[PHOTO] Pride at Holt-Renfrew

The variant of the rainbow flag displayed here, with vertical stripes instead of horizontal ones, is new to me.

[URBAN NOTE] "Tokens give way to Presto starting next year on TTC"

The Toronto Star's Tess Kalinowski reports on how the Presto card is going to replace token on the TTC as part of the general plan to integrate regional transit systems. I'm pleased by this, but especially by the news that the Metropass will survive. I depend on that fixed-rate travel hugely.

The TTC will begin phasing out the sale of tickets and tokens next year as it progresses with the wide-scale roll-out of the Presto smart card.

The old fare media will be sold until the end of 2016 and accepted until mid-2017. But at some point, those tickets and tokens will be phased out completely, said TTC chief customer officer Chris Upfold.

“There will be vending machines in every station so you’ll walk over to the vending machine, use your debit or your credit card or you put cash in there and you will load up on your Presto card which you then tap on at the subway or the streetcar,” he said.

Riders will also be able to buy a Metropass or a quantity of trips the same way, although how those bulk buys will work has not yet been decided. There will be a report discussing possible solutions in November.

Eliminating the tickets and tokens is the only way to ensure most customers convert to Presto, he told the TTC board on Monday.

[LINK] 'Footprints uncovered off B.C. coast could be oldest in North America"

The Globe and Mail's Mark Hume reports on proof of the discovery of evidence of an ancient migration.

More than 13,000 years ago, two adults and a child walked around a fire pit on Calvert Island, off the coast of British Columbia.

The footprints they left in soft clay near the shore were soon covered with black sand, which hid them until a team of archeologists led by Dr. Daryl Fedje and Dr. Duncan McLaren unearthed them recently, exposing what are believed to be the oldest footprints ever found in North America.

The find adds to a growing body of evidence that the first people didn’t arrive in the Americas via an ice-free corridor east of the Rockies about 12,000 years ago, but rather followed a route down the Pacific Coast much earlier.

“It makes the hair on the back of your head stand up,” Dr. McLaren said of the moment the archeologists from the Hakai Institute and the University of Victoria made their discovery.

[URBAN NOTE] "City of Vancouver formally declares city is on unceded Aboriginal territory"

! From Peter Meiszner of Global News:

Vancouver city council has unanimously voted to acknowledge that the city is on unceded Aboriginal territory.

Mayor Gregor Robertson declared a ‘Year of Reconciliation’ last summer, in the hopes of building new relationships between Aboriginals and Vancouverites.

“Underlying all other truths spoken during the Year of Reconciliation is the truth that the modern city of Vancouver was founded on the traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations and that these territories were never ceded through treaty, war or surrender,” reads part of the motion from the city.

The city says it will now work with representatives from the Aboriginal community to determine “appropriate protocols” for conducting city business.

[LINK] "Ocean acidification is killing baby oysters"

Al Jazeera America's Lisa Fletcher reports on the dire consequences of ocean acidification for shellfish.

Although it doesn’t get as much attention as melting ice caps or rising sea levels, ocean acidification is one of the most serious effects of greenhouse gas emissions. Nearly a third of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions, or about 22 million tons of CO2, is absorbed by the ocean every day. Scientists say this pollution has fundamentally changed ocean chemistry.

When carbon dioxide dissolves in water, it becomes an acid. That acid can be lethal to baby oysters, preventing them from forming shells, Eudeline said. And it’s not just oysters at risk; lobsters, crabs, clams and coral reefs are feeling the effects of ocean acidification too.

Ocean acidity is projected to increase by a factor of five by the year 2100, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In water that acidic, the shell of a common sea creature will dissolve in 45 days.

This outlook has a significant effect on family businesses such as [Wasghington State's] Taylor Shellfish, which began harvesting oysters in the 1890s. Diani Taylor, 26, is part of the fifth generation of Taylors to work on beaches.

“Ocean acidification specifically is an issue in the water that’s difficult to manage around,” said Taylor, who is currently a law student at Seattle University. “And it’s affecting us right now in our hatchery.”

[LINK] "There are goldfish the size of dinner plates turning up in Alberta, biologists say"

Postmedia News' Alexandra Zabjek writes in the National Post about invasive life in the waterways of Alberta.

The discovery of dinner plate-sized goldfish and the ongoing threat of a zebra mussel infestation has the Alberta government ramping up awareness of invasive aquatic species in provincial water bodies.

The zebra mussel, which multiplies prodigiously and can clog water pipes, has been the “poster child” for invasive aquatic species. But seemingly mundane creatures can cause problems, too.

“The mussels really scare the crap out of everyone — biologists because of the environmental impacts. And the irrigation industry, the hydropower industry, the waste water treatment industry all potentially have a lot to lose,” said Kate Wilson, an aquatic invasive species specialist with Alberta Environment and Parks.

“It’s a big, scary thing to really engage the public. I’m hoping to use that to get people to think about how … people are dumping their goldfish, which is pretty serious for a whole lot of other reasons.”

Wilson recounted the story of a fisheries biologist who last year saw two children fishing in a Fort McMurray stormwater pond. The biologist discovered they had caught two goldfish, and the municipality then hired a consultant to study the pond.

More, including photos, at the site.

[LINK] "Wolves are better hunters when monkeys are around"

Science Daily reports on an interesting research finding from Ethiopia.

Through extensive data collection from all-day follows on the Guassa Plateau in north central Ethiopia from 2006 to 2011, researchers studied a band of approximately 200 gelada monkeys, who regularly associate with the wolves living in the area.

According to the study's findings, gelada monkeys would not typically move upon encountering Ethiopian wolves, even when they were in the middle of the herd -- 68 percent of encounters resulted in no movement and only 11 percent resulted in a movement of greater than 10 meters. In stark contrast, the geladas always fled great distances to the cliffs for safety whenever they encountered aggressive domestic dogs.

The Ethiopian wolves experienced a foraging advantage on subterranean rodents when among the gelada monkeys -- Ethiopian wolves foraged successfully in 66.7 percent of attempts among the gelada monkeys v. a success rate of only 25 percent when wolves foraged by themselves. The success rate may be attributed to the rodents being flushed out by the monkey herd, which disturb the vegetation as they graze or to what may be a diminished ability for the rodents to detect predators due to a visual or auditory interference posed by the grazing monkeys.

[LINK] "Straightening Europe’s crooked timber into a democratic eurozone"

Open Democracy's Mathew Lawrence considers at length how to improve democratic governance in the European Union, or at least the Eurozone.

The Eurozone’s nemesis – the ongoing Greek debt crisis – has once again returned to centre stage. With Greece’s existing bailout package expiring in just nine days time, today in Brussels the Greek government and its creditors – the ECB, the IMF, the European Commission and the Eurogroup - are meeting in a last-minute attempt to find a deal that can avoid default.

Much is at stake. Without an agreement, Greece risks defaulting, potentially triggering an exit from the Eurozone that could cause economic turbulence across the world economy. For the Greek people, meanwhile, the conditions of the bailout continue to extract a heavy social cost: unemployment has spiralled to 26 per cent, and food consumption has fallen by 28.5 per cent since austerity measures have been introduced. Both sides desperately require breathing space.

Yet whatever the outcome, the latest day of drama is unlikely to be the last. For the intransigence of the crisis is underpinned by a central contradiction: what is necessary is near-impossible politically. Critically, while monetary union necessarily involves losing - or pooling - some form of sovereignty, the creation of the Eurozone and its various coercive economic instruments has not been matched by political or fiscal union, with little democratic accountability or control over the decision-making institutions of the Eurozone. Central to any efforts at reforming the EU must therefore be grasping the nettle implied by the creation of the Euro: the economic logic of monetary union must be matched politically. Monetary union requires deeper fiscal and banking union which in turn requires greater political union.

This necessity – of deeper integration to overcome the debt crisis matched by more effective democratic decision-making within the Eurozone’s structure - is near-impossible, however, in a Europe deeply divided between the interests of creditor and debtor states and their different political economies, between the ‘core’ dominated by Germany and the ‘periphery’ of southern Europe.

Nonetheless, a way forward must be found, both to resuscitate the effective power of the democracies of the debtor states of the Eurozone and to strengthen the economies of Europe more generally. For in an effort to sustain the single currency, the governance regime of the Eurozone has transformed in recent years, progressively neutralising democracies across the debtor states of southern Europe and undermining their right to oppose decisions imposed upon them by a technocratic-led centre. For example, the European Semester System (2010), the Euro Plus Pact (2011) and the Fiscal Compact (2012) have steadily eroded the ability of debtor states within the Eurozone to control their tax and spend decisions, the very stuff of democratic government.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• D-Brief reports on some highly unusual formations, including more bright spots and a pyramid (?), found on Ceres.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper examining the effect the activity of our own sun would have on the discovery of Earth.


• Joe. My. God. quotes Jim Parsons on how he never quite came out.


• Language Log reports on multilingualism in China.


• Marginal Revolution suggests that the question over state debt in Greece is extending moral hazard to private debt.


• Steve Munro notes how the TTC has to balance spending on infrastructure and on operations.


• Personal Reflections' Jim Belshaw reflects on what the Australian equivalent to the New Zealand haka might be.


• Spacing Toronto wonders why carding refuses to die.


• Window on Eurasia argues Ukraine should press Russia harder on Crimea.