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Jan. 5th, 2016
[BLOG] Some Tuesday links
Jan. 5th, 2016 12:16 pm- blogTO shares photos of Yonge Street going back a century.
- Centauri Dreams talks about some vintage science fictions set at Alpha Centauri.
- The Dragon's Gaze notes a simulation suggesting that, in solar systems like ours with massive outer gas giants, impacts like those which formed the Moon are common.
- The Dragon's Tales notes Russia's interests in roboticizing its military.
- Far Outliers shares Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan's concern about the new gatedness of the Internet.
- Language Log notes the death of John Holm, a linguist who studied creoles.
- Marginal Revolution notes Sweden's imposition of border controls.
- Personal Reflections' Jim Belshaw speculates about Australia's prospects in the coming year.
- Torontoist shares its list of local heroes and villains.
Bloomberg's Vivian Nereim describes how Saudi Arabia's recent executions, which have taken tensions with Iran to new heights, were apparently intended as messages to its domestic constituencies. How short-sighted.
Saudi Arabia’s execution of 47 men last weekend quickly became an international drama, agitating markets and triggering a flare-up with longtime rival Iran. But Saudi-watchers say the move was really meant to send a message inside the kingdom’s borders.
After a year of domestic attacks that left dozens dead, and with the economy hurting from the oil slump and a prolonged war in Yemen, the rulers of the world’s biggest oil exporter may be seeking to show the Saudi public that they’re tough on terrorism and won’t tolerate dissent. A large majority of those executed were Sunni Muslims said to be linked with al-Qaeda and implicated in attacks more than a decade ago, though it was the death of Shiite Muslim cleric Nimr al-Nimr that received the most overseas attention and spurred protesters in Shiite-ruled Iran to set the Saudi embassy on fire.
“It largely plays to a domestic audience,” said Toby Matthiesen, author of The Other Saudis, a study of the kingdom’s Shiite minority. “The executions, especially the one of al-Nimr, are very popular among a lot of Saudis,” he said. “It’s a way of kind of rallying people around the flag.”
Al-Nimr’s execution on Saturday and the subsequent breakdown in ties between Saudi Arabia and Iran raised the specter of deepening conflicts in a region where the two powers are already on opposing sides of wars in Syria and Yemen. Tensions have escalated as the administration of King Salman, who ascended to the Saudi throne almost a year ago after the death of his brother Abdullah, breaks with the kingdom’s traditionally cautious foreign policy.
The executions may be intended to reinforce Salman’s more assertive stance, said Robert Jordan, a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia.
At The Conversation, Edward Wastnidge writes about how the Iranian nuclear deal, by reincorporating Iran into the international system, is making Saudi Arabia feel insecure next to its main regional challenger. This insecurity can lead to risk-taking, indeed.
As 2015 drew to a close, you could have been forgiven for cautious optimism as far as Saudi-Iranian relations were concerned. With the years-in-the-making nuclear deal finally sealed, Iran had finally been brought in from the cold in talks over the Syrian conflict. A fragile ceasefire had been agreed between the warring factions in Yemen. Iran and Saudi Arabia had also begun planning direct talks on the issues that had been dividing the two regional powerhouses.
The execution of the Saudi Shiite cleric Nimr al-Nimr on January 2, however, has brought the mutual mistrust that plagues relations between these two states fully into the open. This crisis will clearly have a major impact on the various regional conflicts that Iran and Saudi Arabia are embroiled in – but with the sanctions imposed before the nuclear deal possibly about to be lifted, it also speaks volumes about Iran’s rapidly improving diplomatic position.
The lifting of sanctions against the Islamic Republic will no doubt strengthen Iran’s position both regionally and globally. Iran has already started to reap the diplomatic benefits of constructive engagement, as shown by its participation in the dialogue over Syria before any sanctions were removed. While that upward trajectory could have been stymied by the latest clash, and Bahrain, Kuwait, Sudan and the UAE have already cut their ties with Tehran, the key global powers have simply invested too much in the nuclear deal to see it thwarted by regional rivalry.
That much has been made clear by the West’s measured response to this crisis, with the US urging diplomatic engagement and accusing Saudi Arabia of exacerbating tensions at a time when they need to be reduced. In previous years, the attacks by protesters on the Saudi embassy in Tehran would have been met with a far stronger response against Iran and in favour of Saudi Arabia, particularly from the US.
The Dragon's Tales linked to a BBC feature discussing the idea of covering North Africa's Sahara desert with solar panels, to generate energy for profitable export to Europe. The people interviewed, including proponent Dr. Gerhard Knies, seem at worse cautiously positive about the idea.
"Fifteen minutes after I learned about the nuclear accident at Chernobyl, I made an assessment of how much energy comes from the sun to the earth. It was about 15,000 times as much as humanity was using, so it was not a question of the source, it was a question of the technology.
"When the climate change issue became more prominent, I said we have to pull forward this solution, because it solves the industrial vulnerability problem of our civilisation, and at the same time, the climate vulnerability.
"My strategy was to look for amplifiers. A very good one was The Club of Rome, with its president, Prince Hassan from Jordan. We had a seminar with experts. We included European participants, but also people from North Africa, Jordan and the Middle East. They all said 'Yes, that would be great for us to have such a thing.'
"We did a study so that we had numbers which are scientifically sound, based on the present knowledge in a clear way. We got support from Greenpeace and from several scientific institutions and big companies.
"We didn't want politicians in the game; it should just be scientifically sound and economically viable. But politicians liked it, and when the Desertec Industrial Initiative launched in Munich in July 2009, we were flooded with politicians. When they see the potential for a solution they get interested.
Bloomberg's Heejin Kim describes the extent to which South Korea's thriving media and pop-cultural industries are becoming major drivers of the country's economy, supplanting the old heavy industries which drove the country into the First World in the first place.
While Korean steel mills and ship yards struggled to stay in business in 2015, the nation’s media companies were busy emulating the boom years of the 1980s -- literally.
Shares of CJ E&M, which owns cable TV channel tvN, doubled in 2015 as it capped a year of hits with a weekly drama called "Reply 1988." The show depicting the lives of high school students during a year of 11.9 percent economic growth and the Seoul Olympics struck a chord with households in an economy reeling from 11 months of slumping exports.
The "Korean Wave" of popular culture that spans drama, K-Pop music, fashion and cosmetics boosted a range of stocks last year as companies around Asia sought co-productions or product tie-ins. Shares in Showbox Corp. and Chorokbaem Media Co. jumped more than 50 percent in 2015 on production tie-ups with companies from China.
"While the industries that led Korea’s growth for the past decades are having difficulties from getting out of the doldrums, we found the media content industry emerging as a promising sector for the next generation," said Chang Lee, head of the Equity Research Center at NH Investment and Securities. "We are neighboring with China, a major content importer, and both countries signed a free trade agreement recently."
The Toronto Star carries a Canadian Press article suggesting that the weakening dollar means a new bridge between Detroit and Windsor will cost substantially more than initially estimated.
The federal Liberal government will need to find $3.5 billion more to pay for a new bridge at the bustling border crossing between Canada and the United States.
Documents show Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been warned that the cost of building the new Windsor-Detroit bridge has likely gone up by at least $2 billion, thanks to the declining value of the Canadian dollar.
Government officials told Trudeau the project would also need an extra $1.5 billion in a contingency fund to bear the shock of any interest-rate increases should the loonie decline further against its American counterpart.
The government’s long-term fiscal framework has the price of the bridge, to be named after hockey legend Gordie Howe, pegged at $4.8 billion.
The details are laid out in a secret briefing note to Trudeau obtained by The Canadian Press under the Access to Information Act.
Kate Sheridan's article in the Montreal Gazette looks at an ongoing effort to revive the Irish language in that city. What I particularly like is that this places the current effort in the context of Québec's long Irish history.
The Irish language, or Gaeilge, is experiencing a mini-Renaissance in Montreal with the help of Concordia’s School of Canadian Irish Studies and Comhrá, a non-profit group that organizes Irish language classes and events.
Siobhán Ní Mhaolagáin has been teaching the language in Montreal since September, when she first arrived to accept a year-long position as Concordia University’s Ireland Canada University Foundation Irish language scholar. Comhrá had restarted its Irish language courses in the summer and when organizers asked if she’d like to teach their classes in the fall and winter, Ní Mhaolagáin said yes.
“People in Ireland sometimes don’t believe that I’m over here teaching Irish,” she said. “I’ll say, I’m heading off to teach Irish in Montreal. And they’ll be like, ‘Why?’ And I’ll say, ‘Well, there are Irish speakers in Montreal.’ And they’ll say, ‘You’re having a laugh.’ “
The Irish language is notoriously complex; the unusual sentence structure and confounding phonetics can create a steep learning curve. It’s also “definitely endangered” in UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger. There aren’t many people who speak Irish here — certainly fewer than in Ireland, where 25,000 students attended an annual event in November that challenged them to speak Irish, and only Irish, as much as possible for 24 hours.
In Montreal, about 20 people attended a satellite event, which Ní Mhaolagáin helped organize, to celebrate the Irish language with music, dancing and movies and to speak it as much as they could muster.
The Globe and Mail's Oliver Moore reports on the latest incarnation of the plans to redevelop Union Station.
A huge new market promising the best foodstuffs Toronto offers is at the heart of a proposed retail makeover at Union Station, part of an ambitious redevelopment of the country’s busiest transit hub.
New details about the plans for retail options at the station were revealed on Monday at city hall, and they include an oyster bar and restaurant in the historic great hall, high-end shops and space for cultural events.
“It’s changing, not just as a train station, but as a focal point and a community hub,” said councillor Paul Ainslie, chair of the city hall committee that heard the presentation.
The government management committee voted to approve $480,000 for legal and real estate advice and to give city staff the authority to re-negotiate the lease with Osmington Inc. Osmington, a development firm, is owned by David Thomson, the proprietor of The Globe and Mail
Long Winter's migration north to the Galleria Mall is non-trivially awesome. From blogTO's Amy Grief:
The Facebook event page is here. I'm definitely going ($C 10.99 a ticket).
Toronto's Long Winter is well-known for hosting monthly art and music parties at The Great Hall. But now, it's taking its seasonal event farther north to an unlikely place: the notorious Galleria Mall.
"It's a fun mall but also somewhat of a relic," says co-organizer Mike Haliechuk via email when I ask about the unique venue. "Lots of art happens in the neighbourhood and lots of artists live up there so it felt like a good fit to bring our community into the space."
On January 30, Haliechuk and the rest of his team will transform the rather depressing mall, complete with performances from TEENANGER, The Highest Order, VCR, New Fries and S.H.I.T. as well as an It's Not U It's Me dance party in an empty storefront. As per usual, there will be installations by local artists - including Andrew Lamb, Laura Dawe and Jonathan Carrol and Ben Macarthy - scattered about.
The Facebook event page is here. I'm definitely going ($C 10.99 a ticket).
On the 14th of December, I linked to an isochronic map of the world as seen from London in 1914. This map showed travel times from London, evoking the relative vastness of the world. Now, via Gizmodo, I've discovered a comparable map showing today's travel times.
The map, shown above and created by Rome2rio, shows how long it takes to get anywhere on the planet from London right now. It’s pretty thorough, bringing together data about 750,000 different travel routes from over 4,800 operators in 144 countries.
While the 1914 map, below, showed that it was possible to travel as far west as the Azores and as far east as the Russian city of Perm within five days from London, in 2016 the situation is a little different. For instance, Seattle and Vancouver once took more than 10 days to travel to from London; now they can be reached in under 12 hours. And the journey to the coldest city on Earth, Yakutsk, no longer takes 40 days—instead, you can get there in a mere three quarters of a day.
While travel times had been slashed in certain parts of the world by 1914 thanks to the train, in 2016 we can obviously thank the airplane. That’s perhaps most obvious in journey times to Asia—where a trip to Beijing or Tokyo took 40 days in 1914, it now takes less than a day.