[PHOTO] Southbound train at Eglinton

[URBAN NOTE] "Mystery tunnel built by two young guys ‘to hang out,’ police say"

The Toronto Star's Diana Hall notes that the diggers of the mysterious tunnel found this January by York University have been found, and that their motives for doing so were not criminal at all.

It wasn’t Al Qaeda. It wasn’t future Pan Am Games spectators eager to get closer to the action. According to Toronto Police, the mysterious tunnel discovered in January near York University and the Rexall Centre, a site of the upcoming Pan Am Games, was simply built as a place for a couple of guys to hang out.

“There was nothing nefarious, there was nothing criminal, it was literally them doing it for a place to hang out,” Const. Victor Kwong said of the two builders who have no background in engineering.

[. . .]

Police were able to identify two men in their 20s who “built the tunnel for personal reasons” and confirmed that there was never any “criminal intent nor any threat to the people or city of Toronto,” according to a statement.

After significant media attention generated “enormous interest” in the case, police received information on Feb. 27, which led them to identifying the two men who built the tunnel.

Police aren’t releasing any more information about the builders, who are not facing any criminal charges.

I wonder if these two might later come out and identify themselves, or if they might be identified by someone else.

[LINK] Edwin Lyngar of Salon on the problems of libertarianism in Honduras

Edwin Lyngar at Salon has written a widely-shared travelogue of how, in his view, his visit to Honduras where a libertarian city-state is set to be established demonstrates the terrible weaknesses of that ideology on the ground.

Is this fair? It could be argued that, given a predatory state, a libertarian hands-off policy might be better. (Might.)

People better than I have analyzed the specific political moves that have created this modern day libertarian dystopia. Mike LaSusa recently wrote a detailed analysis of such, laying out how the bad ideas of libertarian politics have been pursued as government policy.

In America, libertarian ideas are attractive to mostly young, white men with high ideals and no life experience that live off of the previous generation’s investments and sacrifice. I know this because as a young, white idiot, I subscribed to this system of discredited ideas: Selfishness is good, government is bad. Take what you want, when you want and however you can. Poor people deserve what they get, and the smartest, hardworking people always win. So get yours before someone else does. I read the books by Charles Murray and have an autographed copy of Ron Paul’s “The Revolution.” The thread that links all the disparate books and ideas is that they fail in practice. Eliminate all taxes, privatize everything, load a country up with guns and oppose all public expenditures, you end up with Honduras.

In Honduras, the police ride around in pickup trucks with machine guns, but they aren’t there to protect most people. They are scary to locals and travelers alike. For individual protection there’s an army of private, armed security guards who are found in front of not only banks, but also restaurants, ATM machines, grocery stores and at any building that holds anything of value whatsoever. Some guards have uniforms and long guns but just as many are dressed in street clothes with cheap pistols thrust into waistbands. The country has a handful of really rich people, a small group of middle-class, some security guards who seem to be getting by and a massive group of people who are starving to death and living in slums. You can see the evidence of previous decades of infrastructure investment in roads and bridges, but it’s all in slow-motion decay.

I took a van trip across the country, starting in Copan (where there are must-see Mayan ruins), across to the Caribbean Sea to a ferry that took my family to Roatan Island. The trip from Copan to the coast took a full six hours, and we had two flat tires. The word “treacherous” is inadequate—a better description is “post-apocalyptic.” We did not see one speed limit sign in hundreds of kilometers. Not one. People drive around each other on the right and left and in every manner possible. The road was clogged with horses, scooters and bicycles. People traveled in every conceivable manner along the crumbling arterial. Few cars have license plates, and one taxi driver told me that the private company responsible for making them went bankrupt. Instead of traffic stops, there are military check points every so often. The roads seemed more dangerous to me than the gang violence.

The greatest examples of libertarianism in action are the hundreds of men, women and children standing alongside the roads all over Honduras. The government won’t fix the roads, so these desperate entrepreneurs fill in potholes with shovels of dirt or debris. They then stand next to the filled-in pothole soliciting tips from grateful motorists. That is the wet dream of libertarian private sector innovation.

[LINK] "Is Weibo on the way out?"

BBC's Celia Hatton notes concerns that China's Weibo social networking platform might be on the way out thanks to state policies on anonymity.

China's internet watchdogs have threatened to enforce real-name registration before. But this time, they're adamant all Chinese citizens must provide their real names and identification numbers before using social media sites starting on 1 March.

Nicknames can be used on the sites, but only after users hand over their personal details to the government.

The new rule will stifle one of the few venues for free speech in China, many fear. Specifically, real-name registration could hasten the slow death of Weibo, China's version of Twitter.

Once the only place to find vibrant sources of debate on the Chinese internet, Weibo is quickly losing momentum.

Fifty-six million people in China stopped using Weibo accounts last year, according to China's state internet regulator, registering a drop from 331 million accounts to 275 million accounts. Several internet companies operate Weibo services in China, though all function in a similar manner.

Those with Weibo accounts don't seem to be using them very much. Ninety-four per cent of the messages on Weibo are generated by just 5% of its users, or 10 million people, according to one study published last April by the University of Hong Kong's Journalism and Media Studies Centre. The same study found that almost 60% of accounts had never posted a message.

[LINK] "Real Paleo Diet: Early Hominids Ate Just About Everything"

At IFL Science, Ken Sayers notes that, far from cleaving to the paleo diet in vogue now, early hominids have a diverse omnivorous diet.

Reconstructions of human evolution are prone to simple, overly-tidy scenarios. Our ancestors, for example, stood on two legs to look over tall grass, or began to speak because, well, they finally had something to say. Like much of our understanding of early hominid behavior, the imagined diet of our ancestors has also been over-simplified.

Take the trendy Paleo Diet which draws inspiration from how people lived during the Paleolithic or Stone Age that ran from roughly 2.6 million to 10,000 years ago. It encourages practitioners to give up the fruits of modern culinary progress – such as dairy, agricultural products and processed foods – and start living a pseudo-hunter-gatherer lifestyle, something like Lon Chaney Jr. in the film One Million BC. Adherents recommend a very specific “ancestral” menu, replete with certain percentages of energy from carbohydrates, proteins and fats, and suggested levels of physical activity. These prescriptions are drawn mainly from observations of modern humans who live at least a partial hunter-gatherer existence.

But from a scientific standpoint, these kinds of simple characterizations of our ancestors' behavior generally don’t add up. Recently, fellow anthropologist C. Owen Lovejoy and I took a close look at this crucial question in human behavioral evolution: the origins of hominid diet. We focused on the earliest phase of hominid evolution from roughly 6 to 1.6 million years ago, both before and after the first use of modified stone tools. This time frame includes, in order of appearance, the hominids Ardipithecus and Australopithecus, and the earliest members of our own genus, the comparatively brainy Homo. None of these were modern humans, which appeared much later, but rather our distant forerunners.

We examined the fossil, chemical and archaeological evidence, and also closely considered the foraging behavior of living animals. Why is this crucial? Observing animals in nature for even an hour will provide a ready answer: almost all of what an organism does on a daily basis is simply related to staying alive; that includes activities such as feeding, avoiding predators and setting itself up to reproduce. That’s the evolutionary way.

[. . .]

Researchers Tom Hatley and John Kappelman noted in 1980 that hominids have bunodont – low, with rounded cusps – back teeth that show much in common with bears and pigs. If you’ve watched these animals forage, you know they’ll eat just about anything: tubers, fruits, leafy materials and twigs, invertebrates, honey and vertebrate animals, whether scavenged or hunted. The percentage contribution of each food type to the diet will depend (you guessed it) on the energetic value of specific foods in specific habitats, at specific times of year. Evidence from the entirety of human evolution suggests that our ancestors, and even we as modern humans, are just as omnivorous.

[LINK] "The 1977 Tablet Computer That Took Up an Entire Room"

Wired's Greg Miller observes how the very first tablet computer produced was actually not very portable at all. The progress between then and now is remarkable.

In the late ’70s, researchers at MIT built a tablet that filled an entire room, and there it is in the images above and the video below. It was called the Spatial Data Management System, and although it was enormous, it was an awful lot like a modern tablet or smartphone. It had a touch screen, voice recognition, and multiple apps. It could even make phone calls.

The idea behind the system is simple: We humans are inherently spatial thinkers. “People are really natural explorers of space and manipulators of space,” says William Donelson, who created the system as part of his masters thesis in MIT’s Machine Architecture Group, the predecessor to today’s Media Lab. “If you wander around your city or your neighborhood, you’ll remember where things are, and I wanted to incorporate that concept into a database.”

Donelson says the team wanted to build a user interface that could mimic the way people organize files on a physical desktop. They weren’t the only ones working on this idea at the time: engineers at Xerox PARC in Palo Alto developed an experimental computer with a desktop interface in the mid-70s and released a commercial version in 1981.

But Donelson’s Spatial Data Management System had a certain grandeur that those clunky boxes lacked. The user sat in a large armchair dubbed the “Captain Kirk Chair,” with dual touchpads and joysticks built into each arm. Two touchscreens—boxy Tektronix color monitors on rolling carts—were positioned on either side, just within reach. One presented what we’d now call the homescreen, an assortment of brightly-colored boxes that opened up different programs when poked by the user. The apps included a calculator, maps, a book reader, and photo and video viewers.

The brains behind all this was network of four minicomputers, packing up to 640KB of combined processing power and 640MB of memory in the original version (more on the tech specs here). The display was a 6 by 8 foot television screen directly in front of the user, and 8 speakers positioned around the room provided surround sound.

[LINK] Abraham Riesman in the Vulture on the Success of Harley Quinn

"The Hidden Story of Harley Quinn and How She Became the Superhero World’s Most Successful Woman" describes how, from humble origins as an intended throw-away character on the Batman animated series of the early 1990s, Harley Quinn has become one of the biggest characters in the world of American comics.

Writer Paul Dini is credited as the creator of Harley, and that's technically true. He came up with the character while he was writing for the acclaimed Batman: The Animated Series in the early '90s. But the true origins of Harley Quinn lie years earlier, in the mind of the actress who voiced her on the cartoon: Arleen Sorkin.

In 1987, Sorkin was a regular on the soap opera Days of Our Lives, playing the show's comic relief: the ditzy, leggy, Noo Yawk–accented Calliope Jones. But unlike her flighty character, Sorkin was a skilled and experienced comedy writer. "I could never just come in and run my lines," she told Vulture. "I was forever suggesting stuff, probably out of boredom!" So when she went to a screening of the faux-medieval The Princess Bride, an idea struck her: Why not do a fairy-tale dream sequence on Days? The producers were into it and aired an episode in which Calliope acts as a court jester, roller-skating into a throne room and doing some hackneyed borscht belt gags for a royal family.



Dini and Sorkin were college friends, and one day, she gave him a VHS tape of her favorite Days moments — including her jester bit. The tape sat idle for years. But in mid 1991, Dini was sick as a dog and popped the tape into his VCR. He was a budding television writer at the time, cranking out freelance scripts for the as-yet-unaired Batman: The Animated Series. He'd been struggling to come up with a female character to use as a one-off in an episode about Batman's archnemesis, the Joker.

"I thought, Maybe there should be a girl there," he said. "And I thought, Should the girl be like a tough street thug? Or like a hench-person or something? And then suddenly the idea of someone funny kind of struck me." When he saw Sorkin in clown makeup, the pieces fell into place, and he came up with a silly little sidekick. He gave her the comic-book-y name of Harley Quinn, sketched out an idea for her look, and brought the sketch to the cartoon's lead artist, Bruce Timm.

"He did do a rough design for her, which was, frankly, not very good," Timm recalled. "It had a weird '60s kind of vibe to it. It was just odd. Charming, but odd. I thought we could improve on that. So I immediately started researching traditional harlequin gear and did kind of a simplified super-villain version of that. It was always intended to be just a one-off." Nevertheless, Timm was — and is — a perfectionist and labored to give this cameo character a distinctive look: a red-and-black full-body jumpsuit adorned with playing-card diamonds, ruffled cuffs, and a dual-pronged jester's cap.

It's a long read, and a good one.

[URBAN NOTE] "The Tabor Hill Ossuary"

Torontoist's David Wencer explained over the weekend the complex story of the Tabor Hill ossuary, found in the 1950s in the course of suburban construction in what is now north Toronto.

On August 17, 1956, while levelling land to make way for a new subdivision, a power shovel ripped into the side of Tabor Hill, northeast of the intersection of Lawrence Avenue and Bellamy Road. According to the next day’s Globe and Mail, “about 100 feet of earth were sliced from the hill before the shovel gouged out a pocket about four feet below the surface. The hole, about seven feet wide and one foot deep, was crammed with bones.” The shovel had uncovered a centuries-old burial pit, one of the earliest ossuary sites in Ontario.

It was immediately apparent that the site contained bones from many burials; initial reports suggested there were at least 50. Gus Harris, then the reeve of Scarborough Township, initially dismissed suggestions that the site might be a First Nations burial ground on the basis that no corresponding artifacts were present. One theory he suggested to the press was that the bones belonged to victims of a late 19th-century cholera epidemic. The Star printed a further theory of Harris’s: that the site at Tabor Hill “might be a disposal spot for some medical school, where they could put human remains after students were through with using them in the laboratories.”

“We should have charged admission,” one workman told reporters as Scarborough residents were crowding the site to see the unexpected discovery. Local children reportedly began digging in the surrounding area, finding additional bones buried only a few inches below the surface.

The next day, archaeological experts visited the site and identified it as a First Nations burial pit, likely several centuries old. James Lovekin, a graduate student and history teacher at R. H. King Collegiate Institute, told the Globe and Mail that he thought it was an Iroquois site from the 17th or 18th century, and suggested it was likely linked to a specific ceremony, wherein “bodies were allowed to decompose for seven years on platforms, scraped clean, and then buried during a Feast of the Dead ritual.”

Over the next few days, Walter A. Kenyon, an archaeologist and assistant curator of ethnology at the Royal Ontario Museum, conducted a preliminary examination of Tabor Hill, in the process discovering a second burial pit at the site that was somewhat smaller than the first. Noting the large number of total burials at the site and the excellent condition of the bones, Kenyon wrote a letter to Gus Harris, suggesting action to preserve the ossuary and to have Tabor Hill declared a historic site. Harris took on this project with considerable enthusiasm, immediately announcing plans to form a committee with representatives from the provincial and federal governments, telling the Star, “We need financial help and we need it fast. Otherwise we could lose a national historical site.”

[BLOG] On the death of Leonard Nimoy

The recent death of Star Trek's Leonard Nimoy was widely noted: Simon Bisson, C.J. Cherryh of Wave Without A Shore, Robert Farley of Lawyers, Guns and Money, Tim Gueguen, Joe. My. God, James Nicoll of More Words, Deeper Hole, Otto Pohl, John Scalzi's Whatever, and Towleroad are just some of the blogs mentioning this.

"Spock Dies: Star Trek - Funeral Scene Tribute To Leonard Nimoy" (Watch on YouTube)

What else can I add but express my appreciation for the entertainment that Nimoy provided so well for so long? We're the worse off for his departure, but we'd be worse off style if he had never taken up the role of Spock in the first place.

[DM] "The Tragedy of Canada's Census"

At Demography Matters, I linked to Aarian Marshall's CityLab article examining the consequences and the causes of Canada's census mayhem. Reducing the amount of hard data reduces the ability of governent to deal with issues. That might have been the whole point.

Rosana Pellizzari, the medical officer of health of Peterborough, Ontario, knows a thing or two about bad data. The public health office she oversees is charged with running policy-driven health programs and services for the mid-size city and county, population 123,000, which makes it the 33rd largest metro in Canada, if that country's most recent census is to be believed.

Trouble is, she's not sure it can be. In 2010, with little fanfare or preparation, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s conservative government decided that the next long-form census, completed in Canada every five years, would not be mandatory. As officials told the story, without citing any specific polls, the public had expressed concerns about their privacy when filling out the long-form census, as well as the threat of jail time should they decline to fill it out.

“We were all shocked,” says Marni Cappe, who in 2010 was the president of the Canadian Institute of Planners. “It sent a ripple through the community … They did it on a [June] afternoon when they thought, ‘Who would be paying attention?’”

So in 2011, Statistics Canada, the governmental body responsible for collecting and analyzing all of Canada’s statistics, sent out two versions of the census. The first, a mandatory short-form questionnaire, asked Canadians about their about age, sex, marital status, mother tongue, and the languages spoken at home. The second was the National Household Survey (NHS), a 40-page voluntary survey sent to 30 percent of Canadians. Munir Sheikh, then the head of Statistics Canada, resigned over the change in policy. “I want to take this opportunity to comment on a technical statistical issue which has become the subject of media discussion ... the question of whether a voluntary survey can become a substitute for a mandatory census," he wrote. "It can not.”

Today, four years after Canada’s first voluntary long-form census, and one year away from what looks to be its second, Rosana Pellizzari is still wondering how to deal with the dearth of data. Thirty-six percent of Peterborough residents sent the voluntary survey did not return it, which gave the metro the lowest NHS response rate of all Canadian cities.