[PHOTO] Looking south down Dovercourt at Hallam

[URBAN NOTE] "Riding the Union-Pearson Express"

Torontoist's Todd Aalgaard recently described his experience, as a journalist, riding the controversial new Union-Pearson Express.

The signage at Pearson itself remains vague, with directions throughout Terminal 1 completely avoiding any mention of the “Union­-Pearson Express.” Only on the platform itself, adjacent to Terminal 1’s boarding area for the existing Terminal Link service, does anything comparable exist: a wall, a couple of doors, a lot of Metrolinx renderings, and the cacophany of construction equipment behind them.

To be fair, though, there’s reason to think that spring of this year might be a more reasonable end ­date than transit­-weary travellers would, quite understandably, let themselves believe. This morning, journalists were invited to the Terminal 1 platform to check out the construction progress, and to see whether reality meets the Metrolinx renderings.

[. . .]

After the donning of reflective vests and helmets to safely enter what it still a construction site, journalists were given a tour of the rail concourse under development. Here, said Daryl Barnett, Metrolinx’s VP of Network Construction, passengers will be treated to everything from another commanding view of the Greater Toronto Area to Wi­Fi access, one of the service’s most-­touted perks.

Ontario-­grown wood lines the ceiling, windows leave the space open to the sun, and supporting beams, officials said, are intentionally designed in a Y­-shape to represent a person with arms raised in elation. ­This is supposedly the way you’ll feel when you’re not stressed out by your trip to and from the airport, an official said earnestly.

It was, of course, a public-relations pitch designed to appeal to Torontonians not universally on board with the plan. The ride, however, did what the most well­-crafted pitch couldn’t.

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• blogTO notes that the site of the former Linux Caffè on Harbord at Grace is set to become a retro-style malt shop.


• Centauri Dreams reacts to the discovery of an exoplanet in the uadruple 30 Arietis system.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper suggesting that the protoplanetary disk of T Chamaeleontis can be best explained by stationary structures.


• The Dragon's Gaze notes controversy over Gliese 581d's existence.


• The Everyday Sociology Blog's Sally Raskoff notes the complex relationship between sex and gender.


• The Frailest Thing considers the possibility of being cruel towards artificial entities like robots.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money is critical of anarchism's ability to organize workers.


• The Map Room's Jonathan Crowe shares a detailed image of Ceres' surface.


• Marginal Revolution debates David Shambaugh's argument of impending political change in China.


• The Planetary Society Blog describes when we should expect detailed images of Pluto and its moons to come in from New Horizons.


• The Russian Demographics Blog charts falling fertility in the North Caucasus.


• Torontoist notes mourning and anger at the police reaction to the death of Toronto transwoman Sumaya Dalmar.


• Towleroad notes a Michigan gym's defense of a transwoman client.


• Why I Love Toronto celebrates the new Honest Ed's development plans.


• Window on Eurasia is skeptical about the prospects for Russian immigrants in Europe to constitute a political force and mourns Nemtsov's death.

[URBAN NOTE] "Where The Hell Are Those Subway Countdown Clocks We Were Promised?"

Gothamist's Jordan Fraade notes the problems of New York City's subway system in implementing countdown clocks network-wide.

Buried deep in the $32 billion capital plan that the MTA approved in September, $209 million was set aside for a project that could give New Yorkers who live on lettered subway lines a perk that numbered-line riders have enjoyed for half a decade: countdown clocks.

New York’s slow progress in providing real-time arrival information to riders is an enduring source of mystery. Subway systems in London, Paris, and Madrid already do it. Those that don’t, like Tokyo and Mexico City, literally run trains every one to two minutes. Boston and Washington, D.C. are also far ahead of New York in providing this information. Meanwhile, only 177 out of 421 stations in the NYC system have clocks. Certain lines have them, namely the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and L, and the rest don’t. What gives?

Like many quirks of the New York City Subway, the answer has to do with the system’s roots in three separate operators. The Interborough Rapid Transit Company, or IRT, built New York’s first subway lines in the early 1900s — now the 1 through 7 trains. Later, the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Corporation (BMT) and city-owned Independent Subway (IND) built competing systems. After the city bought out the two private operators in 1940, it consolidated them into the public, citywide subway we know and love today, turning the BMT into the N/Q/R, J/M/Z, and L trains, and the IND into the A/C/E, B/D/F, and G trains.

The vast majority of the subway uses “fixed-block” signaling, which divides tracks into 1,000-foot portions and allows trains to pass through when the upcoming block is clear. Because fixed-block signals are not automated, according to a report by the Regional Plan Association [PDF], information about train movements can only be disseminated on a station-by-station basis, with the train dispatcher and station operator communicating verbally. There’s no way for a dispatcher to pinpoint a train’s exact location within a block — and no way to amass real-time data about those trains and send them to a central server.

[URBAN NOTE] "Wonderful Somaliland’: Self-declared country aims for spot on tourist map"

Al Jazeera America's James Jeffrey writes about the efforts of stable secessionist state Somaliland to attract tourists, part of the entity's long-running campaign to acquire international recognition.

Friday is the day people head to the beach near the ancient maritime town of Berbera, across the Gulf of Aden from Yemen. On any other day of the week, the shore is all but deserted.

On a recent Saturday afternoon Abdirahman Hashi, 26, cut a lone figure on the sand watching small waves lapping against Baathela Beach. He arrived for a swim, he said. Afterward, he began the walk back to town with the coast line all to himself.

Much like the unsignposted beach, there are few international indicators to identify Somaliland’s existence. Most people do not distinguish it from Somalia, and currently, the global community doesn’t either. Although a self-declared independent nation since 1991, Somaliland doesn’t technically exist. Somalilanders, not surprisingly, take umbrage, pointing out the contrary, highlighting how their country has built a functioning, democratic society from the scraps of civil war.

Today, creating a tourist industry based on the country’s beaches, history and cultural sites offers one means to change global perspectives and boost the livestock-export-dependent economy. However, no one thinks it will be easy.

“It seems that when you are doing things peacefully and helping yourself, then no one cares about you,” Ayanle Salad Deria, the acting Somaliland ambassador to Ethiopia, said of the international community’s approach to his country’s situation. “Somaliland has been functioning for 24 years, and we’ve got lots of places to visit, including 850 kilometers [528 miles] of beaches.”

He left his office briefly, returning with a large black ring binder folder full of visa applications he started to flip through. “American … American … European — these are for this month. There’s about 50,” he boasted.

[LINK] "Irish town builds memorial to thank Native Americans who helped during Famine"

Irish Central's Frances Mulraney reports about the contemporary recognition in Ireland of unexpected help lent to the Irish by the Choctaw during the potato famine.

A sculpture of nine eagle feathers will be installed in Bailic Park, in Midleton, Co Cork to thank the Choctaw Indians for their kindness and support during the Great Irish Famine.

Despite the oppression faced by the Choctaws in the years preceding the famine, on hearing of the plight and hunger of the Irish people in 1847, they raised $170 to send to the Irish people and ease their suffering. This figure is equivalent to tens of thousands of dollars in today’s currency.

The sculpture, consisting of nine giant, stainless steel eagle feathers, is currently being completed by Cork sculptor Alex Pentek. Speaking to the Irish Examiner, Pentek says, “I wanted to show the courage, fragility and humanity that they displayed in my work.”

[. . .]

In what is one of the most surprising and generous contributions to Irish famine relief, a group of Choctaw people gathered in Scullyville, Oklahoma, on March 23, 1847 to collect funds for the starving Irish people. They passed money collected onto a U.S. famine relief organization, in an extraordinary act of kindness from those who already had so little.

Just 16 years prior to this collection, the Choctaws were among one of the so-called “civilized tribes”, who were forced off their land by President Andrew Jackson (the son of Irish immigrants) and forced to complete a 500-mile trek to Oklahoma that would become known as the Trail of Tears.

[LINK] "China’s Arthur C. Clarke"

The New Yorker's Joshua Rothman makes the convincing case for the relevance of Chinese science fiction writer Liu Cixin.

Last week, a team of astronomers at Peking University announced the discovery of a gigantic black hole with a mass equivalent to twelve billion suns. The black hole formed near the beginning of time, just nine hundred million years after the Big Bang. It’s twelve billion light years away, but, because the quasar surrounding it glows four hundred and twenty trillion times brighter than the sun, it’s still visible to telescopes on Earth. “How could we have this massive black hole when the universe was so young?” Xue-Bing Wu, the lead astronomer, asked, in a paper published in Nature. “We don’t currently have a satisfactory theory to explain it.”

Reading about these developments, I thought of Liu Cixin, China’s most popular science-fiction writer. Liu is fifty-one years old and has written thirteen books. Until very recently, he worked as a software engineer at a power plant in Shanxi. In China, he is about as famous as William Gibson in the United States; he’s often compared to Arthur C. Clarke, whom he cites as an influence. His most popular book, “The Three-Body Problem,” has just been translated into English by the American sci-fi writer Ken Liu, and in China it’s being made into a movie, along with its sequels. (If you Google it, beware: there are some big plot twists that you don’t want spoiled.) Liu Cixin’s writing evokes the thrill of exploration and the beauty of scale. “In my imagination,” he told me, in an e-mail translated by Ken Liu, “abstract concepts like the distance marked by a light-year or the diameter of the universe become concrete images that inspire awe.” In his novels, a black hole with the mass of twelve billion suns is the sort of thing that Chinese engineers might build. They’d do it a billion years from now, after China’s spaceships have spread throughout the universe.

American science fiction draws heavily on American culture, of course—the war for independence, the Wild West, film noir, sixties psychedelia—and so humanity’s imagined future often looks a lot like America’s past. For an American reader, one of the pleasures of reading Liu is that his stories draw on entirely different resources. Much of “The Three-Body Problem” is set during the Cultural Revolution. In “The Wages of Humanity,” visitors from space demand the redistribution of Earth’s wealth, and explain that runaway capitalism almost destroyed their civilization. In “Taking Care of Gods,” the hyper-advanced aliens who, billions of years ago, engineered life on Earth descend from their spaceships; they turn out to be little old men with canes and long, white beards. “We hope that you will feel a sense of filial duty towards your creators and take us in,” they say. I doubt that any Western sci-fi writer has so thoroughly explored the theme of filial piety.

But it’s not cultural difference that makes Liu’s writing extraordinary. His stories are fables about human progress—concretely imagined but abstract, even parable-like, in their sweep. Take the novella “Sun of China,” which follows Ah Quan, a young man from a rural village that has been impoverished by drought. In the first three chapters, Ah Quan sets out from the village and finds work in a mine; he travels to a regional city, where he learns to shine shoes, and moves to Beijing, where he works as a skyscraper-scaling window-washer. Then the story takes a turn. We discover that it’s the future: China has constructed a huge mirror in space called the China Sun, and is using it to engineer the climate. Ah Quan gets a job cleaning the reflective surface of the China Sun. It turns out that Stephen Hawking is living in orbit, where the low gravity has helped to prolong his life; Hawking and Ah Quan become friends and go on space walks together. (“It was probably his experience operating an electric wheelchair that allowed him to control the miniature engine of his spacesuit as well as anyone,” Liu writes.) The physicist teaches the worker about the laws of physics and about the vastness of the universe, and Ah Quan’s mind begins to dwell on the question of humanity’s fate: Will we explore the stars, or live and die on Earth? Soon afterward, he is saying goodbye to his parents and setting out on a one-way mission to explore interstellar space. By the end of the story, Ah Quan’s progress is representative of humanity’s. He has traversed an enormous social and material distance, but it pales in comparison to the journey ahead.

[LINK] "Who is Aleksandr Dugin?"

Crooked Timber's Ronald Beiner posted an essay about Eurasianism and its chief ideologue Aleksandr Dugin and his issues.

On February 5, 2015, TVO (the Ontario equivalent of PBS) broadcast an episode of “The Agenda with Steve Paikin” featuring Dugin. The show (entitled “Big Minds on the Future of Democracies”) included Francis Fukuyama, a well-known and influential public intellectual, as well as Ivan Krastev, another heavyweight political scientist concerned with the future of democracy. This already conveyed the impression that Dugin is a serious academic on a par with the other two. The show went out of its way to publicize Dugin’s newly published work, Eurasian Mission, giving it equal standing alongside one of Fukuyama’s books. Eurasian Mission is published by Arktos Media, an incontrovertibly “Aryanist” or white supremacist outfit. On its cover, repeatedly displayed on the TV screens of TVO’s viewers, is the Symbol of Chaos —Dugin’s no less malevolent version of the swastika. It is hard to imagine that Paikin or the TVO producers knew what they were doing when they gave the purveyor of this reptilian ideology his platform on public television. But it is not too late to educate ourselves.

In presenting Dugin to their viewers, TVO advertised him as a “Russian philosopher and political activist.” Is Dugin a Russian philosopher? Yes, it seems that he is. Dugin’s book, Martin Heidegger: The Philosophy of Another Beginning (published by Radix, a far-right press), offers a competent and at times interesting commentary on the philosophy of Heidegger, one of the major thinkers of the twentieth century. Only a fellow philosopher could pursue that kind of engagement with a philosopher as challenging and as important as Heidegger—although Dugin’s book in no way hides the fact that he’s at least as strongly drawn to Heidegger’s ideological significance as to his philosophical significance. (Dugin is very intensely focused on the Heidegger of 1936-1945, a period throughout which Heidegger was a card-carrying Nazi, however much he may have believed that Hitler’s version of National Socialism was grossly inferior to his own.) Since the Enlightenment, there has been a line of important thinkers for whom life in liberal modernity is felt to be profoundly dehumanizing. Thinkers in this category include Joseph de Maistre, Friedrich Nietzsche, Carl Schmitt, and Heidegger. For such thinkers, liberal modernity is so humanly degrading that one ought to (if one could) undo the French Revolution and its egalitarianism, and perhaps cancel out the whole moral legacy of Christianity. For all of them, hierarchy and rootedness is more morally compelling than equality and individual liberty. In his Heidegger book, Dugin helps to bring out why certain intellectuals of the early twentieth century gravitated towards fascism: a grim preoccupation with the perceived soullessness of modernity, and a resolve to embrace any politics, however extreme, that seemed to them to promise “spiritual renewal” (to quote Heidegger). Dugin is now the latest thinker in this line of philosophers of the radical right. But his identity as a philosopher is only one aspect of Dugin’s intellectual personality. He’s also very much captivated by mysticism and occultism, and he’s a determined ideologue who is willing to reach out to allies in the gutter.

The resulting discussion was somewhat depressing, and summed up for me by the final comment, left by one Dominick Bartleme.

Long-time reader and extremely infrequent commenter here. I find many of the comments on this thread to be utterly remarkable. I can see Dugin’s hoped-for coalition of fascists and socialists and other illiberal elements forming before my eyes. The level of disgust of many on the left with the U.S. dominated capitalist world order has rendered them unable to read a simple denunciation of a dangerous fascist ideologue without immediately reacting that he must be 100x better than our evil capitalist overlords. The logical (and short) next step is to make common cause with Dugin and his ilk in our struggle against the liberal order.

Any lover of peace and freedom should stand with the OP against this dangerous ideology and the too-easy rationalization of it by those who do not care for the current global political and economic system. We don’t need to agree on much to agree that this man and his allies are promoting a profoundly evil vision of the future.

[LINK] "Terry Pratchett's Joyful, Absurd, Human Fantasy"

Julie Beck's essay at The Atlantic about Terry Pratchett, passed away today, is a superb tribute to the writer's genius.

There is deep truth to be found in fictional stories, no less so if they include witches and wizards and a flat earth carried through space on the back of four elephants on the back of a giant turtle. Fantasy at its best is more than just escapism. The distorted funhouse mirror of an imagined world can sometimes reflect our own more clearly than the most realistic fiction. Pratchett’s books were fantasy at its best.

But what set him above and apart was his sense of joy. The Discworld novels are satirical, but it’s a kind satire, running over with affection for all the wacky, messed-up things in life. Even death.

One of Pratchett’s greatest and most beloved characters is Death, capital D, the walking personification of the end that waits for everyone. He looks like a classic reaper—a skeleton in a dark robe, wielding a scythe, talking only in all caps. But he rides a horse named Binky. He loves cats. When the Hogfather—Discworld’s equivalent of Santa Claus—goes missing, Death stands in, donning a beard and a red cloak, and doing his best to bring presents to Discworld’s children, even if he finds it a little hard to adjust to the role.

Death is “implacable, because that is his job,” Pratchett once wrote in The Guardian. But “he appears to have some sneaking regard and compassion for a race of creatures which are to him as ephemeral as mayflies, but which nevertheless spend their brief lives making rules for the universe and counting the stars.”

[. . .]

This wonder in life shines through in his writing, in all of his characters, from the gods down to the rats. (Who are met by their own Death—sometimes called the Grim Squeaker. Whimsy even at the very end.) The people and the creatures who inhabit Pratchett’s world are determined, difficult, insightful, and absurd. As are we all.