[PHOTO] Pachi the Pan Am Porcupine, at Yonge and Dundas

Pachi the Porcupine, official mascot of the Pan Am and Parapan Games, remained poised at Yonge and Dundas. The mascot's genesis was described, if perhaps harshly, by Torontoist's Will Sloan.

Who the hell is PACHI? This is the question that your humble correspondent asked when he first saw the smiling porcupine’s effigy atop a bus stop at Yonge and Dundas. “Meet PACHI!” said an accompanying sign, which explained that he was this year’s Pan Am mascot and encouraged us to tweet selfies at #HostCity. It’s also a question you may have asked if you’ve seen him at the many parades, community centres, and ribfests he’s visited in our fair province these past few months.

[. . .]

PACHI was birthed by a group of Grade 8 students from a school in Markham, who entered their design into the TORONTO 2015 Mascot Creation Challenge as part of their phys-ed class. However, like Poochie, the ill-fated third wheel of The Itchy and Scratchy Show, he seems as if he were created out of pie charts and focus groups by a team of marketing gurus. Like a Canadian cinematic blockbuster of the Passchendaele or Men with Brooms variety, PACHI feels like an attempt to create a facsimile of an American product (in this case, a loveable anthropomorphized animal).

CBC's take is more neutral.

[OBSCURA] On an unidentified girl overlooking the remains of the Warsaw Ghetto, 1946

Mikołaj Gliński's Culture.pl post "Search for Missing Woman from 1946 Photograph of the Warsaw Ghetto" looks at the search to identify a young girl photographed in 1946 by Reginald Kenny, looking at the remains of the Warsaw Ghetto.

Until recently this was not a very well-known picture in Poland. But over the last month thanks to the efforts of a couple people and a Facebook profile, the image has gone viral and is now on the path to becoming one of the most iconic images of destroyed Warsaw. Still, while the Internet was able to establish a lot of important facts, including the exact location of the place, the main goal of the whole effort has not yet been achieved, which is finding the girl in the picture and getting to know her story.

[. . .]

The black-and-white image shows a girl (approximately 10 years old) looking at the sea of ruins of the Warsaw ghetto. She is standing on a roof of a building which in the course of a private investigation by Marek Kossakowski (follow here) has been identified as a building at 5/7 Stawki Street - which is one of the very few buildings in the area to have survived the war. The building still stands today at four stories tall, which is not so obvious when you look at the picture – it seems that the flattened background of razed rubble somehow distorts the perspective and proportions.

In the left top corner one can discern the silouette of the Saint Augustine's Church, well known from other pictures of the destroyed ghetto. The T-shaped cross-road on the left has been identified as the intersection of Muranowska and Zamenhofa, the streets that had formed the heart of the Warsaw's Jewish district before WW2.

The girl on the roof is smartly dressed, the only thing which is out of sync are the shoes - too big and probably belonging to a man, they make one wonder how she made it all the way up here. The girl is caught in the act of touching her hair (the wind must have blown furiously at this altitude). [. . .]

This is what the image tells us, and it is not much. But we know also that the iconic photograph was taken on April 3, 1946 by Reginald Kenny who was a photographer accompanying former US president Herbert Hoover on the so-called Food Mission in Europe. In 1946 and 1947 Hoover visited around 40 countries struck by the war in an effort to estimate losses and provide the best relief for war victims. One of the places he visited was Warsaw.

I hope this goes viral; I hope that the girl in the photograph, now a woman in her 80s if she is still alive, is identified.

[LINK] "China sponsors S Africa to teach Mandarin in schools"

Al Jazeera's Azad Essa describes controversy in South Africa over the introduction of the Chinese language into school curriculums. Part of this controversy seems to come from the introduction of a foreign language into a multilingual education system, while more comes from concern over the role of the Confucius Institute.

China is helping to fund a South African programme to introduce Mandarin into the national public school curriculum as an optional language in 2016, officials have said.

A leading expert in Sino-Africa relations said the move will be a game changer in the country's dealings with China, but the plan has also run into criticism, with the South African Democratic Teachers' Union (SADTU) describing the programme as "tantamount to a new form of colonisation".

The Department of Basic Education confirmed that China will train hundreds of South African teachers and build three Confucius Institutes in a bid to promote Chinese culture.

[. . . T]he SADTU's general secretary, Mugwena Maluleke, told local radio station PowerFM, that the union would "not welcome the imposition of Mandarin in our schools".

The union's general secretary said introducing Mandarin would not raise the level of education and that it was still in the best interests of the country to prioritise mathematics and science in childrens' mothertongues.

[LINK] "Some Isolated Tribes in the Amazon Are Initiating Contact"

National Geographic's Scott Wallace describes the various concerns in South America, specifically Peru and Brazil, relating to indigenous peoples' initiation of contact with the outside world. How can this be done in as non-exploitative a way as possible?

Isolated indigenous groups in the western Amazon are under mounting pressure. The noose is gradually tightening around the last stretches of rainforest that remain free from the whine of chainsaws, the crack of rifles, the rumble of machinery. But in this instance, Peruvian officials doubt the Mashco-Piro are fleeing drug traffickers, loggers, or oil exploration crews. They believe the Indians are simply seeking more of the goods they have come to know through raids on settlements and encounters with strangers.

Trade goods have long exercised a powerful attraction for isolated tribes. For most of the 20th century, Brazilian wilderness scouts showered so-called “wild Indians” with such gifts to seduce them into accepting contact. That practice came to an end when Brazil adopted its “no contact” policy to respect the right of the isolated tribes to remain in seclusion if they so desired. After that, government agents would only seek out tribes that were in imminent peril from disease or genocidal violence. Indian rights officials assumed that the tribes would choose isolation over contact.

Recent events are challenging that assumption. Last year, a group of about 30 Indians emerged from the jungles around the native Ashaninka settlement of Simpatia on Brazil’s Xinane River, just across the border from Peru. According to Carlos Travassos, director of the Department of Isolated and Recently Contacted Indians, they melted back into the forest but emerged again days later, sick and exhausted, just as an emergency response team arrived. Speaking through interpreters, the Indians described a harrowing ordeal in the jungle across the border in Peru, where their people had suffered bloodshed at the hands of intruders, presumably illegal loggers or drug traffickers.

“We can’t say for sure that any single thing led them to make contact,” Travassos wrote in an email from Brasilia, “but it’s clear that the violence and attendant exhaustion they suffered cleared the way for contact.” The entire group received inoculations against the flu before returning to the forest. Thanks to the efforts of the team, Travassos continued, “the impacts of contact were kept to a minimum.”

Brazilian officials who helped formulate the “no contact” policy years ago are rethinking their strategy. “There’s something called self-determination,” Indian protection agent Meirelles told National Geographic by phone from his home in the Amazonian port city of Rio Branco. Having devoted decades to working along the Xinane River where last year’s contact occurred, Meirelles was recently invited to Peru to advise Torres and his superiors at the Ministry of Culture on the Mashco-Piro contact.

[LINK] "Mini-Neptunes Might Host Life Under Right Conditions"

Astrobiology Magazine's Amanda Doyle describes one process by which mini-Neptunes orbiting red dwarfs might evolve into broadly Earth-like worlds.

[W]hat if a gas giant migrated into the habitable zone? Astronomer Rodrigo Luger of the University of Washington, along with colleagues, have found that a certain kind of planet called a mini-Neptune with its atmosphere removed could, in fact, become a viable planet to life.

A mini-Neptune is a gaseous planet that is up to ten times the mass of the Earth. Such a planet would be engulfed in a thick atmosphere of gas and then would need to lose its envelope before becoming a water-rich world.

[. . .]

There are two ways in which a mini-Neptune could evict its atmosphere. The first is via a process known as hydrodynamic escape. Extreme radiation from the host star in the form of x-ray and ultraviolet rays bombard the planet, causing the atmosphere to heat up. The upper atmosphere then expands, forcing the gas to accelerate to supersonic speeds. This hydrodynamic wind is fast enough for the atmosphere to escape into space.

The second way for a mini-Neptune to shed its cloak of gas is for the atmosphere to become so extended that it is no longer gravitationally bound to the planet. The area around a star or planet where material is gravitationally bound is known as the Roche lobe. Once gas reaches the edge the of this teardrop-shaped lobe it can escape, and this is known as Roche lobe overflow. Roche lobe overflow couldn’t occur during planet formation, as it simply wouldn’t accrete the material in the first place. However, a planet migrating inwards will start to feel the effects of the star’s gravity more and more, and this can trigger the overflow.

Once the initial atmosphere is gone, the solid core left behind becomes a terrestrial planet. Assuming that a secondary atmosphere could form through a process such as volcanic outgassing, this core could become habitable, earning it the name “habitable evaporated core” (HEC).

[LINK] Marcia Bjornerud on the ancient beaches of Wisconsin

In her New Yorker essay "Meditations on an Ancient Beach", Marcia Bjornerud does a lovely job describing the genesis and the import of the Wisconsin Dells.

The billboards for water parks at the Wisconsin Dells begin at a radial distance of about two hundred miles, markers of the edge of an irresistible vortex into which most Midwestern parents will eventually find themselves drawn some blistering summer weekend. The place is a Vegas Strip for tweens, its resorts a shameless cultural and geographic mashup: Aloha Beach, Atlantis, Caribbean Club, Kalahari, Mount Olympus, Noah’s Ark. Which is why it can be startling to catch a glimpse—perhaps from the top of a three-story waterslide named for an Amazonian snake, out over the trespass-proof walls and crass façades—of the deep, winding pine-rimmed valley of the Wisconsin River and the honey-colored sandstones that are the Dells themselves. Some of the outcrops are undercut like anvils; others curve like the legs of a rococo table. The most recognizable is the mushroom-like Stand Rock, made famous by the nineteenth-century photographer H. H. Bennett, who captured an image of his son in mid-leap between an adjacent bluff and the formation’s flat summit.

The sandstones at the Dells can trace their beginnings to granites and gneisses of the southern Canadian Shield, a vast swath of rock that formed in the tectonic upheavals of the Precambrian, more than two billion years ago. Over the eons, erosion reduced the Midwestern mountains to sediment, and rivers, those compulsive custodians of the land’s surface, picked up the detritus. At the time the rocks at the Dells formed, five hundred million years ago, Wisconsin lay near the equator and was washed by shallow tropical seas. As the rivers meandered downhill and reached the shore, they jettisoned their sedimentary load in a systematic way, starting with the coarsest material—sand, which settled into beaches—and continuing with finer grains of silt and clay, which plumed out into open water. Wind and surf further sifted and rounded the grains. They became remarkably spherical and uniform in size. From the top of that slide, the machine-generated waves of the water park begin to look like an unintentional historical reënactment.

[LINK] "Baku Keeps a Wary Eye on Tehran"

Transition Online's Aleksandra Jarosiewicz describes how and why Azerbaijan is wary of the reentry of post-sanctions Iran onto the global stage. Its sometime rival, inherently stronger, its reentry might be a threat.

As a result of the Russian-Persian wars in the 19th century, Azerbaijan was divided, with the bulk of Azeris staying behind the country's new southern border, in what is today Iran. Potential nationalist or even separatist tendencies of this minority were assessed as a security threat by the Iranian government, and Azerbaijanis have occasionally intensified these concerns by such initiatives as the proposal to change the name of their country to "Northern Azerbaijan." Secondly, Azerbaijan, with a Shi’ite population estimated at 50 percent to 70 percent – although most of the population is indifferent to religion – is suspicious of Iranian attempts to export its version of Islam and support for a small but vocal orthodox Shi’ite community.

A third thorn in Baku’s side is Iran’s continuing support for Armenia. Tehran supported the Armenian side during the active phase of the Nagorno-Karabakh war in the early 1990s as a way of counterbalancing Azerbaijan’s potential influence among ethnic Azeris in northern Iran, who number more than the total population of Azerbaijan itself. Tehran was also concerned about an alliance between Baku and its rival Turkey based on Pan-Turkic ideas.

Iranian economic cooperation with Armenia has continued for the past two decades. Fortunately for Baku, Russian resistance prevented Armenia from diversifying its gas imports with Iranian help. What Baku perceived as Iran’s siding with Armenians prompted it to forge security cooperation with Israel, Iran’s prime adversary.

Finally, in terms of energy, Azerbaijan, although energy-rich for a country of its size, is no match for Iran and its world-class reserves of gas and oil.

[URBAN NOTE] "Housing market risk 'high' in Toronto, Winnipeg and Regina, CMHC says"

CBC News reports on the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation's concern that some Canadian cities might be facing a real estate bubble.

Canada's housing market is in no danger of a correction nationally, but that's not the case in Toronto, Regina and Winnipeg where the CMHC says there's a "high risk" of a slowdown.

In its quarterly house price analysis released Thursday, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation says Toronto, Regina and Winnipeg are at "high risk" of a housing correction for a variety of factors.

The housing agency looks at market conditions in 15 major housing markets across the country. While most markets get a low or moderate risk in the CMHC's eyes, the agency singled out Regina, Winnipeg and Toronto for being in a possible danger zone.

The reasons for concern are not the same in each city. In Toronto, the main concern is that "the rise in house prices has not been matched by growth in personal disposable incomes" the CMHC said, adding there is evidence of overbuilding in the market, with a historically high level of unsold units.

[MUSIC] "Is There a ‘Gay Aesthetic’ to Pop Music?"

At the Smithsonian Magazine, Geoffrey Himes makes the case for the particular importance of Mika, as an artist in his own right and as the latest heir to a specifically queer tradition in popular music.

Now that the Supreme Court has acknowledged that homosexuals have the same right to marriage as any other Americans, perhaps we can begin to think about Gay Americans as we think about Irish Americans, African Americans and Hispanic Americans: as a community with its own traditions and cultural flavors while being an essential part of the American whole.

If that's true, we can ask the question: can we identify a “gay” aesthetic in music the same way we can point to a Celtic, black or Latino aesthetic? You don’t have to look very hard to find not just one but multiple gay currents in music. The most obvious one is disco music, which evolved into today’s nearly ubiquitous EDM. The most out-of-the-closet example is the lesbian-folk-song movement self-described as “Womyn’s Music.”

But one aspect of gay-pop worthy of detailed examination is the sub-genre I call “Glam Piano.” The roots of this tradition can be traced back to New Orleans bars of the 1950s, when Little Richard, Esquerita and Bobby Marchan refined their piano-based rock'n'roll while working with and/or as female impersonators. The biggest Glam Piano star is Elton John, the flamboyantly costumed British pianist whose ringing piano figures and diva-like belting made “Philadelphia Freedom” and “Crocodile Rock” templates for the genre. Culture Club's Boy George put his own twist on John’s sound, and more recently Rufus Wainwright has given an art-song gloss to the genre.

This summer, however, has seen the release of one of the greatest Glam Piano albums ever. “No Place in Heaven” is the work of Mika, a singer-pianist born in Beirut in 1983 and a resident of London since he moved there at age nine. Like Little Richard, oddly enough, Mika was born with the last name Penniman and likewise dropped it. While a modest star in Europe, he remains largely unknown in the United States, yet he has steadily built the best Glam Piano catalogue in history by marrying John's irresistible melodies and thumping rhythms to Wainwright's smart, literate lyrics.

[LINK] On the genetics of the octopus

I liked to the sensationally-titled Metro.co.uk article "Octopuses ‘are aliens’, scientists decide after DNA study" because it was so sensational. A Facebook friend's suggestion, by way of providing inspiration of science fiction writers, that contemporary cephalopods are actually the technology-less descendants of ancient alien visitors, amused me. Another friend linked to Janet Fang's IFL Science article "The California Two-Spot Is The First Octopus To Have Its Genome Sequenced", much more sober and informative.

Cephalopods, which include the octopus, squid, cuttlefish, and nautilus, emerged as predators throughout the ancient seas half a billion years ago. They were likely the first intelligent life-forms on Earth, and these days, the list of octopus innovations is long and impressive: camera-like eyes, the ability to regenerate complex limbs, a propulsion system, and three hearts that keep blood pumping across the gills, to name a few.

Now, to investigate the molecular basis of the cephalopod brain – the largest nervous system among invertebrates – as well as their cool innovations, a team led by University of Chicago’s Caroline Albertin isolated and sequenced genomic DNA from a single male California two-spot octopus, Octopus bimaculoides. These clever problem solvers have a blue eyespot on either side of their heads. A juvenile female is pictured below to the right.

The octopus genome is about 2.7 billion base pairs in size, with long stretches of repeated sequences and more than 33,000 protein-coding genes. This means that their genome is slightly smaller than ours, but they have more genes. Researchers used to think that the large size of the octopus genome was due to whole genome duplication events during their evolution. But while these can result in increased genomic complexity, the team found no evidence of duplications.

Rather, a couple of gene families expanded, novel genes appeared, and the whole genome was shuffled around. "With a few notable exceptions, the octopus basically has a normal invertebrate genome that's just been completely rearranged, like it's been put into a blender and mixed," Albertin says in a statement. "This leads to genes being placed in new genomic environments with different regulatory elements."

Nature's "Octopus genome holds clues to uncanny intelligence" goes into more detail.

[T]he octopus genome turned out to be almost as large as a human’s and to contain a greater number of protein-coding genes — some 33,000, compared with fewer than 25,000 in Homo sapiens.

This excess results mostly from the expansion of a few specific gene families, Ragsdale says. One of the most remarkable gene groups is the protocadherins, which regulate the development of neurons and the short-range interactions between them. The octopus has 168 of these genes — more than twice as many as mammals. This resonates with the creature’s unusually large brain and the organ’s even-stranger anatomy. Of the octopus's half a billion neurons — six times the number in a mouse — two-thirds spill out from its head through its arms, without the involvement of long-range fibres such as those in vertebrate spinal cords. The independent computing power of the arms, which can execute cognitive tasks even when dismembered, have made octopuses an object of study for neurobiologists such as Hochner and for roboticists who are collaborating on the development of soft, flexible robots.

A gene family that is involved in development, the zinc-finger transcription factors, is also highly expanded in octopuses. At around 1,800 genes, it is the second-largest gene family to be discovered in an animal, after the elephant’s 2,000 olfactory-receptor genes.

The analysis also turned up hundreds of other genes that are specific to the octopus and highly expressed in particular tissues. The suckers, for example, express a curious set of genes that are similar to those that encode receptors for the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. The genes seem to enable the octopus’s remarkable ability to taste with its suckers.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• blogTO lists the ten weirdest houses in Toronto.


• Centauri Dreams takes issue with the science of Kim Stanley Robinson's new novel Aurora.


• Crooked Timber notes the ongoing controversy regarding the dismissal of Steven Salaita.


• The Dragon's Gaze reports on the imaging of exoplanet 51 Eridani b.


• Joe. My. God. notes that Madonna is abandoning Russia for its homophobia.


• The Power and the Money notes Douglas Muir's argument that dictatorship, as a system of government, has not become less common.

[URBAN NOTE] On gentrification on Dupont and my place in Toronto

On the 6th of this month, blogTO's Amy Grief wondered if Dupont Street, notwithstanding its location by active rail tracks, might yet see a condo boom. The location is good, after all ...

Dupont might be the street du jour with developers, restaurateurs and gallerists looking to build up what was once a predominantly industrial street. Construction of Fuse Condos is already well underway, which will soon bring 23 and 27 storey towers to Dupont and Lansdowne, but the portion of the street to the east could also see a major injection of density.

Might, however, is the key word. The idea of a large scale development on the north side of Dupont just west of Spadina has been floating around for at least eight years, but the Wynn Group was never able to get approval from the city.

That's because the north side of Dupont from Kendal to Ossington runs directly in front of a busy Canadian Pacific Railway line. And, this stretch of land used to be zoned as as an employment area; meaning residential buildings weren't permitted. Now, as noted in a CBC report, they're allowed, but, according to the city, they must be set back 30 metres from the rail corridor and can be only mid-rise.

Still, the prospect of a large scale development here just won't die.

I would go further and say it is likely to live.

Meanwhile, somewhat earlier on the 20th of July the Toronto Star noted that my neighbourhood specifically is starting to see an influx of art galleries. I live a minute east on Dupont from Cooper Cole gallery. Gentrification is beginning.

"Road to Ruin" is the name of the inaugural exhibition at Cooper Cole gallery’s brand-new space on Dupont and Dufferin Sts., though its proprietor, Simon Cole, intends the opposite effect.

After years on Dundas West, the gallerist pulled up stakes and relocated to an unlikely spot, chased by escalating rents and a growing priority on late-night food and drink ― especially drink ― in his former neighbourhood.

He’s not alone: In the past couple of months, four other galleries ― Erin Stump Projects, PM Gallery, Angell Gallery and Neubacher Shor ― have begun their resettlement to this improbable nexus, anchored by the world-weary Galleria shopping centre on the southwest corner, a McDonald’s and a string of car audio and appliance warehouses.

There is already an artists’ presence here, though, with clusters of studios strung from Dovercourt Rd. west to Dundas. This recent influx only makes it official, and visible.

It comes as no surprise. Art has always nudged at the city’s frontiers in a predictable pattern of forced migration: Art moves in, imbuing a worn-at-the-corners neighbourhood with an instant cache; new businesses follow, looking to capitalize on the sudden sheen, attracting new, more moneyed residents; rents go up; and art moves out.

Gentrification is good, certainly inasmuch as the only alternative seems to be decay or collapse of some kind. I like my neighbourhood--Dovercourt Park, or Dovercourt Village, or Dupont Street, or whatever you want to call it--and I want it to do well. The problem, the huge and significant problem, with this all is that if gentrification continues this will not be my Neighbourhood any more. Rents rise, opportunities for housing close off, and sooner or later I will be forced to move. (But where?)

A thriving neighbourhood is a good neighbourhood. I wish only that I could figure out some way to stay here.