[PHOTO] WiFi on the Toronto subway

The steady expansion of wireless Internet through the Toronto subway that I mentioned last August is continuing.

[URBAN NOTE] "A guide to Indigenous Toronto"

blogTO features a guest post from history professor Alison Norman, talking about the First Nations past and present of the city of Toronto. (It is there; you just have to go digging.) Abundant linkage, and more, is at the site.

When Europeans began settling the area we now call home, the Indigenous people on the land were the Mississaugas, who settled on the Credit River. There had been earlier settlement in southern Ontario by Wendat people and other Iroquoians - archaeological sites dot the city. The land was purchased from the Missisaugas by the British Crown in a deal later known as the Toronto Purchase.

Like many others land purchases, it was a shoddy deal for the Indigenous peoples who believed the agreement was for the lease of the land, and not the outright purchase. A land claim in 2010 sided with the Mississauga, and paid them $145 million. Today the Mississaugas of New Credit live next to the Six Nations of Grand River near Brantford, and are recognized as the host First Nation for the Pan Am games later this year.

It isn't clear how many Indigenous people call Toronto home today. While the City puts the number around 19,000, Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada put the number closer to 37,000. Some Indigenous groups in the city put the number even higher. In the past, it sometimes seemed that Indigenous people had very low visibility in this city, but this is no longer the case. Toronto has many places where one can learn about Indigenous history and culture.

First stop should be the Native Canadian Centre of Toronto on Spadina. The NCCT has a long history of providing a place for Indigenous people in the city, but also for non-Indigenous to come and learn more about Indigenous culture. Through the Toronto Native Community History Program they offer a fantastic bus tour of the city that visits historical landmarks illustrating the Indigenous presence in Toronto.

[. . .]

And visiting The Cedar Basket gift shop is necessary, although if you don't make it in, you can order moccasins, corn husk dolls and even sweet grass online.

Anyone interested in the history of Toronto should download the First Story app, created by the NCCT and the Centre for Community Mapping. The goal of the app is to build both pride and awareness of in the long Indigenous presence in the city, as well as the contributions of Indigenous peoples to the development of Toronto. It provides intriguing and useful information about particular sites around the city that are either important historically or that play a crucial role in Indigenous culture today.

[LINK] "Ethnographers as Writers: Write First Drafts in One Go"

Savage Minds' Kristen Ghodsee has some interesting advice for writers.

Many doctoral students fail to earn their PhDs because they never finish their dissertations. They complete their coursework, pass their qualifying exams, and do all of their research, but writing the thesis proves an insurmountable barrier. Why does the dissertation present such a challenge? Because students can’t push past the first chapter. Too many dissertators start with their introduction and find that they have nothing to say. Or they realize they have no idea what they are trying to introduce.

In Anne Lamott’s brilliant book, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, the author advises all would be writers to embrace what she calls the “sh*tty first draft” (SFD). Decide what you’re going to write, and then write it straight through without stopping. If you need an article, spend some time thinking of an abstract that captures the essence of your argument and the data you have to substantiate it. You can take a few days to put together a really good abstract. Once you have it, use it as you introductory paragraph and start writing.

Keep putting words on the page until you reach what you think will be the end. Never go back and read what you have already written. This may seem difficult, but you can learn to let your thoughts flow. If you find yourself stuck at a section or in need of a particular fact or reference not at hand, leave placeholders in your text. Phrases like “insert quote here” or “discuss relevant studies here” litter my first drafts. If I need to stop working for the day, I always type the letters “XXX” in my electronic document. When I come back to the file, I open the document and search for the “XXX,” thus bypassing the text I’ve previously written.

Writing straight through presents bigger obstacles when working on a dissertation or book. My colleague Doug Rogers understands these challenges and still insists on writing as much as he can without revising:

Given all of the revising and reclassifying that I practice and recommend, it’s imperative for me to keep going, to put off the urge to re-write and re-classify until it will be most useful. I could revise some paragraph or section forever, but I won’t know if it’s right until I see it in the larger chapter context. So I try to push through a whole chapter before I dismantle it. At some point, even if I’m a bit dissatisfied with it, I leave the chapter and move onto the next, so that I can revise at a higher level (two chapters together [and] eventually the whole book) later on.

More at the site.

[LINK] "The Invisible Woman"

Lawyers, Guns and Money linked to a Pitchfork interview with Bjork. One area that this interview touched upon was the way in which women creators see their work minimized, or even ignored.

Pitchfork: When it was originally misreported that Vulnicura was produced by Arca, instead of co-produced by you and Arca, it reminded me of the Joni Mitchell quote from the height of her fame about how whichever man was in the room with her got credit for her genius.

B: Yeah, I didn’t want to talk about that kind of thing for 10 years, but then I thought, “You’re a coward if you don’t stand up. Not for you, but for women. Say something.” So around 2006, I put something on my website where I cleared something up, because it’d been online so many times that it was becoming a fact. It wasn’t just one journalist getting it wrong, everybody was getting it wrong. I’ve done music for, what, 30 years? I’ve been in the studio since I was 11; Alejandro had never done an album when I worked with him. He wanted to put something on his own Twitter, just to say it’s co-produced. I said, “No, we’re never going to win this battle. Let’s just leave it.” But he insisted. I’ve sometimes thought about releasing a map of all my albums and just making it clear who did what. But it always comes across as so defensive that, like, it’s pathetic. I could obviously talk about this for a long time.

Pitchfork: The world has a difficult time with the female auteur.

B: I have nothing against Kanye West. Help me with this—I’m not dissing him—this is about how people talk about him. With the last album he did, he got all the best beatmakers on the planet at the time to make beats for him. A lot of the time, he wasn’t even there. Yet no one would question his authorship for a second. If whatever I’m saying to you now helps women, I’m up for saying it. For example, I did 80% of the beats on Vespertine and it took me three years to work on that album, because it was all microbeats—it was like doing a huge embroidery piece. Matmos came in the last two weeks and added percussion on top of the songs, but they didn’t do any of the main parts, and they are credited everywhere as having done the whole album. [Matmos’] Drew [Daniel] is a close friend of mine, and in every single interview he did, he corrected it. And they don’t even listen to him. It really is strange.

[LINK] "Mac and me — on celebrating the 31st birthday of the Apple 128K"

I quite liked Dave Bidini's National Post essay on the anniversary of the Apple 128K. My encounters with this computer were limited--I had a Commodore 64C at home, and only had early-series Apples at school--but I recognize the feelings.

Trundling out of the loading bay in the early morning, its trailers stuffed with square white boxes squeaking with Styrofoam, the trucks hacked and coughed their way along routes leading to commercial zones, none of them — not yet — boasting hulking retail monoliths or other white whales of consumerism. Instead, there were a variety of department stores, RadioShacks, gadget shops and Active Surpluses; maybe a stereo branch breach-birthed into the modern age. An employee with a blue shirt and striped tie blandly stoned and already dreaming of lunch looked at the watch his grandmother had bought him for graduation and, knowing it was time, entered the stockroom smoking a cigarette while walking to the grille at the back of the building, which he groaningly rolled up before waving in the haulage. The truck braked — an awful screaming sound that portended more than just ear ringing and the inevitable I-should-really-get-my-s–t-together employee soul-searching — and the trucker, a clipboard under his arm, climbed from his seat. He walked the length of the loading dock, disappeared into the trailer and started lifting. A transistor radio duct-taped to the wall — not yet infected by the invention of open-line programming — played “Owner of a Lonely Heart” for the third time that day as a sweep of wind moved through the bay, swooshing an old newspaper folio along the floor. Somewhere a phone rang; the chime of its bell finding the two men. The trucker passed the boxes to the employee: five, maybe six, maybe seven, stacked just outside the stockroom. “Better not take too many, eh?” said the trucker. The personal computer. Expensive. About two grand. Besides, who knows what use anyone is going to have for them?

Looking back, the first Macintosh Apple rig — the 128K, born as a consumer thing on Jan. 24, 1984 — didn’t exactly arrive wreathed in the pure beauty of light. Instead, like the spore that it was, its poetry lied in its blockish, unassuming café au grey; mundanely alien, as muted a portal as C.S. Lewis’s wardrobe or what happened when Abbot and Costello accidentally leaned on that sculpture on the bookshelf in that room where they weren’t supposed to be.

It had a small screenface and a mouth open to one side, which is the expression one makes when uncertain about whether to do what someone else has suggested. It looked like a small television for fear of looking too much like anything else. One sensed that its designers — Jef Raskin, Bill Atkinson, Burrell Smith, Steve Jobs and others — had as much of an idea of the exoticism of its impact as those who tried selling it. Even that Ridley Scott commercial that trumpeted the personal computer during Super Bowl 18 seemed to fetch for a vision of the future like two hands reaching to find each other down a dark hallway. There was a woman in red shorts, a hammerthrow and a sea of drones in Potemkin grey drooling in their fold-up chairs. All of this at a time of Night Court and Hulk Hogan and Madonna. A few days later, Michael Jackson was burned on set while filming a Pepsi ad, and people worried about what life would be like if anything ever happened to the King of Pop, proving that, as a species, following the right story has never been our strong suit.

[LINK] On the discovery of ancient planets around Kepler-444

Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait notes the discovery of five rocky planets in orbit of nearbyish orange dwarf Kepler-444 and what this means.

•The star is called Kepler-444. It’s a bit cooler, more orange, and smaller than the Sun (a K0 dwarf, if you want the details), and is about 117 light-years from Earth. That’s relatively close! Amazingly, it’s actually a triple-star system: There’s a pair of cool red M dwarfs orbiting each other, and the pair in turn orbits the K star. The binary is about 10 billion kilometers from the K star, about twice the distance Neptune is from the Sun.

•The five planets orbit the primary K star, and are called Kepler-444b up to Kepler-444f. All five are smaller than Earth, and get bigger in order with their distance from the star: Kepler-444b has a diameter of 0.403 Earth, Kepler-444c is 0.497 Earth, d is 0.530, e is 0.546, and f is the biggest at 0.741 our home planet’s size.

The import of this particular discovery? Kepler-444 is ancient, just a couple of billion years older than the universe. Earth-like environments plausibly existed very early on, environments capable of sustaining life.

When Kepler-444 formed, there were relatively fewer of these heavy elements, and spectra of the star confirm a paucity of elements like iron. We’ve discovered enough exoplanets now that we see an interesting relationship between heavy elements and planets: Gas giants (like Jupiter and Saturn) tend to form around stars that have more heavy elements; these elements aid in the formation of larger planets. But when you look at smaller, more Earth-sized planets, that relationship goes away. Smaller planets form around stars that have lots of heavy elements, and they also form around stars that have relatively few.

The Kepler-444 system supports this. A gas giant planet would’ve been seen, so it looks like these five planets are all it has (or the biggest it has), and each is small and presumably rocky.

[. . .]

Take a step back and realize that what this means is that Earth-sized planets could form around Sunlike stars even 11 billion years ago! That may have profound implications for life.

You may have heard of the Fermi paradox: If life is easy to get started on planets, then where are the aliens? We do know that life formed on Earth not too long after the planet’s crust had cooled enough to support it. Let’s say it takes 4 billion years for those protozoa to evolve and build spaceships. It turns out that, even with the vast distances between stars and limiting your ships to far less than the speed of light, you can colonize the entire galaxy in just a few million years. That’s far less than the age of the galaxy.

Perhaps you see the problem. If planets like Earth formed 11 billion years ago, and happened to form at the right distance for more clement conditions on the surface, life could have arisen long enough ago and started building spaceships long before the Earth even formed! They’d have planted their flags on every Earth-sized habitable planet in the Milky Way by now.

Where are they?

[LINK] On the circumplanetary disk of super-Saturn J1407b

The discovery paper of the circumplanetary disk of super-Saturn J1407b is remarkable.

The light curve of 1SWASP J140747.93-394542.6, a $\sim$16 Myr old star in the Sco-Cen OB association, underwent a complex series of deep eclipses that lasted 56 days, centered on April 2007. This light curve is interpreted as the transit of a giant ring system that is filling up a fraction of the Hill sphere of an unseen secondary companion, J1407b. We fit the light curve with a model of an azimuthally symmetric ring system, including spatial scales down to the temporal limit set by the star's diameter and relative velocity. The best ring model has 37 rings and extends out to a radius of 0.6 AU (90 million km), and the rings have an estimated total mass on the order of $100 M_{Moon}$. The ring system has one clearly defined gap at 0.4 AU (61 million km), which we hypothesize is being cleared out by a $< 0.8 M_{\oplus}$ exosatellite orbiting around J1407b. This eclipse and model implies that we are seeing a circumplanetary disk undergoing a dynamic transition to an exosatellite-sculpted ring structure and is one of the first seen outside our Solar system.

phys.org has more.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• Antipope Charlie Stross speculates about the consequences of SYRIZA's eleciton victory.


• Bad Astronomy discusses the Rosetta probe's pictures of Comet 67P.
  
• blogTO notes that Uniqlo is coming to Toronto.
  
• The Dragon's Gaze links to a comparative study of binary stars with exoplanets.


• The Dragon's Tales links to a study of the atmosphere of Pluto.


• Joe. My. God. notes that Alexis Tsipras has foresworn a religious oath of office.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes that fast food restaurants could pay their employee living wages.


• Otto Pohl links to a study of his on German exiles in central Asia.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer notes that the Nicaragua Canal still makes no sense.


• Transit Toronto observes the spread of Presto cards on the TTC.


• The Volokh Conspiracy notes an English court's distinction between female genital mutilation and male circumcision.


• Window on Eurasia notes the decline of Christianity in the North Caucasus, high inflation in Kaliningrad, official Belarus' measures to deal with a Ukraine-style invasion, and suggests Ukraine could still win the conflict.


• The Financial Times' World blog considers the question of Greek debt.

[DM] "'Greece: The Impact of Austerity on Migration'"

At Demography Matters, I have a post up linking to another post providing numbers on the scale of Greek population decline and emigration since 2008.