[PHOTO] Alley off of Bloor in the Annex

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• blogTO takes a look at the reasons for the failure of the Toronto Sushi Festival, a failure that included the blog's own misrepresentation of the event's success.


• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly argues that, in our media-saturated environment, paying attention to everything is exhausting.


• Centauri Dreams and D-Brief react to Dawn's arrival at Ceres.


• The Crux notes that Enceladus' seas appear to be driven by tectonic activity, suggesting they may support life.


• The Dragon's Gaze looks at the remarkably eccentric orbit of exoplanet HD 8673Ab, links to a paper suggesting that hot Jupiters disrupt their planetary systems as they migrate inwards, and suggests that planetary systems discovered by Kepler with only one or two planets are the remnants of much denser systems.


• The Dragon's Tales and The Power and the Money discuss the idea of military unity in the European Union.


• A Fistful of Euros compares the recent trajectories of Greece and Iceland following their
  
• Joe. My. God. notes an Irish bishop who made an odd comparison of gay people to people with Down's syndrome.


• Language Hat notes that the Parisian journals of Russian exiles from the Soviet Union are online and notes the South Arabian language of the Yemeni island of Socotra.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money considers if rudeness can be a firing offense.


• Marginal Revolution criticizes the Greek government, and argues that Krugman's criticism of the Trans-Pacific Partnership is misfounded.


• The Planetary Society Blog calls for a return to Venus.


• Otto Pohl observes that just over 62 years after his death, Stalin remains a popular figure in Russia.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer notes worsening American-Venezuelan relations and argues that Venezuela's PetroCaribe scheme hasn't achieved its geopolitical goals.


• Registan considers the controversy surrounding the disappearance of Vladimir Putin.


• Peter Rukavina notes how, by tweaking an inexpensive Raspberry Pi computer, he can detect aircraft incoming to Charlottetown.


• Spacing Toronto notes gendered violence on mass transit.


• Towleroad observes the conviction of a California man on charges of intentionally trying to infect others with HIV.


• The Volokh Conspiracy considers the legal issues surrounding an Indian state's ban on beef, by comparison to California's horse meat ban.


• Window on Eurasia notes one Russian's call to partition Ukraine, observes Russian irredentism towards the Baltics, considers the consequences of Russia's statements about Crimea, looks at Hungarian irredentism towards western Ukraine, argues that a new Yalta is impossible, and compares the position of Vladimir Putin to that of Khrushchev afte the humiliating Cuban Missile Crisis.

[NEWS] Three links on the import of the global ocean of Ganymede

Back on Friday, news that evidence had been found of a subsurface ocean on Ganymede, Jupiter's largest satellite, was widely propagating. Centauri Dreams' Paul Gilster (""Evidence Mounts for Ganymede’s Ocean") was one of the first bloggers on my RSS feed to report this.

Yesterday’s discussion of hydrothermal activity inside Saturn’s moon Enceladus reminds us how much we can learn about what is inside an object by studying what is outside it. In Enceladus’ case, Cassini’s detection of tiny rock particles rich in silicon as the spacecraft arrived in the Saturnian system led to an investigation of how these grains were being produced inside Enceladus through interactions between water and minerals. If correctly interpreted, these data point to the first active hydrothermal system ever found beyond Earth.

Now Ganymede swings into the spotlight, with work that is just as interesting. Joachim Saur and colleagues at the University of Cologne drew their data not from a spacecraft on the scene but from the Hubble Space Telescope, using Ganymede’s own auroral activity as the investigative tool. Their work gives much greater credence to something that has been suspected since the 1970s: An ocean deep within the frozen crust of the moon.

The early work on a Ganymede ocean grew out of computer models of the interior, but the Galileo spacecraft was able to measure the moon’s magnetic field in 2002, offering enough evidence for an ocean to keep the idea in play. The problem was that the Galileo measurements were too brief to produce an overview of the field’s long-term cyclical activity.

It was Saur’s idea to look at the idea afresh. Given that Ganymede is deeply embedded in Jupiter’s magnetic field, the aurorae that are produced in its polar regions are going to be influenced by any changes to that field, changes that produce a ‘rocking’ movement in the aurorae. These movements, Saur reasoned, would be a useful marker, one that, like the silica grains near Enceladus, could tell a story about activity deep below the surface. Says Saur:

“I was always brainstorming how we could use a telescope in other ways. Is there a way you could use a telescope to look inside a planetary body? Then I thought, the aurorae! Because aurorae are controlled by the magnetic field, if you observe the aurorae in an appropriate way, you learn something about the magnetic field. If you know the magnetic field, then you know something about the moon’s interior.”

The ‘rocking’ of the aurorae on Ganymede depends upon what’s inside the moon, and by the researchers’ calculations, a saltwater ocean would create a secondary magnetic field that would act against Jupiter’s field, tamping down the motion of the aurorae. The Hubble data show us that this is happening, for Saur’s models indicate the auroral activity is reduced to 2 degrees as opposed to the 6 we would expect if an ocean were not present. Ganymede thus joins Europa and Enceladus as an outer planet moon with increasing evidence for an ocean.

In "An internal ocean on Ganymede: Hooray for consistency with previous results!", the Planetary Society Blog's Emily Lakdawalla noted that this discovery fits with our understanding of Ganymede's inner workings.

The Hubble results don't precisely pin down the size and depth of an ocean at Ganymede, but the range of possible ocean thicknesses and depths is small. The observed behavior of the aurorae at Ganymede are consistent with a liquid ocean that is a relatively small fraction of Ganymede's radius. Of course, Ganymede is a very big world, so "relatively small" in this case can mean an ocean up to about 100 kilometers deep. According to the paper, some possible oceans that are consistent with the results include, but are not limited to:
•A liquid layer from 150 to 250 kilometers depth with relatively low salinity
•A liquid layer from 190 to 210 kilometers depth with relatively high salinity
•A liquid layer below 330 kilometers depth with relatively high salinity

Water in one form or another at Ganymede goes from the surface to a depth of about 720 kilometers, at which point you reach Ganymede's rocky outer core. So I think we can generalize these all to say: there is an ocean of less than 100 kilometers thickness located within a few hundred kilometers of the surface of Ganymede. In all possible cases, the liquid layer would be perched within the solid icy mantle, with solid ice above it of the form we have on Earth, and ice below it in a high-pressure crystalline form. [. . .]

That is a lot of liquid water, but it's in a very different place within Ganymede than the liquid water that we think exists at Europa and Enceladus. Europa has a much higher proportion of rock to ice than Ganymede does, and is also warmer because of greater tidal friction; the same physics that predicted Ganymede's perched-ocean-within-an-icy-mantle predicts that Europa's liquid water ocean is in direct contact with its warm rocky core. Warm liquid water percolating among warm rocks is, by definition, hydrothermal activity. Hydrothermal zones are places that exobiologists imagine life might happen, because you have lots of energy and you have rich chemistry created in all that warm liquid water eating away at rocks. Earlier this week, one of the Cassini instrument teams announced that they had detected rock particles from just such an environment that originated within Enceladus.

At Discover's Out There blog, Corey S. Powell noted in "Looking for Life in All the Wrong Places?" that the existence of liquid water oceans has implications for the search for extraterrestrial life generally, and for the dispatch of space probes more specifically.

The story used to be all about Mars. Now it is clear that most of the water, most of the organic chemistry, and by extension most of the potentially habitable territory in the solar system resides on or in ice moons. If that’s true in our solar system, there’s a good chance it’s true around other stars across our galaxy and beyond.

Currently there are five orbiters and two surface robots exploring Mars. Here are the equivalent numbers for the four moons: Europa, 0. Ganymede, 0. Enceladus, 0. Titan, 0. It seems like we may have been looking for life in all the wrong places.

That’s the bad news. Now that good part. The Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn is performing local observations and occasional flybys of Enceladus and Titan. Archived information from NASA’s Galileo probe, along with new data from the Hubble Space Telescope, are deepening our understanding of Enceladus and Ganymede. Europe is working on a spacecraft called JUICE, which will examine Ganymede in detail. And the Obama administration is poised to approve the Europa Clipper, the first mission dedicated entirely to one of these icy moons; it could launch as early as 2022. In short, our explorations are starting to catch up with our fast-changing knowledge.

Getting to the next stage of understanding won’t be easy. The icy moons are far away, making them time-consuming and costly to reach. A trip to Mars takes about 8 months. Galileo needed 6 years to reach Jupiter, and Cassini’s voyage to Saturn was a 7-year undertaking. NASA also has a whole planetary-science bureaucracy built around the exploration of Mars. There are a lot of careers tied to the Red Planet.

At the same time, it’s hard to ignore the contrast. This past week, a group of researchers reported that the Red Planet probably had a vast ocean covering its northern hemisphere. It was an encouraging discovery, one that got quite a bit of news coverage. That ocean on Mars dried up about 4 billion years ago, however. The oceans of Enceladus and Europa are calling to us right now. If we want answers—if we want to find life, or the processes leading up to life—those are the places where we have to go.

[LINK] Two Al Jazeera links on the island of Socotra, Yemen

First, Nicholas Alexrod has a photo essay (A precarious living on the Yemeni island of Socotra") showing how the semi-desert island of Socotra, far off the Yemeni coast, is beset by problems as its parent state decays into anarchy.

As interestingly, Mansur Mirovalev's "Russian roots and Yemen's Socotra language notes how the Socotran language--a Semitic language, part of the South Arabian group--has only recently gained status as a written language.

The Semitic language spoken by more than 50,000 inhabitants of Yemen's Socotra island is a linguistic time machine.

Socotri is the most archaic and isolated of several archaic and isolated tongues spoken in Yemen and Oman known as "modern South Arabian languages". Its vocabulary is immensely rich - for example, there are distinct verbs for "to go" according to the time of the day, or for "to give birth" depending on the animal involved.

Socotri's roots are close to the oldest written Semitic tongues that died out thousands of years ago - and it has grammatical features that no longer exist in Arabic, Hebrew or Aramaic. The study of Socotri helps understand the deep, prehistoric past - and the subsequent evolution - of all Semitic tongues.

"This is a very archaic linguistic and literary system that in many ways, I think, has preserved what we, the scholars, are used to perceive as the Biblical world or the ancient Arabic world," Leonid Kogan, professor of Semitic languages at Moscow's Institute for Oriental and Classical Studies, told Al Jazeera.

Ten how is it that Socotri's first alphabet was invented five millennia after the cuneiform tablets in Akkadian - the first written Semitic tongue - and it happened some 5,000km north of Socotra, in Russia's Moscow?

[LINK] "Gigaom is dead. Long live Gigaom"

Canadian tech journalist Mathew Ingram writes at his blog about the reasons for the failure of online tech journalism site Gigaom.

Everyone wants to know why Gigaom failed, and what it says about the online media market. And I feel as though I should know, if only because I was one of the site’s media writers, and I have written so many times about the challenges other online outlets have faced. In fact, I’ve heard from more than one person who sees Gigaom’s death as some kind of karmic retribution for my past criticism of outlets like the New York Times — and perhaps it is. Frankly, it’s as good an explanation as any other.

For me, the business realities and technical aspects of Gigaom are all tied up with my feelings about the place, and about my friend Om Malik, who took a crazy gamble and left his job at Forbes to start a blog, and eventually built what I consider to be one of the best teams of writers and editors I’ve ever worked with. As I have said several times, I have absolutely zero regrets about agreeing to leave a comfy newspaper job and join him in that quest, despite the unfortunate way it ended so abruptly. Was it the best online media business ever? No. But it was a pleasure and a privilege to work there, and I am proud of what we accomplished.

[. . .]

I’ve talked to several media outlets about Gigaom’s death — including Digiday and the Poynter Institute and the Columbia Journalism Review — and that has helped me think through some of the issues around it. Was Gigaom killed by its reliance on outside venture capital, as some have argued? In part, I think it was. As I mentioned in one interview, VC money is a Faustian bargain of the first order: it gives you the freedom to grow quickly, but it also puts pressure on a company to show meteoric growth, and there is a harsh penalty for not doing so — and the media industry isn’t exactly known for meteoric growth of the kind VCs like to see.

One aspect that many people are ignoring, however, is that Gigaom also took on debt, via a financing with several lenders including Silicon Valley Bank, in an attempt to juice its growth even further. In a different kind of market or at a different time, this might have worked — but ultimately the company failed to produce enough cash to service that debt, and that is part of what took it down (Peter Kafka at Re/code has more on that). Creditors are orders of magnitude less accommodating than shareholders or equity investors, and they tend to be a lot more nervous as well. When they want their money, all the happy stories about future growth that startups tell VCs mean less than nothing.

[LINK] "Are Seattle Restaurants Closing in “Record Numbers”? (Spoiler: No.)"

At Lawyers, Guns and Money, djw criticizes the argument that Seattle's restaurants are closing down as a consequence of minimum-wage hikes as unfounded.

Since the initial story about Seattle restaurant closings is making its way through the right wing blogs at the moment, prompting one wingnut outlet to declare that Seattle restaurants are closing “in record numbers,” let’s take a loot at the actual evidence provided in the story that launched the chain reaction. Before we begin let’s note despite long having one of the highest minimum wages in the country, while being located in one of only a handful of states with no ‘tip credit’ for wages, Seattle still manages to have the highest density of restaurants anywhere in the country, except for San Francisco and the greater New York City area.

What’s the evidence? The Seattle Magazine article that started this game of telephone identified four (4) restaurants that have closed or will close between February and May 2015. (A 5th restaurant is seeing its award winning chef resign to move to Spain; the alleged relevance here is unclear.) Included in these four restaurants is one that remains open at its original location, shifting its focus back to their original model, another is owned by one of Seattle’s most successful and celebrated restaurateurs, who continues to own five thriving establishments and is in the process of opening two new restaurants. The owner of the third closing restaurant (easily the most over-hyped Indian restaurant openings I’ve ever seen), identifies the reason for closing as a poor fit between format and location, which seemed pretty obvious to me when they opened. The space the fourth restaurant occupies will be immediately replaced by another new restaurant.

What isn’t included is any analysis to suggest openings are failing to keep pace with closings. Given the short typical lifespan of a restaurant and the size of Seattle, we should expect annual openings and closings to be in the hundreds in a typical year. Identifying four closing restaurants over a four month period is evidence for the thesis in the same way finding a bunch of Democratic voters who don’t want to vote for Hillary Clinton is ‘evidence’ her campaign is in trouble. Indeed, the right wingers are hoping you don’t read the original article, which closes by refuting its own highly speculative thesis[.]

[URBAN NOTE] "“Fun and frolic” at a Toronto double hanging"

Spacing Toronto's Chris Bateman notes how a double execution in Toronto a century and a half ago was a major social event.

The public gallows were built against the west wall of the jail on Front St. the morning of the executions. A heavy rain fell during the night and the area around the 14-foot wooden structure was a quagmire. Around 7:oo, O’Leary’s sister visited her brother’s cell one last time.

“They threw themselves into each other’s arms,” wrote the Globe. “His sister’s distress deeply moved the heart of O’Leary. He cried bitterly, and deplored his unhappy fate.”

O’Leary and Fleming were bound and shackled and the hanging ropes attached to the gallows around 8:00. The crowd outside the jail had swelled considerably and there were cheers when Sheriff Frederick William Jarvis appeared to make his final inspection.

Many pushed and shoved to gain the best view. Wagons were drawn up and used as makeshift podiums, as were several stone piles near the wall of the jail. The crush was enough to knock several people from their perches, resulting in cheers and bursts of laughter. Merchants, labourers, elderly women, mothers with babies, and children were all present, “pushing, crowding, and hooting.”

The condemned pair were led to the gallows at around 9:45, accompanied by Mr. William Davey, a Wesleyan City Missionary who ministered to the pair during their final night in prison, two reverends, and several police officers. The hangman, his face shielded by a dark mask, was a felon recently admitted to the jail for disorderly conduct. For executing O’Leary and Fleming he would be paid $80.

[URBAN NOTE] "Historicist: Sir John A. Macdonald’s Last Hurrah"

In his regular Historicist feature this weekend past, Torontoist's Jamie Bradburn observes how Sir John A. Macdonald's last political speech of note was given in Toronto in 1891.

Rally day was unseasonably warm. By 6 p.m. thousands had gathered on King Street outside the Academy of Music, a throng later estimated to be around 15,000. Pushing and shoving reigned. Sharp-dressed attendees were caked in mud and slush up to their knees. The hot rumour was that Macdonald had damaging goods proving an alleged conspiracy by the Globe to sell out the country.

This rumour worried one man in the crowd. John Willison feared that whatever the Prime Minister had on his paper might spark a riot leading back to the Globe’s office at Yonge and Melinda. He arranged for 50 police officers to protect the paper while he watched the rally unfold.

Police were overwhelmed at the Academy, where the crowd cut off carriage traffic. They barely held the throng back when Tories given advance tickets were admitted just after 6 p.m. When the main doors opened at 7 p.m., around 4,000 people squeezed in. “The standing ways and aisles were all blocked, and pyramids of men were piled up in the corners,” the News reported. Several women fainted during the surge. Seats were ripped out to make more room. A gas lamp outside was destroyed, causing a gas rupture which forced organizers to turn on the electricity inside.

Some people tried alternative methods to get in, creating money-making opportunities. One person charged a quarter to lead attendees one by one through a back staircase into the rafters. Another levied a toll (which rose from a nickel to a quarter) to scale a fence with a ladder. Among those who took the latter route was opening speaker Charles Tupper, who couldn’t enter via the front door when the crowd failed to give him space. The heavy-set, heavily dressed politician had a few antsy moments on the ladder and almost fell into a pile of bricks during his descent.

Macdonald arrived via carriage from the Queen’s Hotel (now the site of the Royal York) around 7:35 p.m. It took 10 minutes to enter the building, as the crowd outside demanded a speech. Rally chairman W.R. Brock finally formed a wedge to let the PM in. Inside, Macdonald saw a hall covered in mottos. There were the patriotic (“Canada for the Canadians”), the flattering (“Hail to Our Chieftain”), and a few cheap shots at annexationists.

[DM] "Why Is Spain's Population Loss An Economic Problem?"

Demography Matters co-blogger Edward Hugh has posted there, and posted at A Fistful of Euros, an analysis of Spain's economic future taking dire demographics into account. With high unemployment driving emigration, combined with a very low birth rate, Spain's future seems challenged.

The most obvious result of having such a high level of unemployment over such a long period of time - Spain's overall rate won't be below 20% before 2017 at the earliest - is that people are steadily leaving the country in search of better opportunities elsewhere. Initially this new development was officially denied, and since there is little policy interest in the topic we still don't have any adequate measure of just how many young educated Spaniards are now working outside their home country. Anecdotal evidence, however, backs the idea that the number is large and the phenomenon widespread. All too often articles in the popular press are misleading simply because journalists have no better data to work from than anyone else. On the other hand work like this from researchers at the Bank of Spain (Spain: From (massive) immigration to (vast) emigration? - 2013) only serves to illustrate how little we know, especially about movement among Spanish nationals.

On the other hand, when it comes to migration flows among non Spanish nationals we do have a lot better quality information due to the existence of the the municipal register electronic database. Everyone who wishes to be included in the health system needs to register with it (whether they are a regular or an irregular immigrant), and non Spanish nationals need to re-register with a certain frequency (so the authorities know if they leave).

More than an economic phenomenon, Spain's property boom was a demographic one. Since births only just exceeded deaths, between 1980 and 2000 Spain's population rose slowly, by just over 2 million people. Then between 2000 and 2009 it suddenly surged by 7 million. This was almost entirely due to immigration, with workers coming to the country from all over the globe attracted by the booming jobs market. Then in 2008 the boom came to an abrupt end, and unemployment went through the roof causing the trend to reverse. Since 2010 more people have left the country every year than have arrived, with the consequence that the population is now falling. Given that in 2015 the statistics office forecast that for the first time deaths will exceed births, it is most likely that this decline will continue and continue.

In fact the overall migration number - a net 251 thousand people emigrated in 2013 according to official data - only tells part of the story. The majority of young Spanish people working abroad are not included in these numbers (unless they have explicitly informed the Spanish authorities they are leaving, and few do this, partly because they do not consider themselves "emigrants"), but just as importantly the net balance masks very large movements in both directions. According to the national statistics office over half a million people (532 thousand to be precise) emigrated from Spain in 2013, while 285 thousand people entered the country as immigrants. So the net migration statistic covers over what are really very large flows.

The number of annual births in Spain has been steadily falling since the mid 1970s. They accelerated again slightly in the first years of this century, partly due to the shadow effect of an earlier boom in the 1970s, and partly because the incoming immigrants had a slightly higher birth rate. Coinciding with the outbreak of the crisis births peaked again in 2008 (after an initial peak in 1976 - ie 32 years later, average age at first childbirth is now just above 30) , and now the statistics office forecast a continuous decline.