[PHOTO] Ryerson Student Learning Center, from the south

Ryerson University's new Student Learning Centre, located on the former site of Sam the Record Man at Yonge and Gould, is indeed quite spectacular as seen from the outside.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• blogTO notes that the cash-strapped CBC may be forced to sell its iconic downtown Toronto headquarters.


• James Bow reflects on winter in Kitchener-Waterloo.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper studying the relationship between exoplanets and circumstellar dust discs.


• The Dragon's Tales links to a simulation of the polar atmosphere of Venus and notes concerns that India's Hindustan Aeronautics might not be able to manufacture French Rafale fighters under contract.


• Far Outliers notes Madeleine Albright's incomprehension of Cambodia's late 1990s struggles and looks at the way the country lags its neighbours.


• The Frailest Thing notes how human traffic errors reveal we're not quite up to some of the tasks we'd like.


• Joe. My. God. notes that Finland's president has signed a marriage bill into existence.


• Languages of the World notes the problem of where the homeland of the Indo-Europeans was located.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the often-ignored pattern of lynching Mexicans in the United States.


• Marginal Revolution notes (1, 2) the problems of human beings with algorithmic, computer-driven planning.


• Otto Pohl notes how Germans in Kyrgyzstan were forced into labour battalions.


• pollotenchegg looks at demographic indicators in Ukraine over the past year, noting a collapse in the east.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer looks at deep history, looking at the involvement of war in state-building in Africa and noting the historically recent rise of inequality in Latin America.


• Window on Eurasia looks at one Russian's proposal to give a Ukrainian church self-government, notes Russia's inability to serve as a mentor to China, and looks at rural depopulation in the North Caucasus and South Russia.

[LINK] "The Search for Planets Around Proxima Centauri"

The Orion's Arm Facebook group shared Andrew LePage's post at his blog Drew Ex Machina for the search for planets at Proxima Centauri, the small red dwarf that is not only the closest star to our solar system but which is likely the third component in the Alpha Centauri trinary. LePage goes over the various searches and notes that none have been found, but then, none would be likely to be found given the propensity of red dwarfs not to have massive planets.

The best planet survey results to date have failed to detect any planets or brown dwarfs orbiting Proxima Centauri. These results effectively eliminate the possibility of any Jupiter-size or larger planets with orbital periods ranging from a short as two days to in excess of 12 years to a confidence level of 90% to 95% or better. The results also effectively eliminate the possible presence any Saturn-size planets with orbital periods less than about 2000 days or Neptune-size planets with orbital periods less than about 40 days to a 95% confidence level or better. No planets with masses greater than 6 to 10 ME are likely to be present in the habitable zone of Proxima Centauri leaving the possibility that rocky, potentially habitable sub-Earth-size to super-Earth-size planets can exist in this zone and still escape detection by published searches to date with a high probability.

While there have been some who have been alarmed by the lack of any planet detections to date, it is not unexpected given what we have learned about the planetary systems of other M-dwarf stars. A recent statistical analysis of the Kepler database for M-dwarf stars performed by Courtney Dressing and David Charbonneau (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) has shown that planets with radii greater than about 2.5 times that of the Earth (corresponding to 0.64 times the radius of Neptune) and orbital periods less than 200 days are rare. Planets larger than Neptune are exceptionally rare in M-dwarf systems. And since the “typical” M-dwarf in the analysis by Dressing and Charbonneau is over four times more massive than the diminutive Proxima Centauri (with the corresponding planets also tending to be larger), the lack of any planetary detections to date is even less surprising.

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[LINK] "The dark future of American space exploration"

At Vox, David W. Brown describes howshort-sighted American politics mean that NASA's budget for interplanetary probes will be cut to the bone. All I can add is that at least the United States is not the only country, or group of countries, with the capacity for interplanetary exploration. As posts I've made here have pointed out, India, China, and the European Space Agency have all done quite nicely with their tentative explorations of the universe outside of Earth orbit.

[T]he allotment for planetary science has been cut to $1.36 billion — the fourth such proposed cut by the Obama administration, and far short of what is needed by the program. (The rest of NASA's budget goes to earth science, human space exploration, and operation of the International Space Station, among other things.) According to the Planetary Society, a nonprofit space research and advocacy organization, for the planetary science division to run well, the United States should spend at least $1.5 billion every year to explore other worlds — "less overall," they report, "than what Americans spent on dog toys in 2012."

Fiscal year 2013 saw the White House's Office of Management and Budget call for slashing planetary science funding by one-fifth. Though Congress restored much of the money, the program has yet to fully recover, and with the doleful figures in the 2016 budget, it is again up to Congress to find money to keep the program funded.

In that regard, planetary science is at a disadvantage compared to other federal programs. During the budget standoff in 2013, for example, national parks were closed, which prompted an immediate backlash from the public. But because it generally takes several years for spacecraft to reach the outer planets, they are already funded by the time they start returning data. In other words, the ticket is purchased before the flight arrives at its destination. As such, from the public's point of view, the planetary science program will seem stronger than ever, returning spectacular images of alien worlds, while in fact the program is hobbling along, ill-prepared for the future due to consecutive years of reduced budgets.

[LINK] "Will No One Rid Me of These Troublesome Canadians?"

Peter Watts does not like Canada's new bill C-51, for good reason.

[T]here’s a ton of commentary happening over C-51, the bill currently undergoing (limited) debate in the House. That’s not really news, although its highlights warrant a bit of review in light of recent events. C-51 is the Bill that would, among other things, jail for up to five years anyone who

“by communicating statements, knowingly advocates or promotes the commission of terrorism offences in general”

What exactly is a “terrorist offense”? According to S83.01 of Canada’s Criminal Code, it’s an act committed

“in whole or in part for a political, religious or ideological purpose, objective or cause, with the intention of intimidating the public’s security or compelling a person, government or organization to do or refrain from doing an act.”

Seems a bit broad, no? Lots of people and groups try to compel governments to change their behavior for ideological or political reasons. That’s what advocacy is. I hope that I’m not alone in thinking it something of an overreach to classify acts of civil disobedience— a roadblock, for example, in pursuit of “ideological” ends involving First-Nations or environmental issues— as acts of terrorism.

But C-51 goes one better. I don’t have to be the one planting bombs, hijacking planes, or holding up a protest sign on Exxon’s front lawn; thanks to C-51, I can go jail if I just promote that kind of activity out loud, knowing that someone within earshot “may” be inspired to act on my words.

The bill is almost more remarkable for what it omits than for what it encompasses. There’s no exception for private conversation, for example; I’m just as guilty if I communicate my thoughts in a personal email, or whisper them to my wife at bed-time to get her in the mood. (Yes, they’d have to be monitoring those emails, bugging that bedroom, to catch me at it— but don’t worry, C-51 has that covered too). There’s no exemption for critique or artistic merit, protections which extend even in cases of child pornography. There’s no geographic limitation; I’m just as much a criminal if I speak out on behalf of Hezbollah or Ukrainian rebels as I am if I go Yay Team! To the local chapter of Idle No More. I don’t even need to be guilty of a “terrorist purpose”, whatever that even means these days. If I were to stick my tongue in my cheek and write a blog post in favor of Baby-Eating For Constructive Political Change— knowing, as I do, that my words might be taken seriously by some unhinged and highly motivated reader— well, tough shit. Do not pass Go.

[LINK] "China to neighbours: Send us your Uighurs"

Al Jazeera's Bethany Matta notes how China is pressuring neighbouring countries to deport their Uighur migrant populations to China, on the grounds of their alleged support for terrorism.

Isreal Ahmet, an ethnic Uighur who immigrated to Afghanistan from western China, lived and worked in Kabul for more than a decade before being detained and deported by Afghanistan's National Directorate of Security (NDS) last summer.

Ahmet, who lived in a meagre, mud-brick house, was described as an honest businessman by those who know him.

An NDS official - speaking on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorised to talk to the media - told Al Jazeera that Ahmet was detained for lacking legal documentation and carrying counterfeit money. He was held in a jail cell with more than two dozen other Chinese Uighurs, including women and children.

Flagged as a spy, Ahmet was quickly escorted to the Kabul International Airport, where Chinese officials were waiting for him. He boarded a plane and has not been heard from since.

Eleven other Uighur men sharing a cell with Ahmet were also sent back to China, according to the NDS official, adding that six women and 12 children in another cell had refused to go. The whereabouts of these women and children are currently unknown.

"Some [of the detainees] were spies, some were [potential] suicide attackers and some illegally entered the country," said the NDS official.

[LINK] "Poverty spurs mass migration from Kosovo"

Euractiv notes the unsurprising fact that migration from Kosovo, arguably the poorest country in Europe, has recently spiked.

There is no precise information on the number of Albanians who ave left Kosovo. Estimates in early February cite several hundred leaving daily. According to data provided by security forces, over the past two months, more than 50,000 have left, while media estimate 100,000 since August 2014.

Such claims are dismissed by Kosovo government officials, who stress that even the smaller number they know of is cause for concern and is a heavy burden on Pristina.

This led the Kosovo Assembly to pass a special resolution on stopping illegal migration and to request that the Kosovo government earmark between 40 and 50 million euros, which would be used to create new jobs and solve social problems.

At the same time, Kosovo President Atifete Jahjaga started touring the municipalities from which the biggest number of illegal migrants had left, and spoke about the matter directly with the those she met on the street and in restaurants.

As one of the measures aimed at stemming the flow of migrants, on 5 February, the government decided to form a commission that would consider the possibility of writing off all of their debts to institutions and public enterprises created between 1999 and the end of 2008. The possibility of writing off interest on the debts of citizens and companies incurred after 2008 was also announced.

[LINK] "Who Speaks for Earth? The Controversy over Interstellar Messaging"

Universe Today's Paul Patton notes the ongoing controversy over the idea of transmitting messages across interstellar distances, with the aim of communicating with extraterrestrial civilizations. I'm inclined to think the idea potentially existentially foolish, myself.

Should we beam messages into deep space, announcing our presence to any extraterrestrial civilizations that might be out there? Or, should we just listen? Since the beginnings of the modern Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), radio astronomers have, for the most part, followed the listening strategy.

In 1999, that consensus was shattered. Without consulting with other members of the community of scientists involved in SETI, a team of radio astronomers at the Evpatoria Radar Telescope in Crimea, led by Alexander Zaitsev, beamed an interstellar message called ‘Cosmic Call’ to four nearby sun-like stars. The project was funded by an American company called Team Encounter and used proceeds obtained by allowing members of the general public to submit text and images for the message in exchange for a fee.

Similar additional transmissions were made from Evpatoria in 2001, 2003, and 2008. In all, transmissions were sent towards twenty stars within less than 100 light years of the sun. The new strategy was called Messaging to Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI). Although Zaitsev was not the first to transmit an interstellar message, he and his associates where the first to systematically broadcast to nearby stars. The 70 meter radar telescope at Evpatoria is the second largest radar telescope in the world.

In the wake of the Evpatoria transmissions a number of smaller former NASA tracking and research stations collected revenue by making METI transmissions as commercially funded publicity stunts. These included a transmission in the fictional Klingon language from Star Trek to promote the premier of an opera, a Dorito’s commercial, and the entirety of the 2008 remake of the classic science fiction movie “The Day the Earth Stood Still”. The specifications of these commercial signals have not been made public, but they were most likely much too faint to be detectable at interstellar distances with instruments comparable to those possessed by humans.

Zaitsev’s actions stirred divisive controversy among the community of scientists and scholars concerned with the field. The two sides of the debate faced off in a recent special issue of the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, resulting from a live debate sponsored in 2010 by the Royal Society at Buckinghamshire, north of London, England.

[BRIEF NOTE] On how a new Maunder Minimum will not save Earth from global warming

Sitting in a pizzeria in the Annex this evening, as I ate my slice I read a complimentary copy of today's Toronto Sun. My attention was caught by Lorne Gunter's QMI Agency column arguing that global warming will be a thing of the past, that the sunspot cycle of our local star is heading towards a new Maunder Minimum that will lead to global cooling.

Forget global warming, it’s more likely we’re on the cusp of another Little Ice Age than of a warming Armageddon. The brutal winter that has hammered the U.S. Northeast, Atlantic Canada, Ontario and Quebec could become the norm in the Northern Hemisphere for the next 30 years if a growing number of solar physicists are right.

Our sun goes through very predictable 11-year cycles. The current one began in 2008 and is expected to produce among the fewest sunspots and most diminished solar radiation of any of the 24 cycles that have been carefully recorded by scientists going back nearly three centuries.

And Cycle 25, which will “peak” in 2022, is expected to be the weakest cycle since the 17th century, when the Earth last encountered such a feeble sun, our planet was plunged into the depths of what has become known as the Little Ice Age.

The sun-climate connection makes perfect sense; far more sense than the theory that a buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is trapping solar radiation close to the Earth’s surface and dangerously warming the planet and changing our climate.

This is especially true because even according to the most devoted global-warming believers, a buildup of CO2 is not enough to trigger dangerous warming. Some other “forcing” factor is needed to push worldwide temperatures higher. But so far, no one knows with certainty what that factor might be. And given that global temperatures have not risen appreciably in 17 years, no forcing seems to be occurring.

This actually is not a bad argument. The middle of the Little Ice Age, a time when the Thames River froze solid to the benefit of skaters, did in fact coincide with the Maunder Minimum. Brian Koberlein's October 2014 phys.org article "Is the sun at Maunder minimum?" does agree that somewhat decreased luminosity will lead to some global cooling, specifically to colder winters in the Northern Hemisphere. How can it not? Assigning a very substantial amount of responsiblity for global climate change to the sun only makes sense. If it gives the world a respite, so much the better.

This is not the same thing as saying that the sun has sole responsibility for global climate. Heightened volcanic activity also led to the Little Ice Age, as did the Earth's changing orbit around the Sun, as did changing patterns in ocean circulation. Critically for our purposes, the depopulation of the Americas after Columbus--the disappearance of carbon dioxide-producing populations and their industries across the Western Hemisphere and the rewilding of lands once home to tens of millions--also played a role. Human activity may not play a dominant role, but is there any reason to think it would play no role when it clearly can? Increased carbon dioxide is increased carbon dioxide regardless of the source.

(It's worth noting that Wei-Hock Soon, a climate scientist who has assigned most responsibility for global climate change to solar output and little to human activity, has just this weekend been revealed to have accepted more than a million dollars from fossil-fuel companies without revealing it in his papers.)

In any case, even if a new Maunder Minimum did happily counterbalance the effects of human industry and more--ignoring, for the moment, effects like the acidification of the oceans--what would happen when the Maunder Minimum ended? Wouldn't an acceleration of global warming be potentially catastrophic? A new Maunder Minimum could give us precious extra time, decades within which we could try to geoengineer away as much of our carbon dioxide as possible. Assuming this temporary phenomenon would exempt us indefinitely from our issues would be foolish.

[LINK] On Mizae Mizumura and The Fall of Language in the Age of English

A recent Slate article by Katy Waldmann pointed me towards Minae Mizumura's 2008 book The Fall of Language in the Age of English. She seems to make some interesting arguments about the position of the English language and the potential threat to the position of non-English languages.

Languages have materiality, Mizumura insists, and her personal essay-cum-allegory lets the landscape of English letters hover like a mirage above physical America. In Iowa “the view was not particularly beautiful. There was none of the poetry one sees in scenes of the countryside in American films.” Yet “turning to Chris [the program director], I roused myself and said exactly what an American might say at such a moment: ‘Beautiful day!’ ” Such are the dangers of a universal language: Being in America, speaking “American,” Mizumura can utter only “what an American might say,” even if that means lying about the blighted prospect around her. In contrast, here is the author’s memory of touching down in France: “Once I set foot in Paris, I was greeted with boulevards shimmering with new leaves and skies gloriously liberated from the dark of winter.”

I mention France because the French language—all liberté and illumination—is one of Mizumura’s sanctuaries, a spiritual alternative to English. (It is also a scholarly alternative: Though she doesn’t mention him outright, Mizumura, who studied French literature at Yale during its Structuralist heyday, is clearly indebted to Ferdinand de Saussure, one of the first to propose that meaning arises from closed linguistic systems. Saussure wrote in French.) Her family moved from Japan to New York when she was 12, and she “stubbornly resisted getting along either with the United States or the English language,” instead soaking in French audiobooks on repeat in her room. What draws Mizumura to the lingua franca of the Enlightenment is its beauty, but also its predicament: Once the embodiment of the “soul of Europe,” a standard-bearer for the humanities, the expressive Play-Doh for writers like Voltaire and Diderot is now in the same lamentable position as Japanese. Which is to say, French and Japanese speakers are confined to the particular, while English speakers live in the universal.

A writer writing in English can count on her words reaching people all over the world, whether in translation or the original, but there’s no guarantee English-speaking readers will ever encounter experiences first framed in Japanese. Nor can bilingual writers just switch to English: Even if the West does not seem “too far, psychologically as well as geographically,” a sense of romance surrounds novels written in the novelist’s mother tongue, making fiction formulated from a second language less palatable. So, Mizumura concludes, non-English speakers “can only participate passively in the universal temporality … they cannot make their own voices heard.” Discouraged by the deafness of the world—even as Internet fans sing about our increasing connectedness—they might decide to stop writing altogether.

When writers stop writing in a language, that language decays. People lose faith in its ability to bear the burden of their fine feeling and entrust their most important thoughts elsewhere. Raging against the decline of “lesser” lexicons, Mizumura is stressing more than the loss of cultural artifacts, or the value of diversity for its own sake. Non-dominant tongues must live on, she warns, because “those of us … living in asymmetry are the only ones condemned to perpetually reflect upon language, the only ones forced to know that the English language cannot dictate ‘truths’ and that there are other ‘truths’ in this world.” Buried in that argument is an oddly touching one about the nature of literature: “The writer must see the language not as a transparent medium for self-expression or the representation of reality, but as a medium one must struggle with to make it do one’s bidding.”

She says some interesting things. Going by this sympathetic review in The Japan Times, it seems as if her argument is based at least as much on a need for better education in non-English languages. Is fluency in Japanese incompatible with fluenct in English?