting Islamic State, referring to “the global war against the Islamic state.”

Friends identified the speaker as Maguire, a University of Ottawa dropout and who was raised in Kemptville and spent a year at Hillcrest high school in Ottawa. He dropped out of sight a year ago.

In that past life, now seemingly so far away, John Maguire was a teenager whose sharp wit sometimes got him into trouble, say those who knew him. In the halls and classrooms of North Grenville District high school, Maguire was far from the strident, opinionated loner those who knew him later in life describe: He was smart, funny and sarcastic.

[. . .]

Few who’d gone to school with him heard anything about him until Postmedia News reported the RCMP was investigating his presence in Syria.

His path there had many stops since Kemptville: In Grade 12 he was living with his grandparents and attending Hillcrest high school in Alta Vista. Classmates say his exit from Kemptville was abrupt and unexpected. “(Maguire) just got rid of everyone on Facebook and kinda disappeared,” says one former classmate. “He never told us why.”

[LINK] "On the abundance of extraterrestrial life after the Kepler mission"

Amri Wandel's new paper using data from the Kepler mission to approximate the frequency of possible Earth-like worlds, and using this data to further estimate the frequency of extraterrestrial intelligence in our galaxy, is a math-heavy document that nonetheless suggests that any extraterrestrial intelligence active now is going to be very far away indeed.

The data recently accumulated by the Kepler mission have demonstrated that small planets are quite common and that a significant fraction of all stars may have an Earth-like planet within their Habitable Zone. These results are combined with a Drake-equation formalism to derive the space density of biotic planets as a function of the relatively modest uncertainty in the astronomical data and of the (yet unknown) probability for the evolution of biotic life, Fb. I suggest that Fb may be estimated by future spectral observations of exoplanet biomarkers. If Fb is in the range 0.001 -- 1 then a biotic planet may be expected within 10 -- 100 light years from Earth. Extending the biotic results to advanced life I derive expressions for the distance to putative civilizations in terms of two additional Drake parameters - the probability for evolution of a civilization, Fc, and its average longevity. For instance, assuming optimistic probability values (Fb Fc 1) and a broadcasting longevity of a few thousand years, the likely distance to the nearest civilizations detectable by SETI is of the order of a few thousand light years. The probability of detecting intelligent signals with present and future radio telescopes is calculated as a function of the Drake parameters. Finally, I describe how the detection of intelligent signals would constrain the Drake parameters.

[LINK] "International Olympic Committee adds sexual orientation to anti-discrimination policy"

The New York Daily News' Michael O'Keeffe shares the good news. The Gay Star News notes this could conceivably bar anti-gay countries from hosting future Olympic games.

The International Olympic Committee unanimously approved a revision of its non-discrimination policy Monday to include sexual orientation, a step sparked by Russian lawmakers' passage of laws before the Sochi games that banned "gay propaganda."

The language will also be included in contracts between the IOC and future host cities. The IOC notified prospective bidders for the 2022 winter games of the change to Principle 6 of the Olympic charter, which already barred discrimination based on race, religion, gender and other factors.

Activists said Russia's laws encourage homophobic attacks on Russia's gay population and criticized the IOC and corporate sponsors for not doing more to force Russia to repeal the legislation. More than 50 current and former Olympians - including tennis great Martina Navratilova and gold medal diver Greg Louganis — joined the “Principle Six Campaign” — to protest the laws.

LGBT rights advocates called for the U.S. to boycott the Sochi games in response to Russia’s controversial “gay propaganda” legislation.

The IOC’s new policy could face a big test in 2022, since gays and lesbians face discrimination and harassment in both finalists, Beijing, China and Almaty, Kazakhstan.

The IOC’s anti-gay policy, meanwhile, also places pressure on FIFA. The 2018 World Cup will be held in Russia, while the 2022 World Cup will be held in Qatar, which has refused to say if gay athletes will even be allowed in the country to participate in the tournament.