[PHOTO] Santa's castle, rear, Galleria Mall, Toronto

[OBSCURA] Dumping Leftover Tea at -40c

The CBC North report "Nunavut tea toss photo at -40 C proves internet gold" alerted me to a remarkable photo from Nunavut. In the community of Pangnirtung, photographer Michael H. Davies photographed local resident Markus Siivola throwing hot tea into the freezing air. The original photo is on Davies' Flickr page, here.

Photographer Michael H. Davies said the whole photo shoot was planned after he saw a similar photo elsewhere and decided he could top it.

"I went through the science of it," he said. "I figured, 'OK, I need 40 below, I need calm winds, I need the sunset in the background so it lights up my fog when I film it.'"

Davies and Siivola travelled by snowmobile into the mountains about 45 minutes out of town.

It was a race against time to catch the setting sun. The community, which is only a few kilometres below the Arctic Circle, gets about 2½ hours of sun this time of year.

They were carrying five or six thermoses of hot water, each with different amounts so they could experiment to get the right shot.

[LINK] sadydoyle on the unusual likability of Hillary Rodham Clinton

Tumblr's sadydoyle recently posted an essay talking about how the author finds Hillary Rodham Clinton, currently front-runner for the Democratic nomination, likeble. She persists in the face of terrible, certainly misogynistic, criticism.

I’ve come to believe that, in some ways, saying nice things about Hillary Clinton is a subversive act. I spent much of this year working on a long project on how women are demonized in the media. Hillary Clinton was a fairly large part of that story – she had to be; if you want to talk “women that people hate,” she’s kind of unavoidable – and I spent a while sorting through Clintoniana, dating back to the early ‘90s, to find nasty things people had said about her, or common narratives about her personality. It wasn’t pretty – the worst stuff for Hillary was way worse than I’d expected, and there was way more of it than I expected to find – but it was also illuminating, in some key ways. I got a better sense of the pressures that she has to live with, and how they’ve informed her decisions.

I also realized that, unless you really take a look at those pressures, the narrative around Hillary Clinton’s “likability” is doomed to be inaccurate, in some way. She might even be very easy to dislike, if you weren’t looking at those narratives, or if you underestimated their severity. But, in my experience, trying to parse Hillary Clinton without also parsing Hillary-Hate is like trying to drink water without touching the glass. As long as you refuse to deal with the container, the actual substance tends to stay permanently out of reach.

For example: Female politicians are stereotyped as “soft” and incompetent when it comes to foreign policy and national security. It’s a basic, entrenched form of sexism: Only boys know how to fight, or play with guns. So, in order to be taken seriously, Hillary has to prove that she’s as tough as any man, or tougher. But she can’t actually be as tough as any man, or tougher; that plays into the stereotype that women are fonts of petty malevolence, prone to irresponsibly starting conflicts for no reason. (Here’s a joke I first heard from my father, and heard from many men throughout my lifetime: “Why can’t you elect a female President? Because, when she gets her period, she’ll launch the nukes.”) She has to look either “soft” and passive, or “hard” and aggressive. Either one is bad for her.

This plays out on the level of personal expression, too: Women are supposedly over-emotional, whereas men make stern, logical, intelligent judgments. So, if Hillary raises her voice, gets angry, cries, or (apparently) even makes a sarcastic joke at a man’s expense, she will be seen as bitchy, crazy, cruel and dangerous. (Remember the “NO WONDER BILL’S AFRAID” headlines after she raised her voice at a Benghazi hearing; remember the mass freak-out over her “emotional meltdown” when someone thought she might be crying during a concession speech.) She absolutely cannot express negative emotion in public. But people have emotions, and women are supposed to have more of them than men, so if Hillary avoids them – if she speaks strictly in calm, logical, detached terms, to avoid being seen as crazy – we find her “cold,” call her “robotic” and “calculating,” and wonder why she doesn’t express her “feminine side.” Again, she’s going to be faulted for feminine weakness or lack of femininity, and both are damaging.

[LINK] "Libya Peace Deal Won't Be Enough to Restore Former Oil Output"

Bloomberg's article about continuing instability in Libya, and its conséquences, is depressing.

Libya’s United-Nations-brokered peace deal may help calm deepening political turmoil, but the North African nation will struggle to restore oil production to levels reached before the Arab Spring five years ago.

Output in the country with Africa’s largest oil reserves has slumped almost 80 percent since Muammar Qaddafi was toppled. Representatives from the two rival factions that emerged after a 2011 rebellion ended the dictator’s 42-year rule -- an Islamist-backed government in Tripoli and an internationally recognized administration operating out of the east -- signed a peace deal on Thursday, paving the way for shuttered oil fields and export terminals to be reopened.

While a lasting peace deal would allow the North African country to ramp up its output from below 400,000 barrels a day last month, the threat from Islamic State in the oil-producing Sirte region means the situation may get worse in the short term, according to Richard Mallinson, a London-based geopolitical analyst at Energy Aspects Ltd.

“There’s no immediate signs that it’s opening up oil facilities,” he said by phone. “The risk is that this expansion of Islamic state into the Sirte basin and some of the producing fields there is a bigger risk than production coming back.”

[LINK] The Inter Press Service on India, Nepal and their relationship

The Inter Press Service's N Chandra Mohan writes about India's missteps in its relationship with Nepal, trying to determine that country's constitutional future at no small economic cost. This behaviour honestly reminds me of Russia's treatment of its smaller neighbours.

South Asian integration remains a distant dream as some member countries like Nepal resent India’s big brotherly dominance in the region. They perceive that they have no stakes in India’s rise as an economic power. Ensuring unrestricted market access perhaps would have made a big difference in this regard. Their resentment has only deepened as this hasn’t happened. Instead they have registered growing trade deficits with India! The on-going travails of the Himalayan kingdom vis-a-vis India exemplify the problematic nature of integration in a region that accounts for 44 per cent of the world’s poor and one-fourth of its’ population.

Nepal appealed to the UN to take “effective steps” to help remove an “economic blockade” imposed on it by India. According to SD Muni, Professor Emeritus at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, this situation is reminiscent of what happened in 1989 when King Birendra’s decision to import anti-aircraft guns from China and his refusal to reform the Panchayat system in the face of a democratic movement precipitated tensions in bilateral relations. India closed down the special entry points for trade and transit, resulting in a severe shortage of essential supplies. Twenty-six years later, Indian trucks have been stopped from entering Nepal.

This blockade similarly has resulted in a shortage of fuel, food and medicines in the Himalayan Kingdom. Supplies of vaccines and antibiotics in particular are believed to be critically low. UNICEF has warned that this will put more than three million infants at risk of death or disease as winter has set in. More than 200,000 families affected by earthquakes earlier in the year are still living in temporary shelters at higher altitudes. The risks of hypothermia, malnutrition and shortages of medicines will disproportionately affect children. As if all this weren’t bad enough, fuel shortages are resulting in illegal felling of forests.

Nepal’s non-inclusive constitution is the proximate cause of this development disaster-in-the-making. The blockade is being spearheaded by ethnic communities who make up 40 per cent of the population like the Madhesis and Tharus from the southern plains or the Terai These minorities have strong historic links with India and are protesting that the recently promulgated constitution marginalizes them. They have stopped goods from India entering the country by trucks since September. India of course formally denies that it has anything to do with the blockade but it is concerned that the constitution discriminates against these minorities.

As Nepal shares a 1,088 mile open border with it, India is concerned that the violent agitation over the constitution will spill over into its country. The bulk of the Himalayan Kingdom’s trade is with India, including a total dependence on fuel. It is also a beneficiary of special trading trade concessions and Indian aid. Nepali soldiers in the Indian army constitute one of its leading infantry formations — the Gurkha Regiment. Nepali nationals freely cross the border and work in India. Normally, such interdependence should occasion closer bilateral ties and integration. Unfortunately, this hasn’t happened till now.

[LINK] "The Bridge That United Copenhagen and Malmo Is Now Dividing Them"

Feargus O'Sullivan's CityLab article explaining how the close integration of Denmark with Sweden, exemplified by the Oresund bridge connecting the two countries, is being challenged by migration issues, is sad.

When the Oresund Bridge (that’s Öresund in Swedish and Øresund in Danish) opened in 2000, it was taken as a harbinger of a bright, borderless future for Europe.

Linking Danish Copenhagen with the Swedish city of Malmo across five miles of the Oresund Strait, the bridge was an unquestionably bold feat of engineering, featuring a two-mile tunnel connecting to it via an artificial island. The bridge’s role in reshaping Scandinavia’s geography was more impressive still. It joined two countries previously linked only by sea and air and helped to bind Denmark’s first and Sweden’s third cities into a new international metro area.

[. . .]

This year, more than 120,000 refugees sought asylum in Sweden between January and November. The source of their exodus is the ongoing war in Syria, creating levels of violence and disorder so intense that hundred of thousands have risked the dangerous journey across sea and over land to reach safety. Of the 800,000 refugees who have arrived by sea this year, one in seven has ended up in Sweden.

This is substantially thanks to Swedish generosity in setting high quotas. (It also helps that conditions the country offers refugees on arrival are relatively better than elsewhere.) Other European states have notably failed to be so generous. The U.K., with more than 6.5 times the population of Sweden, has agreed to take just 20,000 Syrian refugees over the next parliamentary term.

Neighboring Denmark has taken a far tougher line. The country’s government has taken out anti-refugee advertisements in Lebanese newspapers, announcing recent 50 percent cuts to refugee benefits and emphasizing how quickly Denmark would be able to deport them. The contrast could hardly be greater with Sweden, where people crossing by train from Denmark are greeted in Malmo Station with notices reading “Welcome Refugees” in Swedish, English, and Arabic.

[URBAN NOTE] "Muskoka town set to lose its only bank"

Alex Ballingall's Toronto Star article looking at how the Muskoka resort town of MacTier is worried that its only bank might close down, thus dooming the community, makes for sad reading.

The biggest fear in MacTier these days is that, when the lone bank packs up and shuts down, the town will wither and die.

Everyone’s talking about it, from the lumber yards to the Foodland grocery store, Service Ontario branch and the Gordon Bay Marine shop. TD plans to shutter the only bank in town next spring, leaving MacTier without a bank for the first time in nearly 100 years. Residents in the town of just a few hundred worry the lack of a bank will push people to shop and do business elsewhere, while introducing a big inconvenience into their daily lives.

MacTier locals have been told they can do their banking 23 kilometres to the southeast in Bala, or in Parry Sound, which is about 40 kilometres north.

“You’re pulling the economic rug out from under our feet,” said Lorna Keall, who has lived in MacTier for more than 60 years and runs the Muskoka Station Store on High St., where she sells gifts and lottery tickets.

“It’s a huge concern for all of us,” she said. “The last thing you want to do is encourage people to go out of town for one thing, because they’ll do it all.”

[LINK] "Nestle confirms labor abuse among Thai seafood suppliers"

This Al Jazeera article looking at the enslavement of Southeast Asians in the Thai fisheries is depressing.

Impoverished migrant workers in Thailand are sold or lured by false promises and forced to catch and process fish that ends up in global food giant Nestle SA's supply chains.

The unusual disclosure comes from Geneva-based Nestle SA itself, which in an act of self-policing announced the conclusions of its year-long internal investigation on Monday. The study found virtually all U.S. and European companies buying seafood from Thailand are exposed to the same risks of abuse in their supply chains.

Nestle SA, among the biggest food companies in the world, launched the investigation in December 2014, after reports from news outlets and nongovernmental organizations tied brutal and largely unregulated working conditions to their shrimp, prawns and Purina brand pet foods. Its findings echo those of The Associated Press in reports this year on slavery in the seafood industry that have resulted in the rescue of more than 2,000 fishermen.

The laborers come from Thailand's much poorer neighbors Myanmar and Cambodia. Brokers illegally charge them fees to get jobs, trapping them into working on fishing vessels and at ports, mills and seafood farms in Thailand to pay back more money than they can ever earn.

[LINK] "Plants, Electrified: Scientists Just Grew Conductive Wires Inside Real Roses"

William Herkewitz's Popular Mechanics article shares news of a technology of astonishing power and beauty.

Today scientists have taken a surprising leap toward actually integrating living plants into human electronics and power systems: A team of Swedish botanists and electrical engineers unveiled a fascinating method of growing and powering conductive wires inside living plants.

Led by Eleni Stavrinidou—a bioelectronic engingeer at Linköping University in Linköping, Sweden—the scientists employed a transparent, conductive gel that cut roses could naturally soak up into their stems and leaves. After a few hours, the gel material would harden and form flexible wires inside the plants' stems. Thanks to the fantastic properties of the plant-embedded wires, electric current could even be run through the wired stems, without (as far as the scientists could tell) damaging the plants.

"Although many attempts have been made to augment plant function with electroactive materials, [until now] plants' 'circuitry' has never been directly merged with electronics," writes the reseach team. The scientists describe their curious, bionic vegetation today in a remarkably titled science paper —"Electronic plants"—in the journal Science Advances.

Stavrinidou's research team tested countless conductive materials before they came across a winner. Their aim was to get plants to soak up materials that could later harden into wires through the plants xylem, the vein-like system a plant uses to transport water and nutrients. However, most materials (for example, two molecules called pyrrole and aniline) either simply wouldn't uptake, proved toxic when it came down to the hardening phase, or would clog the xylem. In the end, the winning material was a transparent, organic polymer that basically acts like conductive plastic. It's a flavor of a material called PEDOT—short for poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene).

The research team also discovered that rose leaves, when submerged in PEDOT gel, also could uptake the material into a cell layer called the spongy mesophyll. After the PEDOT hardened into a conductive layer, the infused leafs could be introduced to electric current, reversibly darkening and lightening the leaf. While the molecular reason for this color change is still not fully understood, the scientists noted that the PEDOT-infused leafs could be kept alive just as long as unaffected rose leaves.

[LINK] "The first website went online 25 years ago today"

Jon Fingas' brief Engadget article is only two days old.

If the web were a person, it wouldn't have trouble renting a car from now on: the world's first website, Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web, went online 25 years ago today. The inaugural page wasn't truly public when it went live at CERN on December 20th, 1990 (that wouldn't happen until August 1991), and it wasn't much more than an explanation of how the hypertext-based project worked. However, it's safe to say that this plain page laid the groundwork for much of the internet as you know it -- even now, you probably know one or two people who still think the web is the internet.

More there.

[URBAN NOTE] Two Spacing Toronto links about UberHop

First is Sean Marshall's "King Street: How the TTC can strike back against UberHop".

On Friday, John Lornic made an interesting case that UberHop, the controversial new service launched by the San Francisco-based “ridesharing” business, is the kick in the behind that the TTC needs to take seriously the problem of getting across the downtown core.

Lornic makes an important point: UberHop will be susceptible to the same congestion that plagues the 504 King Streetcar, the TTC’s busiest surface route. The King car carries nearly 65,000 passengers a day, but congestion and overcrowded streetcars and shuttle buses along the line have made it difficult for commuters along the line. This is why private-sector alternatives, like the short-lived Line 6 shuttle bus, seem so appealing. Now Uber is giving the private jitney service a try, looking to fill a need in the marketplace for $5 a ride.

But there is a solution that the TTC has looked at and proposed — a King Street Transit Mall — but sunk by local opposition and City Council’s indifference. I wrote more about the idea on my blog.

Rapid residential growth, both east and west of the downtown core, have overloaded the 504 King Streetcar. With 64,600 daily riders, it’s the busiest surface route in the system. The city has done little to facilitate this highrise boom in neighbbourhoods such as Corktown and the Distillery District in the east, and CityPlace, Liberty Village, Niagara, and Queen/Gladstone in the west. Further west, the highrise condos built at Humber Bay Shores must either rely on a painfully slow and unreliable ride on the 501 Queen Streetcar, take an infrequent double-fare express bus, or ride a bus up to the Bloor Subway.

John Lorinc's "Why UberHop will help the TTC" is the article referenced.

When I look at the wonderfully clean map that Uber has provided for its new jitney service, it’s not hard to see how frustrated commuters from transit deserts like Liberty Village might be lulled into believing that the San Francisco sharing monster will solve their morning problems.

After all, the routes look like they could be drone flight paths, all converging on King and Bay.

But as the Uberati will soon discover, those shared cabs must navigate the same core streets that are already so clogged they have slowed transit service to a crawl.

What does Uber know that the TTC doesn’t know?

Nothing, really, except how to use its considerable marketing savvy to capitalize on turning point moments the TTC should ordinarily have to itself, such as the introduction last week of the proof-of-payment rear door access on streetcars (this isn’t the first time Uber has piggy-backed on transit news to market itself).

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Antipope Charlie Stross takes down the flawed universe-building of fantasy fiction.


• Anthropology.net notes that apparently, continents without agriculture saw their populations grow as much as continents with agriculture.


• Centauri Dreams considers Wolf 1061c.


• The Dragon's Tales notes that the Puebloans took part in long-distance trade, as noted by their food.


• The Extremo Files notes a new effort to map the badly underexplored oceans of our world.


• Joe. My. God. notes the five-year anniversary of the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes Mexico's lawsuit against BP for Deepwater Horizon's spill.


• Personal Reflections' Jim Belshaw is critical of New South Wales' new regulation of cyclists. (I personally think much of it should be copied in Ontario.)


• The Planetary Society Blog's Emily Lakdawalla notes satellite observations of Earth changing through the seasons.


• Spacing reviews Ladders, an exciting-sounding book about urban development.


• Window on Eurasia notes a poll suggesting three-quarters of Russians blame the West for their country's economic problems.

[META] What do you think is the future of blogging?

I suppose that my question of the title could well be phrased as something like "Does blogging have a future?" Do you think so? What do you think it should be?

(Yes, this relates directly to my content here at A Bit More Detail. Don't let that stop you.)