[PHOTO] Looking up at the cranes, Yonge and Eglinton

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly talks about her enjoyment of Québec's Eastern Townships.


• Centauri Dreams suggests that the oddities of KIC 8462852 might be explained by gravity darkening on its surface.


• The Dragon's Tales notes the ongoing debate as to when the Panama isthmus formed.


• Language Hat notes the complex multilingualism of Elias Canetti.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money promotes Erik Loomis' new book Empire of Timber: Labor Unions and the Pacific Northwest Forests, which reveals as complex the relationship between forestry workers and the natural environment.


• The Planetary Society Blog notes that work on lightsails continues.


• Towleroad reports on a website that maps the world according to the permissibility of marijuana use.


• Window on Eurasia quotes the fears of a Russian website that Belarus is leaving the Russian sphere.

[LINK] "Canada’s New Government May Be a New Beginning for Science"

Wired's Thomas Hayden reports on how the new Liberal government in Ottawa may be better for Canadian science. It can hardly be worse, after all.

When Simon Donner, a climate scientist at the University of British Columbia, visited a sprawling Canadian government research center last spring, it wasn’t the empty hallways and sparsely occupied laboratories that stuck with him. You’d expect those ghost town conditions after years of cutbacks and attrition. What really got him was the cafeteria.

Donner’s hosts suggested coffee; he figured he’d be able to get a bite to eat as well. “Instead, it was a huge indoor lunch room,” he says. The once-bustling kitchen was locked behind a sliding grate, the food vendor long gone in search of customers. Donner and his hosts had to make do with coffee from a vending machine.

Canadian scientists have been making do for nearly a decade, in the face of funding cuts, federal lab closures, and a blanket gag order on government researchers. For them, the fall of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government in the October 19 national election wasn’t just a relief—it was the rough emotional equivalent of blowing up the Death Star. And the fact that Liberal leader Justin Trudeau won with a surprise majority government, avoiding the mess and gridlock of power sharing, was like having dreamy Han Solo emerge from the explosion and sign on to be your lab partner.

The litany of complaints against Harper is long. In science, they come down mainly to cutbacks in funding and a shift away from discovery research to projects more focused on the short-term needs of industry and commerce. To make matters worse, scientists throughout the bureaucracy faced limits on talking with the press about just about anything. The results were dramatic and widespread.

“Many federal scientists, including high-profile successful researchers with thriving laboratories, were laid off,” says Linda Campbell, an aquatic ecologist at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax. “Funds for whole programs were halted.” As a university researcher, Campbell wasn’t subject to direct hits from the cutbacks. “But I have many collaborations with federal scientists which were significantly impacted by all the restrictions, which in turn impacted my group’s research.”

[LINK] "Harvard cracks DNA storage, crams 700 terabytes of data into a single gram"

Sebastian Anthony's ExtremeTech article shares information about game-changing technology. Computer memory this abundant can enable quite a lot.

A bioengineer and geneticist at Harvard’s Wyss Institute have successfully stored 5.5 petabits of data — around 700 terabytes — in a single gram of DNA, smashing the previous DNA data density record by a thousand times.

The work, carried out by George Church and Sri Kosuri, basically treats DNA as just another digital storage device. Instead of binary data being encoded as magnetic regions on a hard drive platter, strands of DNA that store 96 bits are synthesized, with each of the bases (TGAC) representing a binary value (T and G = 1, A and C = 0).

To read the data stored in DNA, you simply sequence it — just as if you were sequencing the human genome — and convert each of the TGAC bases back into binary. To aid with sequencing, each strand of DNA has a 19-bit address block at the start (the red bits in the image below) — so a whole vat of DNA can be sequenced out of order, and then sorted into usable data using the addresses.

Scientists have been eyeing up DNA as a potential storage medium for a long time, for three very good reasons: It’s incredibly dense (you can store one bit per base, and a base is only a few atoms large); it’s volumetric (beaker) rather than planar (hard disk); and it’s incredibly stable — where other bleeding-edge storage mediums need to be kept in sub-zero vacuums, DNA can survive for hundreds of thousands of years in a box in your garage.

[LINK] "California’s drought is hitting indigenous Latino workers hard"

Sasha Khokha's Public Radio International report documents the plight of Mexican indigenous farmworkers in California, faced with an absence of work as the drought worsens.

Farmworker Maura Lukas says this year has been the hardest to make ends meet since she came to California more than a dozen years ago. She lives in a cramped two-bedroom apartment with her husband and four children.

“Our rent is $600 and right now we only pay half," she says. "We don’t have enough to eat. There just isn’t money for everything.”

Lukas is Mixteca, part of an indigenous group from southern Mexico that’s increasingly become part of California’s farmworker labor force — indigenous migrants who often work the lowest-paying jobs in US fields.

Now, a new survey shows they’ve been hit particularly hard by California’s drought, as farmers leave some fields fallow, or plant crops like almonds that require less labor.

[. . .]

That’s a common story among the 350 mostly indigenous farmworkers who have answered questions for a new grassroots survey about the impacts of the California drought. Those conducting surveys are often former farmworkers, like Zenaida Ventura, who speaks Mixteco, Spanish and English. She works with the Frente Indigena de Organizaciones Binacionales, a binational group operating out of Oaxaca and California.

[LINK] "Climate change could push Persian Gulf temperatures to lethal extremes: report"

Some regions of the world may benefit from global warming reterraforming, but the Middle East will not be one of them.

Rising global temperatures could soon push the sun-baked cities of the Persian Gulf across a threshold unknown since the start of civilization: the first to experience temperatures that are literally too hot for human survival.

A scientific study released Monday warns that at least five of the region’s great metropolises could see summer days that surpass the “human habitability” limit, with heat and humidity so high that even the healthiest people could not withstand more than a few hours outdoors.

The report in the journal Nature Climate Change says booming cities such Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Doha could cross the threshold by the end of the century, if planetary temperatures continue to rise at current rates. Not far behind is the Saudi holy city of Mecca, a destination for millions of Muslim pilgrims every year.

On the hottest summer days, inhabitants of those cities could experience a combination of heat and humidity so high that the human body is no longer capable of shedding the excess heat through perspiration, according to the report’s authors, a pair of scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Loyola Marymount University.

“Our results expose a regional hot spot where climate change, in the absence of significant mitigation, is likely to severely impact human habitability in the future,” the authors write in the study.

[LINK] "China rides the rails of Ethiopia's development"

Al Jazeera's Elias Grebreselaisse reports on Ethiopia, quite possibly a new economic giant set to take off thanks to Chinese aid and assistance.

Ethiopia's Addis Ababa Rail project opened last month to the delight of excited residents of the country's capital.

The $475m urban rail project - funded by China - is one of the most obvious examples of Beijing's huge role in Ethiopia's infrastructure development. The world's most populous nation has also built dams, roads, and factories in Ethiopia, and even gifted Addis Ababa the African Union headquarters, which cost $200m.

Gedion Gamora, a research fellow at Erasmus Mundus University in the Netherlands, said while the relationship between China and Ethiopia goes back to ancient times, formal relations between the countries began only in 1970.

Ironically, though, the Marxist-inspired Ethiopian revolution of 1974 put a damper on the countries' ties for the next 17 years. Ethiopia's closeness with the Soviet Union meant its relations with China, then a Russian rival, were minimal.

In 1995, former Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi made a trip to China where the two sides signed an economic cooperation agreement.

[URBAN NOTE] "The ‘shadow play’ of Budapest"

Márton Békés and Balázs Böcskei's Open Democracy essay, focusing particularly on the transformations of Budapest, has much to say about the late modern city worldwide.

This migration is not irregular, it is the seasonal speeding up of the global tourism of the middle class. European capitals are filled with people talking all kinds of languages, drink menus are replaced with new versions including higher prices and those who don’t belong to the global travelling middle class are crowded out of their cities for months.

According to Zygmunt Bauman “being a tourist” is a privilege, a sign of adaptation to the postmodern state of things. Therefore not only business people working and moving around in networks are classified as tourists, but also those cultural managers and intellectuals who adopt cosmopolitanism as their life strategy. Mostly they are the ones who make up the crowds in the inner city of Budapest, their local governors and their global counterparts are smiling happily, advertising through their life style such bilingual statements as “be a tourist in your own town”.

So, here we are, tourists in our own city. “I love Budapest” – comes the message from new urban marketing. They order us to find a new café, a breakfast place, discover things that have already existed before but now can be “liked”, in other words: now visible for those who see through a digital eye. Let this city be in a light mood, let multiculturalism be a pastime activity, let’s discover day after day that we can discover something again tomorrow. The city turns into a constant buzz and it retains nothing else but its name, Budapest.

In the 2000s in Budapest, the money revolution arrived. The time of the invisible, off-shore development industry, which doesn’t communicate with anybody but itself. They wiped out entire neighborhoods and “developed” them into faceless mall-condo combos. The city embraced them in the name of “development” and only a few “crazy greens” chained themselves to trees and organized resistance.

The new pavements covering new urban rehabilitation projects take us to postindustrial workplaces to check in. On their paper thin laptops, account managers are making their money, forcing themselves to feel good at the places advertised in tourist magazines as “community venues”. In today’s Budapest, thanks to the sterilization and to the multicultural atmosphere-designer industry you have to write up on the entrance of a place what function they fulfil: social bar and public pub. As if a bar would not be a social place in the first place and the pub would not be public originally. While a bar is dark and mysterious, a social bar is white, carefully designed and sterile. While a pub is loud, smoky and swims in malt, a “public pub” is the place for craft, local and cherry beer.

[LINK] "The Paleo Recipe for Complex Life on Earth"

At The Dragon's Tales, Will Baird has a thought-provoking essay noting the evidence that complex life might have first evolved on Earth in Paleoproterozoic era, more than two billion years before the present and one billion years before commonly thought.

The Earth is racked by global glaciations. Ones which have been called the Snowball Earth. They stretch over the entire planet from the poles through the equator. There is some dispute whether or not the oceans were completely frozen over (a slushball earth vs snowball), but the glaciations are acknowledged as real.

The monstrous glaciation is understood to have been triggered by a sudden drop in the atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. This, in turn, is believed to have been caused by photosynthetic organisms drawing down the CO2 levels while spiking the oxygen levels (relatively speaking). Yes, the snowball earth events are, like in the Eocene's Azolla Event, examples of biogenic climate change.

Within 100 million years of the end of the Snowball Earth complex life arose. Except it would vanish from the fossil record, probably having gone extinct and changing the biological fate of the Earth.

Wait. You thought I was talking about the Cryogenian and Ediacaran?

After all, the Cryogenian's Marinoan Glaciation (or maybe Sturtian or Kaigas), NeoProterozoic Oxygenation Event, Ediacaran with its biota and then Cambrian do parallel all of the above. Except that complex life is obviously still around and the Phanerozoic is quite biologically diverse, to say the least.

[BLOG] Some Canada and #elxn42 links, before and after

• Former Globe and Mail editor William Thorsell's essay throwout, a scathing criticism of the Conservative government by a right-leaning critic, got widely syndicated, first on the Medium account of MacLean's journalist Paul Wells then at MacLean's itself. Scott Gilmore's similar MacLean's essay is also worth reading in this light.


• The publicity received by Thorsell also relates, in part, to the Globe and Mail's nonsensical endorsement of the Conservative Party but not Harper. Over at the National Post, Andrew Coyne resigned as an editor on account of interference from above. Torontoist, meanwhile, noted the history of newspaper endorsements in Toronto.


• The fate of the NDP, never breaking through and in fact losing more than half of the seats won in 2011, was also discussed. MacLean's before the vote noted many of the challenges, while the Toronto Star after the vote noted the disaster. NOW Toronto examined the contest in Spadina-Fort York between Olivia Chow and Adam Vaughan. Jacobin Magazine mourned the NDP defeat.


• MacLean's and the Toronto Star celebrated the high voter turnout, 68.5%, the highest in two decades.


• Toronto was a major battlefield. MacLean's looked at the desperate attempt of Harper to cultivate the Ford brothers, while right-leaning mayor John Tory congratulated the Liberals on the scale of their win. Steve Munro looked forward to the impact of the election on mass transit, blogTO looked at the city's recent voting pattern and noted surprising outcomes, and re-elected Adam Vaughan promised an end to the controversial Toronto Islands airport expansion.


• Much is expected of the new government. Suburban ethnic voters are looking to the Liberals to fulfill promises, while on the world stage much is expected of a Canada apparently returned to its progressive promise. Meanwhile, much policy change is expected, everything from science to urban policy.


• The blogosphere took note of the election. Lawyers, Guns and Money started a discussion before the election about what might happen, while Crooked Timber celebrated afterwards. Joe. My. God. and Towleroad were among the sites to note the Trudeau victory briefly, Torontoist shared a cute election-day photo, and The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer celebrated the fact that this election proved Duverger's law.

[LINK] "Ancient civilization: Cracking the Indus script"

3 Quarks Daily and The Dragon's Tales each linked to Andrew Robinson's Nature article on the progress made in the decipherment of the Indus script. The problem, as yet, is that little is known of the Indus script, with no long passages, no agreement on what the underlying language is, or even how many symbols there are.

Views vary on how many signs there are in the Indus script. In 1982, archaeologist Shikaripura Ranganatha Rao published a Sanskrit-based decipherment with just 62 signs4. Parpola put the number at about 425 in 1994 — an estimate supported by the leading Indus script researcher in India, Iravatham Mahadevan. At the other extreme is an implausibly high estimate of 958 signs, published this year by Bryan Wells, arising from his PhD at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Nevertheless, almost every researcher accepts that the script contains too many signs to be either an alphabet or a syllabary (in which signs represent syllables), like Linear B. It is probably a logo-syllabic script — such as Sumerian cuneiform or Mayan glyphs — that is, a mixture of hundreds of logographic signs representing words and concepts, such as &, £ and %, and a much smaller subset representing syllables.

As for the language, the balance of evidence favours a proto-Dravidian language, not Sanskrit. Many scholars have proposed plausible Dravidian meanings for a few groups of characters based on Old Tamil, although none of these 'translations' has gained universal acceptance.

A minority of researchers query whether the Indus script was capable of expressing a spoken language, mainly because of the brevity of inscriptions. The carvings average five characters per text, and the longest has only 26. In 2004, historian Steve Farmer, computational linguist Richard Sproat (now a research scientist at Google) and Sanskrit researcher Michael Witzel at Harvard University caused a stir with a joint paper comparing the Indus script with a system of non-phonetic symbols akin to those of medieval European heraldry or the Neolithic Vinča culture from central and southeastern Europe.

At optimistic best, Robinson's conclusion that we may be on the verge of starting to figure things out is worth noting.