[PHOTO] Point of convergence, Kew Beach looking onto Lake Ontario

There was an astonishing beauty to some of the vistas along the Beach, looking out into wintry Lake Ontario. My longing for Alex Colville felt especially satisfied by this one.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• blogTO notes that yesterday morning's transit crunch led Uber to introduce surge pricing.


• Dangerous Minds links to the Tumblr blog Vintage Occult, which has a vast collection of vintage occult.


• Languages of the World's Asya Perelstvaig notes how the television show Castle badly misrepresented the Geordie dialect.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes a new archeological survey in Greenland.


• Marginal Revolution worries about the collapse of the Schengen zone.


• The Planetary Society Blog notes that Dawn has achieved its primary science work at Ceres.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer considers how Mexico might defend itself in response to a Trump administration. Read the comments.


• Shadow, Light and Colour's Elizabeth Beattie shares a photo of a koi she found living in the sheltered pools of the Evergreen BrickWorks.


• Torontoist examines Toronto's civic tech community.


• Towleroad notes Ian Thorpe did not come out because of media pressure when he was a teenager and looks at a British television documentary about a gay sex club.

[ISL] On the fate of the Confederation Bridge assembly yard at Amherst Point, Borden-Carleton, PEI

The CBC News article "Confederation Bridge fabrication yard removal work could be done by summer" made me sad.

The P.E.I. government has issued tenders to remove above-ground concrete column structures at a Borden-Carleton fabrication yard that was used during the building of the Confederation Bridge.

The site is often referred to as the Stonehenge of P.E.I., due to the concrete pillars that dot its 45 hectares. The area is one of the first sites people see when they come to P.E.I. over the Confederation Bridge.

It has been unused since the bridge opened in 1997.

The province hopes to have the removal work completed by the summer.

I saw the yard in my August 2014 visit, and loved it. I did not get a chance to explore very deeply, unfortunately, but what I saw did evoke Stonehenge in the gloom of the overcast afternoon, on the especially tidal south shore of the Island. Why not keep them up?

[LINK] "Homosexual marriage in 19th-century Africa"

At Daily Xtra, Michael Lyons describes an interesting form of situational homosexuality among the Azande of central Africa.

North American gays have a very specific understanding of what homosexuality is. This cobbling together of an identity from sexual behaviour between consenting, cisgender adults and a spectrum of homosexual gender identities is still a pretty recent phenomenon, growing out of legal and medical discourse in late 19th-century Germany. Throw in ample historical precedent with Judeo-Christian sexual neuroses, an enthusiastic participation in consumer capitalist culture along with a general socio-economic aping of heterosexuals and you have something approaching the modern gay.

Conflating our narrow conception of identity with historic sexual traditions that were based on power dynamics, initiation and hierarchy, especially those involving children or adolescents, gets uncomfortable, although these kinds of relationships were common across the globe throughout history.

Homosexual hierarchical relationships were once commonplace in Azande of North Central Africa (Azande is the plural of Zande in the Zande language), an ethnic group of conquering warriors formed in the early 19th century — the name means “the people who possess much land.” Anthropologist EE Evans-Pritchard explains that warrior adult male Azande were organized into abakumba “married men,” and aparanga “bachelors,” and had a number of royal or court functions aside from fighting. Due to social traditions, there was a scarcity of available women for poorer men; nobility and rich commoners could afford to keep harems of wives, marriages usually arranged at girls’ birth, which meant most women were spoken for. Punishment for adultery was steep, so the only other option for aparanga, “if they were not content to masturbate — a practice to which no shame is attached, though a young man would not do it in public — [was] to marry boys and satisfy their sexual needs with them.”

Although they were temporary unions, they were real marriages in the legal sense. The husband paid a dowry of sorts to the parents of the boy-wife (usually a youth between 12 and 20 years old) and took care of his in-laws — after all, a boy-wife could later be replaced with a girl-wife. The boy-wives assumed the roles of women, following cultural practices like eating out of sight of the warriors, drawing water and collecting firewood for them. The boy-wives also performed the role of apprentice as well, like carrying his husband’s shield on forays. Eventually the husbands would marry females, and the cycle would continue with the former boy-wife taking on his own.

“With regard to the sexual side,” Evans-Pritchard writes, “at night the boy slept with his lover, who had intercourse with him between his thighs (Azande expressed disgust at the suggestion of anal penetration). The boys got what pleasure they could by friction of their organs on the husband’s belly or groin. However, even though there was this side to the relationship, it was clear from Zande accounts that there was also the comfort of a night sharing of the bed with a companion.”

[LINK] "Dodging Wind Farms and Bullets in the Arctic"

National Geographic's Scott Wallace writes about how the Sami of northern Norway are threatened by the steady encroachment upon their traditional lands.

Troms County is a sprawling region of broken coastline, labyrinthine fiords, and rugged alpine forests, situated some 700 miles (1,150 km) north of Oslo. This is the heart of Sami country, where Lapp nomads once moved their herds across vast distances to the rhythm of the seasons, oblivious to national borders. Those days are long gone. Of the estimated 100,000 Sami spread out across northern Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia’s Kola Peninsula, only about 10,000 still herd reindeer for a living. Reindeer meat is an important part of a herder’s diet, as well as the sole source of income for some families. For part-time herders, the animals’ meat and hides augment their earnings from other sources.

Today, reindeer herders find themselves increasingly boxed in by powerful interests competing for their traditional grazing lands. Dams, roads, live-fire military drills, high-voltage power lines, even green energy projects such as wind farms all have nibbled away at grazing territory. Of particular concern to the Sami leadership are a proposed copper mine in Finnmark County to the north and a windmill park just to the south.

So far, no single project has posed an existential threat to the herding culture of the Sami, Western Europe’s only indigenous people who inhabit the Arctic. But the cumulative impacts–a road here, a pipeline there–have reduced Norway’s undisturbed reindeer habitat by 70 percent in the past century and reshaped the way reindeer herding is done.

Technology is a double-edged sword for the Sami. On the one hand, it provides herders with the comforts of modern life–warm houses, GPS collars and smartphone apps to track their animals, snowmobiles and ATVs to round them up. On the other, the steady encroachment of industrial infrastructure has reduced their range and freedom of movement, requiring them to move herds by truck and boat between summer and winter pastures. It’s an expensive undertaking, and herders receive just a one-time payout to compensate losses when courts override their objections and approve large-scale projects.

As Norway, one of the world’s wealthiest countries per capita, pushes forward with plans to extract more resources and build more industry in the Arctic, Sami leaders fear their languages and culture, largely sustained by herding families, will be sacrificed to produce wealth for the larger society.

[LINK] "The Curious Islamophobic Politics of Dem Congressmember Tulsi Gabbard"

Alternet's Zaid Jilani describes how Tulsi Gabbard, a Democratic congressperson from Hawaii who came out in support of Sanders, is also intimately tied up with the Hindutva movement.

“Meet the Democrat Who’s Not Afraid to Criticize President Obama on ISIS,” intones a recent ABC News headline. The story describes remarks by Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D), who has for the past month been all over the media slamming Obama's refusal to directly associate ISIS and other terrorists with the Islamic faith.

She's particularly a favorite of right-wing media. Appearing with Fox's Neil Cavuto last week, she lashed out at the White House for holding an extremism summit with Muslim Americans, saying it's a “diversion from what our real focus needs to be. And that focus is on that Islamic extremist threat.” She criticized Obama for saying that “poverty, lack of access to jobs, lack of access to education” is contributing to radicalization. “They are not fueled by materialistic motivation, it's actually a theological, this radical Islamic ideology,” she said, throwing red meat to Fox viewers.

To the media, Gabbard is a curious spectacle. She's a Hawaii Democrat, coming from one of the nation's most progressive and dovish chapters of the Democratic Party, but she's also an Iraq war veteran, and she's consistently tried to outflank President Obama and the rest of her party to the right on foreign affairs. Last month she openly mocked Secretary of State John Kerry during an appearance on CNN, saying that he thinks, "if we give them [Islamic extremists] $10,000 and give them a nice place to live that somehow they're not going to be engaged in this fighting."

To Gabbard, the fact that Syria and Iraq have been through years of brutal civil war, wrecked economies and massive displacement is irrelevant; the only reason they have an extremism problem is because of Islamic theology.

But the case of Tulsi Gabbard becomes less curious and more expected once you look at her links to a different set of ethnic and religious hardliners: the Hindu nationalist Indian Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Since her election to Congress, Gabbard has tied herself closely to this party, which has a history of condoning hatred and violence against India's Muslim minority. Many of her stateside donors and supporters are also big supporters of this movement, which disdains secularism and promotes religious sectarianism.

[LINK] "Airbus Draws Line at Giving China its Own Widebody Jet Plant"

Bloomberg News reports on the tensions experienced by international airplane manufacturers like Airbus, as they try to do business with China without undermining their long-term positions.

Airbus Group SE drew a line on how far it’s prepared to extend jetliner production into China, saying it won’t help competitors develop aircraft, and that the country’s wide-body orders don’t justify building its most lucrative models there.

No talks have taken place about construction of twin-aisle jets such as the A330 and A350 in China, Fabrice Bregier, who heads Airbus’s planemaking arm, said at a briefing Tuesday in Tianjin, ahead of the opening of a completion shop that will put the finishing touches on wide-bodies flown in from Europe.

At a short ceremony Wednesday breaking ground on the finishing center, Bregier sat with officials from the Aviation Industry Corp. of China, the Tianjin municipality and China’s top economic planning agency against a bright red backdrop emblazoned with an image of the A330. Airbus will perform painting and cabin-fitting work for the wide-body jet at the new plant, as well as assembling four A320s a month at its existing Tianjin facility for narrow-body planes. Rival Boeing Co. also is looking to open a single-aisle finishing center in China.

The A330 completion center, the company’s first for wide-body jets outside of Europe, "marks a new milestone for Airbus’s international footprint and underlines the strong cooperation with our Chinese partners," Bregier said. "We will continue to look for future opportunities."

[LINK] "Self-Publishing Taking Off in Russia"

Window on Eurasia's Paul Goble reports on the popularity of self-publishing in Russia.

Some three million Russians want to self-publish their books, according to Elena Gorelova in today’s “Vedomosti;” and an entire industry is emerging to help them do so, creating yet another means for Russians to reach out to one another largely bypassing the restrictions being imposed by the state.

The Internet plays many of the roles that samizdat did in late Soviet times, but most posts on it are relatively short and thus do not lend themselves to the easy dissemination of larger works or the reproduction of these works in hard copy either for broader dissemination or more permanent holdings.

But those who have prepared such works seldom can find publishers who will handle them given the rising costs of paper and printing, the declining purchasing power of Russian consumers and institutions, and editorial concerns about quality or even getting in trouble with the authorities.

Consequently, Russians are beginning to do what many in the West are already doing: turning to “the services of electronic samizdat” which include firms that format, publish and sell the works of such authors (vedomosti.ru/management/articles/2016/02/26/631462-biznes-na-grafomanah).

Among the largest of these firms is Ridero.ru, which has offices in Yekaterinburg and Cracow, but many more are getting involved, Gorelova says. “There are approximately 29,000” self-published authors in Russia now thanks to Ridero, and their numbers are increasing by approximately 200 a day.

[LINK] "The Interstellar Contract": Alex Ross on copyright and the Voyager Golden Record

I just came across The New Yorker's Alex Ross' delightful article about the complexities of universal copyright in the context of the Voyager Golden Record.

Last September, the Times reported that Voyager 1, the hardy spacecraft launched in 1977, had exited the solar system and entered the interstellar void. Whenever stories about Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 appear in the papers, I read every word, transfixed: I was nine years old when the vessels began their journeys outward, and avidly followed news of their early progress. When, in 1981, I changed schools, a favorite teacher gave me a copy of Carl Sagan’s book “Murmurs of Earth,” which describes the Golden Record affixed to both Voyagers—a disk containing greetings, natural sounds, pictures, and music, intended to document human civilization for the possible benefit of extraterrestrial beings. To hear that Voyager 1 is now nineteen billion kilometres from Earth is a precise indicator of the aging process. At the same time, the craft’s longevity—it is expected to continue sending data until 2025—is vaguely encouraging. May we all transmit so reliably.

Recently, the composer Raphael Mostel told me that one of his colleagues, the composer, musician, and software engineer Laurie Spiegel, has intimate knowledge of the Golden Record and of the curious legal issues it raised. For a section of the disk entitled “Sounds of Earth,” Sagan’s sonic team had chosen Spiegel’s piece “Harmonices Mundi.” Spiegel was given a contract to sign, a copy of which she kept in her files. When I asked about it, she kindly sent me a scan of the document, which will be of interest to specialists in the obscure and complex field of Space Copyright Law, and possibly a few connoisseurs of avant-garde legal language.

“Harmonices Mundi,” or “Harmony of the World,” is a realization of Johannes Kepler’s hypothesis that the motion of the planets can be translated into a “never-ending polyphonic music.” Using the GROOVE system (Generated Real-time Output Operations on Voltage-controlled Equipment), at Bell Telephone Laboratories, Spiegel converted orbital data into musical material, choosing the six planets known to Kepler: Mercury occupies the highest frequencies, Jupiter the lowest. In theory, the piece can go on indefinitely, but the Voyager cut lasts thirty-seven seconds. A ten-minute-and-forty-second version can be heard on Spiegel’s 1980 LP “The Expanding Universe,” which was reissued in 2012.

[. . .]

Spiegel, when confronted by these sweeping phrases [of the copyright agreement], decided that she wasn’t quite ready to surrender rights in the entirety of the known physical universe. Before signing, she crossed out the phrase “throughout the world and.” Therefore, to receive earthly permission for the excerpt above, I needed merely to ask Spiegel herself, and not the rights department at NASA. In any case, as a 2008 paper by J.A.L. Sterling demonstrates, the legal definition of extraterrestrial rights is far from clear. The Economist recently explored the question in relation to Chris Hadfield’s performance of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” on board the International Space Station last year.

[LINK] "The Kijiji economy and what it says about Canadian households"

Jennifer Robson of MacLean's writes about an interesting new analysis by Canadian second-hand retailer Kijiji of its market.

Kijiji released their second annual report on the second-hand economy today. Yes, that Kijiji—the site where maybe you looked to find that second-hand smartphone or sold off your baby stroller when your child was too big for it. As with last year’s report, Kijiji has partnered with an impressive team of academics to field a survey of our habits of trading, renting, donating, buying and selling “previously loved” goods.

The second-hand economy isn’t new. Thrift stores, garage sales and church basement sales have been around for a very long time. Family members and neighbours were swapping, re-gifting and borrowing each other’s belonging for centuries before the term “sharing economy” gained traction. But I think there are at least two reasons to pay more attention to a report like this one.

First, the emergence of online platforms to facilitate trades in second-hand goods is a game-changer in all kinds of ways.

Digital classified services like Kijiji (or Craigslist) should make it easier for resellers to set prices and for buyers to shop around, reducing information asymmetries and improving efficiency in matching buyers and resellers. Interestingly, the report finds that resellers who take the time to use online information before posting their own ad do better—earning an average of $579 from online classifieds versus $279 for resellers who estimate their price. It’s possible that resellers of more expensive goods are just more likely to take the time to research their pricing. The data in this report don’t tell us.

Online platforms may also now be really important for the off-line second-hand economy. Check your local Kijiji or Craigslist or other online classifieds and you’ll see lists of notices for garage sales, book sales and more. One community organization in my city now relies on an online form to pre-screen donations of household goods for Syrian refugees. A popular local chain that resells baby clothing, toys and gear on consignment relies on a web-based platform for resellers to check their list of goods for sale and track their profits. Moving online, in theory, makes it easier for the local book sale to attract more buyers and to attract buyers from outside the area volunteers could reach with posters or flyers. Again, this should be good from the standpoint of connecting buyers and resellers in a competitive market, even if the transaction itself takes place off-line.

[URBAN NOTE] "Syrian refugees find ‘new family’ at first jobs in Canada"

The Toronto Star's Nicholas Keung notes how Adonis Supermarket is doing good for Syrian refugees.

On any given day, when shoppers walk into Adonis Supermarket, they will likely be greeted by a recently arrived Syrian refugee.

Since Canada opened its doors in November to resettling 25,000 Syrian refugees, the Middle Eastern grocery chain has brought many of them onto its payroll in Quebec and Ontario, including several dozen at its two Greater Toronto locations, at Warden and Eglinton Aves., in Scarborough, and its sister store in Mississauga.

Founders — Elie Cheaib, Georges Ghrayed and Jamil Cheaib — are immigrants from Lebanon, and they, like many others, were touched by the refugee crisis and wanted to do their part to show support for Canada’s massive Syrian resettlement plan, said store manager Hani Tawil.

“Our new hires are all highly skilled and educated. They used to be lawyers, doctors and engineers back home. They all need somewhere to start because nobody knows them and they need to survive and be independent as soon as possible,” said Tawil, who, himself, moved here with his family from the war-ravaged Syrian city of Aleppo in 2012.

“It’s not an option to come for them. They all had wonderful lives before. It’s the same for me. On my son’s fourth birthday, he said his wish was to become a shooter because he didn’t want to die. That’s when I decided to leave. We all deserve a better future.”

[FORUM] What blogs would you recommend?

What blogs would you recommend? Surely the blogosphere still has some life left to it!