[PHOTO] Lilacs in bloom, Riverside Drive

On this wet, rainy morning, I thought I'd share a photo I took on my Riverside Drive expedition to L.M. Montgomery's territory, of some lilac flowers in bloom under the warm sun.

[URBAN NOTE] On how this morning's TTC shutdown proves we need to pay to have nice things

Early this morning, my RSS feed was filled with reports--from the Toronto Star and from the CBC and from the Transit Toronto blog, among others--about the end of TTC service owing to communications problems. The system was still in a mess towards noon, dropping me off at Yonge and Eglinton twenty minutes late. (16 minutes late for work.)

Stephanie Werner's Toronto Star article "Subway closure this morning left tens of thousands stranded" goes into more detail.

After a complete system shutdown at 6 a.m., subway service resumed around 7:30 a.m. following what the Toronto Transit Commission described as “major communication issues.”

TTC spokesperson Brad Ross told The Star that subway service was down for a total of 95 minutes Monday morning. At around 6 a.m., he says, TTC lost all communications — including radio, email, and Internet connectivity. The TTC control centre was unable to communicate with trains, resulting in a safety-critical shutdown.

Ross compared trying to operate subway trains without radio communication to “trying to land a plane without having communications with the tower.”

“We don’t understand why the system failed, that’s something we are investigating now,” he said. Still unanswered are questions such as why the backup system did not kick in as designed. A full explanation is expected to be released later Monday.

[. . .]

When service resumed at 7:30 a.m. there was a 20 to 30 minute delay building up service to normal capacity as some trains had not yet left the yard.

Uber is being criticized for allowing its prices to spike during the morning outage. Me, I'm reminded of our decades of underfunding of the TTC: If we want nice things, we have to pay for them.

[LINK] "How Much Did Aboriginal Fire Impact the Australian Environment Over the Last 20,000 Years?"

The Dragon's Tales linked to an interesting-sounding paper, "Exploring the relationship between Aboriginal population indices and fire in Australia over the last 20,000 years" by Williams et al, that took a look at Australian history. Did pre-colonial Aborigines make extensive use of fire to restructure their continent's environment? The abstract suggests that apparently they did not.

The extent of prehistoric human impact on the environment is a contentious topic in various palaeo-environmental sciences. The long history of humans in Australia and its extensive fire-prone biota makes this continent a key research area for better characterization of prehistoric human–fire interactions. Here we use statistically robust cross-correlation of archaeological radiocarbon data (n = 4102 ages from 1616 sites) and a new synthesis of charcoal records (n = 155 sites) to test for any relationship between people and fire over the last 20,000 years at continental and regional (25–45°S) scales. We find that the statistical correlation between the two datasets is weak at both spatial scales, with short-lived synchronous responses only in the terminal Pleistocene–Holocene transition, at the onset of the mid-Holocene climatic optimum (~ 10–7 ka) and during significant transitions of El Niño Southern Oscillation (~ 5–4 ka and 1.2–0.8 ka). One interpretation of this is that Aboriginal populations were implementing ‘fire-stick farming’ only intermittently during periods of societal stress resulting from climatic variability. However, the synchronicity of the correlations with climate changes, along with the low populations through much of this time, suggests that both datasets were independently responding to external climatic forcing. Under either scenario, a lack of significant change in the charcoal record implies that there were no long-lasting impacts to the environmental biota, and macro-scale palaeoenvironmental records prior to European colonization largely reflect responses to non-human influences. While we do not discount the possibility of systematic or deliberate manipulation of fire regimes at local spatial scales, we conclude that human control of fire by prehistoric people in Australia is not evident at broad landscape levels. This conclusion contradicts persistent suggestions of Australian-wide land management and the pervasiveness of the impacts of ‘fire-stick farming’.

[LINK] "Chimpanzees have the brainpower, motivation to cook"

CBC carried this Thomson Reuters article suggesting that chimpanzees--and by extinction, our now-extinct primate ancestors--are smart enough to take advantage of heat to cook their food.

They're not likely to start barbecuing in the rainforest, but chimpanzees can understand the concept of cooking and are willing to postpone eating raw food, even carrying food some distance to cook it rather than eat immediately, scientists reported on Tuesday.

The findings, based on nine experiments conducted at the Tchimpounga Sanctuary in Republic of Congo and published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, suggest that chimps have all the brainpower needed to cook, including planning, causal understanding, and ability to postpone gratification.

They do lack the ability to produce fire. But if they were given a source of heat, chimps "might be quite able to manipulate (it) to cook," said developmental psychologist Felix Warneken of Harvard University, who conducted the study with Alexandra Rosati.

While the finding may seem esoteric, it lends support to the idea that cooking accelerated human evolution. Cooked food is easier to digest, spurring the growth of large brains in our australopithecine ancestors, Harvard's Richard Wrangham proposed about a decade ago.

If chimps have the cognitive skills to cook, australopithecines likely did, too, said Wrangham, who was not involved in the study: "It suggests that with a little extra brainpower, australopithecines could indeed have found a way to use fire to cook food."

[URBAN NOTE] "Toronto, Vancouver house prices soar amid spring rush"

CBC reports on the housing crunch in Toronto and Vancouver.

The mad rush to buy a home continued in the Toronto and Vancouver housing markets in May, despite a shortage of listings and housing prices that have risen sharply in the past year.

In the Greater Toronto Area, the average selling price for all home types rose by 11 per cent in May, compared with the same month the year before, to $649,599. In Greater Vancouver, the composite benchmark price for all residential properties was $684,400, a 9.4 per cent increase.

In Toronto, a record 11,706 homes changed hands, a 6.3 per cent increase since last year, while in Vancouver, 4,056 homes were sold, a 23 per cent increase. Both cities saw a five per cent drop in listings.

The average or composite price masks the intense competition for detached homes in both markets.

[LINK] "Comic Fan Outrage? It's Part of Being Human, Scientists Say"

Newsarama's Vaneta Rogers reports on one new, plausibly-sounding, theory regarding comic fan outrage.

[W]hat gives with comic book fans? With both DC and Marvel embarking on major relaunches that'll feature varying degrees of changes to iconic characters, are previous/classic verions of characters really that difficult for them to give up?

Yes, actually, they are, according Travis Langley, a psychology professor at Henderson State University who studies and writes about popular culture. As Langley describes it, the process of becoming familiar with a certain character is like making a "mental map."

"In our heads, we have our own versions of these characters and stories, our mental maps of them," Langley said. "When writers and companies make changes that don't fit our mental maps, it can be jarring to us. We either have to alter our maps or reject the new information so we can keep our maps the same."

As Langley explained it, when DC and Marvel changed Superman and Spider-Man's circumstances, the publishers may have been trying to attract new fans, but the changes required long-time fans to rewrite their mental map of that character, which some of them rejected.

And when those publishers acknowledge or even bring back the circumstances of the pre-existing "mental map," fans react positively. As one DC fan put it on Newsarama when DC brought back the potentially infinite Multiverse in the finale of Convergence, "I'm back because somewhere out there, there's a Superman who still wears red trunks."

[URBAN NOTE] "The White Torontonian’s Indian"

As part of a series of First Nations-themed posts for June, National Aboriginal History Month, this weekend past Jamie Bradburn's Historicist column looked at the ways in which white Torontonians wore stereotypical First Nations clothing earlier in the 20th century, and why.

Source: Toronto Star, May 6, 1922.

Such an outfit might have been worn by public speakers while presenting travelogues of their adventures in aboriginal lands. Take the case of Martha Craig, who gave a slideshow at Massey Hall in March 1902 illustrating her canoe trips in both her homeland of Ireland and around Lakes Temagami and Timiskaming. “Miss Craig, who wore an Indian costume, has evidently given deep study to Indian lore,” observed the Globe, “and her lecture, though not as distinctly enunciated as one could wish, was a most interesting narrative.” We hope her diction problems didn’t include attempts to speak in pidgin dialect while discussing northern Ontario.

Similarly attired was Mabel Powers, who gave a three-day series of talks at an auditorium Eaton’s Queen Street complex in December 1921. “Dressed in Indian costume, and standing on a stage which represented a corner of an Indian encampment,” the Globe reported, “Miss Powers delighted her audience—particularly the children—with her quaint stories, so alluring in spirit, so suggestive of the great outdoors, and so indicative of the mind of the stalwart race that once possessed North America.” Powers, raised in suburban Buffalo, studied Iroquois culture and toured throughout the region, frequently lecturing at the Chautauqua Institute. Adopted into the Seneca nation as an adult, she was given the name Yehsennohwehs, which meant “storyteller.” Powers saw her talks, which stressed the spiritual aspects of aboriginal culture in ways foreshadowing the peddling of such beliefs to the counterculture decades later, as a means of building bridges between all races by offering “a better understanding of the hearts of the red brothers.”

Such understanding may not have been present when University of Toronto graduate students rang in 1929 with an Indian-themed ball at Hart House. The building was transformed to resemble a reservation in British Columbia, sans poverty. The décor, designed by Group of Seven artist Arthur Lismer, included spruce trees placed in alcoves and totem poles. These motifs carried over into Lismer’s cover for the ball program which, according to the Globe, depicted “a totem pole by the side of a lake, with Indian figures in the foreground.”

Fascinating stuff. More of it is at Torontoist, alongside plenty of pictures.

[PHOTO] "Why photography matters"

Open Democracy's Parvati Nair writes, in the context of online documentary photography of immigrant women in Barcelona, about the importance of photography in our late modern early 21st century. Nice essay, nice project.

In a world where the selfie has become ubiquitous and where images constantly drift past our line of vision, it seems reasonable to wonder if photographs matter. Thanks to the advent of the smartphone, we can all be photographers. This technological dexterity serves to remove whatever trace of the magical there remained in photography against the grain of modernity’s emphasis on rationality. There was a time when a photograph was an event. When the sitter surrendered to timelessness for an instant and when the photographer, in a representative act that sought to capture experience, demonstrated the alchemy of time and place. All that has long since changed.

Photography in the digital era exemplifies modernity’s narcissism and unstable fluidity. In entering the muddy waters of the ordinary and the everyday, it risks anonymity, even irrelevance. This may fundamentally alter the place of photography in our world, but it does not in any way lessen it. Against the grain of a surfeit of the visual and in the face of a surplus that threatens to obscure it, the photograph has shifted to assuming a vernacular that speaks of, and to, the world around us. In so doing, we constitute ourselves via the image as much as through experience. With the ambiguity and ambivalence that has always been part of this medium, images both make up the everyday as much as human subjects do and, simultaneously, announce the uniqueness of the everyday. Yes, most images sorely lack punctum – that ability to pierce the viewer and leave an imprint that Barthes wrote about – but to imagine the world devoid of images is also to imagine the world halved through the loss of its reflection in the mirror. It is to imagine the world halved again by the closing in of horizons of memory and possibility, and halved yet again by the loss of the face of the other. It is to imagine a world unable to progress due to the breakdown of a vital medium that helps us make sense of reality, or even just glimpse it perhaps, through representation.

[. . .]

Images today still retain something of that aura that made the topic, if not the subject, memorable. More to the point, the visual has become a key instrument in mediating the world around us. It is as vital as language itself, and equally potent in symbolic significance. Furthermore, in the same way as the self now engages with the selfie and evolves through and around it, so do images provide us with a means to navigate social contexts and engage with them. We, as photographers, are also our own subjects. We have become the other who occupies the space of the frame – the other whom we cannot distinguish ourselves from, but whose image spurs us on to negotiate the complexities of time and place.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• blogTO reports on the campaign to tear down the east Gardiner Expressway.


• Centauri Dreams considers what the universe would look like outside of a galaxy. (Dim, mainly.)
  
• Crooked Timber's Corey Robin links to his Salon article about corporate influence in politics.


• The Dragon's Gaze reports on a periodic nova that may be a white dwarf drawing matter from a substellar brown dwarf.


• The Dragon's Tales links to a paper suggesting that Titan's karst terrain is quite young, geologically speaking.


• Far Outliers reports on the importance of horses to the Comanche.


• Language Log describes the genesis of some supposed Chinese proverbs in 18th century Europe.


• Savage Minds looks at how you can be an anthropologist in the aftermath of a disaster like the Nepal earthquake.


• Spacing Toronto considers the Gardiner Expressway.


• Torontoist argues that John Tory just isn't as good as we'd have liked him to be.


• Towleroad notes how the Russian Orthodox Church has cut off links with Protestant churches in Scotland and France for being insufficiently homophobic.


• Window on Eurasia notes the continuing heavy out-migration of ethnic Russians from the North Caucasus and looks at changing patterns of ethnic intermarriage among non-Russians.

[DM] "Some migration-related news links"

I've some links up at Demography Matters, reporting on some interesting migration-related news articles.