[OBSCURA] Martian Sunset

From Supernova Condensate:

Carrying on with the sunrise/sunset theme, here is a gorgeous sunset on Mars over the Gale crater, captured by Curiosity’s mastcam on sol 956 (April 15th, 2015) of its mission on the surface of our neighbouring world. Curious about why sunsets are blue on Mars? I wrote a little something about that a while back.

I’d love to see a blue sunset on Mars someday. It’s probably not going to happen but hey, I can dream, right?

[PHOTO] Photos from the Redpath Sugar Refinery during Doors Open Toronto

I've decided to start going through my backlog of photos. To this end, I've finally set about to using my photos of the Redpath Sugar Refinery on 95 Queens Quay East, taken during Doors Open this year. Head office of Redpath Sugar Ltd, this facility is one of the few manufacturing plants left in Toronto, never mind on the Toronto waterfront. As Torontoist noted last year, only complaints from the growing condo communities surrounding Redpath are likely to displace this immense plant.

[LINK] "Throwout" by William Thorsell (#elxn42)

At his Medium account, MacLean's writer Paul Wells shared a commentary by William Thorsell on the federal elections. Thorsell is most of note as a past editor of The Globe and Mail, centre-right economically but liberal socially. (Thorsell came out in the 1990s.) This commentary, widely shared before the election, does a good job of explaining underlying dissatisfaction with Harper and the Conservative government.

Not in recent times have Canadian voters had an opportunity to “throw the bastards out” in the classic phrase. Elected officials generally leave office before such public urges get to them.

Brian Mulroney stepped down five months before an election was required in 1993. (Kim Campbell launched that campaign in September running high in the polls.) Voters rather gently rebuked Pierre Trudeau with his close defeat in 1979, but his resurrection in 1980 set the stage anew. Mr. Trudeau stepped down in 1984, nine months before an election was required. (John Turner called an election that July, also running well in the polls.)

This time however, Stephen Harper is sticking his head up above the parapets after nine years in office — nine years generally seen as the Best Before Due Date in politics, as it is for leadership in the private sector. Knowing when to leave is among the more elegant qualities of any CEO, but then Mr. Harper has never laid claim to elegance.

An accumulation of baggage eventually weighs the owner down to the point of stumbling and falling. Mr. Harper is quite overweight in that department. In recessionary times, he is running a primary budget surplus (revenues over program spending) of some 1.4 per cent of GDP — an elementary error in Economics 101, less a matter of ideology than incompetence. Governments should not pull money out of an economy facing strong economic headwinds: We might refer to Stephen “Hoover” in this context, after the hapless U.S. president in the 1930s.

Thorsell gets more scathing.

[LINK] "Uncontacted tribe's encounters with civilization fuel ethical debate"

CBC reports on the controversy in Peru surrounding the apparent desire of an uncontacted indigenous tribe to make contact, and fears that this could end up backfiring.

Missionaries and tourists are increasingly making contact with an isolated "uncontacted" tribe in Peru, fuelling what the Peruvian government calls a "dangerous situation" and an ethical debate about how governments should deal with the world's uncontacted tribes.

For decades or centuries, the nomadic Mashco Piro people have kept to themselves in the jungles of Manu National Park in southeastern Peru, Luis Felipe Torres Espinoza, Peru's deputy minister of multi-culturalism told CBC's The Current.

However, recently they have started to make contact with nearby indigenous populations, seeking cultivated food such as plantains and metal objects such as knives and pots. Missionaries have also made contact with them, offering them gifts and trying to convert them to Christianity. Tourists en route to the national park have stopped to take pictures of them and give them gifts, Torres Espinoza said.

The encounters could put the Mashco Piro at risk of contracting deadly diseases — they have no natural immunity to contagious illnesses such as influenza and measles. They are also potentially risky to outsiders, as uncontacted tribes been known to attack and kill people outside their tribe.

"What we have seen is a dangerous situation," Torres Espinzo added through a translator. "It's an emergency that we're starting to get under control."

There's more at CBC.

[LINK] "Election for Native Hawaiians faces federal court challenge"

Al Jazeera reports on the controversy surrounding elections in Hawaii regarding a controversial election for an indigenous government. As I understand it, the lack of indigenous Hawaiian self-governance has much to do with the particular mechanics of Hawaii's annexation, the old Polynesian monarchy having been taken over wholesale as it was absorbed into the United States.

A federal court hearing is set over a lawsuit by people who want to put a stop to an election process that's under way for Native Hawaiians.

The lawsuit, filed in August, says it's unconstitutional for the state to be involved in a race-based election. The state argues in court documents that while it had a role in compiling a roll of Native Hawaiians eligible to participate, it's not involved in next month's vote to elect delegates for a convention to determine self-governance for Native Hawaiians.

Tuesday's hearing focused on the plaintiffs' motion for a preliminary injunction. Plaintiffs want the judge to limit voter registration activities or stop the election altogether.

U.S. District Judge J. Michael Seabright, who heard arguments Tuesday, said he'll rule from the bench with an explanation for his decision on Friday, adding he will issue a detailed written order later.

The plaintiffs include two non-Hawaiians who aren't eligible for the roll, two Native Hawaiians who say their names appear on the roll without their consent and two Native Hawaiians who don't agree with a declaration to "affirm the un-relinquished sovereignty of the Native Hawaiian people, and my intent to participate in the process of self-determination." The suit was brought on the plaintiffs' behalf by Judicial Watch, which describes itself as "a conservative, non-partisan educational foundation."

Native Hawaiians are the last remaining indigenous group in the U.S. that has not been allowed to establish its own government. Former U.S. Sen. Daniel Akaka spent about a dozen years trying to get a bill passed that would give Native Hawaiians the same rights already extended to many Native Americans and Alaska Natives.

Thoughts?

[URBAN NOTE] "Neechi Commons: Winnipeg grocery store bucks trend in core neighbourhood"

CBC's Rosanna Deerchild has an interesting story about how old native entrepreneur is dealing with a "food desert" in part of downtown Winnipeg by opening up an indigenous-theme grocery store.

Neechi Commons sales and marketing coordinator Kelly Edwards says the indigenous-owned supermarket is bringing healthy, affordable food - and jobs - to one of Winnipeg's poorest neighbourhoods.

An indigenous-owned supermarket is succeeding in one of Winnipeg's poorest neighbourhoods, at a time when other businesses have long left for the suburbs.
Neechi Commons is an aboriginal worker co-op housed in a 35,000-square-foot converted brick warehouse located at 865 Main Street — a strip notorious for its run-down hotels.

"We have a supermarket that includes a bakery and produce section, meats and pretty much all of the groceries that you can find anywhere else," says Kelly Edwards, the store's sales and marketing coordinator.

"We also have a restaurant, we do catering, and we have an art store that features over 200 artisans."

While the price of meat skyrockets across the country, Neechi Commons has boldly slashed their prices by as much as 50 per cent. The move not only helps provide healthy, affordable food to an area known as a food desert — it's also providing jobs.

There's more, including a feature more than five minutes long, at the site.

[URBAN NOTE] "Inner-Suburban Food Bank Use Soars"

Torontoist's Catherine MacIntyre reports on growing use of food banks in Toronto.

Diane Clarke is a single mother of four, living in North Etobicoke. In April 2014, she had to leave her job as a social worker to take care of her oldest daughter, who had become sick. Her $4,000 monthly income was cut down to $1,380; after paying rent, Clarke had less than $200 left over to cover her family’s cost of living. Her small savings quickly dried up, and after three weeks without work, she ran out of food.

“I was at rock bottom,” says Clarke. “Here I am out of work, I have no money, I don’t know what to do.”

That’s when she called North York Harvest food bank. “They were just closing the doors and I started explaining that I really need bread and milk for my kids,” she says. “They realized my need at that moment and they said, ‘you know what, come.’”

For the past year and a half, Clarke has been visiting the food bank—a four bus-ride commute—once or twice per month, each time stocking up on four days’ worth of food for her and her kids.

According to a recent report by The Daily Bread Food Bank, a network of food banks across the city, Clarke is among a growing demographic of Torontonians who rely on food banks to survive.

[URBAN NOTE] "GO and Smarttrack are one and the same service, says Metrolinx"

The Toronto Star's Tess Kalinowski helps clear some of the confusion surrounding regional transit plans. Some, mind.

Metrolinx has finally answered the question that has confounded transit watchers since Mayor John Tory campaigned on his $8-billion signature transit plan. SmartTrack and GO's regional express rail plan are the same thing — at least for now — says the head of the provincial agency.

"An independent and parallel service would be unaffordable and unworkable," Metrolinx CEO Bruce McCuaig wrote to city manager Peter Wallace in a letter dated Oct. 6.

Both SmartTrack and GO propose running electric trains at 15-minute frequencies on the GO tracks surrounding the city, connecting Markham and the west end through Union Station.

The mayor has been vague on how his service will be distinguishable from GO. Now, Metrolinx has a clear answer: At this point, there is no difference.

But it’s not clear what, if anything, that will mean for the future of SmartTrack.

[LINK] On the non-existence of Alpha Centauri Bb

The Dragon's Gaze linked to a new paper by Rajpaul et al., "Ghost in the time series: no planet for Alpha Cen B". The apparent existence of close-orbiting Alpha Centauri Bb is but an artifact.

We re-analyse the publicly available radial velocity (RV) measurements for Alpha Cen B, a star hosting an Earth-mass planet candidate, Alpha Cen Bb, with 3.24 day orbital period. We demonstrate that the 3.24 d signal observed in the Alpha Cen B data almost certainly arises from the window function (time sampling) of the original data. We show that when stellar activity signals are removed from the RV variations, other significant peaks in the power spectrum of the window function are coincidentally suppressed, leaving behind a spurious yet apparently-significant 'ghost' of a signal that was present in the window function's power spectrum to begin with. Even when fitting synthetic data with time sampling identical to the original data, but devoid of any genuine periodicities close to that of the planet candidate, the original model used to infer the presence of Alpha Cen Bb leads to identical conclusions: viz., the 3σ detection of a half-a-metre-per-second signal with 3.236 day period. Our analysis underscores the difficulty of detecting weak planetary signals in RV data, and the importance of understanding in detail how every component of an RV data set, including its time sampling, influences final statistical inference.

[LINK] "Can Lorin Stein Translate Michel Houellebecq Into a Great Writer?"

Cody Delistraty introduces his readers to a new criticism of Michel Houellebecq as a writer of note. I would just add that it's important to distinguish between "attention-getting" and "good".

Few would call Houellebecq, who holds the Prix Goncourt, France’s highest literary honor, a “bad writer,” but in France he is known for his narrative inventiveness while his style is generally accepted as second-rate: something readers put up with in order to get to his ideas. And yet in Submission, his latest novel, his style is so distracting that the Parisian weekly L’Express called him out as “a poor writer but a good sociologist,” adding, “a good writer would not use ‘based on’ in lieu of ‘founded on,’ ‘however’ in place of ‘on the other hand,’ and ‘wine vintage’ when he wants to mean ‘vintage.’ ”

Houellebecq is a classically French intellectual in that the Idea comes above all. By systematically draping ideas over characters, he has created a text that is essentially a political treatise disguised as a novel. For instance, near the end, François gets into a dialogue with a former academic colleague, whereupon they proceed to discuss everything from the social instability caused by mass secularism to the supposed evolutionary benefits of polygamy—all this for multiple chapters, unrelieved by an explanation of feelings or a description of the setting or any of the other details that a reader of fiction might reasonably expect.

Characters, too, are created and erased at will. Myriam, François’ romantic interest, comes onto the scene near the middle of the novel, then disappears when she moves to Israel, never to be mentioned again except for three sentences in the final act. It’s clear that Houellebecq invented Myriam predominately as a comparison to the sexually submissive wives that François’ male friends are gifted after Mohammed Ben Abbes, the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, wins the 2022 French presidential election. Nabokov famously said his characters are his “galley slaves.” Houellebecq’s characters are his way to claim his stories as novels and not academic texts.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• 3 Quarks Daily hosts an essay by one Akim Reinhardt talking about the history of the Oglala Sioux.


• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly shares her personal credo.


• Crooked Timber notes the various concerns of different societies in the past over migration.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper suggesting that O and B-class supergiants do not destroy their protoplanetary discs.


• The Dragon's Tales notes the French development of hypersonic weapons.


• The Everyday Sociology Blog considers the question of infamy. To what extent should people responsible for horrors be studied?


• Geocurrents maps some innovative Wikipedia maps of world religion.


• Language Hat reports on new Chinese borrowings from Japanese.


• Language Log notes the apparently strong preference for pinyin input in writing Chinese electronically.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money considers the complexity of colonialism in naming a sports team in Oregon the "Pioneers".


• Marginal Revolution describes how one Turkish economist disproved his father-in-law's involvement in an alleged coup conspiracy.


• The New APPS Blog looks at the philosophy job market.


• Strange Maps shares some beautiful watercolour maps of the world's divides.


• Supernova Condensate points out how very small our civilization's electronic footprint is.


• Towleroad links to one defense of Danny Pintauro's coming-out as HIV-positive.


• Transit Toronto notes the threatened TTC lawsuit against Bombardier and notes the refurbishing of some older streetcars.


• The Volokh Conspiracy reports on why a Pennsylvania court refused to recognize a Saudi custody order on the grounds of its inconsistency with American public policy.


• Window on Eurasia notes that Russia does not own the Russian language, looks at Armenia's intake of Syrian refugees, suggests the Russian intervention in Syria is not supported by Russia's neighbours, and looks at how Belarus is using Lithuanian and Latvian ports instead of Kaliningrad.

[LINK] How Deus Ex: Human Revolution predicted PM Justin Trudeau

The National Post's Daniel Kaszor had a nice article noting how the 2011 Montreal-designed cyberpunk computer game Deus Ex: Human Revolution predicted Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Deus Ex showed a future world 20 years in the future (16 now) where people live as augmented cyborgs, a giant super city looms over Hong Kong … and Justin Trudeau is the Prime Minister.

[. . .]

Near the end of the game, you pick up an email indicating that the Liberals have come back into power, and that Justin Trudeau is now the Prime Minister of Canada. And that his wife is a bit of a diva. What isn’t clear is why she would be staying at the Chateau Laurier instead of 24 Sussex. Maybe Trudeau finally allowed the much-needed renovations on the house he grew up in.

Some of the details aren’t quite right (in real life Sophie Gregoire, for example, kept her last name. She’s not Mrs. Trudeau). But it’s a fun easter egg in a game filled with Canadiana.

Earlier in the game one of the missions takes your character to Montreal, where you have to infiltrate the offices of Picus Communications, a sort of evil journalism/propaganda mill. Surprisingly, it looks like Picus has taken up shop in a renovated Olympic Stadium. The mission even includes a ride on the stadium’s funicular.

Additionally, in the future history of Canada, the booming Northern economy outstrips a flagging U.S. one. The economic disparity culminates in a shoot-out between Canadians and illegal U.S. immigrants who are crossing the B.C. border.