[PHOTO] A Chinese letter in the Galleria Dollarama, Toronto

I found this letter, written entirely in Chinese, resting near the chip rack at the Galleria Mall's Dollarama. What does it mean?

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• blogTO looks at Toronto's north/south-divided streets.


• The Dragon's Gaze suggests that there might be lightning in protoplanetary disks.


• The Dragon's Tales considers way to make gasoline a biofuel.


• Far Outliers notes the breakdown of interethnic relations in the late Soviet South Caucasus into war.


• Joe. My. God. let George Takei explain why he stayed in the closet.


• Language Hat likes the poetry of Pasternak.


• Language Log notes a bizarre clip from 1930s New York City featuring a boy scout speaking Cantonese.


• Marginal Revolution links to a paper suggesting that economists overlooked the rise of the 1% because of sampling issues and argues that power couples worsen economic inequality.


• Cheri Lucas Rowlands shares photos from Paris in December.


• The Russian Demographics Blog notes unhelpful reactions to the decline of Russian as a language of wider communication.


• Window on Eurasia notes turbulence in the Russian Orthodox Church (1, 2) and suggests the Donbas is likely to evolve into a second Chechnya.

[LINK] "Deciphering Beluga Whales’ Bubble Language"

Kiona Smith-Strickland's D-Brief post looking at research into the meaning of the bubbles blown by belugas appeals to me. I like belugas a lot--the above is a photo I took at Marineland of one in 2007. That perhaps this same animal, this canaries of the sea, was a subject in the research project in question is just fantastic.

Whales and dolphins have a wide repertoire of ways to communicate with each other, from complex vocalizations to body language and even blowing bubbles.

And after watching 44 captive belugas for the past eight years at Marineland of Canada, in Ontario, animal behavior researchers Elizabeth George and Michael Noonan say they’ve begun to decode belugas’ bubble language. They believe beluga whales blow bubbles that correspond to specific states of mind. Their observations raise some new questions about beluga whales’ social lives.

Belugas, George and Noonan say, blow bubbles in four distinct flavors: blowhole drips, blowhole bursts, blowhole streams and mouth rings. A shimmering bubble ring or a handful of little bubbles slowly released from the whale’s blowhole, for example, usually indicates a playful attitude, while large, sudden bursts of bubbles seem to be a warning or a defensive reaction to something startling.

It’s impossible to say for certain what is going through a whale’s mind, of course, but researchers can draw some conclusions about what a behavior means based on when it happens. Researchers are careful not to anthropomorphize, or assign human emotions to animal behavior.

And the findings come with another important caveat: George and Noonan were observing belugas in captivity, not in their natural habitat. Animals in artificial environments may behave very differently than they would in the wild, so researchers have to take observations like these with a proverbial grain of salt.

The trouble is that it’s difficult to study belugas in the wild, so nearly all research on beluga bubble-blowing so far has been conducted in captivity. George and Noonan’s findings match other researchers’ observations of captive whales. They presented their findings at the annual conference of the Animal Behavior Society in July, and a more detailed paper is currently under review for publication in the journal Aquatic Mammals.

[LINK] "Gay Leather Scene Tones Down From Hard-Core to Dress-Up"

In The New York Times, Michael Musto describes the transition of the gay leather scene, from lifestyle to something more like a hobby. The generation gap described is fascinating.

On a warm Saturday night in November, about 800 gay men wearing harnesses and other items made of leather gathered at Brut, a party held at Santos Party House in Lower Manhattan.

Mostly in their 20s and 30s, the men danced to pounding house music, flirted in an intimate lounge below the dance floor and ogled two beefy go-go men gyrating on boxes. Shirts came off, but leather harnesses stayed on all night, as Brut bills itself as New York’s only monthly leather party.

But if the party was introducing the leather scene to younger gay men who had never heard of the Village People, it also underscored a social shift: The leather scene has lost much of its overt sadomasochistic edge, and is now more about dressing up.

“I’m wearing a harness from Nasty Pig” — a sex-oriented clothing store in Chelsea — “but I’m not a part of the leather community,” said Joseph Alexiou, 31, a writer in New York, who was taking a break from the dance floor. “This party is introducing leather in a fun way that doesn’t seem so serious.”

Stalwarts of the leather scene agree that there has been a shift from lifestyle to sexy dress-up.

[LINK] "The Last King of Coal Makes His Stand as Mines Vanish Around Him"

Bloomberg's Andrew M. Harris describes how the last of the big American coal magnates is desperately fighting against the end of his industry. I do feel a certain amount of sympathy for Robert E. Murray, but the death of the industry he's connected to is inevitable. For the good of the planet, too.

At a time when the U.S. coal industry is beset on all sides -- by environmentalists, by regulators, by the economics of shale gas -- Murray has positioned himself as King Coal’s warrior-in-chief. And his main antagonist is the country’s commander-in-chief.

He calls Barack Obama “the greatest enemy I’ve ever had in my life.” His fight with the president, he says, has gotten “beyond personal.”

Since Inauguration Day in 2009, Murray Energy Corp. has filed no fewer than a dozen separate lawsuits against the federal government, more than any other U.S. coal company. Murray, the man, is trying to beat back Obama administration regulations, which he says are strangling his industry. Someone, he says, has to try.

It’s an uphill battle, perhaps even a quixotic one. But that isn’t dissuading Murray, who’s built his private company into the No. 6 U.S. coal producer, according to 2013 data collected by the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Since then, he has expanded further while many others have retreated, paying $1.37 billion last March for a controlling stake in Foresight Energy LP. Adding its extensive operations in the Illinois basin, Murray Energy now can produce nearly 65 million tons of coal a year.

[. . .]

Today he’s responsible for a company with 7,500 employees digging coal out of 13 mines in five states. Not surprisingly, he’s no big fan of the recent Paris climate agreement, dismissing it as “a meaningless fraud that will have no effect on carbon dioxide emissions.”

[LINK] "Sino-Russian energy relations reversed: a new little brother"

Open Democracy's Morena Skalamera suggests that the new dependence of the Russian economy on oil and natural gas exports to China may not be in Russia's long-term advantage.

Closer Russo-Chinese energy ties mean that China may agree to take up the slack of investment in the wake of sanctions, pouring money into energy field development in exchange for increasing stakes in Russia’s upstream, already seen in CNPC’s recent acquisition of a 10 per cent stake in Rosneft’s subsidiary Vancorneft. In practice, China is committed to provide the financial liquidity that Russian companies desperately need in light of collapsing investment and severe recession.

Thus, Russia’s geopolitical victory offered Putin a desired dose of grand visuals to bolster the regime’s narrative of an easy Asian pivot. But the realities of Russia’s position vis-à-vis China belie a different and less advantageous set of emerging paradigms. Any equity stakes that China may see as a result of the deal will weigh significantly on the profitability of the deal in practice.

Since China does not depend on Russian gas the way Europe does, price guarantees and upstream stakes will most likely become sine qua non in future deals. The same is likely to be true for making Russia’s pipelines conform to preferred Chinese routes, as seemed to happen in October 2014 when Gazprom announced the potential cancellation of Vladivostok LNG. This giant project is likely to be substituted with a third gas pipeline to China, in addition to the agreed Power of Siberia and the planned Altai pipeline, thus greatly refocusing Russian resources on bolstering supplies to China.

In turn, this would signal the abandonment of Gazprom’s strategic aspirations to diversify its energy ties to the Asian-Pacific market to service Japan as well as South Korea, putting all of the proverbial eggs in the China basket.

All of this points to a scenario in which Russia will come to operate as a resource appendage to China—one that, in order to supplant western partnerships, accedes to China’s seniority in the energy partnership in exchange for the loans and investments necessary to drive energy development and production. Thus, the picture of what is likely to happen if the price of oil stays low, if western sanctions against Russia do not abate, and if China continues to develop at a relatively robust pace, is not a pretty one for Russia.

[LINK] "Zimbabwe to adopt China's currency the yuan"

Al Jazeera reports on a new shift that I'm not convinced is even of symbolic importance. To be quite honest, how relevant is Zimbabwe?

Zimbabwe plans to adopt the Chinese yuan as legal tender in return for debt cancellation worth about $40m - a move one economist predicted "has no future at all".

China has become the largest investor in Zimbabwe, which has been shunned by the West over its human rights record and is struggling to emerge from a deep 1999-2008 recession that forced the government to ditch its own currency in 2009.

Zimbabwe's Finance Minister Patrick Chinamasa announced the plan in a statement on Monday and said the use of the yuan "will be a function of trade between China and Zimbabwe and acceptability with customers in Zimbabwe".

[. . .]

However, according to one Zimbabwean analyst, the yuan has already been a legal tender for the past two years and Chinamasa's comments are rather puzzling.

"Nothing looks to change from this latest move," economist John Roberston told Al Jazeera.

"Yuan was included in the so-called multi-currency system a couple of years ago. It's nothing new. What is different is the attachment to debts. It seems that the government is trying to pass this on as a concession by China.

"But they don't need to make concessions. This is pretty meaningless as it stands."

[LINK] "Ethiopia, Egypt dam feud drags on"

Al Monitor's Ayah Aman writes about the continuing tensions between Egypt and Ethiopia over the latter's plans to build a dam on the Nile that might threaten downstream water consumption. It does not seem to me as if Egypt is in the best position, honestly.

Negotiations between Cairo, Addis Ababa and Khartoum have entered a decisive stage in which the parties must express their final stance concerning the controversy and disagreement caused by Ethiopia's Grand Renaissance Dam, which threatens Egypt’s annual share of the Nile waters. Meetings involving the parties’ foreign affairs and water ministers have intensified, as Ethiopia and Egypt are preparing by finding alternatives that speed up the implementation of the studies should the feud deepen and the negotiations fall through.

On Dec. 11, the foreign affairs and water ministers met in six-party talks in Khartoum, after the failure of technical initiatives to break the deadlock over a mechanism to reduce the dam’s repercussions on Egypt and Sudan. These talks represent a new attempt at direct political negotiations to reach an agreement or a mechanism guaranteeing no harmful effects for Egypt and Sudan will come from the dam. However, construction is underway regardless of the results of the negotiations or studies, which are supposed to modify the construction standards if needed to mitigate the damage.

The parties exhibited anxiety and tension, especially the Egyptian and Ethiopian delegations, throughout the closed meetings on Dec. 11-12. The talks concluded with a brief statement read by Sudanese Foreign Affairs Minister Ibrahim al-Ghandur, who declared, “The parties did not reach any agreement, and meetings will be resumed on Dec. 27 and 28, at the same level of political and technical representation.”

The main problem between the Egyptian and Ethiopian delegations during the meeting concerned the clauses under discussion. While the Egyptian delegation demanded to speed up the technical studies of the dam’s effects that began more than 18 months ago with the formation of a tripartite technical committee, the Ethiopians stressed the importance of the technical studies, as per the Declaration of Principles.

The Egyptian foreign affairs minister demanded that the meeting focus on discussing a new mechanism to agree on the dam’s administration and operation policies and fill the reservoir directly, without wasting any more time to reach a written agreement.

[LINK] "Turkey-Russia Conflict Divides South Caucasus"

Eurasianet's Giorgi Lomsadze describes how the Turkish-Russian feud is forcing the states of the South Caucasus to pick sides, in something that is not going to be in their benefit at all. (Armenia, as expected, is aligning with Russia, while Georgia and--more reluctantly--Azerbaijan are moving towards Turkey.)

Sandwiched between Turkey and Russia, and for centuries a battleground for the erstwhile empires, the South Caucasus is bracing for fallout from the geopolitical furor sparked by the Turkish downing of a Russian fighter jet.

Memories of multiple Ottoman-Tsarist wars that ravaged the South Caucasus from the 17th to the 20th centuries still exert influence over public opinion in the region. But modern-day issues wield the most influence in shaping loyalties, splitting the region into pro-Turkey and pro-Russia camps. The three states in the region – Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia – are coming under growing pressure to choose sides following Turkey’s November 24 shoot-down of the Su-24 fighter.

Armenia, Russia’s main, if only, committed ally in the South Caucasus, has been quick in unequivocally backing the Kremlin. With no diplomatic ties with Turkey to worry about, Yerevan essentially has echoed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “stab-in-the-back” line about Turkey’s conduct.

Armenian public opinion backs Moscow’s military objectives in Syria, according to policy analyst Vahram Ter-Matevosian, a lecturer at the American University of Armenia. Prior to the outbreak of the civil war, Syria had been home to a large ethnic Armenian Diaspora. Meanwhile, Russia has long been a guarantor of Armenia’s security, a status underscored by the presence of a Russian military base in the northern Armenian town of Gyumri, not far from the Turkish border.

With Russia’s actions in Syria possibly set to expand, Moscow might look to use Gyumri as a “lily pad” facility that supports its Syrian campaign.

The “increasing military engagement of the Russian armed forces in this war [in Syria] will require huge resources,” said Ter-Matevosian. “Armenia is the closest [place] to the Syrian front where Russia has military bases. Hence, Armenia, as Russia’s strategic ally and a CSTO [Moscow-led Collective Security Treaty Organization] member, may be asked to contribute.”

[LINK] "E-book sales plateau while print books hold place in readers' hearts"

CBC's Laura MacNaughton and Renee Filippone write about the relative lack of in-road made by e-books. I'm inclined to think, myself, that e-books and print books might occupy different niches, at least for the time being. (As always with e-book statistics, be wary about their validity.)

When e-books were first introduced more than a decade ago it appeared that print was in danger, but that so-called death of the physical book hasn't happened.

According to the Association of American Publishers, U.S. e-book sales during the first five months of 2015 declined by 10.3 per cent.

BookNet Canada has done consumer research around e-books sales in Canada and found that sales on this side of the border are not going up.

"What we are seeing in Canada is that over the last year or so, two years, it's been a ... plateauing of the e-book numbers," said BookNet Canada CEO Noah Genner.

Genner urged caution over the low sales numbers being reported in the U.S. suggesting that they aren't all inclusive and only take into account e-book sales by the big publishers.

"There is a whole other piece of the market that isn't reported into those AAP numbers and that's self-published authors and micro-publishers and even some indie publishers. And so they may be doing very very well in digital," said Genner.

[LINK] "A poem becomes immortal embedded in bacterial DNA"

Experimental Toronto poet Christian Bök's embedded of his newest collection of poetry in the DNA of radiation-resistant bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans is the subject of this article by the Toronto Star's Ryan Porter. The ambition impresses me, honestly.

At Coach House Books, poet Christian Bök (pronounced “book”) is stuffing signed and lettered copies of his first collection of poetry in 14 years, The Xenotext: Book 1, into zippered wallets.

He’ll build 26 of these Deluxe Edition packages, one for each letter of the alphabet, stuffed with 12 pieces of “ephemera” — including a comic that outlines Bök’s manifesto and a glyph that, when held up to a webcam, creates a hologram of a poem by Amaranth Borsuk.

He’s dressed today in loose jeans, a turquoise T-shirt, a grey blazer and a belt buckle of sufficient size and shine to betray the 10 years he’s spent in Calgary, where he teaches in the English department at the University of Calgary.

The variety of work in The Xenotext includes pastoral poetry, a day-in-the-hive itinerary of a bee colony, a prose explanation of the parts and processes of DNA (including both illustrations and photographs), acrostic poems that use the three-letter structure of a molecule to talk about bees, and ruminations on the apocalypse.

What it does not include are the show-stopping centrepieces of Bök’s ambitious project. It goes something like this: having written the sonnet “Orpheus,” he created a code to translate the English poem into the alphabetical sequences of DNA. He then embedded that translated DNA sequence into E. coli. The E. coli then interpreted that DNA as a set of instructions to build a protein. When the DNA of that protein is translated back into English, it is a new sonnet called “Eurypidis.” (Cue mind explosion.)

[PHOTO] In defense of photographs at art galleries, even selfies

On my Tumblr feed a week or two ago, I came across an article of some interest to me, "An Amsterdam Museum Asks Visitors to Trade Their Selfie Sticks for Pencils and Paper"/a>.

Rijksmuseum, an arts and history museum located in the heart of Amsterdam, is asking visitors to put down their cameras and pick up a pen next time they enter the museum’s walls. Rijksmuseum’s new campaign #startdrawing wants to slow down observers, encouraging attendees to draw sculptures and paintings that interest them rather than snapping a picture and moving on to the next work in quick succession.

By slowing down the process of observation, the visitor is able to get closer to the artist’s secrets, the museum explains, engaging with each work by actively doing instead of passively capturing. “In our busy lives we don’t always realize how beautiful something can be,” said Wim Pijbes, the general director of the Rijksmuseum. “We forget how to look really closely. Drawing helps because you see more when you draw.” The museum has begun to highlight drawings completed by participants on their Instagram as well as their blog associated with the campaign here.

Banning cameras (or softly dissuading attendees from using them) is also a way to bring the focus from the selfie an attendee may take with a work of art to the masterpiece before them. A perfectly timed exhibition titled “Selfies on Paper” is currently on display in the museum — 90 self-portraits from well known artists from the 17th to 20th century spread through each floor of the museum. The exhibition shows how artists captured themselves on paper while acting as a challenge to those who might have thought selfie sticks were the only tool appropriate for self preservation. “Selfies on Paper” will run though the winter.

Oh. Where do I start?

Perhaps I should note that giving me a pen and some paper to sketch upon is not going to produce anything lasting. Even assuming that I can draw, and that I have the time, any paper document I would take with me from the museum would likely go with,the other papers I take from museums, into closets and bins and eventually sent off to be recycled. Some people might prefer ephemera; I prefer artifacts which have the durabilty of the digital.

More to the point, who is to say that photography is not an activity that requires a certain amount of skill and attention. I went to the Art Gallery of Ontario’s fantastic Welcome to Colville exhibition twice, and took photos of the Alex Colville works most important to me both times. (They can be found on my blog, here and here.) I can assure the reader that I took great care in looking at this artworks, paying attention to them, trying to compose images in my mind.



Is the process of photography different from drawing? Sure. Are there things in common between the two processes? Definitely. I’m certainly engaging with the art.

There’s also the question of the selfie, raised slightingly in the article. As a glance at my photographic output should make clear, I’m not especially fond of the selfie myself. Leaving aside a possible reluctance to be photographed, I think that I see the photographer as implicit in the photograph. When you see one of my photographs, you hopefully see something close to what I saw there on the museum floor.

That said, there definitely are photographs of me at Welcome to Colville. My mother took this photograph of me in front of “To Prince Edward Island” on our trip to the AGO, my second to see this exhibition.



The plush lobster claw on my arm, something available in the exhibit’s gift shop, was a straightforward selfie.



What’s wrong with inserting myself into my memory of the exhibit? Why should I not have digital documents showing me a wonderful afternoon I had with my visiting mother, or documenting my bemusement at finding such a thing as a plush lobster claw? Should I efface myself, not have any kind of explicit presence at all? I think not.

There’s nothing wrong with a program encouraging visitors to draw artworks they see. There’s also nothing wrong with letting visitors take photographs of those same artworks in ways meaningful to them.

[BRIEF NOTE] On the life and death of expanded universes, in Star Trek and Star Wars

Earlier this month, someone on Quora asked a question about Star Wars' Expanded Universe, the collection of books, comics and games that have been made officially out of date by the new movies.

How do I get over the fact that the Star Wars "Expanded Universe" is no longer canon?

I tried to like the new canon. I really did. I watched "The Force Awakens", and while it wasn't bad, it really bothered me that it didn't follow the Star Wars Expanded Universe (EU). I grew up on the EU--through most of my childhood it was my life. Now it's just causing me anxiety. What now?back in June, in connection to this expanded universe's Star Trek equivalent. Writing an answer made sense to me.

* * *

I'm familiar with this sort of issue through my participation in the fandom of Star Trek, specifically the novels and other secondary material.



To date, there have been two separate canons of Star Trek tie-in material. The first materialized in the 1980s, alongside the movies but at a time when there was very little new material coming out. To make up for this, the authors of the authorized tie-in novels published by Pocket Books ended up creating a loose but real continuity, one which went into much greater detail about the universe of the 23rd century. Some authors took a deeper look at the Federation and its different worlds and their histories, for instance. Others took a look at other civilizations: Diane Duane's Rihannsu series, taking an in-depth look at the Romulans, was acclaimed. This continuity spread beyond the novels, overlapping substantially with the setting of FASA's Star Trek: The Role Playing Game..

This all changed. In large part this was because Star Trek: The Next Generation came out, hugely expanding the televisual canon. Roddenberry and the other owners of Star Trek intellectual property saw no particular need to incorporate the derivative tie-in material. This was particularly the case when they had objections to the content of much of the material--Roddenberry was taken aback by much of the alleged militarism of the roleplaying game, for instance. The end result was a shift from the late 1980s on, particularly under the stewardship of Richard Arnold, towards the production of tie-in material that not only had no connection to the loose canon of the 1980s but had no connection to each other. All fans got were disconnected stories, nothing with lasting consequence.

This began to change from the mid-1990s on. As television production on the different series began to wind down, different editors and writers at Pocket Books began to assemble a new continuity. From my perspective, much of this seems to do with crossover events. After the end of Deep Space Nine, the 2000 creation of the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine relaunch series led to a massive surge in the creation of a new novelverse canon, a veritable expanded universe. This has lasted to the present day, and has enabled what I think is a veritable surge of creativity. In this new novelverse canon, things happen which have lasting consequences: People die, people get together, civilizations end or are transformed. There is a sense of dynamic progress that in many cases we did not get on the television show. It's great!

Of course, this is all fragile. The novelverse might be popular and even very good, but in Trek canon the novels rate as nothing next to the television shows. The 24th century might be safe from new television shows which would challenge the existing novelverse canon, or it might not. Perhaps more seriously, the current focus on the alternate 23rd century continuity created in the new movies could lead to radical shifts, whether by contradicting the continuity of the current universe or by leading to an end to the current production. Maybe future generations of show-runners will prefer that tie-in material only be produced to the continuity being worked by television? The expanded universe that I've been actively consuming for a decade can come to an end so easily.

How do I deal with this looming possibility? I would prefer that the fictional universes I consume last indefinitely, that they continue to develop, but this is simply beyond my control. Last year's article at TheForce.net, "Anger Leads to Hate: Inside The Movement To Save The Expanded Universe", made the point that no amount of reaction from the fans was likely to save *Star Wars*' original expanded universe. There is simply much more money, and much more market, to be found in the creation of new material, on film and on television. The economics are the same for *Star Trek*. Why should I get upset by something I cannot control? The answer is that I should not. What would be the point?

Even if the current continuity did end, that by no means requires me to stop liking the material that has come out. Vonda N. MacIntyre's 1981 The Entropy Effect was the first novel produced in the 1980s continuity I'd mentioned. Even though it belongs to that continuity only, never having been explicitly referenced in the television series or in any novel that I know of, The Entropy Effect is still an exciting and compelling story. Why would I not reread it? If the current Trek expanded universe met the same fate as its predecessor, the stories that were exciting and compelling to me before its end would remain as effective after its end. I cannot imagine that the Star Wars Legends books would be any different.

Finally, for people really upset that the expanded universe of old is gone, they might want to keep an eye out for elements of the expanded universe which make it into the current continuity. The season one TNG episode "Where No One Has Gone Before", co-authored by the aforementioned Duane, is substantially based on her earlier novel The Wounded Sky, while the creation of the Klingons as a species of warriors capable of great honour seems to owe much to the novels. Some stories and story elements from the previous novel continuity have likewise made it into the present. Despite significant differences in the description of the Romulans, for instance, the culture and history of Duane's Rihannsu continues to be the culture of the Romulans in the contemporary novelverse. On a more abstract level, Kurtzman and Orci have explicitly acknowledged their influences from various Trek novels, influences which create an atmosphere common to these novels and their movies. Katharine Trendacosta's io9 article "What The Force Awakens Borrowed From the Old Star Wars Expanded Universe" suggests that the Expanded Universe of old may have been a substantial influence, as was in fact implied by Disney when the announcement was made. What's wrong with seeing the better concepts you liked on the big and small screens in recognizable form?

TLDR: Just try to keep in mind that we read these tie-in stories for fun, like we do any stories. Whether or not the particular universe they exist in continues or not is fundamentally irrelevant to their enjoyability.