[PHOTO] High Park station as the eastbound train enters

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• blogTO's Chris Bateman notes that Yonge and Eglinton is set to boom in coming years, between condo and mass transit construction.


• Centauri Dreams looks at the second stage of the Kepler mission.


• The Dragon's Gaze notes the redetection of exoplanets WASP 39b and WASP 43b, and links to a study of proto-Kuiper belts in young planetary systems.


• The Dragon's Tales notes Russian air deployments to Belarus.


• The Everyday Sociology Blog considers the concept of "kung fu" sociology, used to undermine false claims.


• Geocurrents considers the environmental implications of marijuana cultivation.


• Language Log notes a paper mapping language diversity onto geographic complexity, regions more difficult to traverse being more linguistically diverse.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money is very critical of the Trans-Pacific Partnership.


• Marginal Revolution notes that the Moroccan occupation of the Western Sahara is enormously costly.


• Otto Pohl commemorates the 71st anniversary of the deportation of the Kalmyks, while Window on Eurasia notes the high degree of assimilation of Kalmyks.


• The Planetary Society Blog provides an overview of the observational history of Ceres.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer takes issue with a review of his new book, The Empire Trap.


• Window on Eurasia notes Ukrainian support for NATO and Ukrainian opposition to giving up the Donbas, notes Tsarist emigrés' support for Russia in Crimea, argues that Russia really hasn't incorporated Crimea, and notes Latvian interest in launching a Russian-language television channel.

[URBAN NOTE] "Vancouver home prices worry businesses as they seek to hire staff"

The Twitter user who linked to this CBC article joked that Vancouverites might almost do better to look for homes in Toronto, with its own real-estate boom (bubble?). If there are structural issues to Vancouver's housing issues, with geography at the mouth of the Fraser River requiring very high densities, very high prices, and both, a throttling effect on the regional economy can't be excluded.

When Allan Pulga, a communications manager, found out he was going to be a father, he had to make a tough choice — stay in a tiny downtown condo or leave Vancouver.

The 34-year-old, who works for fast-growing private Canadian technology firm iQmetrix, packed his bags and moved to Regina, Sask., where the typical family home costs roughly one third of the price in the Greater Vancouver area.

"When you're a young, single person, you can make Vancouver work financially," said Pulga, who was able to transfer to iQmetrix's Regina office. "But I feel like if it's time to settle down and have kids, maybe you won't stay."

Pulga typifies a worrying trend in Vancouver, where sky-high housing prices are forcing many young professionals out of the city and into long commutes from far-flung suburbs, with some choosing just to leave the region altogether.

That has business groups raising the alarm about Vancouver's ability to attract and retain the talent needed to foster local successes like retailer Lululemon Athletica or tech start-ups like video surveillance maker Avigilon Corp and social media manager Hootsuite.

[LINK] "Aleksei Navalny, Putin Critic, Is Seized at Rally After Suspended Sentence in Fraud Case"

The New York Times' David M. Hersz3enhorn reports from Moscow.

The police in Moscow briefly detained the anticorruption crusader and political opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny on Tuesday as he tried to join an unauthorized, antigovernment rally, just hours after a Moscow court had given him a suspended sentence on criminal fraud charges.

The authorities said later that the police were merely escorting Mr. Navalny back to his home, Interfax reported.

Earlier, in a surprise twist, the court had spared Mr. Navalny jail time by suspending his sentence of three and a half years but ordered his younger brother, Oleg, who was also charged, to serve a prison term of the same length.

The imprisonment of Oleg Navalny, who is generally viewed as a pawn in a larger battle, signaled that the Kremlin was making a thuggish attempt to suppress Aleksei Navalny’s political activities and avoid making a martyr out of him.

After the sentencing, Mr. Navalny tried his best to provoke the authorities, walking from Pushkin Square, down Tverskaya Street toward Manezh Square, and the Kremlin, alternately grim-faced and smiling, trailed by a scrum of journalists.

[LINK] "Ruble’s Rout Breeds Uncertainty for Central Asian Migrants"

The Inter Press Service hosts a multiply-authored Eurasianet article talking about the impact of the Russian economic slowdown on Central Asian migrant workers. (The lure of access to the Russian labour market may have been raised as a way to seduce migrant-exporting Uzbekistan and Tajikistan to join the Eurasian Union.)

According to Russia’s ambassador to Uzbekistan, there are about three million Uzbek labour migrants in Russia, the most from any Central Asian country. Others estimate the number of Uzbeks could be twice that.

Unofficial estimates put their remittances in 2013 at the value of roughly a quarter of Uzbekistan’s GDP. Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan are even more dependent on labour migrants, with remittances contributing the equivalent of 30 percent and roughly 50 percent to their economies, respectively.

Data from Russia’s Central Bank shows that the funds Uzbeks send home dipped nine percent year-on-year during the third quarter of 2014. Analysts predict the fall will continue. The Russian business daily Kommersant estimates that remittances fell 35 percent month-on-month in October alone.

That was before the ruble, which has steadily fallen since Russian troops seized Crimea in February, nosedived earlier in December. Thanks to Western sanctions, the low price of oil, and systemic weaknesses in Vladimir Putin’s style of crony capitalism, the currency has lost roughly 50 percent against the dollar this year. Most migrants convert their rubles into dollars to send home.

“My salary was 18,000 rubles a month, which several months ago would be equivalent to 500 dollars. Now, it is less than 300 dollars,” Sherzod, a 29-year-old from the Ferghana Valley who was working at a shop in Samara, told EurasiaNet.org.

[LINK] "Ex-Worker Theory Casts Doubt on North Korea as Sony Hacker"

Bloomberg's Pavel Alpeyev reports. I would note that there's no reason state hackers and disgruntled employees can't collaborate.

At least one former employee of Sony Corp. may have helped hackers orchestrate the cyber-attack on the company’s film and TV unit, according to security researcher Norse Corp.

The company narrowed the list of suspects to a group of six people, including at least one Sony veteran with the necessary technical background to carry out the attack, said Kurt Stammberger, senior vice president at Norse. The company used Sony’s leaked human-resources documents and cross-referenced the data with communications on hacker chat rooms and its own network of Web sensors, he said.

Norse said the findings cast doubt on the U.S. government’s claim that the attack was aimed at stopping the release of “The Interview,” a comedy about a plot to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. The FBI said Dec. 19 it had enough evidence to link the attack to the communist regime, prompting President Barack Obama to vow a response to the cyber-assault.

“There is no credible information to indicate that any other individual is responsible for this cyber incident,” Jenny Shearer, a Federal Bureau of Investigation spokeswoman, said today in an e-mail. The agency based its assessment on information from the U.S. intelligence community, the Department of Homeland Security, foreign partners and the private sector.

[LINK] "Science fiction and the post-Ferguson world"

Mary Hansen's Open Democracy interview with writer and activist Walidah Imarisha about the potential of science fiction to offer possibilities was well worth reading. There is yet hope in the genre.

Mary Hansen: What was your reaction to the grand jury’s decision not to indict Darren Wilson, the police officer who shot the unarmed black teenager Mike Brown?

Walidah Imarisha: Someone on Twitter posted, “Just because I’m not surprised, doesn’t mean I’m not heartbroken.” And I think that was a succinct way of summing it up. I think that a reaffirmation of an unjust system by an unjust system is not surprising and is utterly heartbreaking because we are talking about lives. We’re talking about Mike Brown and Tamir Rice, and, unfortunately, thousands of black and brown folks who have been murdered by the police.

“It’s incredibly important that we begin to shift our thinking away from the state keeping us safe.”

I think that I would have been incredibly surprised if they had indicted Wilson, given the ways that policing functions in this nation. What’s most amazing and powerful is the response from the people. The fact that there were over 170 protests around the world in response to that is incredible. And that it’s not just about Darren Wilson; it’s about people mobilizing to say that this is not the world we want to live in.

MH: For you, science fiction offers a useful way of thinking through these issues—especially the writing of Octavia Butler. What’s the connection there?

WI: I think that science fiction and visionary fiction, as my co-editor Adrienne Maree Brown says, are a perfect testing ground to explore the countless alternatives that could exist to policing and institutions like prisons.

It’s incredibly important that we begin to shift our thinking away from the state keeping us safe, given that that has never been the purpose of the state—it’s never been the purpose of the police or the prison system—and instead begin to ask, how do we keep each other safe? How do we prevent harm from happening? How do we address harm when it does happen in our communities in ways that are about healing, and about wholeness, rather than about punishment and retribution?

[LINK] "Climate Change Threatens Quechua and Their Crops in Peru’s Andes"

The Inter Press Service's Fabiola Ortiz reports on how climate change in the Peruvian Andes is threatening the potato.

In the Parque de la Papa, which is at an altitude of up to 4,500 metres and covers 9,200 hectares, 6,000 indigenous villagers from five communities – Amaru, Chawaytire, Pampallaqta, Paru Paru and Sacaca – are preserving potatoes and biodiversity, along with their spiritual rites and traditional farming techniques.

The Parque de la Papa, a mosaic of fields that hold the greatest diversity of potatoes in the world, 1,460 varieties, was created in 2002 with the support of the Asociación Andes.

This protected area in the Sacred Valley of the Incas is surrounded by lofty peaks known as ‘Apus’ or divine guardians of life, which until recently were snow-capped year-round.

“People are finally waking up to the problem of climate change. They’re starting to think about the future of life, the future of the family. What will the weather be like? Will we have food?” 50-year-old community leader Lino Mamani, one of the ‘papa arariwa’ – potato guardians, in Quechua – told IPS.

He said that whoever is sceptical about climate change can come to the Peruvian Andes to see that it’s real. “Pachamama [mother earth, in Quechua] is nervous about what we are doing to her. All of the crops are moving up the mountains, to higher and higher ground, and they will do so until it’s too high to grow,” he said.

[. . .]

To prevent crop damage, over the last 30 years farmers have increased the altitude at which they plant potatoes by more than 1,000 metres, said Mamani. That information was confirmed by the Asociación Andes and by researchers at the International Potato Centre (CIP), based in Lima.

[LINK] "Trudeau's Liberals led in 2014, but what does 2015 hold?"

CBC's Éric Grenier makes predictions, with charts, of Canadian political dynamics in the coming year. It may be the Liberals' year.

It was a good year for Justin Trudeau's Liberals, as the party maintained its lead in national voting intentions. But there were moments when it looked like the Conservatives were on track to dislodge the Liberals from top spot.

That was certainly the case when the House of Commons began its summer break. The Liberals had begun the year with a comfortable six- to eight-point lead, but by June the margin between the two parties had decreased to just two points. The Trudeau honeymoon was at risk of coming to an end.

But the Liberals' polling numbers ballooned over the summer, as the party surged to the highest level of support it would enjoy all year, at 38 to 39 per cent. The Conservatives, however, were keeping their heads above water at 30 per cent, and as parliamentarians returned to work in the fall, the margin closed once again.

As it stands at year end, the Liberals still lead in the polls, but their advantage over the Conservatives is modest at about 35 to 32 per cent.

The New Democrats have trended downwards throughout the year, having started 2014 in a strong third position with 24 to 25 per cent support. But as Liberal support jumped in the summer, the NDP dropped to the low-20s and, this past month, has been even flirting with the high-teens. While the party is still polling quite well by historical standards, it is a far cry from the 31 per cent the NDP captured in 2011.

[LINK] "Possible Psychology of a Matrioshka Brain"

Eric Schwitzgebel's New APPS Blog post from October speculating about the possible drives of a Matrioshka brain--briefly, a planet-sized supercomputer powered by the energy of a sun--is wonderful. What would it do, and why?

Enclose the sun inside a layered nest of thin spherical computers. Have the inmost sphere harvest the sun's radiation to drive computational processes, emitting waste heat out its backside. Use this waste heat as the energy input for the computational processes of a second, larger and cooler sphere that encloses the first. Use the waste heat of the second sphere to drive the computational processes of a third. Keep adding spheres until you have an outmost sphere that operates near the background temperature of interstellar space.

Congratulations, you've built a Matrioshka Brain! It consumes the entire power output of its star and produces many orders of magnitude more computation per microsecond than all of the current computers on Earth do per year.

[. . .]

A common theme in discussions of super-duper-superintelligence is that we can have no idea what such a being would think about -- that a being so super-duper would be at least as cognitively different from us as we are from earthworms, and thus entirely beyond our ken. But I'd suggest (with Nick Bostrom, Eric Steinhart, and Susan Schneider) that we can think about the psychology of vast supercomputers. Unlike earthworms, we know some general principles of mentality; and, unlike earthworms, we can speculate, at least tentatively, about how these principles might apply to entities with computational power that far exceeds our own.

So...

Let's begin by considering a Matrioshka Brain planfully constructed by intelligent designers. The designers might have aimed at creating only a temporary entity -- a brief art installation, maybe, like a Buddhist sand mandala. These are, perhaps, almost entirely beyond psychological prediction. But if the designers wanted to make a durable Matrioshka Brain, then broad design principles begin to suggest themselves.

Read the rest of the post for insight.