[PHOTO] Toronto, sign and City Hall

[URBAN NOTE] Spacing and Torontoist on Old City Hall, Toronto

Spacing Toronto's Chris Bateman writes in "How the Eaton Centre nearly wrecked Old City Hall" about Old City Hall's close call.

Old City Hall was completed in 1899 to plans by architect E. J. Lennox. Romanesque Revival design was popular at the time, and so Lennox included an array of arches, columns, and decorative brickwork typical of the style. He designed the grand clock tower with its 900-kilo gargoyles, the marble-lined main hallway, and even cheekily wrote his name on the upper part of the Bay St. facade.

The building served as the City of Toronto’s municipal headquarters until 1965, when New City Hall opened across the street. After the bureaucrats moved out, the Lennox structure was almost immediately threatened with destruction.

The T. Eaton Co. unveiled plans in March, 1966 that called for the demolition of almost everything in the block surrounded by Dundas, Bay, Yonge, and Queen, including most of Old City Hall. Only the clock tower, cenotaph, and Holy Trinity Church would remain.

In their place would rise three office buildings (one 32- and two 57-floors) with room for a workforce of 65,000, a cylindrical 500-room hotel and convention centre, and a 69-floor apartment and office tower, which, at 277.3 metres, would have been roughly the same height as today’s Soctia Plaza.

Eaton’s also planned to build a new store at the corner of Queen and Yonge in the concrete box style of Yorkdale Shopping Centre.

The whole thing was projected to cost $260 million ($1.8 billion in today’s money). $8 million of that was set aside for the purchase of Old City Hall.

Torontoist's Jamie Bradburn, meanwhile, used "Shaping Toronto: Reusing an Old City Hall" to examine what other cities did, and what could be done.

While our former City Hall carried on as a courthouse, other cities across North America found mixed uses for their former municipal sites, or are struggling with solutions. Boston’s 1865 Old City Hall houses tenants ranging from heritage agencies to law firms to a Ruth’s Chris Steak House. In Indianapolis, the old building housed the state historical museum for four decades, then served as a temporary home for the city’s central library. Vacant since 2007, the city recently entered a lease agreement with boutique hotel operator 21c Museum Hotels to restore the building as arts-related spaces and a museum, and provide a physical link to a new hotel being built in the neighbouring vacant parking lot.

Like Toronto, Tacoma, Washington nearly lost its Victorian-era city hall to demolition in the early 1970s. A remodelling with space for businesses and restaurants fell prey to the real estate market collapse. Falling into the disrepair, Tacoma bought the building from a private owner for $4 million earlier this year after a failure to meet repair deadlines. This week, the city is showing it off to potential investors, hoping to attract office use or a hotel.

Being a National Historic Site, it’d be a difficult, protracted process to radically overhaul the building, so anyone fearing a mini-Eaton Centre can probably relax. If such plans went ahead, public outcry would alter them (though the cleaning the soot stunt might not work a second time). What is required is a strong vision which, fingers crossed, can survive the inevitable petty political wrangling. Ideally, the building would house a long-needed city museum or other historical exhibition spaces accessible to the public. Retail tenants could integrate nods to our past a la the current occupants of Maple Leaf Gardens, and include businesses offering Toronto made or inspired products. The city report hints at possible trendy office uses such as a business or technology incubator. Given its long service to the city, whatever goes in the building should celebrate Toronto while continuing to respect Lennox’s enduring design as much as possible. It’s a site with plenty of potential that would be foolish to waste.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly asks readers how they define their community.


• Centauri Dreams looks at the Rosetta probe's unusual comet.


• Crooked Timber notes the death of Brian Friel.


• The Dragon's Gaze reports that hot Jupiter 51 Pegasi b apparently does not have rings.


• The Dragon's Tales suggests the bright spots on Ceres are salt deposits.


• Language Hat wonders where the sabra accent of Hebrew comes from.


• Languages of the World suggests grammar is a better guide to language history than words.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money looks at the Russian deployment in Syria.


• The Map Room's Jonathan Crowe exposes the failings of the Mercator projection.


• Marginal Revolution wonders if there might be a South Asian free trade zone soon.


• Out There notes that Earth's near-twin Venus is important for many reasons, not least as a guide to exoplanets.


• Window on Eurasia looks at population growth in the North Caucasus and examines xenophobic rhetoric in Russia.

[BRIEF NOTE] On how Peeple, an app to rate people Yelp-style, is a terrible idea

Joe. My. God. and Wired were among the news sources sharing the news of a new app, a Yelp for people, described in this CBC report.

An app that allows users to rate people like they would rate a restaurant is scheduled for a November release, but it already has the internet up in arms.

Calgary-developed Peeple will allow users to rate other humans on a scale of one to five stars, much like a Yelp review.

All you need to create a profile for someone is their cellphone number. The subject of the profile cannot delete the comments or the rating, according to an article in the Washington Post.

"You're going to rate people in the three categories that you can possibly know somebody — professionally, personally or romantically," Peeple CEO and co-founder Julia Cordray told CBC Calgary in September. "So you'd be able to go on and choose your five-star rating, write a comment and you will not be anonymous."

Negative comments will sit unpublished in the person's inbox for 48 hours, giving them the opportunity to work out any disputes with the person who posted them, according to Peeple's website. If the dispute can't be resolved in that time, the comment will go live. The person can publicly defend themselves by commenting on the negative review.

They're Canadian. How wonderful.

Vox had a somewhat neutral article suggesting that it might not be that bad.

Peeple says it will take a number of precautions to prevent the service from becoming a cesspool of nasty reviews. Reviewers will be required to use their real identities as verified by Facebook, and new Facebook profiles won't be allowed to participate.

Positive reviews of another person — those rated three or more stars on a five-star scale — will be posted immediately, but negative reviews will be held until the subject has time to review them. If someone refuses to register for the site, those negative reviews will be kept private indefinitely.

So the emerging caricature of Peeple as an app for stalkers and disgruntled exes may turn out to be wrong. It may actually be harder to harass people on Peeple than on existing social media platforms.

The thing is, I have seen people making comments on public websites using their Facebook identities. This scarcely restrains them at all. An app like Peeple could easily serve as a platform to let shameless people do terrible things to other, without any identifiable recourse. The Internet is forever, but at least it was better than high school.

The real shame? Even if Peeple is stopped, or radically transformed, other like apps are likely to develop.

[LINK] On WOW Air's $C 99 flights to Europe (well, Iceland)

CBC's report, delivered by Pete Evans, certainly caught my attention.

Discount airline WOW Air has unveiled a plan to fly from Montreal or Toronto to Iceland for $99 one way and travel to numerous destinations in Europe for $149.

Those figures represent the base price of a one-way ticket, with all applicable airport charges and taxes in effect. But there are charges for other optional services, including up to $106 to change a ticket, up to $82 for a seat with extra leg room, and up to $246 to check three heavy bags. (Special items like skis, bikes, golf clubs and musical instruments also come with a $76 charge, the website says.)

The Icelandic carrier says the service via Reykjavik will begin out of Montreal's Pierre Elliott Trudeau airport on May 12, 2016, and out of Toronto's Lester B. Pearson airport on May 20, 2016.

Launched in 2011, the airline has grown quickly and has offered deeply discounted flights with few amenities to European travellers for several years. But the move announced Thursday is part of the airline's plan to do the same in the opposite direction, and luring North American travellers eastbound.

The extra fees are emphasized by the Toronto Star.

[T]hose $99 prices are for one-way flights. While Iceland is a beautiful country, it’s safe to assume most travellers will be interested in a return flight.

The cheapest seats are also limited in number. By Friday, many WOW flights appeared to be sold out of the least expensive fares. On the other hand, those that remained are still relatively inexpensive, with return fares of about $475 for a week’s visit to Reykjavik.

But that’s before you start counting the cost of WOW’s add-on prices. Carry-on luggage is restricted to five kilograms, in contrast with the 10 kilos allowed by both Air Canada and Air Transat. Buying an additional seven kilos will cost you at least $24 for a flight under four hours, and $47 minimum for a journey over four hours, according to the airline’s website.

Checked luggage costs more, too. When you choose its least expensive fares, Air Canada charges $28 for a checked bag of up to 23 kilos on international flights. At WOW, it’s at least $59 for a 20 kg bag.

Overweight baggage is priced around $85 for Air Canada and $100 for Air Transat. Flying with WOW, you pay $24 per kilo over that limit, up to a maximum of 32 kilos; hit that limit, and you’ll add $288 to the cost of your flight.

Even so. I, one day, would like to fly.

[LINK] "Ex-CBC Radio host Jian Ghomeshi pleads not guilty to sexual assault charges"

It begins.

Disgraced former radio host Jian Ghomeshi today pleaded not guilty in a Toronto courtroom to all five charges against him.

The former host of CBC Radio's cultural affairs show q is facing five charges, including four counts of sexual assault and one count of overcoming resistance by choking.

The 48-year-old did not speak with reporters as he walked into the downtown courthouse, where he was arraigned during a court appearance.

Ghomeshi, wearing a dark suit and tie, said only "not guilty" when asked how he pleaded. He had to repeat that because he wasn't speaking into a microphone.

[LINK] "China Billionaire With Canal Dream Confronts Biggest Loss of '15"

Jill Mao and Blake Schmidt's Bloomberg report suggests one major new obstacle to the controversial Nicaragua canal concept.

The Chinese billionaire using his personal fortune to help fund a $50 billion Nicaraguan challenger to the Panama Canal has crashed into the bitter reality of equity markets in the world’s second-largest economy.

Telecommunications entrepreneur Wang Jing, 42, was one of the world’s 200 richest people with $10.2 billion at the peak of the Chinese markets in June, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. His net worth has since fallen to $1.1 billion.

His 84 percent drop so far in 2015 is the worst recorded by the index, which provides a daily ranking of the world’s 400 richest people. Ivan Glasenberg, chief executive officer of Baar, Switzerland-based Glencore Plc, had the second-biggest percentage decline, falling 66 percent to $1.8 billion.

Wang owns 35 percent of publicly traded Beijing Xinwei Telecom Technology Group Co., which has tumbled along with China’s equity markets. The end of a lockup on 51 percent of its shares on Sept. 10 triggered a further decline that’s pushed Xinwei to a 57 percent drop this year. He pledged Xinwei shares valued at $2.4 billion in July that were removed from his net worth calculation.

[ISL] "The Jewish and Muslim merchants of Djerba"

Via Facebook's Stephen comes the Rik Goverde's Middle East Eye report on the history of the Jews of Djerba, a Tunisian island known for its merchant diasporas.

These are busy times for Nissem Bittan, a Jewish jewellery salesman in the heart of the old city of Houmt Souk. Customers keep walking into his shop, which seems to be constructed solely out of lavishly plastered ceilings and walls and handcarved wooden showcases.

The customers dig deep in their pockets and take out jewels and gold they want to sell. It’s just before Eid al-Adha and people on Djerba are running out of money. On the island just off the coast of Tunisia tourism is the main source of income, but it became almost non-existent after terrorists hit the Bardo Museum in Tunis in March and the beaches of Sousse in June, leaving almost 60 dead in total.

“People don’t have money but they still want to buy a sheep for their family (as part of the Eid tradition). So they sell their jewelry to us,” says Bittan, a 52-year-old in shorts and a striped shirt who was born and raised on Djerba.

Bittan runs one of the many jewellery stores in the old city of Houmt Souk, the small capital of Djerba. In those narrow streets, Jews and Muslim merchants have been working side by side for centuries, relatively secluded from the outside world. He has Muslim friends, Bittan says, although they don’t really come over to each others houses for dinner a lot and "there are certainly no inter-marriages" between the two religious groups. “In Tunis that might happen... maybe,” he says. “The Jews there are a bit more liberal. But here, no. It’s a religious thing, we don’t blend. But we still respect each other.”

[LINK] "Catalonia, Scotland and the fluid concept of democracy"

Open Democracy's Daniel Coyne makes the compelling argument that the ability of the United Kingdom, unlike Spain, to accept the possibility of separatism is a strength.

If we return our focus to Catalonia, where on Sunday the pro-independence parties won a majority of seats in parliament. The exact levels of support for Catalan independence vary according to who you ask, with both sides in the debate naturally exaggerating their own support base. It is beyond doubt, however, that at least a sizeable minority of Catalan voters want full independence from Spain.

The Spanish government has of course secured its own democratic mandate to govern, having been chosen for office by the entire Spanish electorate. It also has its own perfectly sensible reasons for wanting Catalonia to remain part of Spain. Aside from patriotic notions of Spanish unity, it benefits Spain economically to have the relatively wealthy and productive Catalonia as part of the family.

Yet the national government in Madrid isn’t the sole legislative power in Spain, a highly de-centralised country divided into 17 autonomous communities, each with its own legislature.

Catalan elections consistently garner a lot of support for the independence cause. In refusing to allow an independence referendum to be held, the Spanish government chooses to utilise its own mandate as a democratically-elected body to overrule a subordinate yet equally legitimate body. A body that is simply seeking to serve the interests of the people that voted for it.

[LINK] "Humans have more primitive hands than chimpanzees"

Science does its readers a service in reporting new findings suggesting that chimpanzees cannot be taken to represent the original state of proto-humans, that this species also evolved over time. Michael Balter writes.

Humans and chimps diverged from a common ancestor perhaps about 7 million years ago, and their hands now look very different. We have a relatively long thumb and shorter fingers, which allows us to touch our thumbs to any point along our fingers and thus easily grasp objects. Chimps, on the other hand, have much longer fingers and shorter thumbs, perfect for swinging in trees but much less handy for precision grasping. For decades the dominant view among researchers was that the common ancestor of chimps and humans had chimplike hands, and that the human hand changed in response to the pressures of natural selection to make us better toolmakers.

But recently some researchers have begun to challenge the idea that the human hand fundamentally changed its proportions after the evolutionary split with chimps. The earliest humanmade stone tools are thought to date back 3.3 million years, but new evidence has emerged that some of the earliest members of the human line—such as the 4.4-million-year-old Ardipithecus ramidus (“Ardi”)—had hands that resembled those of modern humans rather than chimps, even though it did not make tools. And back in 2010, a team led by paleoanthropologist Sergio Almécija, now at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., began arguing that even earlier human relatives, dating to 6 million years ago—very soon after the human-chimp evolutionary split—already had humanlike hands as well. This even included the ability to press the thumb against the fingers with considerable force, a key aspect of precision gripping.

To get a grasp on what early hands really looked like, Almécija and his colleagues analyzed the thumb and finger proportions of a large number of living apes and monkeys, including modern humans. They then compared these to the hands of several extinct species of apes and early humans, including Ardi, the Neandertals, and the 2-million-year-old Australopithecus sediba from South Africa, which its discoverers controversially think might be a direct ancestor of humans. The sample also included the 25-million-year-old fossil ape known as Proconsul.

The team crunched the measurements from all these samples using sophisticated statistical methods designed to determine the course of hand evolution over time. The researchers found that the hand of the common ancestor of chimps and humans, and perhaps also earlier ape ancestors, had a relatively long thumb and shorter fingers, similar to that of humans today. (Gorillas, which spend most of their time on the ground and not in trees, have similarly shaped hands.) Thus, the human hand retains these more “primitive” proportions, whereas the elongated fingers and shorter thumbs of chimps, as well as orangutans, represent a more specialized and “derived” form ideal for life in the trees, the team reports today in Nature Communications.

[LINK] "The siege of Damascus: an account of everyday life in Syria’s savage war"

Peter Oborne at Open Democracy writes about the experience in Damascus of that country's civil war. Heartbreaking.

I went to Syria under the auspices of the Assad government’s Ministry of Information, accompanied much of the time by a government minder. I had no other means of going to government-held territory. I was unable to cross the lines into other areas, and witness the devastation there caused by the government, and hear responses from its victims. I accept that my report is therefore selective, but it is authentic and I believe that the people I met deserve to have their stories told.

It could have been a society wedding in London, Milan or Paris. Instead, the packed event took place in the heart of Damascus’ Christian quarter. The men wore formal suits, the women elegant dresses. As the solemn ceremony led into a cheerful after party at a hotel in the centre of town, it seemed that the brutal civil war ravaging the country did not exist.

Yet everybody I talked to had suffered misfortune or disaster. Some had been kidnapped. Many had lost their businesses. Others had received death threats. They were all resigned to the possibility, in some cases the likelihood, of sudden death.

Without exception, those I spoke to had suffered the loss of friends and relatives in the conflict. The groom had already moved to Germany. He told me he hoped his new wife would join him. Some guests had already left Syria and had returned for the wedding. Almost everyone I spoke to was thinking of emigration.

Much, much more at the site.

[LINK] "Is There a Kraken in Kraken Mare? What Kind of Life Would We Find on Titan?"

At Universe Today, Paul Patton speculates about plausible biochemistries for life on Titan.

Could there be life on Saturn’s large moon Titan? Asking the question forces astrobiologists and chemists to think carefully and creatively about the chemistry of life, and how it might be different on other worlds than it is on Earth. In February, a team of researchers from Cornell University, including chemical engineering graduate student James Stevenson, planetary scientist Jonathan Lunine, and chemical engineer Paulette Clancy, published a pioneering study arguing that cell membranes could form under the exotic chemical conditions present on this remarkable moon.

In many ways, Titan is Earth’s twin. It’s the largest moon in the solar system and bigger than the planet Mercury. Like Earth, it has a substantial atmosphere, with a surface atmospheric pressure a bit higher than Earth’s. Besides Earth, Titan is the only object in our solar system known to have accumulations of liquid on its surface. NASA’s Cassini space probe discovered abundant lakes and even rivers in Titan’s polar regions. The largest lake, or sea, called Kraken Mare, is larger than Earth’s Caspian Sea. Researchers know from both spacecraft observations and laboratory experiments that Titan’s atmosphere is rich in complex organic molecules, which are the building blocks of life.

All these features might make it seem as though Titan is tantalizingly suitable for life. The name ‘Kraken’, which refers to a legendary sea monster, fancifully reflects the eager hopes of astrobiologists. But, Titan is Earth’s alien twin. Being almost ten times further from the sun than Earth is, its surface temperature is a frigid -180 degrees Celsius. Liquid water is vital to life as we know it, but on Titan’s surface all water is frozen solid. Water ice takes on the role that silicon-containing rock does on Earth, making up the outer layers of the crust.

The liquid that fills Titan’s lakes and rivers is not water, but liquid methane, probably mixed with other substances like liquid ethane, all of which are gases here on Earth. If there is life in Titan’s seas, it is not life as we know it. It must be an alien form of life, with organic molecules dissolved in liquid methane instead of liquid water. Is such a thing even possible?

It is, actually.