Jan. 20th, 2016

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blogTO's Derek Flack describes the historical seediness of Toronto, something I myself haven't seen--I came too late.

Strip clubs could be found everywhere
Toronto isn't bereft of strip clubs, but you used to find a whole lot more of them around town and in areas you might not expect. The wonderfully named Cheaters drew the ire of Yonge and Davisville residents throughout the '80s, but it was just one of hundreds of adult bars littered across the city. Today there are fewer than 20.

Everything was filthy
I mean this quite literally. When the city was run on coal, our buildings were covered in a thick layer of soot that made red brick appear brown and that gave Toronto a generally gritty look, particularly downtown.

The TTC featured a lot more graffiti
Back in the early 1980s, the state of some TTC stations was surprisingly poor. I know we tend to complain about the littlest things these days, but when the original Vitrolite tiles were coming apart at downtown stations back then, the platforms seemed like prime places for spray paint. Broken windows, they say...
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Torontoist's Catherin McIntyre describes a pop-up effort for refugees in east-end Toronto.

After seeing images of three-year-old Alan Kurdi’s body washed ashore in Turkey back in September, Caroline Starr felt compelled to do something. She wasn’t certain what that something would be, exactly, so she called some fellow East End moms together for a brainstorm session.

“We thought about sponsoring a family,” says Starr, “but then we realized that was crazy, because we all have one-year-olds and full-time jobs. This was supposed to be less work,” she says glancing around “The Hub,” a free pop-up shop for Syrian refugees that’s brimming with household items. “It’s turned into not less work at all,” she adds, tired but proud.

The Hub is the most recent initiative by East Toronto Families for Syria (ETF4S), the grassroots organization that Starr and seven other local women founded in response to the Syrian refugee crisis. At the time of its inception, the women didn’t know how many—if any—refugees Canada would take in, but they started making welcome baskets anyway. They put a call out to the community to donate kitchen and bathroom supplies, and the response was overwhelming. “We were a bit wary of accepting too much stuff,” says Starr. “We thought, ‘what if this doesn’t happen?’ At the same time, it felt like kind of a given that something was going to happen. There was just so much public outcry.”

Sure enough, the new Liberal government quickly acted on its promise to bring in 25,000 Syrian refugees, and ETF4S ramped up its efforts.
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Nick Kozak's Toronto Star article profiles a Tibetan refugee who has now found a home in Toronto.

Somewhere, the Dalai Lama is smiling.

He couldn’t help but be pleased by Tsering Yangzom, a Tibetan refugee who has made Canada and Toronto her home since 2011.

Yangzom, the first Tibetan graduate of the Munk School of Global Affairs, is interested in pursuing a career in refugee and human rights law, perhaps even one day helping to free Tibet.

With a master’s degree in East Asian and Asia Pacific Studies from Munk now completed, law school is next on her list. She’s looking at universities in British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec.

The 31-year-old is truly a student of the world. She has studied in five countries and speaks English, Tibetan, Hindi and Nepali, and a bit of Norwegian.

But until she came to Canada she was stateless, and all she had for identification was a travel document from India. She knows too well the plight of refugees and has great empathy for the Syrians who are coming to Canada and taking their first steps toward settling in a new homeland. She also feels compassion for those stuck in war-torn Syria and for those who have fled but remain in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey.

“I can connect on a human level with the problem they’re going through. I can feel it.”
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Barbara King's NPR commentary is unsettling, mainly for its implications about humans. Are we really actually fully conscious?

In her January Scientific American piece titled "What Animals Know about Where Babies Come From," anthropologist Holly Dunsworth makes a convincing case that despite popular assumptions to the contrary, animals generally — and our closest living relatives, the great apes, specifically — don't understand that sexual intercourse produces babies.

Dunsworth leads off with an example (something I also wrote about here at 13.7) in which the captive gorilla Koko, who knows some American Sign Language and comprehends some spoken English, is asked to make choices among several options presented verbally and in diagram form related to "family planning." Dunsworth dismisses the suggestion that Koko is cognitively equipped to understand the four different scenarios by which she could potentially become a mother — and I couldn't agree more.

I also think Dunsworth is spot on when she argues that "reproductive consciousness" is unique to our own species. But outside the realm of strange anthropomorphic assumptions made by caretakers of media-star apes, do people really go around thinking that wild animals, farm animals or their dog and cat companions grasp where babies come from? I don't know of evidence one way or the other.

People do often assume that animals' behavioral choices are highly cognitive and strategic when they may simply be products of natural selection — and this is part of Dunsworth's main point. When a gorilla silverback male, for example, takes over a new group of females and offspring from a resident rival male, he may commit infanticide; at the point when a female's young baby dies, lactation hormones no longer suppress ovulation and she comes back into estrus, thus becoming a likely mate for the conquering male.

"We love to narrate observations of animal sex and parenting with language that implies common ground between them and us," Dunsworth writes. But, "animals may carry out all kinds of seemingly complex behaviors without actually anticipating the outcomes."
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The Toronto Star's Sean Fitz-gerald took a look at how the dreams of some for a NFL team for Toronto, or southern Ontario, have been fading.

Eight years ago, when the Buffalo Bills announced their extended plans for Canada, there seemed to be a real sense Toronto’s long-standing search for an NFL franchise was about to come to an end. Now, as NFL owners prepare to decide which of three teams (San Diego, St. Louis, Oakland) they will allow to relocate to Los Angeles, Toronto has never seemed quite so far away.

Here is a glimpse at how the landscape looked then compared to now:

Then

Potential Ownership

On Feb. 6, 2008, Ted Rogers, one of the richest people in Canada, was sitting on a stage in Toronto, talking about a ground-breaking venture many believed was the first step down the road to relocating the Buffalo Bills. His eponymous communications company had agreed to spend $78 million to lease eight games over the next five years.

Rogers was estimated to be worth $7.6-billion, making him the second-richest Canadian.

“I think it’s a dream come true for the city, for the province” he told the room. “I think it’s a dream come true for southern Ontario. It’s a great opportunity.”

Bills in Toronto Series

Boosters had no doubt the series would succeed in Toronto. Phil Lind, vice-chairman of Rogers Communications Inc., suggested the next step would be for the Bills play a split schedule — with half their home games in Buffalo, the other half at Rogers Centre.

Organizers prepared a lottery system for the expected waves of ticket demands.

“In Southern Ontario, this is NFL territory,” Lind said in May 2008. “The CFL’s great, wonderful, terrific, but this territory is NFL territory, at least if you’re 50 and under. If you’re older, fine, you can go for the Argos or Hamilton or whatever.”
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The Globe and Mail's Eric Duhatschek suggests that, to get a local hockey team, Québec City would be best advised to look for a team ready to relocat.e

Is Quebec City a viable business if the buy-in is $500-million (U.S.), which at Tuesday’s exchange rate is about $680-million (Canadian)? Consider that when the ownership in Winnipeg bought the distressed Atlanta Thrashers in 2011, it paid a quarter of the expansion amount – $170-million (U.S.). And that was at a time when the loonie was above par.

Winnipeg has been a smashing success at the box office. Every game is sold out; the love affair with the Jets is as strong today as it was when commissioner Gary Bettman originally announced the move.

But even at that, Winnipeg is a mid-market team that has to stick carefully and efficiently to a budget. The franchise remains on solid ground, though the loonie’s value has since fallen to 74 cents and player salaries are all paid in U.S. dollars.

But what if the buy-in for the Jets had been four times higher, as it would be for expansion teams? Could Winnipeg keep operating in the black if the cost of financing the Thrashers purchase was that high?

No.

And however well the Quebec City franchise does at the box office, in merchandise sales and local television revenue, the market could not spin off enough cash to make a $680-million (Canadian) buy-in work. That is the NHL’s concern, even though Quebecor, the prospective buyer, has deep pockets.

So, while Bettman always discourages the relocation of teams, it would make far more sense for Quebec City to pursue an ailing franchise whose owners are weary of mounting losses. At that point, the cost of the transaction becomes a different financial equation – simply a business deal between an eager buyer and a motivated seller, with the price to be mutually negotiated.
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Writing at Open Democracy, Lorenzo Berardi explores Poland's role as a base for opposition radio broadcasting into Belarus.

It's a rainy Saturday afternoon in December 2015 and many cars sporting Belarusian number plates are maneuvering their way in and out of the parking lot of Centrum Handlowy Marki, a shopping centre on the eastern outskirts of Warsaw. As there are only 200 kilometres separating the Polish capital from the border with Belarus this is hardly a surprising sight. The distance between Warsaw and Minsk is less than the one between the Polish capital and Berlin.

Both Poland and Belarus held presidential elections last year. In May 2015 Polish voters chose the then underdog candidate, Andrzej Duda, instead of backing the president in office, Bronisław Komorowski (an outcome confirmed by the following parliamentary elections). In October last year Belarusians voted en masse for their president running for his fifth term. Alexander Lukashenko has now been leading Belarus for twenty-one years in a row, winning the latest elections with a staggering 83.47% of the vote.

To the casual observer such a landslide victory may suggest that Belarus is a stable and united country, but in fact part of Lukashenko's success lies in controlling the national media. So much so that today only the friendly voices of State-approved televisions, radios and newspapers can be read and heard in Belarus, with the only exceptions being a few independent websites and online newspapers.

No surprise then that neighbouring Poland hosts many independent Belarusian media organisations backed by international subjects and targeting the 9.5 million people living in Belarus as their main audience. A list of Belarusian 'non-State' media broadcasting from Poland includes the satellite television channel Belsat TV, the website of the Charter 97 organisation as well as radio stations such as Białystok based Radio Racyja and Warsaw based Eŭrapéjskaje Rádyjo dla Biełarúsi (European Radio for Belarus).
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Will Partin's article in The Atlantic about how video game universes come to an end is an affecting look at a corner of pop culture rarely examined. What does happen when worlds come to an end?

In English, the word “apocalypse”—ety. Greek, n. apo (un-) + kaluptein (-veil)—has three non-exclusive meanings. The first and most common is simply the end of the world, whether by divine punishment or whatever transpires in movies directed by Roland Emmerich. The second is any form of calamity, representational or real, man-made or no, that resembles the end of the world, like the 2010 Haitian earthquake, Chernobyl, or the movies directed by Roland Emmerich themselves. The third is what the Greeks intended apocalypse to mean: the revelation of knowledge through profound disruption, which is why the final book of the New Testament is called “Revelations” (composed, it is thought, to reassure Christians during their widespread persecution by the Roman emperor, Domitian). In other words, the apocalypse either is the end, looks like the end, or helps us understand the end.

Like books, movies, and the visual arts, video games are well acquainted with the apocalypse. Scores of them have been set in the final days of mankind; countless more ask the player to prevent them. Yet, as mere setting, the apocalypse can never be true to its name—when Mass Effect 3 ends and the galaxy has been saved/altered/destroyed, you can always boot up the series’s first act and play it all again. The finale is not the end. In the curious lexicon of games criticism, we often speak of “world-building,” yet rarely do we stop to think about its opposite. Anything made can be destroyed, yet destruction in games is rarely the destruction of games. What masterpiece of eschatological design could possibly convey the all-encompassing, crushing finality of a true apocalypse?

Since the 1990s, when the rise of reliable home Internet access made persistent game worlds both commercially and technically viable, the game industry has developed over 300 massively multiplayer online games, some gargantuan (The Old Republic, etc.) and others slight, like the thoughtful browser-based government simulator NationStates. The majority of MMOs, of course, don’t experience the runaway success of World of Warcraft or EVE Online and eventually adopt a free-to-play model once it becomes clear that subscriptions alone can’t sustain ongoing costs. But a smaller number—44, if Wikipedia is to be believed—have shut down, and with their closure, their persistent worlds simply phase out of existence, beyond the reach of any archaeology.

Star Wars Galaxies launched in 2003 to critical and commercial acclaim. Though video games routinely spoil the player with fantasies of singular greatness (in Elder Scrolls Online, every player is, improbably, “the one”), Galaxies initially set its sights lower. Instead of saving the Star Wars universe for the umpteenth time, the player was asked merely to live in that universe, getting by doing anything from bounty hunting to stripping in dusty cantinas on the Outer Rim. That might seem hopelessly jejune in 2015, but Galaxies was a tremendous success for several years. Alas, in 2005, in response to a lack of new players, Sony Online Entertainment redesigned the game to emphasize combat, trading the game’s supreme sense of inhabitation and belonging for a sense of power (the lure of the dark side indeed!). Players revolted, and, by 2006 barely 10,000 people could be found in Galaxies on any given Friday. The death-knell came in 2011, when SOE announced, to no one’s surprise, that Galaxies would be shut down for good in December of that year (not coincidentally, the same month that BioWare launched its dreary Star Wars MMO, The Old Republic).

Call it pity, or perhaps apology, but SOE used the end of Galaxies to do something meaningful with its apocalypse: It declared a winner for each server based on the relative population of Rebels and Imperials. And in the galaxy’s final moments, before the servers took everything and everyone with them, the players who remained gathered in Mos Eisley and Corellia to wait for the end. Bittersweet celebration ruled the day: Veterans let neophytes try out their finest gear, the sky was filled with brilliant (if lag-producing) fireworks, and the spaceports clogged with groups of friends, some cultivated over thousands of hours, waiting to say goodbye. In the end, though, the final moment was a whimper.
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Gizmodo and Centauri Dreams each noted that the famous Wow! signal of 1977, one of the best candidates for an extraterrestrial signal, might be an artifact of comets. From Centauri Dreams:

We do know that the ‘Wow!’ signal’s intensity rose and fell over the same 72-second interval that the Big Ear itself could keep an object in its view — with a fixed field of view, the Earth’s rotation governed this. Hence Ehman could assume the signal had an origin in space, and Antonio Paris makes the same assumption. Scheduled to appear in the Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences, the paper notes that the size of a comet’s hydrogen cloud is determined by the size of the comet, extending for as much as 100 million kilometers in width. The cloud increases significantly as the comet approaches the Sun. From the paper:

Since the rate of hydrogen production from the comet’s nucleus and coma has been calculated at 5 x 1029 atoms of hydrogen every second, the hydrogen cloud is the largest part of the comet. Moreover, due to two closely spaced energy levels in the ground state of the hydrogen atom, the neutral hydrogen cloud enveloping the comet will release photons and emit electromagnetic radiation at a frequency along the hydrogen line (1420.40575177 MHz).

Two comets are of interest. Looking back to 1977, Paris found that from July 27 to August 15, the Jupiter-family comets 266P/Christensen and P/2008 Y2 (Gibbs) were transiting near the Chi Sagittarii star group, placing them close to the source of the “Wow!” signal. [. . .]

If the cometary hypothesis is correct, this would explain why subsequent searches using the Very Large Array and the Ohio State University Radio Observatory between 1995 and 1999 found nothing, for neither comet would then have been near the right ascension and declination values of the original signal. Paris suggests that the period of 266P/Christensen (6.63 years) and P/2008 Y2 (Gibbs) (6.8 years) can explain why the signal was never again detected.

The idea that the Wow! signal was produced from clouds of neutral hydrogen emanating from the two comets seems quite a stretch, but usefully, Paris offers a way to falsify the hypothesis. We learn that comet 266P/Christensen will again pass through the neighborhood of the “Wow!” signal on January 25, 2017, while comet P/2008 Y2 (Gibbs) will be in the area on January 7 of 2018. So we will have the opportunity to test the notion and analyze the hydrogen spectra of the two comets. Shouldn’t the Big Ear have picked up the same cometary signature 24 hours later? We can’t be sure, but scanning the hydrogen signal from each comet sounds like a good idea.
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  • blogTO identifies five fast-changing neighbourhoods.

  • Crooked Timber praises Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan quartet.

  • The Dragon's Gaze examines the formation of supermassive stars.

  • A Fistful of Euros reflects on global income inequality.

  • Geocurrents examines Russia's demographic issues.

  • Joe. My. God. notes that the head of the Russian Orthodox Church has blamed ISIS on gay pride parades.

  • Language Log looks at how language issues influenced the outcome of Taiwan's election.

  • Lawyers, Guns and Money argues that First Worlders are responsible for poor conditions in Bangladeshi factories.

  • The Map Room examines "persuasive cartography".
  • Marginal Revolution notes that discrimination hurts economies.

  • Livejournal's pollotenchegg notes Ukraine's rapid shifts in natural gas consumption by source country.

  • The Power and the Money considers if the United States might be governed by people who think it a good idea to provoke a war with China.

  • The Russian Demographics Blog links to sources on the Circassian genocide.

  • Strange Maps notes Chinese cartographic propaganda.

  • Transit Toronto favours a partial pedestrianization of King Street.

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Wikipedia calls the hypothetical planet announced by a Caltech team to possibly exist beyond Neptune's orbit "Planet Nine". The first article I was sent was National Geographic's coverage.

As described Wednesday in the Astronomical Journal, the gravitational signature of a large, lurking planet is written into the peculiar orbits of these farflung worlds. Called extreme Kuiper Belt Objects, the misbehaving bodies trace odd circles around the sun that have puzzled scientists for years.

It’s tantalizing evidence that a ninth large planet might live in the solar system, though the world hasn’t been detected yet.

“If there’s going to be another planet in the solar system, I think this is it,” says Greg Laughlin of the University of California, Santa Cruz. “It would be quite extraordinary if we had one. Fingers crossed. It would be amazing.”

The team calculated that the planet, if it’s there, would be about 10 times as massive as Earth, or roughly three times larger. That makes it a super-Earth or mini-Neptune—a type of planet the galaxy is incredibly efficient at assembling, but which has been conspicuously absent from our own neighborhood.

“This thing is on an exceptionally frigid, long-period orbit, and probably takes on the order of 20,000 years to make one full revolution around the sun,” says Caltech’s Konstantin Batygin, who is one half of the planet-sleuthing team.


The paper mentioned, Batyagin and Mike Brown's "Evidence for a Distant Giant Planet in the Solar System", makes for interesting if technical reading. NPR, interviewing Brown, suggests that the existence of this planet explains quite a lot about the outer solar system.

The first suggestion that something big might be affecting the orbits of distant, icy bodies came in 2014. An international team of astronomers announced that they'd discovered a new dwarf planet, nicknamed Biden, that stays even farther out than Sedna. They also noted a strange clustering in the orbits of these objects, and in the orbits of about a dozen others. Perhaps, they hypothesized, the gravity of some unseen planet was acting as a shepherd.

"They were pointing out that there was something funny going on in the outer solar system, but nobody could really understand what it was," says Brown. "Ever since they pointed it out we've been scratching our heads."

[. . . As Brown and Batyagin] studied the freaky way that these objects lined up in space, Brown says, they realized that "the only way to get these objects to line up in one direction is to have a massive planet lined up in the other direction."

What's more, this planet naturally explains why the dwarf planets Sedna and Biden have weird orbits that never let them come in close to the solar system. "This wasn't something we were setting out to explain," says Brown. "This is something that just popped out of the theory."

But there was one moment that turned Brown into a believer. Their computer simulations predicted that if this hypothetical planet existed, it would twist the orbits of other small bodies in a certain way. So Brown looked through some old data to see if any icy bodies had been discovered with those kinds of orbits — and, lo and behold, he found five of them.

"They're objects that nobody has really explained or tried to explain before," says Brown. "My jaw hit the floor. That just came out of the blue. Being able to make a prediction and having it come true in five minutes is about as fun as it gets in science."


At least one person, astronomer Alessandro Morbidelli quoted in the Washington Post, as saying that the evidence for this planet is much stronger than for other putative ninh planets. Brown, for his part, famous as the man who made Pluto a dwarf planet, has gone on the record as saying that this planet would definitely qualify.

"This would be a real ninth planet," says Brown, the Richard and Barbara Rosenberg Professor of Planetary Astronomy. "There have only been two true planets discovered since ancient times, and this would be a third. It's a pretty substantial chunk of our solar system that's still out there to be found, which is pretty exciting."

Brown notes that the putative ninth planet—at 5,000 times the mass of Pluto—is sufficiently large that there should be no debate about whether it is a true planet. Unlike the class of smaller objects now known as dwarf planets, Planet Nine gravitationally dominates its neighborhood of the solar system. In fact, it dominates a region larger than any of the other known planets—a fact that Brown says makes it "the most planet-y of the planets in the whole solar system."

[. . .]

Brown, well known for the significant role he played in the demotion of Pluto from a planet to a dwarf planet adds, "All those people who are mad that Pluto is no longer a planet can be thrilled to know that there is a real planet out there still to be found," he says. "Now we can go and find this planet and make the solar system have nine planets once again."


Centauri Dreams and the Planetary Society Blog have more information about this world, the latter having links to relevant papers.
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D-Brief's Carl Engelking shared this beautiful image, originating from the Twitter account of astronaut Scott Kelly.

For people on solid ground back in the United States, spring is nothing more than pinprick of light at the end of a long, cold tunnel we call winter. But aboard the International Space Station, by all appearances, spring has sprung.

Marathon U.S. astronaut Scott Kelly over the weekend tweeted images of the first flower to grow from a seed and subsequently bloom in space. The 13-petaled orange zinnia brought a little color to the otherwise aesthetically sterile surroundings on the ISS, and it was the first flower to show its glory in zero gravity.

That’s one small step for Heliantheae, one giant leap for Plantae.

The path to orange splendor on the ISS wasn’t easy, and that’s what NASA scientists wanted. In May 2014, the Veggie plant growth facility was installed on the ISS, and crew members planted red romaine lettuce as the initial crop. The first crop wasn’t very successful, due to drought and stress. But the second crop — benefiting from insights gleaned from the first — yielded an edible harvest that crew members dined on.


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