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The intersection of Bathurst Street with Dundas Street West is one of the best vantage points in the downtown for people looking at Toronto's skyscrapers.
Jan. 7th, 2016
The intersection of Bathurst Street with Dundas Street West is one of the best vantage points in the downtown for people looking at Toronto's skyscrapers.
From CBC:
The spectacular image of a snowy owl in flight has been captured by Transport Quebec's traffic camera along Montreal's Highway 40.
The images were captured on Jan. 3 by a traffic camera at Highway 40 and Sources Boulevard.
[. . .]
According to Barbara Frei, the director of the McGill Bird Observatory, this young female was probably looking for a place to perch.
"I think they are attracted specifically to the highway because it has open, grassy fields nearby which is perfect for hunting their favourite prey, which is small rodents," she said.
"They like to get a good lay of the land and the high lamp posts or other posts that they can perch on while hunting just suits them perfectly."
CityLab's Steve Mollman describes how Singapore is set to build its own, island-wide, equivalent to New York City's High Line.
The success of the High Line in Manhattan certainly hasn’t gone unnoticed internationally. Since the High Line’s first phase opened in 2009, tourists and locals alike have flocked to the iconic park, built atop an elevated railroad spur that had fallen out of use.
Now, Singapore is creating its own version. And while the High Line runs for 2.33 km (1.45 miles), Singapore’s new park will be about 10 times longer at 24 km.
It will run along the route of the former Keretapi Tanah Melayu railway line, which was built in the British colonial period to transport tin, rubber, and other resources from the Malay Peninsula to the Singapore port. When Malaysia and Singapore separated in the mid-1960s, they agreed the railway would remain under Malaysian control. Thanks to an agreement reached in 2010, Singapore gained control of the largely neglected corridor.
The park’s winning master plan was announced in November and creates a seamless space for walking, jogging, and cycling. The Japanese architectural firm Nikken Sekkei designed the winning bid in collaboration with local landscape design firm Tierra Design, as well as with engineering and project management company Arup Singapore.
The city will be accepting public feedback on the plan in the months ahead, while the winning team carries out the preliminary design and feasibility study of an initial 4 km stretch. The proposal calls for over 120 access points, and includes 21 platforms with toilets and rest areas.
The Dragon's Tales linked to this EurekAlert! press release describing a study looking at the temperature of the world's lakes. I mentioned this study before in connection to the Great Lakes, but this is a worldwide trend.
Climate change is rapidly warming lakes around the world, threatening freshwater supplies and ecosystems, according to a study spanning six continents.
The study is the largest of its kind and the first to use a combination of satellite temperature data and long-term ground measurements. A total of 235 lakes, representing more than half of the world's freshwater supply, were monitored for at least 25 years. The research, published in Geophysical Research Letters, was announced today at the American Geophysical Union meeting.
The study, which was funded by NASA and the National Science Foundation, found lakes are warming an average of 0.61 degrees Fahrenheit (0.34 degrees Celsius) each decade. That's greater than the warming rate of either the ocean or the atmosphere, and it can have profound effects, the scientists say.
Algal blooms, which can ultimately rob water of oxygen, are projected to increase 20 percent in lakes over the next century as warming rates increase. Algal blooms that are toxic to fish and animals would increase by 5 percent. If these rates continue, emissions of methane, a greenhouse gas 25 times more powerful than carbon dioxide on 100-year time scales, will increase 4 percent over the next decade.
"Society depends on surface water for the vast majority of human uses," said co-author Stephanie Hampton, director of Washington State University's Center for Environmental Research, Education and Outreach in Pullman. "Not just for drinking water, but manufacturing, for energy production, for irrigation of our crops. Protein from freshwater fish is especially important in the developing world."
Jillian Kestler-D’Amours's Toronto Star article about a viral video set in the snow of Montréal was fun.
More, including the video, at the site.
This no tame two-step. Richard Laubonet, Kevin Noah, and Abdul Somade laugh and sing and use their shovels as props, moving in unison to move out the snow.
And that’s exactly what the African dance and fitness instructor did, when he and two friends picked up shovels to clear an area of a park in north-end Montreal.
In a video that has since garnered almost 380,000 views on Facebook, Laubonet and friends Kevin Noah (from Cameroon) and Abdul Somade (from Togo) fling heaps of snow over their shoulders in a choreographed dance set to African music.
They laugh and sing and use their shovels as props while moving in unison in the impromptu dance in the snow.
“I’m still blown away. I just can’t believe it,” Laubonet told the Star in a telephone interview on Wednesday about the response the video has received.
More, including the video, at the site.
Kristy Kirkup's Canadian Press report, published in the Toronto Star, notes that one expected consequence of global warming will hit the First Nations peoples of northern Ontario.
Wonky weather conditions are prompting aboriginal leaders to raise concerns about the impact of climate change on winter roads, which serve as lifelines for food, fuel and other necessities in several northern communities.
Isadore Day, the Ontario regional chief for the Assembly of First Nations, said the reliability of the northern winter road network is in jeopardy in his province.
“The winter roads have essentially become a way of life for the communities and now they can’t rely on those winter roads,” Day said, noting the network is used to offset the cost to bring essential goods to fly-in reserves by air.
The problem exemplifies why there was outcry from First Nations during the recent COP21 climate change summit in Paris, Day said.
“This is the type of issue where the rubber hits the road,” he said.
“There will be no road if we don’t have an opportunity to speak for ourselves on the issue of climate change and this certainly is a direct impact.”
MacLean's hosts Murray Brewster's The Canadian Press noting something that really doesn't surprise me, given what we know about the stresses on military people. The numbers are the only thing surprising me.
For what’s believed to be the first time, the federal government has estimated how many of Canada’s homeless are former soldiers — but the department that compiled the report warns the data is far from complete.
The March 2015 study by Employment and Social Development Canada estimates that 2,250 former soldiers use shelters on regular basis, about 2.7 per cent of the total homeless population that uses temporary lodging.
The information in the report, released to The Canadian Press under the Access to Information Act, comes from a database that tracks 60 emergency shelters across the country and added veterans as an identifiable category in 2014.
“It’s shocking in Canada that we would have any veteran who is homeless, but it is a sad reality,” Gen. Jonathan Vance, the country’s top military commander, said in an interview with The Canadian Press.
The report noted that the data still has some holes in it and does not capture the number of veterans who do not use shelters. The national findings contradict counts being done in individual cities, which analysts suggest means that “veterans are more likely to be found outside shelters.”
Researchers also found that veterans who end up homeless tend to be older than non-veterans in the same circumstances and that ex-soldiers are more prone to so-called episodic homelessness — meaning they are individuals with disabling conditions who’ve been on and off the street three or more times in one year.
[LINK] "Soy Boom Revives Amazon Highway"
Jan. 7th, 2016 10:07 pmFabiana Frayssinet's Inter Press Service article lokos at how the soy fields of Amazonia are expanding, at significant ecological cost.
The BR-163 highway, an old dream of the Brazilian military to colonise the Amazon jungle, was revived by agroexporters as part of a plan aimed at cutting costs by shipping soy out of river ports. But the improvement of the road has accentuated problems such as deforestation and land tenure, and is fuelling new social conflicts.
The 350-km stretch of road between the cities of Miritituba and Santarem in the northern Brazilian state of Pará look nothing like the popular image of a lush Amazon rainforest, home to some of the greatest biodiversity in the world.
Between the two port terminals – in Santarém, where the Tapajós and Amazon Rivers converge, and in Miritituba on the banks of the Tapajós River – are small scattered groves of trees surrounded by endless fields of soy and pasture.
Cattle grazing peacefully or resting under the few remaining trees, taking shelter from the high temperatures exacerbated by the deforestation, are the only species of mammal in sight.
“A common phrase heard in the area along the BR-163 is ‘whoever deforests, owns the land’ – in other words, deforestation has become an illegal instrument for seizing public land.” – Mauricio Torres
“When we came here 30 years ago this was all jungle,” local small farmer Rosineide Maciel told IPS as she and her family stood watching a bulldozer flatten a stretch of the BR-163 highway in front of their modest dwelling.
Maciel doesn’t miss the days when, along with thousands of other Brazilian migrants, she was drawn here by the then-military government’s (1964-1985) offer of land, part of a strategy to colonise the Amazon rainforest.
Thanks to the paving of the highway that began in 2009, it takes less time to transport her cassava and rice to the town of Rurópolis, 200 km from her farm.
“It’s been easier since they improved the road,” she said. “In the past, there were so many potholes on the way to Rurópolis, and in the wet season it took us three days because of the mud.”
BR-163, built in the 1970s, had become practically impassable. The road links Cuiabá, the capital of the neighbouring state of Mato Grosso – the country’s main soy and corn producer and exporter – with the river port city of Santarém.
Of the highway’s 1,400 kilometres, where traffic of trucks carrying tons of soy and maize is intense, some 200 km have yet to be paved, and a similar number of kilometres of the road are full of potholes.
Accidents occur on a daily basis, caused in the dry season by the red dust thrown up on the stretches that are still dirt, and in the wet season by the mud.
But compared to how things were in the past, it is a paradise for the truckers who drive the route at least five times a month during harvest time.
Truck driver Pedro Gomes from the north of the state of Mato Grosso told IPS: “When soy began to come to Santarém, three years ago, sometimes the drive took me 10 to 15 days. Today we do it in three days, if there’s no rain.”
Justus Wanzala, writing for the Inter Press Service, looks at the kitchen gardens of Kenya.
Busia County in western Kenya is home to an array of indigenous vegetables. But for decades there has been a shift in popular taste leading to leading to little interest in what is indigenously grown. This relegated the vegetables to the periphery with most farmers cultivating kale and cabbages among other more exotic varieties.
However, but this has been changing courtesy of awareness created by nutritionists and the emergence of kitchen gardens. A kitchen garden is an area in a homestead where leafy vegetables, fruit or herbs are grown.
Subsistence farming is the mainstay of communities in Busia County with an average acreage being two hectares. Thanks to a local a local community-based organisation (CBO), Sustainable Income Generating Investment (SINGI), and its partners, the concept of kitchen gardens is in vogue having a huge impact on nutrition and food security in the county.
SINGI works with over 50 farmer groups in the county with members running up to hundreds. Women however dominate the membership. Buoyed rains that come two seasons each year, with some farmers being able to practice irrigation, most households are able to maintain their kitchen gardens throughout the year.
Wired's Andy Greenberg describes an interesting new initiative. I don't personally have any need for this kind of privacy now, but perhaps in the future?
THE SO-CALLED DARK web, for all its notoriety as a haven for criminals and drug dealers, is slowly starting to look more and more like a more privacy-preserving mirror of the web as a whole. Now it’s gained one more upstanding member: the non-profit news organization ProPublica.
On Wednesday, ProPublica became the first known major media outlet to launch a version of its site that runs as a “hidden service” on the Tor network, the anonymity system that powers the thousands of untraceable websites that are sometimes known as the darknet or dark web. The move, ProPublica says, is designed to offer the best possible privacy protections for its visitors seeking to read the site’s news with their anonymity fully intact. Unlike mere SSL encryption, which hides the content of the site a web visitor is accessing, the Tor hidden service would ensure that even the fact that the reader visited ProPublica’s website would be hidden from an eavesdropper or Internet service provider.
“Everyone should have the ability to decide what types of metadata they leave behind,” says Mike Tigas, ProPublica’s developer who worked on the Tor hidden service. “We don’t want anyone to know that you came to us or what you read.”
Of course, any privacy-conscious user can achieve a very similar level of anonymity by simply visiting ProPublica’s regular site through their Tor Browser. But as Tigas points out, that approach does leave the reader open to the risk of a malicious “exit node,” the computer in Tor’s network of volunteer proxies that makes the final connection to the destination site. If the anonymous user connects to a part of ProPublica that isn’t SSL-encrypted—most of the site runs SSL, but not yet every page—then the malicious relay could read what the user is viewing. Or even on SSL-encrypted pages, the exit node could simply see that the user was visiting ProPublica. When a Tor user visits ProPublica’s Tor hidden service, by contrast—and the hidden service can only be accessed when the visitor runs Tor—the traffic stays under the cloak of Tor’s anonymity all the way to ProPublica’s server.
MacLean's carries an Associated Press article noting China's displeasure with North Korea's newest nuclear test. Angering North Korea's only ally cannot possibly be a good strategy, I'd think.
China sees North Korea’s claim to have conducted its first hydrogen bomb test as yet another act of defiance, and will likely retaliate by joining tougher United Nations sanctions and could possibly even impose its own trade restrictions.
Wednesday’s test was staged close enough to the border to send palpable tremors into northeastern China, prompting schools to be evacuated. The political reverberations in Beijing will likely be just as dramatic, boding ill for a relationship already under strain.
“Relations will become colder than ever,” said Lu Chao, director of the Border Studies Institute at the Liaoning Academy of Social Sciences in the northeastern province that borders North Korea.
North Korea acted “wilfully in disregard of the opposition of the international community, including China, and caused a real threat to the lives of the Chinese people living along the border,” Lu said.
China’s Foreign Ministry said it would summon Pyongyang’s ambassador to Beijing to lodge a formal protest, and said environmental officials were monitoring air quality near the border though they had found nothing abnormal so far.
[NON BLOG] On being in my body
Jan. 7th, 2016 11:45 pmI spent most of today getting a patellar dislocation in my left knee treated at Toronto Western Hospital. Briefly, Tuesday night I slipped on my kitchen floor, dish soap having soaked unseen through a plastic bag onto the floor, and my kneecap slid off to the side. It went back in place when I kicked my leg out, just as it did the other time this happened two decades ago, but the pain and swelling remained even this afternoon.
The swelling has gone down from its peak--my left knee looks only moderately larger than my right--and the X-rays haven't revealed any damage to the bone. I've an appointment to 7:45 in the morning on the 18th to have a specialist take a look at the joint, so I'll find out what happened them.
One thing this incident has made me do is think about my relationship to my body. I've been reminded forcefully that Cartesian dualism is false.
The swelling has gone down from its peak--my left knee looks only moderately larger than my right--and the X-rays haven't revealed any damage to the bone. I've an appointment to 7:45 in the morning on the 18th to have a specialist take a look at the joint, so I'll find out what happened them.
One thing this incident has made me do is think about my relationship to my body. I've been reminded forcefully that Cartesian dualism is false.