[PHOTO] Looking up at the South Tower of the Royal Bank Plaza, Toronto

I love the statement of the gold-impregnated windows of the Royal Bank Plaza's South Tower.

[META] What are the stories behind my Livejournal userpics?

At the beginning of the week on Livejournal, first Keith R.A. Decandido then Steve Roby took part in an interesting meme. What are my Livejournal userpics, and what are their backstories?



This, my default icon was posting, is a crudely grayscaled version of a photo originally taken of me by Bill Pusztai in January 2005. We were just outside the CIBC branch at 90 Danforth Avenue when I got a phone call from some telemarketers I was working for part-time, telling me that my week-long trial was over and I was done with them.



This icon, used for my [FORUM] posts, is drawn from a photo was taken by my ex, G., as I was leaning back against his balcony on a warm summer night.



This photo, which I use for my [PHOTO] posts, was a selfie, taken as I was standing in front of the shiny gold-impregnated windows of the South Tower of the Royal Bank Plaza complex.



My [CAT] icon is taken from a photo I took of Shakespeare when he was young, barely more than a year old, swiping at my visiting mother's leg.



I do not use my [OBSCURA] icon much any more. It's a shame, since there's so much photography I see on my Flickr feed that I would like to highlight, but not such a shame, since to my embarrassment I can't remember where I got this photo of a vintage 19th century camera. I hope it was from the Wikimedia Commons.
obscura forget where

[LINK] On two serendipitous discoveries of objects in deep space

Two posts yesterday at The Dragon's Gaze, here and here pointing to the serendipitous discovery of two very distant objects. Centauri Dreams set things up.

Two papers have appeared on the arXiv server suggesting hitherto undiscovered objects in the outer Solar System (thanks to Centauri Dreams reader Stevo Darkly for the pointer). Both papers use data harvested by the Atacama Large millimeter/submillimeter array (ALMA), an interferometer of radio telescopes in Chile’s northern high desert. Here some 66 12-meter and 7-meter radio telescopes work the sky at millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths, with targets that have ranged from galactic dust in the early universe to magnetic fields near a supermassive black hole.

ALMA’s uses closer to home are made clear in the new papers, which demonstrate that this array can be a major tool in helping us probe the outer system well into the Oort Cloud. In the first paper, the researchers draw on three periods of observation with ALMA to detect point-like emissions at different positions in two of the periods. The two emissions are thought to be the same source, considering what the authors call “the negligible probability of having identified two independent highly variable background sources.” Assuming a single source, the team dubs the object Gna, noting that it was not visible in the third observing period 42 days later.

So what exactly do we have here? If gravitationally bound, the object would be at a distance between 12 and 25 AU, most likely a Centaur with a semi-major axis between Jupiter and Neptune, though a large one, in the range of 220-800 kilometers depending on distance and albedo. The authors note that the location of the field of view (close to the galactic plane toward the star W Aquilae) may explain why the object was not seen sooner despite its size.

But there is another possibility, that Gna is unbound. “In that case,” write the authors, “the most exciting possibility is that we have observed a planetary body or brown dwarf in the outer reaches of the Oort cloud.” Which leads to recent WISE studies that found no evidence of a Saturn-class object out as far as 28000 AU, or of a Jupiter out to 82000 AU, while a Jupiter-sized brown dwarf could be excluded out to 26000 AU at the locations previously suggested by John Matese and Daniel Whitmire. The latter have argued that a large planetary body in the Oort would explain the seemingly clustered orbits of many comets.

Other blogs, including D-Brief, noted this was very early yet.

[URBAN NOTE] Two notes on the Beck Taxi protests against Uber in Toronto

blogTO noted that, while Beck Taxi formally came out against the anti-Uber protests, it claimed to sympathize with the strategy. As James Bow noted, this strategy--if it can be called that--is not very smart.

I get that Toronto's taxi drivers see Uber as a threat to their livelihood, but all these protests serve to do is communicate to Toronto voters that cabbies are angry, and nothing more. It fails to communicate to Toronto voters why they should themselves be angry at Uber. In that vacuum, Toronto voters are almost certain to come to their own conclusions, and assume that Toronto's taxi drivers have had a monopoly of operations for years and are reacting like spoiled brats at having it threatened.

This is not my sentiment, personally, but it's easy to see how many Torontonians could come to think this way, and it is why downloads of the Uber app have skyrocketed after similar protests by taxi cab drivers in other cities.

Toronto voters are not going to react positively to what they perceive as people shouting "I! Me! Mine!" because, like all humans, they're kind of selfish themselves. Taxicab protests that inconvenience commuters at the height of a stressful rush hour aren't going to curry favour. Instead, taxi companies need to use their protests to communicate why it's in the average Toronto commuter's interest that Uber be regulated, just like the other taxi companies.

[URBAN NOTE] "Vortex Records to close after nearly 40 years"

blogTO's brief item about the closure of a long-time record shop in Yonge and Eglinton was sad. I guess I'll have to head over to take a look.

One of Toronto's oldest record stores is set to close in the new year, as Vortex Records announced yesterday that owner Bert Myers is retiring. The shop, currently in operation out of a second floor space near Yonge and Eglinton, has been in business for nearly 40 years, at one time boasting a variety of locations around the city.

The last remaining outpost has occupied its upstairs digs since the late '80s. I recall buying a copy of The Joshua Tree on vinyl up there when I was in high school after getting my first record player. Through the '90s many of the kids from North Toronto and Northern Secondary would hit the shop for grunge-era CDs. It was always a rather welcoming place.

Even as Myers' retirement is cited as the primary reason for the closure, one would be remiss not to note the massive development going on immediately to the south of Vortex. Much of the block that the record shop occupies has been vacated for the construction of a new condo, and the remaining two storey retail seems destined to be replaced sometime soon.

Deep discounts are promised.

[URBAN NOTE] "Toronto council doesn't want Davenport rail bridge"

David Rider's Toronto Star article notes what I might call a certain NIMBYism on the part of the inhabitants of this neighbourhood.

Toronto city council is blasting Ontario’s transportation agency and its plan for a big elevated rail bridge through Davenport neighbourhood, demanding Premier Kathleen Wynne intervene.

“We’re talking about a huge (ongoing) transformation, revitalization in this area, that could get severely impacted if you put this Gardiner Expressway-in-the-sky flying over this community, with trains going back and forth all day long,” thundered planning and growth chair Councillor David Shiner.

Davenport Councillor Ana Bailão said her residents support provincial electric rail expansion but “we don't want to be the community known as the train-watching community,” with, eventually, up to 180 a day overhead.

Others questioned Toronto’s future relations with the Metrolinx agency and its regional express rail plan, including agreements that compel the city to pay a share of some construction costs.

[URBAN NOTE] "The Activist Group Suing the Suburbs for Bigger Buildings"

Bloomberg's Patrick Clark writes about the San Francisco area group that has been suing suburban municipalities for blocking much-needed construction. I have to say that I strongly agree with this goal: Cities need housing if they are to function.

In a speech last month, Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Jason Furman blamed zoning restrictions—local land-use rules governing things like how tall buildings can grow—for the lack of affordable housing, lost economic productivity, and rising inequality across the U.S.

On Tuesday, a San Francisco activist named Sonja Trauss took Furman's argument to the streets, filing a lawsuit in Contra Costa County (Calif.) to fight what she sees as a lost opportunity to build more housing.

Trauss's organization, the San Francisco Bay Area Renters Federation (yes, SFBARF), is suing the City of Lafayette, a Bay Area suburb of about 25,000, to block plans to build 44 single-family homes on a plot of land once slated for a 315-unit apartment complex. Her argument relies on a three-decade-old California law intended to check local governments’ ability to reduce the density of certain construction projects. Called the Housing Accountability Act, the law has been used successfully by developers of affordable housing who have had their projects blocked, Trauss said, but never by an advocacy group advocating for greater density as a public good.

"Everyone can agree that we should be building more," she said. "They just want it to be somewhere else."

Trauss, 34, is a former high school math teacher who launched SFBARF last year to advocate for residential development projects. In San Francisco, where the median rent for a two-bedroom apartment is approaching $5,000 a month, there's a common-sense reason to oppose land-use laws—there's simply not enough housing, and it's driving up home prices and rents, especially for new arrivals. Earlier this year, she raised $40,000—much of it from tech workers—so that she could quit her day job and run the organization full time.

[LINK] "To See the Future of Electric Cars, Look East"

Bloomberg View's Adam Minter notes the future of the electric car, in China.

Nevada is starting to look like the place where the electric car's future will be decided. Last June, Tesla broke ground on a $5 billion battery plant in Sparks, and on Wednesday, Chinese start-up Faraday Future announced that it had chosen a Las Vegas suburb as the site for a new $1 billion plant to make electric vehicles. Faraday hopes to roll out a competitor to Tesla’s flagship Model S in 2017.

But as glitzy as these bets are, the real action is happening in China, where smoggy skies and government subsidies are creating the perfect conditions for electric vehicles to thrive. The proof is in the numbers. According to data released this week by the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers, sales of electric cars are poised to exceed those in the U.S. for the first time ever. Already, they’ve grown 290 percent year-on-year to 171,145 vehicles. They're expected to reach 220,000 to 250,000 for the year, whereas the U.S. market is predicted to top out at around 180,000 cars.

What’s fueling the mainland's electric-car surge? As with so many other things in China, cost is the main factor. Take Xindayang, a 14-year-old electric-vehicle manufacturer that recently linked up with Geely, the Chinese car goliath that owns Volvo. Xindayang's recently-released D2 is designed for urban-dwellers who drive short distances and don’t generally use the highway. It's not a high-end ride: A 2013 review of Xindayang’s first model, the D1, claimed it made “golf carts look luxurious by comparison.” Meanwhile, according to Forbes, the D2 makes a “harsh rattle” as it goes from 0 to 30 mph in a turtle-like ten seconds.

What the D2 does have is an eye-catchingly low price of $10,000, compared to $70,000 for Tesla's Model S. That's helped Xindayang to sell 32,000 cars this year, roughly comparable to the 33,157 cars sold worldwide by Tesla through the third quarter. “The guy who’s making the $100,000 car is not changing the world,” one of Xindayang's financiers boasted to Forbes, referring to Tesla's flamboyant founder Elon Musk. “The guy who is making the $10,000 electric vehicle is changing the world.”

[LINK] "Uber can’t be defeated from the outside—but maybe from within"

Colin Horgan's MacLean's article suggests productive ways of challenging Uber, by pointing out inequities in Uber's functioning.

Get into any Uber car and the driver will likely tell you that working for Uber is a great way to buttress another income they earn elsewhere. In fact, usually conversations with Uber drivers, if they happen, are upbeat. In a way, they ought to be: the driver wants a good rating and so does the passenger. But elsewhere, some drivers have expressed annoyance with Uber and its almighty algorithm.

A recent workshop paper for the Center for European Policy Studies by a pair of researchers from New York University and the Data & Society Research Institute interviewed Uber drivers and monitored online driver forums. They concluded that the very ideas Uber uses to promote itself and its business model might not necessarily be what they seem. “Uber’s claims regarding its labour model—which center on freedom, flexibility, and entrepreneurship—are not borne out in the experience of Uber drivers, in large part due to the information asymmetries and controls that Uber exerts over driver behaviours through performance metrics, behavioural nudges, unreliable, dynamic rates, and scheduling prompts, and design.”

For example, according to the study, Uber has “full power to control and change the base rate its drivers charge,” and allows drivers to negotiate a lower fare but not a higher one. At their lowest, “these rates are discussed in forums as a net-loss for drivers after factoring in overhead costs.”

Drivers can also have the money they made reduced if a customer complains. As one former Uber customer service representative wrote: “We would track a rider’s travel route and check it against any ‘best routes’ alternatives, then adjust the final charge up or down based on computer-generated fare estimates.” That is, if the computer thinks you, as a driver, could have gone a better way—no matter what obstacles you might have come across in the real world—your fare is reduced.

The rating system passengers have, which “directly impact” a driver’s employment eligibility, is also a point of contention. “Uber monitors drivers’ ratings, customers rate drivers on their Uber experience, and the company deactivates drivers whose ratings drop too low, although the cut-off point is a shifting target,” the NYU report states. Last year at Quartz, one Uber driver who formally worked as a private luxury car driver explained that the system passengers have to rate their experience constantly means drivers “have to live in fear of losing their jobs.”

[URBAN NOTE] "Tomson Highway’s Wisdom"

The interview of Torontoist's Martin Morrow with queer Cree Canadian dramatist Tomson Highway is a joy to read.

There’s no disputing that Tomson Highway is Canada’s best-known First Nations playwright. However, he might also be one of Canada’s foremost feminist playwrights. Apart from one notable exception—the all-male Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing—Highway’s plays have been dominated by strong women, from The Rez Sisters and Rose to Ernestine Shuswap Gets Her Trout and, most recently, his Juno Award-nominated one-woman musical The (Post) Mistress.

“Are you telling me to stop it?” Highway says, laughing, when his preference for female characters is pointed out to him. He’s on the phone from Saskatoon, where The (Post) Mistress recently played at Persephone Theatre. But he’ll be in Toronto this weekend to showcase his tuneful side with a talent-packed variety show at Hugh’s Room in Roncesvalles.

Dubbed Songs in the Key of Cree, the show features Highway—who is also a songwriter and classically trained pianist—performing his eclectic repertoire with guests including Micah Barnes, Patricia Cano, Teresa Castonguay, Laura Hubert, and Jani Lauzon. Marcus Ali will be blowing sax and John Alcorn is acting as musical director and co-keyboardist.

“I just adore him,” Highway says, at the mention of Alcorn’s name. “If you need a headline for your piece, make it: ‘Tomson Highway Adores John Alcorn.’ I’m thrilled to be working with him again.”

[LINK] "Canada’s New Typeface Unifies the Country’s Many Languages"

From Wired's Liz Stinson:

If the United States were to have a typeface, it might be something like Highway Gothic, the sans-serif, designed by Ted Forbes, that’s plastered across our nation’s road signs. Or maybe Helvetica, the famed font found just about everywhere, including your cereal box’s nutrition label. Some people, the ones less impressed with the government’s competence, might even say Comic Sans.

While the United States has yet to determine its typographic identity, its northern neighbor recently chose one. Canada 150, created for the country’s 150th birthday, is a typographic family that unites the Latin characters of English and French with the syllabic characters of the country’s many indigenous dialects. It is the work of Raymond Larabie, a typographer who says he sought to create a font that might help bring together Canada’s disparate cultures. “I just thought, well it’s a birthday present for Canada, it kind of has to be inclusive,” he says.

Canada 150 is an expansion of Larabie‘s free typeface Mesmerize, a geometric font with sharp, pointed angles. Though it’s not perfect, it does come with an interesting evolution. To expand the original typeface, Larabie studied the syllabic characters of the Cree language and other indigenous languages of what is now Canada. The written Cree language, created in 1840 by missionary James Evans, is marked by geometric glyphs, each of which stands for a syllable. Though distinct from their Latin counterparts, Larabie says most of the syllabic glyphs are a “Frankenstein-ing” the original Mesmerize typeface. Many of the syllabics look like a modified version of an M or U or C, with slightly wider apertures. “The triangular shapes have a lot to do with the A,” he explains. Canada 150 is among a handful of typefaces to bridge multiple languages, which includes Huronia, another multilingual typeface from Rosetta Type Foundry that blends Latin and Inuktitut symbols, the latter of which are derived from the Cree system.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• blogTO notes the various subway stations scheduled to get upgrades.


• Crooked Timber considers the ethics of wealth inequality.
  
• The Dragon's Gaze notes the apparent detection of signals from disrupted hot Jupiters in nearby galaxies.


• Joe. My. God. notes a lawsuit lodged by people in a New York City parish who allege the church was covering up their priest's theft of a million dollars for a S&M dungeon master, and notes one instance of Greek Orthodox homophobia.


• Language Hat notes how Irish Gaelic nobility tried to Anglicize their names, dropping their Macs and O's.


• Savage Minds considers the ethnography of the urban wilderness.


• Spacing Toronto considers biking plans in Scarborough.


• Torontoist notes the effects of the Fort York bridge, looks at funding for the Toronto Public Library, and examines the greenbelt.


• Understanding Society contrasts historical and sociological explanations of events.


• Window on Eurasia notes Russian concerns about the infrastructural vulnerability of Kaliningrad.

[LINK] "Meet the gay Caribbean man Canada wants to deport"

Daily Xtra's Arshy Mann reports on a man, a refugee from the Caribbean island nation of Saint Kitts and Nevis, who is faced with expulsion from his new home in Toronto despite the threats against him.

This expulsion of a man from safety should not be allowed to happen. Trudeau, are you listening?

Back in St Kitts and Nevis, where gay sex is punishable by up to 10 years in prison, he was subject to constant harassment. Walking home from work, men would use homophobic slurs calling him “anti man” and “batty man.” They would punch him in the gut or in the face if they felt he was walking too close to them. Sometimes they would throw stones at him in the streets.



St Kitts, the island where Ryan lived, is small, with a population of only 40,000 people. So even though Ryan wasn’t completely out of the closet, everyone knew he was gay. He isn’t sure if it was because of how he walks or how he talks. At a young age, he would only play with girls. His uncle certainly knew he was gay — he would beat him regularly, while yelling those same slurs.

Ryan is an accomplished dancer. He travelled around the Caribbean performing and won cash prizes in dancing competitions. But being a dancer in St Kitts gave the homophobes even more ammunition to target him with.

Ryan was stabbed for being a gay man in St Kitts. Not once, but twice. The first time he had been out with friends and was walking through an alley to get back to his house. A group of men stopped him, demanding money and calling him homophobic names. He tried to run away, but they beat him badly. He was stabbed multiple times and was hospitalized. He still has the scars.

A few years later, he was attacked, stabbed and robbed again. The last straw for Ryan came when a man pulled a gun on him. “Don’t walk on this street batty man,” he was threatened. Ryan was scared for his life. An online friend in Canada was able to link him up with Rainbow Railroad, a Toronto-based organization that gets LGBT people out of situations like his. They bought him a plane ticket and a month later he was in Canada.

Rolston Ryan is a gay man. He was subjected to vicious attacks and abuse because of that. He comes from a country that criminalizes his very existence. None of that is in dispute.

But what the Canadian government does dispute is that he’s a person in need of protection. And that’s why they’re sending him back.

[META] What content of mine do you especially like?

Here's another late-night [META] question. What content of mine do you particularly like? Is it the morning photos? Is it the links, whether blog roundups or individual news links? Is it longer-form writing?

Let me know.