[PHOTO] Food court under construction, Yonge Eglinton Centre

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• Centauri Dreams examines different ways in which starships can decelerate.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper examining the potential habitability of exomoons orbiting bright white main-sequence stars, between F5 and F9.5. Ultraviolet radiation is key.


• The Dragon's Tales notes a Chinese ASAT weapons test.


• Joe. My. God. notes the Swedish language now has officially added the gender-neutral pronoun hen to its vocabulary.


• Language Hat notes an ambitious new project to digitize ancient Irish-language documents.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer is critical of the Democratic Party's stance on abortion when it gets in the way of necessary policy, likening it to the Republican Party's ongoing satisfaction of its base.


• The Planetary Society Blog notes the final interesting weeks of Messenger's survey of Mercury, with photos.


• Peter Rukavina remembers when in 1995 he was commissioned by the government of Prince Edward Island to set up a provincial website.


• Torontoist reacts with humour to the impending merger of Postmedia and Sun Media.


• Towleroad notes a lawsuit brought by a Michigan women against her former gym for being too trans-friendly.


• Understanding Society examines the mechanisms connecting experiments with policies.


• The Volokh Conspiracy argues against mandatory voting and mandatory jury service.


• Window on Eurasia observes a controversial election among Moldova's Gagauz and looks at the extent to which Islam in Russia is not under the government's control.


• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell goes on at length about the ridiculous Biryani project, a failed dirty tricks effort to sabotage the English Defense League and radical Muslims. Wow.

[LINK] "Why Chinese Tourists Love Japan"

Bloomberg View's Adam Minster notes the phenomenon of Chinese tourism in Japan. Despite strained relations, the reputation of Japanese goods is enough to attract Chinese visitors. Could this be the basis, or a base, for reconciliation? One hopes.

There's no lack of ill will in China toward Japan. The chilly diplomatic relationship between Beijing and Tokyo is matched by occasional expressions of antagonism by the Chinese public. In September, the tenth Japan-China Public Opinion Poll (a joint effort by Chinese and Japanese organizations) showed that only 11.3 percent of Chinese had a favorable opinion of Japan, with 57.3 percent claiming that their impression had worsened over the last year. (Grievances about World War II and ongoing territorial disputes were among the top reasons cited.)

And yet, despite this apparent disdain, Chinese tourists can't seem to get enough of Japan. In 2014, 2.4 million Chinese visited Japan, an 83 percent increase on the previous year. And last week the Japanese government announced that it was increasing Chinese consular staff to handle a surge of Chinese visa applications.

Why haven't China's travel plans seemingly been affected by its political views? It comes down to shopping -- specifically, to the Chinese public's penchant for shopping overseas. Given China's frequent product safety scandals and the rampant forgeries of designer goods that flood its markets, Chinese often schedule shopping sprees when they're outside the country. In 2014 alone, Chinese spent $164 billion abroad, making them the world’s biggest vacation spenders.

And Japan is increasingly China's favored shopping destination. In 2014, spending by Chinese tourists was up 10.3 percent over the previous year -- amounting to almost $2,000 per visitor. During this past February's Chinese New Year, Chinese tourists spent around $1 billion in Japan. Business has been so good that Laox, a Chinese-owned duty free chain that caters to Chinese tourists in Japan, has seen its stock rise 1,400 percent since 2012.

[LINK] "Egypt, Sudan Edge Toward Cooperation on Ethiopia’s Nile Dam"

Bloomberg's William Davison and Ahmed Feteha note that the geopolitics of the water of the Nile remain fraught, with upstream countries' increasing their usage while downstream countries are concerned with their water supply. Increasing the efficiency of water use is going to be a necessity in the long run, I think.

Egypt and Sudan took another step toward cooperating with Ethiopia on the hydro-power dam it’s building on the Blue Nile river after the three nations’ leaders signed an accord on Monday.

The countries agreed that the river’s waters should be used in a way that doesn’t cause “significant damage” to any of them and that any disputes will be resolved through negotiations, according to a copy of the “declaration of principles” published by Ahram Online, a state-owned Egyptian news website.

“The purpose of the Renaissance Dam is to generate power, contribute to economic development, promote cooperation beyond borders, and regional integration through generating clean sustainable energy,” according to the agreement signed in Sudan’s capital, Khartoum.

The 6,000-megawatt dam on the Nile’s main tributary will be Africa’s largest power plant after its scheduled completion in 2017. Ethiopia says it will benefit the region by generating electricity, reducing floods and storing water for use during droughts. Sudan and Egypt will receive priority to purchase electricity generated by the dam, according to the agreement.

[. . .]

Egyptian officials have expressed concern there will be water shortages during the filling of the dam’s 74-billion cubic meters reservoir, a capacity that’s almost equivalent to one year’s flow of the Nile. While the dam is a “vehicle” for Ethiopia’s development, for Egyptians “it’s a source of worry, because the Nile is their only source of water and life,” El-Sisi said Monday in a televised speech at the signing ceremony.

[LINK] "The Scottish Streets Where a U.K. Election Will Be Won or Lost"

In an extended article, Bloomberg's Rodney Jefferson looks at Scotland, where in the next British election the Scottish National Party may not only drive out Labour but end up providing needed support for a Labour minority government. Shades of the proposed Liberal-NDP coalition government under Stéphane Dion some years ago, here.

Six months after a referendum on independence put politics back into pubs and living rooms, the movement that brought voters out in record numbers and rattled financial markets has evolved into a mass phenomenon sweeping Scotland.

Rather than retreating after Scots voted to remain in the three-centuries-old union with England, the nationalists have harnessed that radical spirit and directed it at the U.K. Parliament at Westminster. SNP membership has quadrupled to 100,000, or one in 43 Scottish voters, and polls suggest the surge in support will translate into votes in May, placing Scotland once more at the heart of deciding the U.K.’s fate.

“It’s unprecedented, on a different scale,” Nicola McEwen, associate director of the Centre on Constitutional Change at Edinburgh University, said in an interview. “The referendum was never about a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ I just didn’t foresee how the extent to which the ‘yes’ alliance mobilized behind the SNP.”

The Scottish nationalists meet this weekend for their pre-election convention in Glasgow amid unprecedented electoral expectations under new leader Nicola Sturgeon. The party’s rise is reverberating beyond Scotland’s borders because polls point to the U.K. election producing no clear winner, potentially handing the SNP a decisive role in who governs the country which they are committed to splitting up.

[. . .]

Polls show the SNP, which opposes the Conservative-led U.K. government’s fiscal austerity, is ahead in at least 40 of Scotland’s 59 districts. It currently has six lawmakers at Westminster. If the polls are replicated on Election Day, the SNP could become the third-biggest force in U.K. politics, with the main opposition Labour Party which has dominated Scottish politics for decades the biggest casualty.

[LINK] "Venezuelan doctors face tough choices as economic crisis worsens"

MacLean's hosts Hannah Dreier's Associated Press article noting that one casualty of Venezuela's ongoing economic collapse is modern medicine.

Oncologist Gabriel Romero performs hundreds of life-saving surgeries a year, but he no longer takes pleasure in his work.

That’s because he believes that many of the mastectomies he does on some of Venezuela’s poorest women wouldn’t be needed in a normally functioning country. Doctors say they are being forced to return to outdated treatments because the socialist country’s economic problems make it impossible to ensure the proper running of radiation machines in public hospitals, where patients receive free treatment under Venezuela’s universal health care.

“You don’t feel comfortable with it, because you’re making a decision that goes against your professional judgment,” Romero said recently after seeing patients in the grubby basement clinic at the Dr. Luis Razetti Oncology Center, at the foot of a Caracas slum. The hospital’s only linear accelerator machine, the more modern of the two kinds of radiotherapy devices used in Venezuela, has been broken since November.

“We’re practicing medicine from the 1940s here, and we know that’s not right,” Romero said.

The challenges facing doctors are just one reflection of an economy battered by widespread shortages. The recent crash in global oil prices, which account for 95 per cent of Venezuela’s exports, is creating a cash shortage that makes it difficult to buy imported goods, such as parts for medical machines. Also depressing economic activity is 68 per cent inflation and a currency crisis that has seen the value of the local Bolivar plunge 46 per cent this year on the closely-watched black market.

[LINK] "Norway’s sovereign wealth holds lessons for Canada"

CBC News' Susan Ormiston describes how resource-wealthy provinces like Alberta, and perhaps Canada as a whole, should learn from the example of Norwegian prudence.

Norway today sits on top of a $1-trillion Cdn pension fund established in 1990 to invest the returns of oil and gas. The capital has been invested in over 9,000 companies worldwide, including over 200 in Canada. It is now the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world.

By contrast, Alberta’s Heritage Savings Fund, established in 1976 by premier Peter Lougheed, sits at only $17 billion Cdn and has been raided by governments and starved of contributions for years.

“For the last 10 years, when nothing went into the Alberta fund, and we put a lot of money aside, the profit went out of Canada," says Rolf Wiborg, a petroleum engineer who recently retired from Norway’s public service.

Wiborg, who studied at the University of Alberta and worked for a Norwegian oil company before joining Norway’s Petroleum Directorate, says the key to success has been Norway's ethos of sharing and a commitment to never waver from that goal.

“We don’t change our policies in Norway, with changes in the oil price – you can’t do that," he says. “Lougheed’s government in Alberta knew that, they made policies and then they left them behind."

Oil and gas make up 25 per cent of Norway’s GDP, so the recent plunge in oil prices should have set off alarm bells in Oslo. Thousands of workers have indeed been laid off, but parliament is not painting a dire forecast for 2015.

Much more at the link.

[LINK] "Can’t Get There from Here? Writing Place and Moving Narratives"

Savage Minds hosts an essay by anthropologist Sarah Besky talking about the importance of the ethnographic writer's awareness of place and movement.

Why should we care about how (or whether) one can “get there from here”? Perhaps because, as Kirin Narayan reminds us, “Reading transports us.” She frames the project of writing place with a question: “How do ethnographers enhance this journey so that readers glean facts about a place and something of the feel of being there?”

The “arrival trope” is, of course, the most common of ethnographic devices. I have one. You probably do, too. But the arrival trope has been rightly criticized for fetishizing the state of finally being somewhere (else), ready to begin anthropological fieldwork. We probably all recall Malinowski’s directive to “Imagine yourself suddenly set down surrounded by all your gear, alone on a tropical beach close to a native village, while the launch or dinghy which has brought you sails away out of sight.”

This impulse to recount arrivals speaks to the fact that ethnographic narratives are at heart concerned with movement—from place to place.

The primary means by which I move from place to place, both in the field and closer to home, is walking. When I work in Kolkata, the act of winding my way through pedestrian congestion, in and out of markets, and through that city’s metro, is a constant sensorial overload. When I write about Kolkata or Darjeeling, I use the local equivalents of the “wicked huge Radio Shack” to draw readers into these movements—and importantly the sensations of these movements. As Alex Nading has argued, “trailing” the movements of people and other creatures can be a way of carrying place seamlessly from fieldwork into narrative.

When I write about place, then, I close my eyes and re-imagine walking. This is less visualization exercise and more constructive daydreaming. What does it smell like? What does it sound like? What does it look like? What does it feel like? How do I get there from here? How many Dunkin Donuts (or their Himalayan or Kolkatan analogues) do I pass on the way? I find that on my first couple of drafts, these descriptions are way overwritten, but with more editing, place starts to tighten, and even serve to bolster historical and theoretical elements of books and articles as well.

Wonderful writing on writing, this.

[MUSIC] Eurythmics, "Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me"

I had a minute-long snippet> of the Eurythmics' cover of the Smiths' song "Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me" years before it was officially released on CD, an extra on the 2005 reissue of We Too Are One. (Audiogalaxy was superb.)

"Eurythmics Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me 1989" (Watch on YouTube)

Morrissey's lachrymose lyrics fit squarely into his classic mold.

Last night I dreamt
That somebody loved me
No hope, but no harm
Just another false alarm

Last night I felt
Real arms around me
No hope, no harm
Just another false alarm

So, tell me how long
Before the last one?
And tell me how long
Before the right one?

The story is old, I know
But it goes on
The story is old, I know
But it goes on

Oh, goes on
And on
Oh, goes on
Goes on

The below video places the Smiths' original version against the Eurythmics' cover, and then against a third cover by Eddi Reader, Clive Gregson and Boo Hewerdine.

"Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me" (Watch on YouTube)

I argued back in 2005 that the Eurythmics' performance was a better version of the song than the original, and I stand by that argument. There's a sense of urgency, in Lennox's vocals and the inexorable sweep of the music forward into despair, that just isn't present in the more languid original.

[BRIEF NOTE] On how the Germanwings crash shows how much we depend on trust

The news today that the crash in the French Alps of Germanwings Flight 9525 was almost certainly caused intentionally by co-pilot Andreas Lubitz was the talk of much of the world today. News media around the world, and investigators in Europe, are already dissecting the life of one apparently normal young man who not only decided to kill himself but to murder 149 other people. Why did he do this?

When I first heard of the plane's odd course yesterday, its calm preprogrammed descent into a cold mountainside, I thought of William Langewische's November 2001 article in The Atlantic examining the 1999 crash EgyptAir Flight 990. That plane, too, was intentionally crashed by its pilot, one Gameel al-Batouti. The consensus seems to be that al-Batouti killed hundreds of people because of personal problems, the consequences of reprimands from his employers at EgyptAir ranking highly. What will we find out about Lubitz?

This intentional crash, this mass murder, seems to have created a certain sense of unease. Philip Gourevitch's essay in The New Yorker, "A Bewildering Crash", caught the reality that, from the perspective of victims and non-victims alike, this seemed almost a random occurrence. These people died for no reason, and nothing could have been done to prevent this.

They could have been any of us, anywhere—whoever flies or rides a train or takes a bus or in any way entrusts her life to strangers, as we all must regularly and routinely to get through this world. That sense of investment in calamity—it could have been me—is true, of course, of accidents and targeted acts of terrorism as well. But to be told that a scene of mass death is the result of an accident or terrorism is to be given not only an explanation of the cause but also an idea of how to reckon with the consequence–through justice, or revenge, or measures meant to prevent a recurrence. After the massacre at Sandy Hook, we could at least dream of gun control. But the story of Lubitz, suddenly in control of a plane flying all those aboard to their deaths, offers us only a cosmic meaninglessness and bewilderment.

It would almost be more comforting if the Germanwings crash did turn out to be some sort of terrorist attack, after all, if this terrible action can trace its roots to some sort of dark conspiracy. It would almost be nice if, as seems quite possible, this wasn't the action of a single man who had a single bad morning and decided, kilometres above the ground, to commit mass murder. Then, there would be a proportionality between the act and its origins. Things would match up. As things stand, as James Follows observed earlier today, there really is very little that can be done to prevent future occurrences of this sort.

But then, this sort of thing is common in all catastrophes of this kind. Look at September 11th conspiracy theories, particularly the ones alleging the active involvement of the American government. Yes, it would be a terrible thing if there was a conspiracy by powerful people in the United States to destroy two skyscrapers at the cost of thousands of lives in order to manipulate global politics, but at least the terrible outcomes of 9/11 would seem to have proportionately weighty origins. The reality of 9/11--the fact that a couple dozen men working on a shoestring budget directed by people on the other side of the planet could wreak such havoc, could change the world--demonstrates how fragile our civilization is.

If Germanwings 9525 means anything, it is as an illustration of the reality that modern globalized civilization relies on the good will of its members to avoid catastrophe. Knowing about this fragility is unsettling, I grant, but it's rather better to know about this than to remain in ignorance. We need to be prepared.