![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Jul. 23rd, 2015
Today's NASA announcement of the discovery of Kepler-452b, a relatively Earth-like planet orbiting the relatively Sun-like yellow dwarf star Kepler-452, 1400 light years away in the constellation of Cygnus, has made headlines. The CBC's coverage is representative.
Note that while the planet is broadly Earth-like in its particulars, we know nothing about actual conditions. Most critically, we have no idea what its atmosphere is like, preventing us from knowing if it might support life of some kind.
Kepler 452b, discovered using the planet-hunting Kepler Space Telescope, is about 60 per cent larger than Earth, making it a type of planet called a super-Earth, but scientists think it likely to be rocky, NASA researchers said at a news conference today.
[. . .]
John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA's science mission directorate in Washington, said the planet appears to be the "closest twin, so to speak, to Earth … that we've found so far."
However, he said it's more like a "close cousin" than an exact twin because of its larger size, which would give it five times the mass of the Earth and double the gravity. But it's less than twice the diameter of Earth, which means it's likely to have a rocky surface. Planets larger than that are not solid, but gassy, like Jupiter.
Planetary geologists and atmospheric scientists think Kepler 452b would have a thicker atmosphere than Earth, with more cloud cover, and is likely to still have very active volcanoes, said Jon Jenkins, Kepler data analysis lead at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif.
The star it orbits is the first G2 star — similar to our sun — ever found with a small planet in its habitable zone.
Note that while the planet is broadly Earth-like in its particulars, we know nothing about actual conditions. Most critically, we have no idea what its atmosphere is like, preventing us from knowing if it might support life of some kind.
CBC carries the Associated Press' report about cost overruns in Japan as that country prepares for the 2020 Olympics.
In a major reversal, Japan's leader announced Friday that the plans for the main stadium for the 2020 Olympics will be redone because of spiralling costs.
As a result, the stadium won't be completed in time for the 2019 Rugby World Cup, as planned, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said.
"We have decided to go back to the start on the Tokyo Olympics-Paralympics stadium plan, and start over from zero," Abe told reporters after a meeting at his office with Yoshiro Mori, chairman of the Tokyo 2020 organizing committee.
The government has come under growing criticism as the estimated cost for the new National Stadium rose to 252 billion yen (more than $2 billion CDN), nearly twice as much as the initial plan of 130 billion.
The controversy was an additional headache for Abe, whose support rating has fallen over unpopular defense legislation that he is pushing to expand the role of Japan's military overseas.
Bloomberg's Andrew Rosati and Joe Carroll report about the discovery of massive oil deposits offshore of Guyana. Besides noting that this might provide an explanation for Venezuela's renewed claims, I think I'm right to fear for the consequences of massive oil deposits on the life of a poor country. Right?
An Exxon Mobil Corp. discovery in the Atlantic Ocean off Guyana may hold oil and natural gas riches 12 times more valuable than the nation’s entire economic output.
The Liza-1 well, which probably holds the equivalent of more than 700 million barrels of oil, may begin producing crude by the end of the decade, Raphael Trotman, the South American country’s minister of governance, said in an interview Monday. The prospect would be on par with a recent Exxon find at the Hadrian formation in the Gulf of Mexico, and would be worth about $40 billion at today’s international crude price.
Guyana produces no oil and its gross domestic product of $3.23 billion in 2014 ranked between Burundi and Swaziland, according to the World Bank. Exxon, which has a market value of $341 billion, has declined to provide an estimate for Liza-1 since describing the discovery as “significant” in a May 20 statement.
“A find of this magnitude for a country like ours, which sits on the lower end of the scale of countries in this hemisphere, this could be transformational,” Trotman said. “From my sense, from speaking to experts outside of Exxon, it has to be something in excess of 700 million barrels.”
Exxon, which began drilling the well in March, said it found a 295-foot (90-meter) column of oil- and gas-soaked rock in a subsea region known as Stabroek Block. The well is 120 miles (193 kilometers) offshore and 5,710 feet beneath the sea surface.
It would be one thing if these Syrians, displaced from their homeland, were able to find profitable lives for themselves elsewhere. It's another thing if, as described by CBC's Nil Köksal, they do not.
The children are underfoot, barefoot, buskers and beggars. They are Syrian refugees, and many are fending for themselves on the streets of Istanbul.
Of the some two million Syrian refugees Turkey has taken in, an estimated 300,000 are living in Istanbul. Children, it is believed, make up about 150,000 of that group.
At any given time, but especially late into the night, there are scores of children on Istiklal Street off Taksim Square in Istanbul.
More than a million people walk the 2 kilometre stretch daily, but most ignore the children. As stunning as it is to see even toddlers alone on the street, to many they've become wallpaper in a busy city already bursting at the seams.
Hussein Yilmaz does what he can to get tourists' attention in Taksim Square. At 12 years old, he's doing what so many other Syrian children are doing in Turkey.
"We sell tissues, what can we do?" he says. He can bring in the equivalent of about $10 a day selling the small packets.
[LINK] "The future of Scots"
Jul. 23rd, 2015 06:20 pmHarry Giles' Open Democracy essay explores, in English and Scots, the likely prospects of the Scots language, faced with a lack of standards. The status of Scots has interested me for a while, as a speech form that has lacked much recognition or support but has continued nonetheless. (For how long?)
What does it mean that Fiona Hylop, when launching Creative Scotland's Scots Language Policy this month, stumbled over the part of her speech that was written in Scots?
Government speeches are written in a peculiar idiom of English. We're used to hearing the empty words of public relations slide smoothly by, and most of the Culture Secretary's speech was written in this easy tongue. So no wonder that, when she ran into the Scots of her speech's final lines – words that mixed archaisms, contemporary urbanisms and variant grammatical forms into a new old language, words stuffed with anxieties of class and identity and nation – she was scunnered. To me, it's grand to think that Scots might still foul the wheels of government.
Hyslop talked about growing up in England with a mother who spoke English for the most part but switched immediately to a rich urban Scots when phoning home.Perhaps, then, unlike the language of government, the words of the policy launch speech seemed strange and unfamiliar anyway: for the most part, they belonged to the literary (but still beautiful and useful) canon of Scots rather than the agile vernacular her mother spoke down the phone. This longed-for language – a formal, standardised Scots suited to journalism and cultural policies – belongs to the government websites of some Scots' longed-for state, and as such it's closer to the language of Westminster than the language of Craigmillar.
A language has numerous registers, each suited to different circumstances. Even a technically monolingual person speaks to their closest friends in a different language – with a different, if overlapping, vocabulary, grammar, intonation and pronunciation – than they would in a job interview. A language also has numerous dialects, varying from region to region, some of which might stake a claim to being a language as well. So when Creative Scotland's Scots Language Policy (laudably) welcomes all the varieties of Scots, what does that mean?
If Rhitu Chatterjee's NPR report about the role of high-caste Hindus enforcing religious food taboos on lower caste children is correct, I wouldn't be surprised. Sacrificing the weak and vulnerable in the name of high-sounding religious ideals is common worldwide.
India is in the midst of a war of sorts — a war over eggs. To eat them, or not to eat them. Actually, it's more about whether the government should give free eggs to poor, malnourished children.
It all began in late May, when Shivraj Chouhan, the chief minister of the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, shot down a proposal to serve eggs in government-run day care centers (anganwadis) in some tribal areas.
These communities have high rates of malnutrition, says Sachin Jain, a local food-rights activist in the state. "The idea behind the proposal was to address the gap in protein deficiency through ... eggs," he says.
But Chouhan wasn't convinced. As Indian newspapers reported, he publicly vowed not to allow eggs to be served as long as he was minister.
Why this vehement opposition to eggs? Well, the local community of Jains, which is strictly vegetarian and also powerful in the state, has previously thwarted efforts to introduce eggs in day care centers and schools. Chouhan is an upper caste Hindu man who recently became a vegetarian.
And the state of Madhya Pradesh is mostly vegetarian, as are some other states, like Karnataka, Rajasthan and Gujarat. For years, the more politically vocal vegetarians in these states have kept eggs out of school lunches and anganwadis.
But here's the thing: While these states as a whole may be mostly vegetarian, the poorest — and most malnourished — Indians generally are not. They would eat eggs, if only they could afford them, says Dipa Sinha, an economist at the Center for Equity Studies in New Delhi and an expert on India's preschool and school feeding programs.
The Toronto Star's Allan Woods reports on an issue I'm of two minds about. On the one hand, First Nations self-rule and respect for treaties matter. On the other, there are undeniable public health elements here.
Bill C-10, which took effect in April, targets individuals caught producing, transporting or selling large quantities of raw tobacco leaves or manufactured cigarettes on which a government tax has not been paid.
[. . .]
Police define contraband tobacco as products such as raw leaves smuggled into Canada, counterfeit cigarettes that arrive from overseas and tobacco produced for sale on First Nations territory that is sold tax-free to non-natives.
Intended to hamper a black market worth billions of dollars each year, natives fear the law will single them out for enforcement. They warn of job losses, economic decline and the criminalization of a people who have been growing and trading tobacco wherever and with whomever they please.
“This is our own product. We’d like to know where in history we gave up the right to conduct business and trade with that specific product,” said Chief Gina Deer, a member of the Mohawk Council of Kahnawake, south of Montreal.
Both Kahnawake and the Six Nations First Nation near Brantford, Ont., are expected to formally adopt their own tobacco laws as early as August in a bid to regulate cigarette production and sales, collect their own revenues from the smokes and stave off interference from non-native police and governments.
I mentioned The Blue Nile's 1989 song "The Downtown Lights", off of the group's lauded 1989 Hats, back in August of 2008. I'd actually first heard the song in 1995, when I bought Annie Lennox's covers album Medusa.
Medusa is more of an uneven album than I thought on first listen, but Lennox's version of song definitely holds up on re-listening two decades later. I suspect this might be because Lennox and The Blue Nile's songwriter Paul Buchanan share the same ethos, of the careful construction of quietly passionate songs. Back in 2008, I was struck by this lyric:
I was in love, then.
Now, it's the final monologue, about the dead ends of city life and hopes dashed, that gets me.
Medusa is more of an uneven album than I thought on first listen, but Lennox's version of song definitely holds up on re-listening two decades later. I suspect this might be because Lennox and The Blue Nile's songwriter Paul Buchanan share the same ethos, of the careful construction of quietly passionate songs. Back in 2008, I was struck by this lyric:
Tonight and every night
Let's go walking down this empty street
Let's walk in the cool evening light
Wrong or right
Be at my side
The downtown lights
I was in love, then.
Now, it's the final monologue, about the dead ends of city life and hopes dashed, that gets me.
The neon's and the cigarettes
Rented rooms and rented cars
The crowded streets, the empty bars
Chimney tops and trumpets
The golden lights, the loving prayers
The colored shoes, the empty trains
I'm tired of crying on the stairs
The downtown lights
Yeah, yeah</blockquote