[PHOTO] Looking east on Armoury Street from University Avenue

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• blogTO shares pictures of Toronto's Polar Bear Dip swimmers.


• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly describes the culture shock associated with renting an apartment in Paris.


• Centauri Dreams' Paul Gilster looks at close encounters between stars in our galaxy.


• Crooked Timber started a thread aimed at sharing the best political theory and philosophy papers published in recent years.


• The Dragon's Tales links to papers (1, 2) examining how patterns of dust in protoplanetary disks of young stars might reveal the existence of planets.


• The Dragon's Tales links to a paper examining Hadley-like cells in the atmosphere of Venus and notes the decay of China's rustbelt northeast.


• Joe. My. God. notes that, rather than preside over civic same-sex marriages, fourteen counties in Florida have abolished court weddings.


• Languages of the World's Asya Perelstvaig looks at Old Church Slavonic and its alphabets.


• Marginal Revolution notes the success of the mall in Bangladesh and the decline of the Russian ruble.


• Savage Minds takes a final look at Zora Neale Hurston as an ethnographer and looks at the relationship of ethnography with writing.


• Spacing Toronto links to the latest newsletter from Fort York.


• Strange Maps describes Europe's "blue banana" conurbation.


• Towleroad notes marriage equality in Luxembourg and the political uses of homophobia in Slovakia.


• Window on Eurasia notes that foreigners can now serve in the Russian military, suggests Russia seeks Ukraine's fragmentation, and warns Putin's entourage might try to get rid of him to save themselves.

[LINK] "Julian Fantino out as veterans affairs minister"

CBC had the news that Julian Fantino, a controversial former head of multiple Ontario police services and most recently Conservative MP and Minister for Veterans Affairs, was shifted out of his ministerial position. His tenure had been marked by multiple scandals, perhaps most memorably the time he made a veteran cry on television.

Is this the beginning of the end for the Conservative government? I wonder.

Canada's prime minister has replaced embattled Veterans Affairs Minister Julian Fantino with retired air force officer and first-time MP Erin O'Toole.

In a release Monday, the government said Fantino will remain in cabinet as associate minister for defence — the same post he held before being named international co-operation minister in 2012.

This time, Fantino will focus on Arctic sovereignty, information technology security and foreign intelligence, the release said.

[. . .]

Fantino faced repeated opposition calls for his resignation or firing in the fall over his handling of the Veterans Affairs Canada portfolio. The department has faced much criticism from some veterans because of the decision to close regional offices and for a lack of support for veterans with mental illness.

In November, the auditor general found the department was not doing enough to provide mental-health services to veterans, just days after it was revealed the government had returned nearly $1 billion in lapsed funding to the treasury in recent years.

Fantino was out of the country attending commemorative Second World War events as the opposition called for a response to the auditor general's report.

Fantino was roundly criticized for a testy meeting with veterans early last year and for refusing to speak with the wife of a veteran who pursued him down a hallway in Parliament.

[LINK] "An Ohio transgender teen's suicide, a mother's anguish"

Towleroad linked to a distressing CNN interview with the mother of transgender Ohio teen Leelah Alcorn. From my reading, her statements seem to support her child's statements about a lack of support from parents and imposed social isolation. That his mother, at least, appears to have meant well makes the whole thing all the more distressing.

"We don't support that, religiously," Alcorn's mother told CNN on Wednesday, her voice breaking. "But we told him that we loved him unconditionally. We loved him no matter what. I loved my son. People need to know that I loved him. He was a good kid, a good boy."

Crossing out the name "Josh," the 17-year-old signed the name "Leelah" in a suicide note posted to Tumblr.

[. . .]

In her interview with CNN, Carla Alcorn referred to her child as her son and used male pronouns.

[. . .]

Carla Alcorn told CNN that her child was depressed and that counselors and a psychiatrist gave the teenager medication.

"He just quit talking about (being transgender)," she said.

She worried Wednesday that hateful messages directed toward her and her husband are making them out to be "horrible people," she said. She has other children, she said, and they are incredibly sad about losing a sibling.

Dan Savage suggested that the parents should be prosecuted for apparently driving their child to suicide. I don't know about that. I would hope that the pain Leelah's parents are suffering, knowing that their child whatever the eventual gender was no longer in the world at least in part because of their actions, would be sufficient deterrent. May they eventually find peace.

[URBAN NOTE] "39% Of Households In The City Of Detroit Cannot Read This Post"

I found via somewhere this Daily Detroit article talking about the city of Detroit's terrible issues with mass communications. Suggesting that this is a contributing factor to the city's issues does not at all strike me as wrong.

An interesting statistic popped up in a conversation earlier this week. More than 100,000 Detroit households, according to the U.S. Census American Community Survey for 2013, have no access to Internet. No hard line, no cell with data or mobile hotspot for 39.9% of the more than 255,000 active households in the city.

The numbers get worse. When you throw out those with a cellphone with mobile data, and count only hard lines (which have higher speeds, more reliability, and most times no real data caps) the number jumps to more than half – 56.9% in Detroit without access.

A third troubling statistic is that more than 70% of Detroit schoolchildren don’t have Internet access. So those tens of thousands of netbooks Detroit students got awhile back? Most times, there was nothing at home for them to hook up to. Especially when it comes to netbooks, without the Internet the machine is basically a doorstop.

These data points weren’t passed around in the local press much, but these are numbers that need to be paid attention to. No matter how he tries, even the mighty Dan Gilbert and his dream of turning Woodward into “Webward” will stop at Grand Boulevard next to the last stop of the M1 Rail unless there’s wide effort put into this nuts-and-bolts problem.

No one person or organization can do this alone, and admittedly, this problem is harder to solve than hiring a few extra waitstaff at a hip bar. Both Google and Facebook are active in getting Internet to the corners of the world. How about bringing that outreach to Detroit?

[LINK] "Islam in Taiwan: Lost in tradition"

Al Jazeera's Athena Tacet reports on Taiwanese Islam, beset equally by assimilation into surrounding and overwhelmingly non-Muslim populations and by immigration of people foreign to the Taiwanese practice of Islam. (Indonesia is a major source.)

Every Friday afternoon about 1,000 Muslims gather for the weekly prayer at the Taipei Grand Mosque.

Only 20 percent are local Taiwanese - the majority come from Indonesia, Pakistan, Malaysia and various other countries from Africa and the Middle East.

[. . .]

According to Omar Yang, chairman of the mosque, there is a crisis of faith among the Muslim community here stemming from the new generation's lack of education about Islam, and the prevalence of Chinese culture and traditions, which have led to the fading away of Islamic practices.

In an interview with Al Jazeera, Yang recalled the story of a family from central Taiwan who discovered their ancestors were Muslims. They respected various Islamic practices, including not eating pork, but never questioned their ways.

One day they unwrapped one of the offerings their ancestors had left on the traditional Chinese family shrine, and discovered a copy of the Quran in Arabic.

"Knowledge about Islam is not being passed on to the next generation," Yang said. "That's the real problem."

[LINK] "How Scary Can Greece Get?"

Bloomberg View's Mark Gilbert looks at various economic indicators, on the eve of a Greek election where SYRIZA might take power, and finds cause to worry. (Charts are at the site.)

With Greeks getting the opportunity to vote on their economic future, let the scaremongering begin. European Union leaders will utter menacing words about the euro-exiting consequences of straying from the path of fiscal righteousness. The threat of financial Armageddon will be bandied about. As is often the case, one of the most useful ways to distinguish signal from noise is to follow the money.

[. . .]

Here's a chart suggesting the Greeks themselves knew all along that the euro crisis wasn't over. It uses official figures from the Bank of Greece to track how much money is on deposit with banks in the country. And it shows that most of the money that fled at the start of the emergency never came back:

When there's a run on a bank -- think of the perennial Christmas movie, ``It's a Wonderful Life'' -- there's a rush to get your money out before your neighbor, in case the bank shuts its doors. When there's a run on a sovereign nation, there's a rush to get money out of the country before the government either imposes capital controls that will lock the cash behind its borders or decides to confiscate some or all of it.

Between 2010 and the middle of 2012, Greek depositors withdrew 37 percent of their cash from local banks. Total cash in the domestic banking system is down to about 165 billion euros ($200 billion), leaving it 31 percent below its peak and suggesting savers still aren’t convinced their money is safe. So a key measure to watch in the coming months as the incoming Greek government renegotiates with its creditors is whether the banking system starts to bleed deposits again.

The second market measure to watch is the gap between Greek three- and 10-year yields. That indicator proved prescient in divining that Prime Minister Antonis Samaras's gamble on whom to pick as president would fail. The fall of the government this week, triggering elections in January that seem likely to usher in the anti-austerity, debt-renegotiating Syriza party, prompted investors to drive the gap even wider:

The final barometer of Greek risk is also the simplest. Traders in the market for credit-default swaps get paid for gauging the likelihood of a borrower failing to pay its debts. They've been ratcheting up the cost for investors[.]

[LINK] "Sanskrit and English: there’s no competition"

Writing in response to a claim of an Indian government minister that Sanskrit could eventually displace English as India's common language, The Hindu's Data column argues that such a dream is completely unrealistic. There aren't even enough second-language speakers of Sanskrit to pose a challenge; Sanskrit's descent Hindi would be infinitely better-placed.

Anecdotally, we’d all agree that the last ten years are likely to have seen a huge jump in the number of English-speakers; English is now the second biggest language of instruction in primary schools after Hindi.

So India’s official language numbers, over ten years old now, are almost certainly an underestimation of the number of English speakers. Even so, there is little comparison between the number of English and Sanskrit speakers.

In terms of primary languages – what we commonly understand as the “mother tongue” – both English and Sanskrit were miles away from India’s Top 10. Of the123 primary languages counted by the Census – 23 scheduled and 100 non-scheduled – Sanskrit was fifth from bottom in terms of primary languages spoken, with only Persian, Chakhesang, Afghani/ Kabuli and Simte less commonly spoken. English, meanwhile, was the 45th most commonly spoken primary language.

Charts at the site.

[LINK] "Facebook is the new AOL"

The Verge's Nilay Patel argues that what is old is new again. (More precisely, he seems to be suggesting that ideas implemented imperfectly at the time might be done rather better now.)

The 90s are back.

They’re back in fashion, they’re back in music, and they are most certainly back in technology.

In a way this makes sense; the top end of the Millennial generation was just entering high school in the 90s, and now they’re into the workplace and armed with spending power, so it’s easy to appeal directly to their nostalgia. Look, here’s Salt-n-Pepa shilling for Geico!

But um, hey everybody: the 90s were a decade of excess and mistakes and excessive mistakes. The rollicking good times of the 90s ended with the dot-com collapse of the early 2000s, the memories of which continue to shape the industry today.

So it's worth noting that the broad outlines of tech in 2015 look surprisingly like the late 90s. The major players are set up the same, the fights are the same, and the mistakes will almost certainly be the same. It's going to be pretty fun until it all blows up, actually — some of these ancient dreams might finally come true.

2015 will be defined by the Revenge of 90s Internet: media and tech giants flirting with each other, dominant players throwing their weight around, and portals, portals everywhere. And CES, starting this week, will offer a big glimpse into what all that 90s dark lipstick looks like on a modern face.

[ISL] On the New Year's Day levee of Prince Edward Island

Prince Edward Island blogger Peter Rukavina did his readers the service of posting the schedule for the New Year's Day levees of Charlottetown and area. What is a levee, you might ask? (The é is almost never used.) Wikipedia has it.

The word levée (from French, noun use of infinitive lever, "rising", from Latin levāre, "to raise") originated in the Levée du Soleil (Rising of the Sun) of King Louis XIV (1643–1715). It was his custom to receive his male subjects in his bedchamber just after arising, a practice that subsequently spread throughout Europe.

In the 18th century the levée in Great Britain and Ireland became a formal court reception given by the sovereign or his/her representative in the forenoon or early afternoon. In the New World colonies the levée was held by the governor acting on behalf of the monarch. Only men were received at these events.

It was in Canada that the levée became associated with New Year's Day. The fur traders had the tradition of paying their respects to the master of the fort (their government representative) on New Year's Day. This custom was adopted by the governor general and lieutenant governors for their levées.

[. . .]

Today, levées are the receptions (usually, but not necessarily, on New Year's Day) held by the governor general, the lieutenant governors of the provinces, the military and others, to mark the start of another year and to provide an opportunity for the public to pay their respects.

[. . .]

Today the levée has evolved from the earlier, more boisterous party into a more sedate and informal one. It is an occasion to call upon representatives of the monarch, military and municipal governments and to exchange New Year's greetings and best wishes for the new year, to renew old acquaintances and to meet new friends. It is also an opportunity to reflect upon the events of the past year and to welcome the opportunities of the New Year.

The province of Prince Edward Island maintains a more historical approach to celebrating levée day. On New Year's Day, all Legions and bars are opened and offer moosemilk (egg nog and rum) from the early morning until the late night. Though there are still the formal receptions held at Government House and Province House, levée day is not only a formal event. It is something that attracts a large number of Islanders, which is quite unusual in comparison to the other provinces where it has gradually become more subdued.

Rukavina also shared a news story from 1974-1975, the controversial first admission of women to the levees of Prince Edward Island. Initially, women were banned. It took considerable public outcry to get this changes.

[LINK] The anti-Castro extremist who will never give up his fight

The Toronto Star's Oakland Ross introduces his readers to Luis Posada Carriles, a Cuban-American accused of committing multiple terrorist attacks against civilians in his fight against Castro who has nonetheless found refuge in Florida.

Now 86, the terrorist/hero who allegedly once blew up a Cuban passenger plane, killing all 73 on board, is a free man in the U.S.A., still hoping to end the autocratic rule of longtime Cuban strongman Fidel Castro Ruz and his brother Raul, a mission that will brook no trace of compromise.

Last month’s stunning announcement that Washington and Havana intend to restore diplomatic relations following more than five decades of rancour was like a shot across the bow for Posada.

“It will not succeed,” he reportedly vowed during a Miami street demonstration last month. “You cannot do business with bandits. Nobody can do business with criminals, with murderers, with drug traffickers, and that is what they are, Raul and the horde alongside him.”

Posada speaks with difficulty now, in a voice that barely rises above a whisper, owing to an attempt on his life in 1990 in which he was shot a dozen times. But his defiant outlook hasn’t changed.

[. . .]

A terrorist in a land that professes to abhor terrorism, Posada is a one-man microcosm of all the explosive fury that has built up and not infrequently erupted among the anti-Castro exile community based mostly in South Florida, with its epicentre on Miami’s Eighth Street — Calle Ocho in Spanish — a bustling and bumptious barrio where “Castro” is a dirty word and always will be.

“Cuba is a terrorist state,” said Luis Molina, owner of the Molina Fine Art gallery on Calle Ocho, expressing a sentiment still popular in the neighbourhood. “Everybody knows it is a terrorist state.”