[PHOTO] The Union-Pearson Express coming down the tracks, at Dundas Street West

Walking west on Dundas Street West on grey Sunday, I was lucky enough to see the Union-Pearson Express passing south on the tracks towards Union Station. (I have no idea how many passengers were on board.)

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• blogTO shows a downtown office tower being converted into condos.


• The Big Picture has a sad photo essay showing the disintegration of the life of a heroin addict.


• The Dragon's Tales notes that there might be mud volcanoes on Mars' Chryse Planitia.


• The Everyday Sociology Blog looks at American state laws sociologically.


• Geocurrents finishes its regional schema for California.


• inuit panda scarlet carwash looks at the pervasive influence of David Bowie throughout his life.


• Joe. My. God. notes a report about the decline of gayborhoods worldwide.


• Language Hat notes an interesting-sounding study of the nature of inner voices.


• Language Log notes the problems with rare characters in Taiwan.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes odd conservative obsessions about the ways they think liberals think.


• The Map Room Blog links to a map of North American mass transit routes.


• The New APPS Blog looks at the representation of women and minorities in the ranks of philosophy doctorates.


• Savage Minds explores David Bowie from the perspective of difference.


• Window on Eurasia notes that Circassians of Turkish citizenship are being asked to leave Russia.

[URBAN NOTE] "Public Works: Replacing Phone Booths With Wi-Fi Kiosks"

Torontoist's Peter Goffin notes New York City's creation of pujblic WiFI kiosks to take the place of payphones.

In New York, they’ve found a way to address both the phone booth’s obsolescence and the continued public need to connect and communicate cheaply and conveniently.

The City is working with tech conglomerate CityBridge to create LinkNYC, a public network that will replace payphones all over Gotham.

Special kiosks, called Links, will eventually take the place of 7,500 phone booths. Each Link will offer free wi-fi, mobile device chargers, and a tablet for anyone to use. Oh and you’ll also be able to make phone calls at these street-side booths, like it’s 1956. And all the Links’ services are totally free.

Each location Links will have a pair of 55-inch HD screens for broadcasting public service announcements and advertising. Ads are expected not only to cover the cost of LinkNYC, but to raise over $500 million USD in revenue for the City.

And for anyone (rightly) concerned about data collection and privacy, the City has said LinkNYC uses encrypted connections between your device and the internet. The kiosks will collect only anonymous data to track usage and serve advertising. And, refreshingly, the City has pledged not to sell or share personal data with third parties.

[URBAN NOTE] "Metrolinx Finalizes Eglinton Crosstown Station Names"

Torontoist's Sean Marshall notes that name selection for the stations on the Eglinton Crosstown light rail route is nearly done.

Getting station names right is important. Station names should, where possible, be unique, intuitive, and simple enough that you can provide directions. Short station names are helpful as they’re easier to display on maps, signs and display boards.

In 2015, Metrolinx developed a decision tree [PDF] with these considerations in mind, in which priority is given to street names, followed by neighbourhood names and local landmarks for identifying stations, and looking to avoid duplicate names where possible. For example, Metrolinx didn’t want to have a “Keele” Station on the LRT, as it duplicates an existing station name on the Bloor-Danforth Subway.

Guided by these principles, Metrolinx staff recommended several name changes. Keele became “Silverthorne,” Dufferin became “Fairbank,” Bathurst would became “Forest Hill,” Avenue became “Oriole Park,” Bayview wbecame “Leaside,” and Don Mills became “Science Centre.”

In October, Metrolinx conducted an online consultation to test these proposed station names. Lo and behold, some names were very unpopular with the public. “Silverthorne” was not very representative of the Keele & Eglinton neighbourhood, others complained that they didn’t know where Fairbank was. (It’s the historic community name for the Eglinton and Dufferin intersection and the name of a nearby park most famous for the Fairbank Park scandal that sent two politicians to prison and launched Frances Nunziata’s [Ward 11, York South-Weston] career as a whistleblower.) Neither Forest Hill nor Leaside stations are in the centre of their historic communities, which also raised some concerns.

Taking public feedback into account, further changes were recommended. “Keelesdale” replaces “Silverthorne” at Keele Street, “Cedarvale” becomes the preferred name for the interchange station at Eglinton West (though the TTC has the final say), Oriole Park was renamed back to “Avenue”, and several surface stops east of Don Mills were also renamed, including Ferrand (to “Aga Khan”, as it’s adjacent to the culutral centre and museum), Victoria Park to “O’Connor” and Warden to “Golden Mile.”

But these changes didn’t satisfy a few Metrolinx board members. At its meeting in December 3, 2015, after passing a problematic GO Transit fare increase with minimal debate, it spent four times as long debating a few station names along the LRT corridor, namely the stops at Dufferin Street, Bathurst Street, and a surface stop at Lebovic Avenue in Scarborough. Toronto Star transportation reporter Tess Kalinowski called the station name debate the liveliest the board has ever seen.

[URBAN NOTE] "Toronto’s history in two buildings"

At Spacing Toronto, Sean Marshall writes about how Toronto City Hall and the Toronto-Dominion Centre are the two buildings which best sum up modern Toronto. That both are creatures of the modernist mid-century is likely not a coincidence.

Construction began on Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s modernist Toronto-Dominion Centre in 1964; the first tower was completed in 1967, the year of Canada’s centennial. Unsatisfied with various proposals for the consolidation of the merged bank’s office space (the Bank of Toronto and the Dominion Bank joined in 1955), Phyllis Lambert, adviser on the architectural review for the T-D complex, helped to bring in the famous German-American architect to design something special.

Looking at archival photographs, it appears that first black tower fell on Toronto like the monolith in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. The old city of stone, brick, and wood, punctuated by a few office buildings and many church spires, was suddenly interrupted by a new age of steel and glass. It seemed that all of a sudden, Toronto was awoken from its slumber as a quiet, boring, Protestant provincial city, and began to emerge as an exciting cosmopolitan metropolis. Three additional buildings later joined Mies van der Rohe’s vision of two towers surrounding a banking hall, and other skyscrapers have surrounded the complex, but the Toronto-Dominion Centre remains an important and historic symbol of Toronto’s rise as an economic powerhouse and of a modern, global city.

A few years earlier, in 1955, Torontonians elected its first non-Protestant mayor, Nathan Phillips. Up until Phillip’s election, every mayor of Toronto elected in the twentieth century was a Protestant member of the Orange Order, a sectarian (and historically anti-Catholic) organization that dominated city politics and business. Phillips, on the other hand was Jewish, signalling a change in the city’s attitudes.

Meanwhile, the federal government was finally loosening its restrictive immigration laws, setting the stage for the Toronto’s cultural transformation. Phillips championed a new City Hall, whose construction began in 1961, designed by Finnish architect Viljo Revell. Construction of the new city hall (and the square named for its champion, Mayor Phillips) was completed in 1965.

Toronto City Hall and Nathan Phillips Square serve as the focal point of the city. Fifty years later, the square remains popular; hosting ice skating in the winter, and concerts, festivals, commemorations, rallies and protests year-round. The Toronto Sign, introduced for the 2015 Pan-Am/Parapan Games, has been an especially popular addition to the square among residents and tourists alike. Like the T-D Centre, City Hall is a built reminder of an important turning point in Toronto’s history.

[URBAN NOTE] "Shaping Toronto: Union Station"

Torontoist's Jamie Bradburn wrote, at length and with substantial use of photos and other images, about the genesis and evolution of Union Station.

Pierre Berton called it “the soul and heartbeat of Toronto.” Over its history, Union Station has welcomed new arrivals to Canada, bid farewell to soldiers going off to war, hosted nobility, and endured cranky commuters. The City’s government management committee’s approval earlier this month of a proposal to develop space under the Great Hall for a culinary market and cultural event space is the latest step in the long evolution of our main downtown transportation hub.

Toronto entered the railway age in 1853, when a train departed a shed on Front Street for Aurora. Five years later the first incarnation of Union Station (so named because it was used by multiple railways) opened on the south side of Station Street between Simcoe and York. A shed-like structure, it couldn’t cope with the rapid increase in rail traffic, which prompted railways to build new stations elsewhere.

The Grand Trunk Railway decided a new main station was needed. Built on the site of the original station, the second Union Station debuted on July 1, 1873. The opening ceremony was a muted affair due to the untimely death two months earlier of contractor John Shedden, but the new station was nicely decorated with evergreens for the occasion. Designed by E.P. Hanneford, the new Union was a grand building inspired by English railway stations of the previous decade, and was graced with three towers. Facing the harbour, it helped shape the city’s mid-Victorian skyline.

Like its predecessor, Union #2 couldn’t cope with the demands of a booming city. Facility improvements, including an 1894 expansion which blocked the original façade from view, barely alleviated the station’s woes. “The general consensus of opinion,” Railway and Shipping World reported in 1899, “is that the Toronto Union is one of the most inconvenient stations in America, expensive to run and unsatisfactory in very many respects.”

[LINK] "David Bowie Poised to Dethrone Adele on Album Sales Charts"

Bloomberg's Lucas Shaw wrote about something that made me smile. Americans, make Blackstar a #1 album!

David Bowie’s “Blackstar,” released days before his death, is on track to knock Adele’s “25” out of the top spot on the Billboard 200. It would be the first No. 1 album in the U.S. for the British pop star.

Sales of “Blackstar” increased 10-fold after Bowie died Sunday at the age of 69, surpassing 120,000 through Tuesday, according to data from Nielsen Music. Digital sales account for 70 percent of those purchases, Nielsen said. Adele sold 163,792 copies of her album last week, her seventh at No. 1. Her record-breaking “25” made its debut in November.

Bowie’s death has lifted sales for more than his latest album, released by Sony Corp.’s Columbia Records. Purchases of past hits such as “Space Oddity” and “Under Pressure” surged on Monday, Nielsen said, while data analytics company BuzzAngle Music forecast three Bowie records would chart in the top 10 this week.

“Blackstar,” Bowie’s 25th studio album, has received strong reviews, earning an 86 rating from Metacritic based on 37 reviews. The New York Times’ Jon Pareles described it as “strange, daring” and “ultimately rewarding.”

[LINK] "Mammoth bones reveal early human presence in Arctic"

The Toronto Star carried Malcolm Ritter's Associated Press article reporting on suggestive evidence of an early human presence in northern Siberia. This, as some have suggested, has noteworthy implications for the peopling of the Americas as well--why couldn't people have crossed from the Asian Arctic to the American Arctic earlier?

The remains of a mammoth that was hunted down about 45,000 years ago have revealed the earliest known evidence of humans in the Arctic.

Marks on the bones, found in far northern Russia, indicate the creature was stabbed and butchered. The tip of a tusk was damaged in a way that suggests human activity, perhaps to make ivory tools.

With a minimal age estimate of 45,000 years, the discovery extends the record of human presence in the Arctic by at least about 5,000 years.

The site in Siberia, near the Kara Sea, is also by far the northernmost sign of human presence in Eurasia before 40,000 years ago, Vladimir Pitulko of the Russian Academy of Science in St. Petersburg and co-authors reported in a paper released Thursday by the journal Science.

They also briefly report evidence of human hunting at about the same time from a wolf bone found well to the east. That suggests a widespread occupation, although the population was probably sparse, they said.

[LINK] "The Great PC Decline Isn't As Bad As It Looks"

Wired's Brian Barrett suggests that the market for PCs is still relatively strong, that they still have durable niches.

Last year was rough for PCs. There’s no getting around that. But it wasn’t bad enough to merit the doom and gloom that has accompanied two reports detailing their continued decline in popularity. The PC situation is much better than the pundits would have you believe.

The reports, from industry-tracking stalwarts Gartner and IDC, show an overall drop in the global PC market of 8 and 10.4 percent, respectively. That sounds bad. And to be fair, it’s not actively good. Take a closer look at what the numbers actually say, though, and the context in which they say it, and you have a picture of an industry whose death has been greatly exaggerated.

Unsurprisingly, the “global PC market” comprises a lot of moving parts. A single number, however dramatic it appears, belies a range of strengths and weaknesses. Especially when that number, in one instance, doesn’t include a substantial chunk of what reasonably could be considered a PC.

Let’s look at just what we’re counting here. Gartner lumps in detachable devices like Microsoft’s Surface in with traditional PCs, while IDC explicitly does not. That somewhat explains the gap between the two, but IDC concedes that including those increasingly popular hybrid devices would have resulted in an overall decline of 7.5 percent for the year—in line with Gartner’s figure—and 5 percent for the last quarter.

More importantly, IDC sees what it calls detachable tablets “growing quickly, but from a small base.” That’s especially impressive given that the most visible of them, Microsoft’s Surface Pro, didn’t receive an update until deep into October. That’s encouraging, if that really is where the industry is moving. But even if it isn’t, and traditional PCs turn out to be what we wanted all along, the picture’s still not nearly so dire as it seems, particularly in the US. Stateside, IDC says PC shipments fell just 2.6 percent in 2015 compared to 2014. Gartner pegs it at 2.7 percent. In either case, nothing close to a freefall.

The pockets of strength aren’t just geographic. Apple managed to increase worldwide shipments by 5.8 percent (Gartner) or 6.2 percent (IDC) last year. Lenovo saw a monster year in the US, increasing shipments by 14.5 percent.

[LINK] "Saudi Life With $30 Oil"

Donna Abu-Nasr's Bloomberg article notes how Saudi Arabia is beginning to adapt, again, to low oil prices. Can it adapt successfully?

Times are getting tougher in the Hathut household, so father Mohammad is looking for extra work and the three kids are being told to switch off the lights to cut his electricity bill.

This is Saudi Arabia in 2016. It may be a familiar story to austerity-hit Europeans and Americans, but in a nation synonymous with conspicuous consumption, the belt-tightening has been unsettling. Unprecedented cuts to fuel and energy subsidies are forcing the kind of rigor never seen during the era of petrodollar-fueled wealth that quadrupled per-capita income since the late 1980s.

“A lot of things will change,” said Hathut, 30, who plans to supplement his income as a business-administration teacher at a Riyadh university with private training sessions. “But many youths are still in
a state of shock. They haven’t processed the news and what to do.”

With oil having plunged to about $30 a barrel, signs of the tectonic shift taking place in the ultra-conservative Islamic kingdom are everywhere: from the royal palace where the nation’s founding family is contemplating the sale of its monopoly oil producer to the homes and businesses adjusting to the new economy.

Those aged 15 to 34, who make up more than 40 percent of the 21 million Saudis, are at the forefront of the upheaval. No longer can they take for granted free health care, gasoline at 20 cents a liter and routine pay increases.

Even the power of the religious police, which upholds the strict brand of Islam that defines Saudi Arabia, may no longer go unchecked by the government. The Consultative Council, an advisory body, last month urged the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice to compile a list of banned behaviors to prevent abuse by officers. They can arrest unmarried couples found together in a car or people caught with flowers on Valentine’s Day.

[LINK] "There’s No Place Like Home, Unless You’re a Repentant Jihadist"

Jihen Laghmari and Caroline Alexander's Bloomberg article notes Tunisia's efforts to deal with Islamic State recruits who have returned to their country. I feel a certain, very limited, sympathy for these people. Offering them pathways out may be important, but I do not think these should be easy, if only for the sake of the people they brutalized.

It took just weeks of brutal fighting for Ahmed to realize that his journey from a working-class home in Tunisia’s capital to the battlefields of Syria had been a mistake.

Radicalized at an unofficial Tunis mosque, Ahmed, then 24 years old, was helped into Syria by militants he met on social media. With their assistance he slipped across frontiers in early 2013 on his way to jihadist-run villages. He says he expected to be defending Muslims caught up in civil war, and instead found himself among their oppressors.

“I saw with my own eyes how armed groups like Ahrar al-Sham and Al-Nusra Front kill and terrorize civilians, especially women and children, without reason, just to intimidate residents and control cities,” Ahmed said. He asked for his real name to be withheld and replied to questions posed through his lawyer.
“Anyone who rejects orders or tries to quit is killed. Getting out of Syria alive was like being reborn.”

Back in Tunis, where he keeps a low profile to escape police searches, Ahmed is at the center of a debate over how to deal with returning fighters -- one that may soon echo all over Europe with as many as 30,000 foreigners having traveled to Syria and Iraq. It pits activists calling for greater emphasis on rehabilitation against politicians who fear being seen as soft on terrorism.

Assaults on tourists and security forces have shattered Tunisia’s image as the Arab Spring nation that avoided spiraling violence and held successful elections -- a transition rewarded with the Nobel Peace Prize. Compounding the problem are the estimated 3,000 Tunisians who’ve traveled to war zones to fight.
The government has imposed a state of emergency and is fencing part of its border with Libya, where intelligence agencies say attacks on a Tunis museum and a beach resort were planned. That won’t be enough, say proponents of a draft law that would offer a future to men like Ahmed.

“You can’t fight terrorism with violence, imprisonment and insult,” said Mohammad Iqbal Ben Rajab, president of the Rescue Association of the Tunisian Stranded Abroad. “Without a clear strategy, most of the returnees will turn into time bombs and sleeper cells.”

[LINK] On the latest Chang'e lunar missions of China

The Planetary Society's Emily Lakdawalla wrote about China's exciting new plans for Moon exploration.

An article about Chang'e 4 appeared on the website of China Daily today, and it contains a small amount of news about China's present and future lunar exploration plans. Thanks to @sinodefence on Twitter for the link and to scientist Quanzhi Ye for some help with translating the news.

It had already been reported that China planned to send Chang'e 4 (the backup model of the Chang'e 3 lander) to the lunar farside. The intent to land on the farside was announced on the Chinese Lunar Exploration Program website on December 2. The China Daily News article mentions launch dates, and they're earlier than previously discussed. A communications relay satellite (based on the design of Chang'e 2) will be launched in June of 2018, and will take up a position at the Moon-Earth L2 point, where it will be able to see both the landing site and Earth. The lander will be launched at the end of 2018. There is still no official word on what the lander's scientific payload will be, or even if it will carry another rover. Interestingly, the article mentions some kind of public involvement in the payload development. China already has experience navigating lunar orbiters to the L2 point. [. . .]

Guokr -- a Chinese blog site that often hosts science-related content -- posted a blog with a little more information about the planned Chang'e 4 mission. This is not an official source! The Guokr blog mentions the south pole-Aitken basin as a possible landing site.[. . .]

The China Daily News article also talks about "successful completion" of the Chang'e 3 mission. This does not mean the end of the mission, but rather an official statement that Chang'e 3 has been successful. Monthly contact with Chang'e 3 continues, although it's not clear if it is still doing scientific observations. A review paper about Chang'e 3 recently appeared in the literature, which helped lunar mapper Phil Stooke update his maps of the Chang'e 3 landing site, likely for the final time. Here's an overview, including the lovely names for the mini-craters observed by the lander during its descent:

More, including links and maps and photos, at the site.

[LINK] On the latest surprises from KIC 8462852

Distant star KIC 8462852/a>, known for its very unusual dimmings, continues to produce surprises. The Dragon's Gaze recently noted one paper suggesting that the level of interplanetary dust around this bright star is low enough to exclude the possibility of something catastrophic like a planetary breakup, providing evidence in support of the thesis that the dimmings were caused by the incursion of a family of comets. But then, we also recently got this, Bradley E. Schaefer's paper "KIC 8462852 Faded at an Average Rate of 0.165+-0.013 Magnitudes Per Century From 1890 To 1989". Drawing on his naked-eye analysis of archived images including some more than a century old, Schaefer identifies a much older pattern.

The star KIC 8462852 is a completely-ordinary F3 main sequence star, except that the light curve from the Kepler spacecraft shows episodes of unique and inexplicable day-long dips with up to 20% dimming. Here, I provide a light curve of 1232 Johnson B-band magnitudes from 1890 to 1989 taken from archival photographic plates at Harvard. KIC 8462852 displays a highly significant and highly confident secular dimming at an average rate of 0.165+-0.013 magnitudes per century. From the early 1890s to the late 1980s, KIC 8462852 has faded by 0.193+-0.030 mag. This century-long dimming is completely unprecedented for any F-type main sequence star. So the Harvard light curve provides the first confirmation (past the several dips seen in the Kepler light curve alone) that KIC 8462852 has anything unusual going on. The century-long dimming and the day-long dips are both just extreme ends of a spectrum of timescales for unique dimming events, so by Ockham's Razor, all this is produced by one physical mechanism. This one mechanism does not appear as any isolated catastrophic event in the last century, but rather must be some ongoing process with continuous effects. Within the context of dust-occultation models, the century-long dimming trend requires 10^4 to 10^7 times as much dust as for the one deepest Kepler dip. Within the context of the comet-family idea, the century-long dimming trend requires an estimated 648,000 giant comets (each with 200 km diameter) all orchestrated to pass in front of the star within the last century.

Centauri Dreams looks at this, with an extended discussion in the comments. Speaking as a non-astronomer, all I can say is that this points to Kepler's discovery of something very interesting. If this dimming trend has been ongoing for some time, KIC 8462852 is unusual. Whether this has something to do with KIC 8462852 itself--perhaps a very rare long-term variable, or even a perfectly normal star caught at a stage of its life not yet suspected?--or whether it involves peculiarities of the system, even extraterrestrial megaconstructions, is uncertain.

I hope we can find out.