[PHOTO] Family Day visitors to the Union-Pearson Express to the left, paying customers to the right

The Union-Pearson Express was exceptionally popular yesterday. I was lucky enough to get there at 11:30 in the morning, waiting only an hour and a half. As Toronto Star's Geoffrey Vendeville noted in "UP Express a huge hit — when it’s a free ride", the line got much longer after that.

Thousands of people crammed into Union Station and spent much of Family Day lining up for a train ride to the airport, even if they had no flight to catch.

Metrolinx, the provincial transit agency that oversees the Union Pearson Express, waived the shuttle’s fares during the holiday and NBA all-star weekend to introduce more people to the eight-month-old train service.

The UP Express usually gets between 2,200 and 2,500 riders per day, well short of its first-year goal of 5,000 passengers daily, said Anne Marie Aikins, a Metrolinx spokeswoman.

But ridership increased almost fivefold this weekend. About 10,000 people boarded trains on Saturday, and 13,500 did on Sunday.

On Monday, the queue for the airport shuttle from Union snaked all the way from the east wing of the train station’s Great Hall to the UP Express terminus in the SkyWalk. There was a separate, much faster line for people hurrying to catch a plane.

In this photo, you can see the Family Day visitors lined up to the left, leaving space free for these paying customers to the right. There was a lot of space to the right.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait shares pictures of stellar shock waves.


• Beyond the Beyond's Bruce Sterling discovers he got the title of his blog from a Poul Anderson title.


• blogTO reports on yesterday's massive lineup for the Union-Pearson Express.


• Centauri Dreams bids adieu to comet probe Philae.


• Dangerous Minds shows us how the David Bowie instrumental "Crystal Japan" got used in a Japanese TV commercial for sake in 1980.


• The Dragon's Gaze shares the Kepler-454 system with its oddities.


• Language Log talks about "Kongish", a mixed Cantonese-English speech used for political protest in Hong Kong.The Map Room Blog notes misuses of maps.


• At the NYR Daily, Charles Simic despairs after visiting New Hampshire.
  
• Transit Toronto notes progress building infrastructure in Mississauga.


• Window on Eurasia notes that Yandex News gets more sources from Facebook and Twitter than elsewhere.


• Arnold Zwicky looks at the gay love songs of Eli Lieb.

[LINK] "'Hobbits' found on Flores island are not Homo sapiens, but mystery remains"

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation reports on the confirmation of the existence of Homo floresiensis as a distinct human subspecies.

Fossils of Homo floresiensis, dubbed "the hobbits" due to their tiny stature, were discovered on the island of Flores in 2003.

Controversy has raged ever since as to whether they were an unknown branch of early humans or specimens of modern man deformed by disease.

The study, based on an analysis of the skull bones, shows once and for all that the pint-sized people were not Homo sapiens, according to the researchers.

[. . .]

One school of thought holds that so-called Flores Man descended from the larger Homo erectus and became smaller over hundreds of generations.

The proposed process for this is called "insular dwarfing".

Animals, after migrating across land bridges during periods of low sea level, wind up marooned on islands as oceans rise and their size progressively diminishes if the supply of food declines.

An adult hobbit stood one metre tall and weighed about 25 kilograms.

[LINK] "New Iqaluit mosque opens doors"

CBC reports on the completion of a mosque in Iqaluit, capital of Nunavut.

After years in the making, Iqaluit's new mosque held its inauguration Friday, officially opening as a place of worship.

The building will serve as a prayer space and a community centre for Iqaluit's 100 or so Muslims, as well as a place to learn about Islam.

"By establishing this mosque, we are saying one thing: we are now an integral part of Iqaluit, we are now a part of the Iqaluit community," said Hussain Guisti, the Zubaidah Tallab Foundation's general manager.

Members of the foundation, along with the Islamic Association of Nunavut, built the mosque themselves at a cost of $800,000. The foundation has also helped construct mosques in Inuvik, N.W.T., and Thompson, Manitoba.

"We just finished the mosque now. The guys were working outside underneath the mosque in –56 below," Guisti said. "I mean, that's treacherous. If you can build a mosque in Iqaluit, you can build it anywhere else on the planet."

[LINK] On the completion of the Inuvik to Tuktoyaktuk highway

The Toronto Star's Jim Coyle describes in "Highway will complete Canada’s road network from coast to coast" how a highway on the Canadian Arctic is nearing construction.

For a half century and more, an all-weather Inuvik-to-Tuktoyaktuk Highway has been imagined, proposed, talked about in the Northwest Territories. Call it Jack Kerouac on the tundra, the chance to get on the road year-round and drive across a part of Canada glorious in its harsh beauty and still the last frontier. The project, which began in 2014 and has put hundreds of surveyors, equipment operators and labourers to work, is expected to be completed in 2017-18. A series of photographs from the New York Times shows the land and people of a place apart, soon to be linked to the rest of the country.

Inuvik, with a population of about 3,500, is in the Mackenzie Delta above the Arctic Circle and is the current northern terminus of the Dempster Highway, connecting the Inuvik region to the Yukon highway system. Tuktoyaktuk, known as Tuk, is a hamlet of about 1,000 on the shore of the Arctic Ocean northeast of Inuvik. Its location has been used for centuries by the Inuvialuit people as a camp for harvesting caribou and hunting whales.

The 138-kilometre ITH is expected to cost about $300 million, two-thirds covered by the federal government, the rest by provinces and territories involved in the project. Maintenance costs — estimated at from $2,000 to $8,000 per kilometre a year — fall to the territory. The benefit of the highway’s top-of-the-world location on the treeless open tundra is reduced snowplowing cost, as snow tends to blow off the roadway.

Construction is expected to create more than 2,000 jobs in various parts of the country. When completed, local residents will benefit from a cheaper cost of living as goods can be shipped year-round, not just when an ice highway is operational between mid-December and the end of April. There will also be greater access to health care and educational opportunities, as well as enhanced social and recreational opportunities in the region. Locals look for a tourism increase as the more intrepid of their southern compatriots come to visit.

[LINK] "Can we make sense of the Malheur mess?"

In the High Country News, writer Hal Herring has a sensitive essay about the standoff in Oregon. Many of these people might have problems with land tenure, but what they're doing and the likely reaction will make it worse.

What more can be said? I was one of the hundreds of journalists who went to the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge during the Ammon Bundy occupation, and I saw the same things that all the rest of them did. If there was any difference between myself and those hundreds of other journalists, maybe it was that I went there looking for kindred spirits.

I am a self-employed, American-born writer with a wife and two teenage children living in a tiny town on the plains of Montana. I’m a reader of the U.S. Constitution, one who truly believes that the Second Amendment guarantees the survival of the rest of the Bill of Rights. I came of age reading Edward Abbey’s The Brave Cowboy, Orwell’s 1984, and a laundry-list of anarchists, from Tolstoy and Kropotkin to Bakunin and Proudhon, who gave me the maxim that defined my early twenties: “Whoever lays his hand on me to govern me is a usurper and a tyrant: I declare him my enemy.” I read Malthus and Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, and am a skeptic of government power. I was not surprised when I read about the outrage over the sentencing of Oregon ranchers Dwight and Steve Hammond for arson: Federal mandatory minimum sentencing has been a terrible idea since its inception. I am gobsmacked by an economy that seems engineered to impoverish anyone who dares try make their own living, and by a government that seems more and more distant from the people it represents, except when calling up our sons and daughters to attack chaotic peoples that clearly have nothing to do with me or anybody I know.

I am isolated by a culture that is as inscrutable to me as any in the mountains of Afghanistan. For loving wilderness and empty lands and birdsong rather than teeming cities, I risk being called a xenophobe, a noxious nativist. For viewing guns as constitutionally protected, essential tools of self-defense and, if need be, liberation, I’m told that I defend the massacres of innocents in mass shootings. When I came to Montana at age twenty-five, I found in this vast landscape, especially in the public lands where I hunted and camped and worked, the freedom that was evaporating in the South, where I grew up. I got happily lost in the space and the history. For a nature-obsessed, gun-soaked malcontent like me, it was home, and when Ammon Bundy and his men took over the Malheur refuge, on a cold night in January, I thought I should go visit my neighbors.

At first light on Jan. 12, in the parking lot above the headquarters of the Malheur refuge, I met Neil Wampler, a tall, white-bearded man in his sixties who was standing in the snow, at twelve degrees above, wearing a pair of old black running shoes and a green coat over a hooded sweatshirt. He was near the campfire where the occupiers would gather, behind the big white pickup that blocked the road into the refuge headquarters and that was emblazoned with signs that said, “Clemency for the Hammonds.” Blaine Cooper, whose real name would be revealed as Stanley Blaine Hicks (with felonious history) of Humboldt, Arizona, was sitting in the pickup with the heat blasting. Cooper looked like an urban model – perfectly trimmed and moussed black hair, pale blue eyes, and, oddly, given the place and the weather – 4,100 foot elevation, sagebrush steppe, severe ice fog – a lightweight black Calvin Klein jacket. As I approached the open window of the truck, Cooper said something to me about how the government had to be opposed. I was holding my legal pad and trying to make notes, but then he said something to the effect that “the left” had killed and enslaved people and blown up buildings to create this refuge, and I smiled, nodded, and kept walking. I learned from covering wolf reintroduction in 2000 that the most outlandish quotes, however entertaining, ruin stories. I shook hands with Wampler, who was much calmer than Cooper, didn’t seem to be suffering from the cold, and actually looked like he was having a good time.

“I’m just the cook, really,” he said. “Been cooking for the crew since Bunkerville.” He smiled, “And I can tell you, it’s good to be the cook.” When he told me that the goal was for a federal transfer of the refuge lands to the states, I asked him how much he knew about what would happen to the lands if they were successful. He admitted that he didn’t know, really. “This is a deep study,” he said. “Our previous actions were more protective, to keep the federal government from harming the citizens. This is different, because the states are asserting their 10th Amendment prerogatives. When our founders created the states out of the territories, 95 percent of it was meant to be private land.”

I asked him if he knew the history of this place - the range wars, the overgrazing, the plume hunters that led to the establishment of the refuge in 1908. He admitted that he did not, but that he would like to know more. “You really need to meet Ammon, and talk to him about these things,” he said. “I’m amenable to other solutions, but we have to rid ourselves of this government. All three branches are out of control. When we were at Bunkerville, the BLM had attack dogs, snipers, tasers. I saw that happening on television in California, and by 10 am that morning, I was packed up and on the road to join up. And we had a great victory there.” He brightened, and the circuit-preacher intensity of his voice was gone. “I’ll get off my soapbox now. I’m an old hippy, and this is a high, the most exciting and energizing thing. I’m off my butt, I’m 68 years old, and my friends back home are so jealous. To be an old hippy from San Francisco, and to be in this mix, to be friends with a redneck from Alabama. It’s beautiful.” Unlike the other occupiers around the fire, Wampler was not conspicuously armed, perhaps because, as other reporters would uncover, he has a 38-year-old conviction for second degree murder (of his father) in California, a crime for which he long ago served his time but which precludes him from legally owning firearms.

[LINK] "Praying to Allah in Mexico: Islam Is Gaining a Foothold in Chiapas"

In Spiegel, Jens Glüsing describes how Islam is spreading noticeably among the Mayans of Chiapas. The number are small, but perhaps this is a trend to Watch out for.

Anastasio Gomez, a Tzotzil Mayan from Mexico, fondly remembers his pilgrimage to Mecca. He circled around the Kaaba, the highest sanctuary of Muslims, seven times. At Mount Arafat he prayed to Allah and then he, together with 15 other Indians, sacrificed a sheep before boarding the flight back to their Mexican home.

"In Islam, race plays no role," the young man says joyously. His enthusiasm is understandable. After all, in his home state of Chiapas, Mexico's poorest, the indigenous people are viewed as second class humans, and whites and Mestizos treat the Indian majority as if they weren't there. In the southern Mexican provincial metropolis San Cristóbal de las Casas, the descendants of the Maya even have to move onto the street if a white person approaches them on the sidewalk.

Gomez, 23, converted to Islam eight years ago; ever since then, he has called himself Ibrahim. On his first pilgrimage seven years ago, the Indian was still something of an anomaly. Today, however, Muslim women in headscarves have become a common sight on the streets of San Cristobal.

About 300 Tzozil-Indians have converted to Islam in recent years and it's a development that is beginning to worry the Mexican government. Indeed, the government even suspects the new converts of subversive activity and has already set the secret service onto the track of the Mayan Muslims. Mexican President Vincente Fox has even gone so far as to say he fears the influence of the radical fundamentalists of al-Qaida.

But the Indians have no interest in political extremism. Rather, they belong to the Sunni, Murabitun sect that was founded by the Scotsman Ian Dallas and is seen as an offshoot of a Moroccan religious order. The Murabitun followers represent a sort of primal Islam: Earning interest profits through money lending is a no-no and they preach a literal interpretation of the Koran.

[LINK] "Six Nations Polytechnic to offer course in disappearing language"

The Toronto Star's Louise Brown describes the effort to use education to save Cayuga, an Iroquoian language, from extinction.

Among the Babel of global dialects exploding across Canada, one old home-grown language is in a race against extinction.

The language of the Cayuga people — one of the Six Nations of the Grand River, just west of the GTA — is fighting to survive while the last 49 native speakers are still alive to pass the torch. In a bid to breathe new life into the vanishing language, the community has been running preschool programs, elementary Cayuga immersion and post-secondary diplomas in the language.

But now Cayuga — and Mohawk, its more widely used cousin in the Iroquois language family — are getting a boost in recognition. The languages will be the subject of a new three-year Bachelor of Arts degree offered by Six Nations Polytechnic.

It’s the first time Queen’s Park has permitted a First Nations-run post-secondary institute to offer a degree of its own, and the Six Nations community sees the program in Ogwehoweh, which refers to both languages, as an academic lifeline to the heart of their cultures.

“Cayuga is close to extinction; it’s in a very fragile state but we need it for our traditional cultural activities and institutions,” said Rebecca Jamieson, president of Six Nations Polytechnic, who has studied Cayuga but not yet mastered speaking it.

[LINK] "How Bernie Sanders Spent His Soviet 'Honeymoon'"

In Bloomberg View, Leonid Bershidsky reacts to reports that Bernie Sanders honeymoon in the small Soviet, now Russian, city of Yaroslavl in 1988. What does it mean? Certainly something much more interesting and complex than what his detractors would have.

The trip, which began the day after his wedding with his second wife, Jane, in May 1988, was undertaken as part of Sanders' official duties as mayor of Burlington, Vermont. And in any case, most of his critics seem to have forgotten that the Soviet Union at the time was hardly the place for an admirer of communism to find comfort.

Under Sanders, Burlington developed sister-city programs with places that reflected his sympathies, notably Puerta Cabezas, Nicaragua. That pairing was in keeping with Sanders' opposition to President Ronald Reagan's attempts to undermine the leftist Sandinista government. Sanders and the Burlington Board of Aldermen even wrote angry letters demanding that the president "stop killing the innocent people of Nicaragua."

Burlington also had a link-up with the city of Yaroslavl, in Russia. But as Sanders wrote in his 1998 political memoir, "Outsider in the White House," the motivations were quite different:

Like the Puerto Cabezas project, the sister-city program with Yaroslavl has been very successful. Each has different constituencies of support. Puerto Cabezas mostly attracted the energy of left-wing activists who were initially involved because of their support for the Sandinista Revolution and opposition to U.S. intervention in Central America. The Yaroslavl project received more broad-based backing, including from a number of business people in the city.

The Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev was opening to the world, no longer exactly an enemy of the U.S. and more an intriguing, unknown entity. In 1987, Gorbachev effectively signed the planned economy's death sentence, permitting so-called "cooperatives" -- essentially private companies that could produce and trade goods as freely as the tired and greedy bureaucracy allowed. Thus began the second stage of what Gorbachev called perestroika, or restructuring. It also included political reforms that attempted to shift the center of power from the Communist Party to the Soviets -- a system of representative government that handled the Soviet Union's housekeeping.

[URBAN NOTE] On a big bang approach to mass transit in the Greater Toronto Area

What Toronto's rapid transit network could look like in 15 years, according to recommendations from the city of Toronto and the TTC. The Crosstown LRT would be extended west to the airport jobs hub and northeast to the Scarborough campus of U of T. The subway would reach the Scarborough City Centre. Emerging neighbourhoods along the eastern waterfront would be connected via LRT. The first phase of the relief line would carry riders south from Pape Station along Queen St. at Nathan Phillips Square. More Torontonians would hop on the Stouffville and Kitchener GO lines via SmartTrack.

The above inspiring map appeared twice on my Feedly feed. The first appearance was made via blogTO's Amy Grief, then via Tess Kalinowski's Toronto Star article "Planners want public’s input on ‘motherlode’ of GTA transit". (The caption comes from Kalinowski's article.)

Toronto’s chief planner Jennifer Keesmaat calls it the “motherlode” of transit. She’s referring to plans that will add miles of rapid transit to the city and surrounding region in the next 15 years and beyond, connecting communities in ways that have been dreamed about for a generation.

The veil comes off the next phase of expansion at a series of meetings around the city and region starting Tuesday.

It’s an unprecedented public consultation incorporating seven provincial and city-led projects — from SmartTrack and electrified GO service, to a relief subway along Queen St. and a 17-stop eastern extension of the Crosstown LRT.

The scope of the meetings reflects the mega-expansion going on in transit in Toronto and the surrounding municipalities, said Keesmaat.

But a new network-based approach to planning is also finally come to the fore. It will transform the way we live and move in the Toronto region, she said.

“Historically the city advances one project at a time, and the thinking is, when that project is built then we’ll start planning for the next project,” said Keesmaat.

But it was clear that approach wouldn’t allow Toronto to catch up on the 20-plus years in which there was no transit investment.

There was a realization, she said, “That to address the backlog in transit infrastructure we need to be advancing a whole series of projects at one time in parallel.”

I'm all for this if it gets the job done. Toronto, obviously, does need to invest in its transit future. Desperately.