[PHOTO] Three photos each of the seven Winter Stations, Toronto (#winterstations)

Yesterday, I shared the selfie standing on Woodbine Beach in front of the Steam Canoe. I had taken this photo at the end of my pilgrimage to the seven Winter Stations. I came down from the north, from Queen Street East through Kew Gardens park, walking south to the Kew and Balmy Beaches. Reaching the easternmost point of Balmy Beach, I then had to double back to Woodbine Beach to their west.

The first I had seen was Floating Ropes, on Woodbine Beach. It created a wonderful self-enclosed space for children to play in.

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I did not get Lithoform.



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Aurora Borealis was the first interactive exhibit I came across, with the wheel on the topped that could be tugged around by the playful.



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Sauna was an actual working sauna, or would have been if the stove was turned on.



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Flow was ingenious, a mound of wooden toys shaped like ice crystals. People had fun picking them up and throwing them back on.



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In the Belly of a Bear created an interior space, a round wooden globe lined on the inside with fur and with a porthole looking up into the blue sky.



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The Steam Canoe was ingenious, a beautiful thing of wood that could not have seen its full use. When it's 20 degrees below, solar panels can melt snow into steam. This was not at all possible on Sunday.



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[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• blogTO notes the increasing unaffordability of real estate in Toronto.


• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly is quite right about the restorative power of a walk.


• The Dragon's Tales notes China's plans to launch its space station into orbit.


• The LRB Blog features an essay from a German Jewish cemetery in Berlin, reflecting on past and present migrations and refugees.


• Geocurrents notes the very sharp worldwide drop in fertility rates between 1950 and 2015.


• The NYRB Daily considers controversies over museums in Berlin.


• Peter Rukavina notes the very odd weather projected Thursday for Charlottetown.


• Torontoist examines how Ontario's proposal for free tuition for student from low-income families would work.


• Window on Eurasia notes Russian interest in triggering Latgalian separatism to try to control Latvia.


• Arnold Zwicky considers the idea of the "greater West Coast."

[URBAN NOTE] "UP Express fare drop another blow to taxis: drivers group"

Metro Toronto notes that Toronto taxi drivers are upset with dropping Union-Pearson Express fares. This is not going to help their cause, not in the age of Uber.

Lowering fares on the UP Express is another blow the city’s already struggling taxi industry, drivers say.

“It will significantly hurt the taxi business and the limos working at the airport,” said Sajid Mughal, president of the driver’s group iTaxiworkers. “It will hurt everyone.”

The cash price of the UP Express from Union Station is $27.50, coming in at a little more than the half price of a taxi to the airport from downtown and making it cost effective for couples travelling together to take a cab. But, when Metrolinx drops its price on March 9, a couple will be able to make the trip for $24.

There’s no doubt it will eat away at drivers’ income at a time when they’re continuing to take hits from Uber, according to Mughal.

[URBAN NOTE] "Goodwill Toronto moving ahead with bankruptcy"

This brief Toronto Star article notes the effective end of Goodwill in Toronto and most of Ontario.

Goodwill Industries of Toronto, Eastern, Central and Northern Ontario is moving ahead with its bankruptcy process as its CEO steps aside.

In a news release Monday, Keiko Nakamura said there is no longer a role for her as CEO now that a trustee had been installed.

Nor is there any “viable option that allows the organization to reemerge from” bankruptcy, she said.

Goodwill TECNO filed for bankruptcy on Feb. 8. The move came three weeks after Goodwill TECNO shuttered all 16 of its stores, 10 donation centres and two offices, putting more than 400 people out of work.

[LINK] "Norway Seeks to Piggyback on ‘Brexit’ Deal to Escape EU's Grip"

Bloomberg's Saleha Mohsin describes how some Norwegians want to take advantage of the United Kingdom's Brexit referendum to renegotiate their relationship with the European Union.

The case [of Norway] illustrates how hard it will be for the U.K. to escape the bloc’s influence even if it decides to head for the exit. While voters have twice rejected joining the EU, Norway has still adopted 75 percent of its laws to access the lucrative single market.

Some lawmakers in Europe’s second-richest nation per capita now want a deal similar to the one U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron struck with the EU on curbing welfare benefits for workers from other member states.

“Thanks to Britain’s agreement with the EU, we could solve some of our own issues,” said Arve Kambe, a lawmaker of the ruling Conservatives who is chairman of parliament’s labor and social affairs committee. “We want to have the same options that Britain has with work-related benefits.”

With an economy backstopped by an $810 billion wealth fund, Norway has a lot to offer foreign workers. The nation provides its 5.2 million residents with publicly funded health care, parental benefits and practically free education.

As a result, it now spends about 223 million kroner ($25.8 million) a year on family and work-related benefits for migrants, according to Kambe. The problem, for Kambe, it that much of the cash is being sent back to Poland, Bulgaria or other countries where the cost of living is lower. These payments should be adjusted depending on the country, he said.

Norway also has far larger costs in accessing EU’s internal market as a member of the European Economic Area. Western Europe’s biggest crude producer contributes roughly 860 million euros ($948 million) annually to help implement EU policy and for programs designed to reduce economic disparities within the bloc, according to the Norwegian Foreign Ministry.

[LINK] "Turkey Seen Seeking to Reanimate GUAM as Anti-Russian Alliance"

Window on Eurasia's Paul Goble notes a Russian article suggesting that Turkey might interested in pushing the GUAM alliance into forming an alliance against Russia.

The Turkish government is seeking to revive GUAM in order to form an alliance of states against Russia broader than the pan-Turkic groupings it had promoted in the past, Aleksey Fenenko says; but he adds that Ankara faces real difficulties in doing so and that Moscow has the means to block any such geopolitical effort.

In today’s “Nezavisimaya gazeta,” the instructor on world politics at Moscow State University says that “Turkish diplomacy is trying to revive a block like GU(U)AM” consisting of “countries which have difficulties with Russia” and which thus could help Ankara in its conflict with Moscow (ng.ru/cis/2016-02-26/3_kartblansh.html).

GUAM was formed by Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Moldova. Uzbekistan later joined and left the organization: hence, its acronym. Like Latvia, Turkey already has observer status in the group and like its members it wants to make the organization into “an alternative” to the Moscow-led Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).

The idea of creating such a grouping of states arose in the mid-1990s. In June 1996, Moldova and Georgia issued a joint statement. And in October 1997, they were joined by Azerbaijan and Ukraine in calling for a system of mutual consultations in order to “’counter Russian hegemony.’” That became GUAM at a meeting in Yalta on July 7, 2001.

But despite the aspirations of its organizers, the group has not become a truly effective grouping of states, Fenenko says. They are divided on many issues, and Uzbekistan has pointed to its dissolution by leaving as a result of differences with the others over relations with the United States.

[LINK] "Dear GOP: We Can’t Save You If You Won’t Save Yourself"

John Scalzi's post at Whatever talking about how Americans need not try to save the Republican Party from itself, given that Trump is the party's own creation, makes perfect sense to Canadian me.

And now is the part of the election cycle where the pundit class comes forward and begs the rest of the US electorate to help save the GOP from itself. In the Atlantic, Peter Beinart argues that liberals should support Marco Rubio over Trump, and over in the Washington Post, Michael R. Strain of the American Enterprise Institute is flat-out begging for people to vote for someone, anyone, but Trump. “We all have to stop him,” reads the headline to the article.

We? We? I don’t know if Michael R. Strain is up on the news, but Trump is polling at 49% nationally among Republican voters. He’s outpolling Rubio, Ted Cruz, John Kasich and Ben Carson combined among the people who are actually going to go to the polls to vote Republican. Likewise, Beinart’s suggestion that liberals throw in with Rubio, who aside from his pandering antediluvian positions appears to dissolve into a stammering puddle of flop sweat when people are mean to him, which is a quality I know I always look for in a potential leader of the free world, is actively insulting. Hey, liberals! Save the GOP from Trump by supporting the establishment’s hand-picked empty suit, which it will use to shore up shaky senatorial races and then push and pass a political agenda massively antithetical to everything you believe in! Yeeeeah, thanks for the hot take, there, Pete. Let me know who you buy your weed from, because that’s clearly some primo shit you’re smoking.

News flash, pundit guys: No one can save the GOP from Trump but the GOP, and its voters clearly have no intention of doing that. To repeat: Trump currently outpolls every other GOP candidate in the race, combined. What, pray tell, do you want any of the rest of us to do about that? The answer may be “vote against Trump in the primaries,” but this is where I point out that the rest of us are not GOP primary voters for a reason. Some of us may want to vote in the Democratic primaries. Some of us may be independents and have to wait to see what dumbasses the parties elect. Some of us may belong to third parties because we’re political idealists/masochists. The point is, we have other plans for the day. They are legit plans. They don’t involve keeping the GOP from setting itself on fire.

Also, you know. If I were the paranoid type, I’d look at the pundit class begging the rational portion of the electorate to save the GOP from itself as a suspicious bit of political theater orchestrated by the shadowy cabal that really runs the nation. We can’t let the GOP implode yet, we still have to pay taxes! I know! Convince the liberals to vote against their interests to save a political party whose goals oppose theirs in every relevant way! And as a bonus, that way they don’t vote for that commie Sanders! Quick! To the pundits! I’m not saying that’s what’s happening. But I’m also not not saying it, nod, wink, nod, hand signal, wink.

[LINK] "Mysterious Chimpanzee Behavior May Be Evidence of "Sacred" Rituals"

The Dragon's Tales linked to a remarkable paper, "Chimpanzee accumulative stone throwing".

The study of the archaeological remains of fossil hominins must rely on reconstructions to elucidate the behaviour that may have resulted in particular stone tools and their accumulation. Comparatively, stone tool use among living primates has illuminated behaviours that are also amenable to archaeological examination, permitting direct observations of the behaviour leading to artefacts and their assemblages to be incorporated. Here, we describe newly discovered stone tool-use behaviour and stone accumulation sites in wild chimpanzees reminiscent of human cairns. In addition to data from 17 mid- to long-term chimpanzee research sites, we sampled a further 34 Pan troglodytes communities. We found four populations in West Africa where chimpanzees habitually bang and throw rocks against trees, or toss them into tree cavities, resulting in conspicuous stone accumulations at these sites. This represents the first record of repeated observations of individual chimpanzees exhibiting stone tool use for a purpose other than extractive foraging at what appear to be targeted trees. The ritualized behavioural display and collection of artefacts at particular locations observed in chimpanzee accumulative stone throwing may have implications for the inferences that can be drawn from archaeological stone assemblages and the origins of ritual sites.

The full paper is accessible via the link above.

One of the authors, Laura Kehoe, wrote an extended article for Scientific American.

We paused at a clearing in the bush. I let out a sigh of relief that no thorns appeared to be within reach, but why had we stopped? I made my way to the front of the group to ask the chief of the village and our legendary guide, Mamadou Alioh Bah. He told me he had found something interesting—some innocuous markings on a tree trunk. Something that most of us wouldn’t have even noticed in the complex and messy environment of a savannah had stopped him in his tracks. Some in our group of six suggested that wild pigs had made these marks, while scratching up against the tree trunk, others suggested it was teenagers messing around.

But Alioh had a hunch—and when a man that can find a single fallen chimp hair on the forest floor and can spot chimps kilometres away with his naked eye better than you can (with expensive binoculars) as a hunch, you listen to that hunch. We set up a camera trap in the hope that whatever made these marks would come back and do it again, but this time we would catch it all on film.

[. . .]

What we saw on this camera was exhilarating—a large male chimp approaches our mystery tree and pauses for a second. He then quickly glances around, grabs a huge rock and flings it full force at the tree trunk.

Nothing like this had been seen before and it gave me goose bumps. Jane Goodall first discovered wild chimps using tools in the 1960s. Chimps use twigs, leaves, sticks and some groups even use spears in order to get food. Stones have also been used by chimps to crack open nuts and cut open large fruit. Occasionally, chimps throw rocks in displays of strength to establish their position in a community.

But what we discovered during our now-published study wasn’t a random, one-off event, it was a repeated activity with no clear link to gaining food or status—it could be a ritual. We searched the area and found many more sites where trees had similar markings and in many places piles of rocks had accumulated inside hollow tree trunks—reminiscent of the piles of rocks archaeologists have uncovered in human history.

Videos poured in. Other groups working in our project began searching for trees with tell-tale markings. We found the same mysterious behaviour in small pockets of Guinea Bissau, Liberia and Côte d’Ivoire but nothing east of this, despite searching across the entire chimp range from the western coasts of Guinea all the way to Tanzania.

This, surely, is proof of chimpanzee minds.

[LINK] "In my guts, Trump is nuts"

At The Power and the Money, Noel Maurer writes about how profoundly offputting the idea of President Donald Trump is to him.

I realized something yesterday, right after Governor Christie endorsed Trump.

A few posts ago, I idly wondered if Trump might make a better president than Marco Rubio. That was comment-bait more than anything. (These comment threads are oddly short compared to the email threads they displaced. People? Afraid of Trump twitter followers?) But it reflected a logical belief that there were reasons why a liberal might prefer President Trump over the other GOP options.

And then Christie announced. Somehow, in my gut, that suddenly pulled away a level of denial that I did not know that I had: Trump might actually become President in November.

It was a gut punch. I had trouble looking at my children while imagining Donald Trump as the head of our state.

Relax, Pop. America will survive President Trump

I viscerally hate the idea of Donald Trump as president of the United States. I would strongly prefer Ted Cruz. I would campaign for Ted Cruz to keep Donald Trump away from the Oval Office.

Cruz, it should be noted, is not someone Noel likes.

The discussion in the comments is long, informative, and very much worth reading. What will become of the Republican Party, the United States even?

[URBAN NOTE] "What the TTC would look like if Toronto stuck to plans"

blogTO's Derek Flack writes about Toronto's long history of flirting with ambitious mass transit plans and then failing to live up to them.



The above map shows an abortive subway/streetcar line proposed more than a century ago.

It's cruel to think about what the TTC might look like today had previous municipal and provincial leaders stuck to a coherent vision when it comes to transit planning. Current planners have released a series of maps detailing what might be done in the next 15 years, which looks as promising as it does unlikely to happen in the allotted timeline.

Yes, Toronto is good at imagining new transit futures, but not at making them happen. This has been happening since 1910, when the first meandering subway was proposed for Toronto. If only we had really started building underground transit that long ago. We might even have a Queen subway and the Bloor-Danforth Line.

The grandaddy of all of these visions would be five years old now had the political will existed to push it through to realization. Conceived in 1985 when the city realized that it was falling behind in transit infrastructure growth, Network 2011 would shuttle Toronto into the future with no less than three new subway lines.

Whenever Network 2011 comes up, the project that gets the most focus is the Downtown Relief Line (DRL), but in fact this was a comprehensive package meant to help Toronto meet the transportation needs of its rapidly swelling population across the entire city. Along with a DRL, significant commitments were made away from the core.

Here's the plan in a nutshell: The YUS Line would be extended to Downsview, A Sheppard Line would be built from Downsview to Scarborough Town Centre, Bloor-Danforth would be extended to Sherway Gardens, an Eglinton West Line would be built to the airport, the Scarborough RT would be extended to Malvern, and a DRL would be built from Union to Pape.

These are not hiccups. This underachievement is part of a trend. I only hope Toronto will break from this, and soon.

[DM] "On Brexit and how limited free movement in the Commonwealth is a poor substitute for the EU"

I blog at Demography Matters about how British interest in a very limited liberalization of migration in the Commonwealth is a poor, politically appealing, substitute for the gains from European Union migration.