[PHOTO] A lovely fairy queen on Yonge

This might well be my favourite photo of 2014. Everything seemed to work.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• D-Brief notes that American populations are much more genetically mixed than people would have it.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to one paper examining how the Square Kilometre Array could be used to detect extraterrestrial intelligence, and to another paper noting that atmospheric freeze-out on tidally locked planets could be more common than previously thought.


• The Dragon's Tales looks at Chinese outsourcing and notes Russian discontent with the Ukrainian purchase of American nuclear fuel.


• Far Outliers notes the inertia of post-war Bosnia.


• Joe. My. God. shares Dan Savage's call to prosecute the parents of Leelah Alcorn for driving her to suicide.


• Language Hat notes a new argument that the language of the Tartessians of ancient Spain was actually Celtic.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes thinks that things are very bad for lawyers.


• Marginal Revolution bets Greece will leave the Eurozone and notes French economist Thomas Piketty's refusal of the French Legion of Honor.


• Personal Reflections' Jim Belshaw notes likens immigration and refugee restrictions to a Great Wall, unflatteringly.


• The Planetary Society Blog's Emily Lakdawalla notes that 2015 will be a year when dwarf planets Ceres and Pluto finally get visited.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer argues that the Syrian government is coming to the end of its rope and notes Venezuela's belated efforts to control air-based cocaine traficking by Mexican planes.


• The Volokh Conspiracy looks at the implications of a recent American court case finding against North Korea.


• Window on Eurasia argues that an extended Putin government in Russia will make things worse, looks at the visibility of the Chuvash language in Chuvashia, and notes warnings by a Crimean Tatar leader that Russia should return Crimea to Ukraine else risk catastrophe.


• Whatever's John Scalzi marks the ten-year anniversary of his Old Man's War.

[URBAN NOTE] "Expect erratic weather in Toronto this weekend"

The Toronto Star reports.

Environment Canada released a special weather statement Friday morning, warning Toronto residents of a “significant winter storm” over Saturday and Sunday.

According to the statement, snow will begin falling Saturday, and as temperatures rise, this snow will turn into rain.

As much as 5 to 10 cm of snow is expected to fall on parts of central and eastern Ontario.

There is a risk of freezing rain Saturday afternoon, as temperatures inch above zero, and then rain by the evening, with winds gusting up to 20 km/h.

Temperatures will surge Sunday, with a high of 10 C forecast for Toronto, and there will be more periods of rain.

The warmth won’t last, however, as a cold front is predicted to travel across the southern part of the province, bringing with it powerful winds and flurries. The temperature is set to plummet to -9 C overnight Sunday.

[LINK] "Evidence of Leelah Alcorn's short life removed from Tumblr"

Gay Star News reports on the disappearance of Leelah Alcorn's Tumblr account. All I can say is that at least her words and images were very widely shared before the account disappeared. If someone was trying to hide her, they failed.

The erasure of every trace of Leelah Alcorn's short life online continued today with the apparent removal, from Tumblr, of her 'satan's wifey' account.

It was from here, earlier this week, that the Ohio teen posted two notes shortly before her death, claiming that her parents' refusal to accept that she was transgender made it impossible for her to continue to live.

Those searching for Leelah's account are now greeted by a standard Tumblr 'not found' page, which states: 'There's nothing here. Whatever you were looking for doesn't currently exist at this address. Unless you were looking for this error page, in which case: Congrats! You totally found it.'

At time of writing, Gay Star News been unable to contact Tumblr to ask what has occurred.

However, an investigation last year revealed that Tumblr appeared to have banned a number of tags from its mobile app, including 'gay,' 'lesbian,' 'bisexual' and 'transsexual.'

They had also banned 'depression' and 'suicide.'

Leelah's last posts may have been removed either because she claimed to be transgender - or because their content related to suicide. This would not, however, explain why her entire blog, including artwork and images that she created for her sisters, has now gone.

[LINK] "When restorative justice isn’t enough"

Emma Teitel of MacLean's is very skeptical about the idea of restorative justice as applied to the male Dalhousie University dentistry students who were joking on Facebook about sexually assaulting sedated patients (among other things).

The group, Class of DDS 2015 Gentlemen, deleted shortly after an anonymous source alerted the press to its existence, was a mecca of juvenile, hateful material. It was not, as many of its defenders claim, home to harmless, sexist jokes of the “make me a sandwich” variety. In addition to a quiz about female dentistry students entitled “Who would you hate-f–k?” (sadder still is that these geniuses had to borrow their sexist barbs from Jian Ghomeshi), the group’s content included explicit jokes about sedating women for sexual purposes. In one post, a photo of a man holding a rag up to a woman’s face was accompanied by the caption: “Does this rag smell like chloroform to you?” To add insult to injury, the group’s creators also exhibited a very poor understanding of human biology. In the now-deleted words of one member: “Penis . . . The tool used to wean and convert lesbians and virgins into useful, productive members of society.” In short, the so-called dentistry gentlemen not only implicated themselves as deviant pricks, but as unprofessional, irresponsible dolts. This isn’t a case of “rape culture.” It is one of malpractice.

Yet the school has decided to handle the issue behind closed doors with the promise, says Florizone, that the process will be “victim-centred.” In Florizone’s defence, Gerald Hashey, a senior manager with the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission, told the CBC, “The restorative approach is the best way to ensure that community interest, public interest and the interests of the female students are kept at the heart of the issue.”

A restorative approach to justice in this case may benefit the victims—if, of course, the victims wish to resolve the issue as quickly as possible without fear of being named, even at the expense of the “gentlemen” getting off scot-free (and let’s face it, scot-free in this case means any punishment short of expulsion). But the suggestion that restorative justice will benefit the community and the public at large is a sick joke. For starters, dentistry school is not a community. It is a professional school: a launching pad into the world—which was a public place, the last time I checked. And the public will not benefit from a closed-door approach to rape jokes made by aspiring dentists. Something tells me the guys responsible for this Facebook group might have a thing or two in common with the doctor who allegedly took a selfie with an incapacitated Joan Rivers minutes before her death. In other words, the sooner we know their names, the better.

After all, according to Dal’s faculty of dentistry website, the school and its students have been “providing public dental care for over 100 years.” The students, no doubt, were among those to “provide care for approximately 10,000 patients a year . . . at a reduced rate,” as the website reports. Natasha Legay, a 19-year-old student at Halifax’s Mount Saint Vincent University, is one of those patients. She can’t afford to go to a professional dentist and is very uncomfortable with the possibility that one of the guys in the Facebook group might have worked on her teeth in the past—or might in the future. “I was hoping the students would be suspended, just for my peace of mind,” she says. Her peace of mind doesn’t appear to be of great concern to an administration more interested in covering up a scandal than laying it bare. Rather than suspend or expel the students responsible, Dal dentistry has chosen to temporarily close its public clinic until Jan. 12, indirectly punishing the low-income people who rely on its services, for the bad behaviour of 13 students.

[LINK] Two Bloomberg links on economic crisis in Ukraine

First is "Ukraine’s Economy Set to Drop 7.5% in Full-Blown Crisis".

Ukraine’s economy probably shrank 7.5 percent this year, after the conflict with eastern separatists and Russia’s takeover of Crimea helped trigger a “full-scale” financial crisis, central bank Governor Valeriya Gontareva said.

The Ukrainian banking system is “non-functioning,” and the rate of the hryvnia, which has fallen 48 percent against the dollar this year to become the world’s worst-performing currency, reflects its true value, Gontareva said today at a central bank briefing in Kiev. When asked whether Ukraine would default on its debt, she said: “I don’t think Ukraine needs to be a pariah country.”

The conflict has killed more than 4,700 people, according to a UN estimate, while Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk said this month that the fighting wiped out 20 percent of Ukraine’s economic potential. The central bank has spent $1.3 billion of its reserves supporting the hryvnia and will continue taking steps to limit its decline, the governor said.

“There is a full-blown financial crisis,” Gontareva told reporters. “We can only overcome it if we implement quick and even extreme reforms.”

Ukrainian lawmakers approved a 2015 budget yesterday, taking another step toward unlocking future tranches of a $17 billion International Monetary Fund-led bailout. The central bank expects to receive three tranches in early 2015, including two delayed tranches that were due this year.

The second is "Ukraine to Import Coal From ‘Far Away’ as War Curtails Mines".

Ukraine’s coal supplies are at unprecedentedly low levels because of the conflict with pro-Russian rebels, requiring imports from as far away as Asia to avert rolling blackouts this winter.

The former Soviet, which had about 1.4 million tons of coal in reserve stockpiles as of Dec. 1, needs another 1 million tons to get through the winter, said Energy Minister Volodymyr Demchyshyn today at a briefing in Kiev.

Ukraine, which blames Russia for supporting a violent separatist movement in the east that has killed more than 4,700 people, is looking for alternative fuel sources as supplies are curtailed at coal mines in the war-stricken regions of Luhansk and Donetsk and the country faces the possibility of blackouts if temperatures suddenly plunge this winter.

“We are incapable of independently supplying our power plants with coal,” said Demchyshyn. “Money was designated to purchase additional volumes of coal and negotiations were held with all participants, starting from Australia, South Africa and Kazakhstan, to work on the possibility of shipping coal from far-away countries.”

Historically coal self-sufficient and a net exporter of the fuel, Ukraine has seen its carbon production decimated because of the separatist conflict and after rail transport became unavailable or uncertain.

[URBAN NOTE] "How a Ferry Ride Helped Make Brooklyn the Original Suburb"

Sam Roberts of The New York Times recently described how an early ferry made Brooklyn the United States' first commuters' suburb.

This much is known about the maiden voyage of the Nassau: The twin-hulled boat carried 549 passengers, one wagon and three horses. It was captained by Peter Coffee, who would remain with the company that operated the vessel for 50 years.

Though Lewis Rhoda, the chief engineer, got tangled in the machinery and was killed on the first day, “this noble boat surpassed expectations of the public in the rapidity of her movements” as those on board glided across the unpredictable river as gracefully as if they were “passing over a bridge,” a newspaper account at the time said.

What is unknown is the name of the first passenger — the man (and chances are it was a man) who on May 10, 1814, boarded the Nassau, the first regularly scheduled steam-powered ferry from Brooklyn to Manhattan. Whoever he was, he can justly be called America’s first commuter.

Since then, for fully two centuries, millions of his fellow travelers have arrived by bridge, railroad, trolley, elevated train, subway, automobile, bus, helicopter, bicycle and, more recently, by revived ferry service in the diurnal ebb and flow that arguably transformed Brooklyn Heights into the nation’s first suburb, gave New York City what E. B. White described as its “tidal restlessness,” inspired the terms rush hour, bedroom community and urban sprawl and now nearly doubles Manhattan’s population on weekdays.

[LINK] "Say Goodbye to 'Made in China'"

The Dragon's Tales linked to Adam Minter's Bloomberg View article describing how China is starting to outsource as it becomes rich.

In November, Hebei Iron & Steel Co Ltd, a provincial-owned company and China’s largest steelmaker by production, announced that it was moving 5 million tons of its annual production -- roughly 11 percent of the 45 million tons of steel it makes every year -- to South Africa. According to press reports, it won’t be going abroad alone. By 2023, Hebei Province -- China’s most polluted province -- plans to export 20 million tons of steel, 30 million tons of cement and 10 million weight boxes of glass capacity (a weight box equals roughly 50 kilograms) to points still not named.

At first glance, the export of excess industrial capacity wouldn’t appear to make much business sense. As Bloomberg News noted two weeks ago, Hebei Iron & Steel’s South African mill will be “equivalent to two-thirds of that nation’s output last year, and a third of continental Africa’s.” In other words, it's not clear there's much demand in these new locales for the Chinese steel giant's plentiful wares. Why, then, are they doing it?

[. . .] Hebei may simply be at a loss as to how to scale back businesses that they recognize have become massively bloated. Officials in China’s construction-related industries clearly have too much capacity and too little demand. Back in September, I attended a speech in Beijing where a Vice-President of the China Iron & Steel Association announced that Chinese steel production capacity had grown by 200 million tons since the end of 2012, to reach 1.1 billion tons total. Much of that capacity isn’t used -- China is projected to manufacture around 750 million tons of steel this year.

The effect on domestic Chinese steel prices has been devastating. Consider the price in Shanghai for steel reinforcing bar (rebar), a key component to building everything from subways to residential high-rises: it's fallen twenty-nine percent this year. That drop was largely precipitated by China’s economic slowdown (and the slowest growth rate since 1990).

So where is the steel going in the absence of a strong domestic market? During the first 11 months of 2014, China exported 86 million tons of steel (almost equal to total U.S. production in 2013), up 47 percent over the same period in 2013. But the export market is hardly a sustainable bet in the long-term, especially at a time when the United States and other importing countries are erecting anti-dumping duties on Chinese steel.

For a company looking for growth over the long-term, and significant capital to invest, that really only leaves one choice: go global. In fact, the Chinese government has had a “go global” policy since the 1990s, whereby companies are encouraged to set up subsidiaries abroad, for the purpose of extracting raw materials and energy and -- to a lesser extent -- manufacture. But unlike in the past, when going global had served as a nice long-term goal, today's “going global” strategy has taken on urgency.

[BRIEF NOTE] On the close encounter of HIP 85605 with Sol in a few hundred thousand years

io9's George Dvorsky was the first person I saw reporting on the news that we have discovered the stars next to make a close brush with our own planetary system, the binary HIP 85605. From New Scientist:

Coryn Bailer-Jones of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, decided to assess the risks Earth faces by simulating the past and future motion of 50,000 stars, using data from the European Space Agency's Hipparcos spacecraft, which scanned the entire sky in the 1990s. He found 14 stars predicted to come within one parsec, or slightly more than three light years, of the sun over the next few million years.

The star that is set to come closest is called Hip 85605, and has a 90 per cent chance of reaching between 0.13 and 0.65 light years away from us in the next quarter to half a million years – although its current position data isn't entirely clear so the estimate may be wrong. The next closest is GL 710, which has a 90 per cent chance of reaching 0.32 to 1.44 light years in the next 1.3 million years.

Either one would be close enough to influence the Oort cloud, which extends from 0.0065 to around 1.63 light years from the sun. "I think we can safely predict that comet orbits would indeed be disrupted by the closest encounters," says Bailer-Jones. He is now working on a follow-up study to determine the probability of Earth being hit by a comet as the result of a star passing by.

Forbes' Bruce Dorminey had more.

Using Newton’s laws and standard numerical computations, Bailer-Jones traced each star’s trajectory backwards and forwards in time through “a sequence of a large number of very short line segments.” He says he also did the same for the Sun, since it, too, is moving around our galactic disk. Allowing for observational errors, he slightly changed each star’s initial coordinates some 10,000 times in order to build up what he terms a “probability distribution” of how close the stars actually came or will come to the Sun.

Such stellar interlopers can threaten life on Earth in three basic ways. Their gravity can cause the injection of Oort Cloud comets into our inner solar system. Passing massive hot stars could destroy Earth’s atmosphere via powerful ultraviolet (UV) radiation. And a very small fraction of passing stars might even go supernova over the estimated 30,000 year time-frame that they spend crossing through the Oort Cloud. Bailer-Jones says supernova remnants could induce long-term global cooling through the follow-on production of nitrogen dioxide (NO2)* in our atmosphere.

[. . . O]btaining these answers remains very much a work in progress. Bailer-Jones hopes that forthcoming data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia space observatory will allow astronomers to statistically investigate the link between such stellar close encounters and the Earth impact record.

But such encounters do happen over all timescales. Bailer-Jones notes that Van Maanen’s star, the closest known solitary white dwarf — a burned out stellar remnant — lies some 13 light years away in Pisces. It encountered our own Sun only 15,000 years ago.

The Dragon's Tales linked to a Universe Today article talking about the potential for visits.

[T]he most interesting question explored on his webpage is the possibility of using stellar close encounters as a shortcut for exploring exoplanets. According to current cosmological models, the majority of stars within our galaxy are believed to host exoplanets.

So if a star is passing us at just a few parsecs (or even with a single parsec) why not hop on over and investigate its planets? Well, as Bailor-Jones indicates, that’s not really a practical idea: “Traveling to a star passing our solar system at a distance of around 1 pc with a relative speed of 30 km/s is no easier than traveling the the nearby stars (the nearest of which is just over 1 pc away). And we would have to wait 10s of thousands of years for the next encounter. If we can ever achieve interstellar travel, I don’t suppose it would take that long to achieve, so why wait?”

Darn. Still, if there’s one thing this phenomena and Bailor-Jones study reminds us, it is that in the course of dancing around the center of the Milky Way, stars are not fixed in a single point in space. Not only do they periodically move within reach of each other, they can also have an affect on life within them.

Alas, the timescale on which such things happen, not to mention the consequences they entail, are so large that people here on Earth need not worry. By the time HIP 85605 or GL 710 come within a parsec or two of us, we’ll either be long-since dead or too highly evolved to care!