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Oct. 22nd, 2015
Universe Today's Bob King reports on the latest, plausible, SETI target.
“We either caught something shortly after an event like two planets crashing together or alien intelligence,” said Dr. Gerald Harp, senior scientist at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, referring to the baffling light variations seen in the Kepler star KIC 8462852.
And he and a team from the Institute are working hard at this moment to determine which of the two it is.
Beginning last Friday (Oct. 16), the Institute’s Allen Telescope Array (ATA) was taken off its normal survey schedule and instead focused on KIC 8462852, one of the 150,000-plus stars studied by NASA’s Kepler Mission to detect Earth-sized exoplanets orbiting distant stars.. The array of 42 dishes comprises a fully automated system that can run day and night, alerting staff whenever an unusual or interesting signal has been detected.
At Open Democracy, Dzhemil Insafly writes about Russia's policy of keeping Crimean Tatars, traditionally Muslim, under tighter control than they were used to.
In late February 2014, just a few days before what became known as the ‘Crimean Spring’, several thousand Crimean Tatars assembled under Crimean Tatar and Ukrainian flags for a rally in the regional capital Simferopol. One of the speakers, mufti Emirali Ablayev, railed at those who supported the peninsula’s reunification with Russia.
‘Is Vladimir Konstantinov [a central figure in the regional government, one of the first to suggest the peninsula could secede from Ukraine – ed.] planning to hand our great motherland over to Russia?’ asked Ablayev. ‘I say to Konstantinov: if he loves Russia so much and wants to live there, we can give him one of the railway trucks that took our grandfathers to Central Asia when they were deported by Stalin in 1944, and God help him. Let him clear off to Russia, and take those Russians who have occupied in our families’ homes with him.’
The crowd received Ablayev’s speech enthusiastically. The Crimean Tatars spent half a century in exile before being allowed to return home to Crimea, and have come to see Russia, the successor to the USSR, as responsible for this terrible tragedy. It’s unsurprising they’ve been opposed to the peninsula’s annexation, but their religious organisations have had a far more difficult game to play.
After Crimea came under Russian jurisdiction, it didn’t take long for Ablayev to change his tune, toning down his speeches and calling for patience and unity from his fellow Muslims. At the same time, the body Ablayev is in charge of, the Spiritual Directorate of Crimean Muslims (SDCM), also known as the muftiate, started making overtures of friendship to the Muslim Spiritual Leadership of European Russia, and Ravil Gainutdin, the Chair of Council of Muftis of Russia, has become a frequent visitor to Crimea.
‘I went to Crimea not as a politician or a diplomat, but as a spiritual pastor,’ said Gainutdin after one such trip. ‘I wanted to meet my Muslim brothers, to hear their concerns and fears, and discover why they don’t want to be part of Russia and its 20-million strong Muslim community. “I have a certain status,” I told them, “I can take your hopes and fears, and any questions you want to ask, right to the top, and I shall do my best to help you.”’
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This multiply-authored Bloomberg article notes that there is hope for some settlement in the Donbas.
As Vladimir Putin’s bombing campaign in Syria enters a fourth week, Ukrainian officials are increasingly hopeful the country’s cease-fire with pro-Russian separatists will lead to a lasting peace.
The financial penalties the U.S. and EU imposed on Russia for backing the insurgency finally appear to be curbing’s Putin’s appetite for the rebellion, according to Borys Lozhkin, President Petro Poroshenko’s chief of staff.
“Putin wants sanctions lifted as soon as possible, so he’s showing readiness to implement Minsk II,” Lozhkin said in an interview in Kiev, referring to the second truce agreement Ukraine reached with rebel leaders and Russia, in neighboring Belarus in February.
If the accord holds, Ukraine will meet one of Russia’s key demands -- passing constitutional changes giving regions more autonomy -- but probably not until December, when Putin’s intentions become more clear, Lozhkin said.
“We’ll only know in a month or two if Putin’s readiness for peace is real, but the situation is much more safe now than it was just a month ago,” he said.
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CBC reports on an intriuging new map project in Nova Scotia, aiming to reunite contemporary placenames with their original meanings.
The new Mi'kmaq Place Names Digital Atlas and Website project is letting people see the true origins of Nova Scotia place names.
The project is meant to raise public awareness and document the Mi'kmaq's 13,000-year history in Nova Scotia.
Although the project may sound a little stuffy, it has revealed some pretty funny facts about places around the province.
"It's the expulsion of gas, human gas and that's where we get the word Picto," said Bernie Francis the linguist on the project.
That's right — Pictou is the Mi'kmaq word for fart. There's a logic to the name as well. Francis said the bad smelling sulfur in some parts of Pictou County most likely lead to the area getting its distinct name.
The community named Hectanooga in Digby County also has a bizarre origin word. Francis said Hectanooga is very similar to a Mi'kmaq word meaning "Your dog's on fire."
The Lower Bedeque Schoolhouse described by CBC must post-date my residence on the Island, I think. Islanders?
A community group in Lower Bedeque, P.E.I., is looking for ways to attract more visitors to the schoolhouse where Anne of Green Gables author Lucy Maud Montgomery once taught.
Montgomery taught at the school for only six months in 1897 before returning to Cavendish to care for her elderly grandmother following the death of her grandfather.
She never taught again.
The volunteer board operates the Lower Bedeque Schoolhouse on a budget of less than $2,000 a year, which comes mainly from visitor donations.
The group also receives government funding for two summer students, meaning the only months they can keep the schoolhouse open is July and August.
Angela Watercutter's Wired article says awkward things for the future of online television.
We talk a lot about the Golden Age of Television. What we talk less about, however, are the casualties of the war for programming dominance. Amazon’s Transparent winning awards and Netflix’s House of Cards launching a binge-watching boom are huge victories in the struggle to validate streaming TV, but there have been losses as well—and now Yahoo has lost a huge battle.
Late yesterday, as the company relayed its third quarter earnings, Yahoo also announced that its slate—led by the reboot of Community, as well as Sin City Saints and Other Space—had resulted in a $42 million loss. As such, it would likely pull the plug on its original series.
“We thought long and hard about it, and what we concluded is (for) certain of our original video (series), we couldn’t see a way to make money over time,” company CFO Ken Goldman told investors. “We’re not saying we’re not going to do these at all in the future. But … it didn’t work the way we had hoped it to work, and we’ve decided to move on.”
What went wrong? Well, for one, Community was already a niche property when Yahoo decided to save it; it had generated paltry numbers for NBC for years before being cancelled, and had lost a good share of its audience after showrunner Dan Harmon was fired in 2012. (He returned to the show after a year away.) Putting it on a platform that’s a tiny blip on the streaming landscape didn’t help. Yes, most people know the name Yahoo, but they don’t all know that the company has a streaming service, let alone one with the high-profile, baked-into-your-new-flatscreen prominence of Netflix or Amazon Instant.
Alana Semuels' recent article in The Atlantic describing how, deindustrializing, the Tennessee city of Bruceton seems doomed, is eminently plausible. There are going to be more Brucetons.
When textile companies started sending jobs overseas in the 1990s, this town wasn’t spared. Here, the Henry I. Siegel company made jeans and suits in three giant plants, employing 1,700. It started laying people off in 1995. Over time, Siegel, known locally as H.I.S., closed its wash plant, its distribution center, and its cutting center. It laid off its last 55 workers in 2000.
In the 15 years since then, this town has struggled to figure out how to survive. The three giant H.I.S. plants in town are empty, their windows broken, their paint peeling. A few new manufacturing operations have come, but they’ve also left. One by one, the businesses on the main streets of Bruceton and neighboring town Hollow Rock have closed, leaving modern-day ghost towns. In downtown Bruceton, the bank is gone, the supermarket and the fashion store have closed, and there’s a parking lot where there used to be another supermarket. All that’s left is a pharmacy where seniors come to get their prescriptions filled.
“What we say here about NAFTA [the North American Free Trade Agreement] is, I cannot tell you if it’s good for the country, but I can tell you that it’s not good for Carroll County,” said Brad Hurley, who grew up in Bruceton and is now the president of the Carroll County Chamber of Commerce, as he drove me down the mostly abandoned main street of Bruceton. He’s lived in town all his life and worked at the H.I.S. plant some summers; his mother and brother worked there for decades. But the town he sees now is a shadow of what it once was, and other towns in Carroll County, and indeed much of rural Tennessee, are struggling too.
[. . .]
While one-time manufacturing strongholds such as Cleveland and Pittsburgh have been able to reinvent themselves as centers of biotechnology or robotics, small, rural towns such as Bruceton have had more trouble. The unemployment rate in Carroll County is currently 8.5 percent, which is much higher than the state average of 5.7 percent, but is still the lowest rate the county has seen since 2008. Unemployment here reached startling heights as the factories closed—18 percent in 1996, 11.2 percent in 1999, and 10 percent in 2003, the same year that the U.S. unemployment rate was 5.8 percent.
This Torontoist feature describes a GLBT literary festival in Toronto I wish I had attended. Next year, hopefully, I will.
This past weekend, Toronto got its first queer literary festival. Presented by Glad Day Bookshop, Naked Heart: An LGBTQ Festival of Words, took place in various venues within walking distance of the Church Street Village.
David’s Tea, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Yorkville Library, City Park Library, the Ontario Public Services Employees Union Hall (OPSEU) and well-known bar Zipperz hosted more than 120 writers who presented 47 panels, workshops, and readings during the three-day festival. Although some internationally renowned queer writers were present (most notably, American novelist Larry Duplechan) it was Toronto’s own heroes who took the spotlight. Playwright Brad Fraser, writer (and sometimes-Torontoist contributor) Denise Benson, Farzana Doctor, Sarah Liss, and Sky Gilbert were among the locals involved.
Scott Dagostino, manager of Glad Day Bookshop and a regular columnist for Daily Xtra, also presented at the inaugural festival.
“We need to tell our own stories and the next generation needs to see themselves represented in script. This is what got us through the AIDS crisis and this is what keeps us alive,” said Dagostino.
[BLOG] Some Thursday links
Oct. 22nd, 2015 05:46 pm- Bad Astronomy and The Dragon's Gaze each note WD 1145+017, a white dwarf caught eating its planets.
- The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper speculating that Jupiter ejected a Neptune-sized planet early in our solar system's history.
- Languages of the World considers the use of grammar to gauge the relatedness of languages.
- Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the catastrophe that is the United States' law school system.
- Marginal Revolution notes the de-Sinification of Taiwan, as measured by the tearing down of statues.
- The Power and the Money is critical of Vox's war coverage, noting particularly Syria.
- pollotenchegg maps the sources of migrants to five major Ukrainian cities.
- Window on Eurasia notes that Russia is sending Chechen conscripts to Crimea.