[PHOTO] The surf of Lake Ontario at Kew Beach

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• Anthropology.net notes a finding suggesting that Neanderthals deliberately used rocks rich in manganese dioxide to start fires.


• Centauri Dreams considers what could be false signs of life.


• The Crux notes the stone-throwing chimpanzees.


• D-Brief suggests that a fungus was the first form of life to make it onto land.


• The Dragon's Gaze notes exceptionally eccentrically-orbiting gas giant HD 7449Ab.


• The Dragon's Tales notes Russian competition to build India a new aircraft carrier.


• Language Hat notes the complexities of literary translation.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money points to a Robert Farley article imagining an Anglo-American war in the early 1920s.


• The Map Room Blog links to a map of Euroskepticism in the United Kingdom.


• Marginal Revolution tries to map European place names with the word saint in them.


• The NYRB Daily despairs for the American party system.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer notes the indirect ways in which repealing NAFTA could pay for a US-Mexican border wall.


• Spacing notes how parks can change cities.


• Arnold Zwicky considers a variety of geographic areas with indeterminate boundaries, like the South and northeast Asia.

[URBAN NOTE] "Is this farm the last frontier of GTA sprawl?"

The Toronto Star's Alex Ballingall writes about the last remnants of an eastern GTA farm set to be erased by development.

Time has chipped acres away from the old Westney family farm for more than a century, and now nearby residents in Ajax and Pickering want to halt suburban sprawl to save what’s left of a piece of local history.

The two-acre plot of former farmland is subject to a development proposal that would plop 19 new houses in a cluster around the 19th century Westglen farmhouse, which was designated a heritage site in 1985. A group of neighbours and history enthusiasts has organized a “Save Westglen” campaign, worrying that the new construction, as proposed, would obscure the house and diminish a landmark that’s significant to the story of communities east of Toronto.

“To reduce that family and what they’ve done to just the smallest fraction and this tiny footprint, that’s the real injustice here,” said Paul Gittens, who lives near the old farm.

“It’s high time that the politicians and the developers need to recognize what is going on. We are losing historical sites to commerce and to greed.”

Tribute Communities, the developer that owns the old farm property, did not respond to requests for comment from the Star.

[URBAN NOTE] "York Region pitches Justin Trudeau on Yonge subway extension"

The Toronto Star's Tess Kalinowski writes about how York Region is pushing for an extension of the Yonge subway line into Richmond Hill.

It’s the subway issue that seldom surfaces amid the din of Toronto’s more heated transit debates. But in York Region the persistent call to extend the Yonge line north to Richmond Hill is growing louder.

Sixteen York Region mayors, councillors and senior staff pitched the $4-billion subway proposal to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau last week.

It’s the first time York has taken its case to the capital, said region chair Wayne Emmerson, who led the contingent.

“We’re hoping the federal government has heard us,” he said.

About 2,500 buses a day carry commuters down the corridor that would be served by a Yonge subway extension, which would take about 10 years to build, with six new stops north of Finch Station, terminating at Richmond Hill Centre.

[URBAN NOTE] "Airport and Portlands to be transit hubs of activity?"

Spacing Toronto's John Lorinc is decidedly skeptical about plans to make Toronto Pearson and the Portlands into regional transit hubs. Better planning is desperately needed.

Way up in the north-west corner of the city, we have the Greater Toronto Airport Authority (GTAA) fearlessly shilling, with the help of top provincial Liberal strategists, for a “multi-modal transportation hub” on its lands. Said hub would connect the Pearson/Mississauga area with regional transit (MiWay, Smart Track, various bus services, UP Express, etc.) and points west, especially Waterloo Region.

Way down in the south-east corner, near the Portlands, we have City officials quietly testing out a variation on the standard Downtown Relief Line configuration that includes a slight southward jog to allow for a new subway stop on the former Lever Brothers/Unilever site, which could someday become a second major office cluster. It’s not difficult to imagine that such a station would itself become something of a multi-modal operation, given planned links to the re-built Gardiner (think buses), Smart Track/GO, and the Queen’s Quay East LRT.

So what to make of this looming hub-of-war?

Let’s start with the airport. In recent weeks, an intriguing data point from a November, 2015, Neptis study has found its way into the policy dialogue about land use and transportation planning in the region. According to her review of the ten-year-old Places to Grow Act, veteran planner Pamela Blais has identified three employment “megazones” in the GTA. These distant constellations are not merely ill served by transit; Blais says they scarcely figure in Metrolinx’s long-term plans to link the region’s 25 urban growth centres. Two extend along the Vaughan/Markham/Richmond Hill axis, and the third, which is about two-thirds the size of the entire City of Toronto, centres on Pearson.

With almost 300,000 jobs, the latter is Canada’s second largest employment cluster, trailing only downtown. According to the GTAA, other global airports have multi-modal transportation hubs that serve multiple purposes, including, as the report notes, connecting “employees to jobs at the airport and to those in the surrounding employment zone.” (We have to keep up with the Joneses.)

I’ve been hearing rumblings about the GTAA’s transit ambitions for almost half a year, and it’s still not at all clear to me which tail is wagging which dog. The GTAA, blessed with debenturing authority and land, has the tools to borrow mega-bucks, which will be paid down by jacking the already outrageous user fees paid by airport customers. (Pearson, in case you missed the memo, has the dubious distinction of levying North America’s steepest airport fees, and is not even modestly competitive in global rankings of airport efficiency/productivity, according to a 2014 study done at the University of British Columbia.)

[URBAN NOTE] The latest news on the Union-Pearson Express, Metrolinx, and Kathy Haley

Last night, I read Oliver Moore's article in The Globe and Mail noting that the Metrolinx executive responsible for the Union-Pearson Express, hence assigned responsibilities for its problems, is no longer with the company.

The head of Toronto’s struggling airport train is being eased out of her role as part of a Metrolinx reorganization.

The Globe and Mail has learned that plans are taking shape to move the Union Pearson Express under the direct control of GO Transit.

As president of the UPX, Kathy Haley was tasked with rolling out the airport train as an explicitly “premium” service. But a recent decision by Metrolinx to slash fares, in a bid to attract riders, has the effect of turning the train into more of a commuter option. A coming reorganization that would fold it into GO is expected to further that shift.

It is unclear if this change would leave a role at Metrolinx for Ms. Haley. The regional transit agency said in a brief statement Wednesday that they are in the midst of an “organizational review,” adding that they couldn’t comment on plans “that have yet to be finalized.”

“I would say [Premier] Kathleen Wynne and [Transportation Minister] Steven Del Duca are absolutely looking for a fall person … over at Metrolinx to shift the blame on the disaster rollout of UPX, and they may have found somebody,” Progressive Conservative MPP and transportation critic Michael Harris said.

Steve Munro is skeptical of this assignation of blame.

While it may be convenient to target Haley as the culprit here, the real question is how the structure and corporate attitude that led to UPX’ creation arose in the first place. From the beginning, this has been a project for which the word pretentious is almost inadequate. Despite the abandonment of this scheme by its original private sector proponent – for the simple reason that it was judged financially unsound – Ontario forged on with this as a signature project, part of the Bid Book for the Pan Am Games. We would show the world what Ontario could do.

Haley may take the fall for this fiasco, but she worked for a board who lapped up the praise, who bought into the flawed vision of what UPX would become. That board, and the government who set all of this in motion to begin with, owe us all an explanation.

[LINK] "ESA Planning To Build An International Village… On The Moon!"

Universe Today's Matt Williams explores the European Space Agency's interest in building an outpost on the Moon.

With all the talk about manned missions to Mars by the 2030s, its easy to overlook another major proposal for the next great leap. In recent years, the European Space Agency has been quite vocal about its plan to go back to the Moon by the 2020s. More importantly, they have spoken often about their plans to construct a moon base, one which would serve as a staging platform for future missions to Mars and beyond.

These plans were detailed at a recent international symposium that took place on Dec. 15th at the the European Space Research and Technology Center in Noordwijk, Netherlands. During the symposium, which was titled “Moon 2020-2030 – A New Era of Coordinated Human and Robotic Exploration”, the new Director General of the ESA – Jan Woerner – articulated his agency’s vision.

[. . .]

In the past, Woerner has expressed his interest in a base on the Moon that would act as a sort of successor to the International Space Station. Looking ahead, he envisions how an international community would live and perform research in this environment, which would be constructed using robotic workers, 3D printing techniques, and in-situ resources utilization.

The construction of such a base would also offer opportunities to leverage new technologies and forge lucrative partnerships between federal space agencies and private companies. Already, the ESA has collaborated with the architectural design firm Foster + Partners to come up with the plan for their lunar village, and other private companies have also been recruited to help investigate other aspects of building it.

Going forward, the plan calls for a series of manned missions to the Moon beginning in the 2020s, which would involve robot workers paving the way for human explorers to land later. These robots would likely be controlled through telepresence, and would combine lunar regolith with magnesium oxide and a binding salt to print out the shield walls of the habitat.

[LINK] On using the transit of the Earth of the Sun to look for extraterrestrial intelligence

Astronomy reports on an intriguing new technique for searching for extraterrestrial intelligences.

Are we alone in the universe? To answer this question, astronomers have been using a variety of methods in the past decades to search for habitable planets and for the signals from extraterrestrial observers.

The first part of this venture has been highly successful: More than 2,000 planets around distant stars — so called exoplanets — have been found so far. The second part, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), has not yet been successful.

Maybe the search strategy has not been optimized until now, said researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Göttingen, Germany, and from McMaster University in Canada. They suggest that future searches focus on that part of the sky in which distant observers can notice the yearly transit of Earth in front of the Sun.

Observers in this zone could have discovered Earth with the same techniques that are used by terrestrial astronomers to discover and characterize exoplanets. According to the researchers, the probability that extraterrestrials are already deliberately sending us signals is much higher in this part of the sky.

This strategy reduces the region that needs to be searched to about two thousandths of the sky, drastically reducing the amount of data to be analyzed.

[URBAN NOTE] "Hong Kong Bookseller Lee Confesses to Sneaking Into China"

David Tweed's Bloomberg report is yet another data point highlighting the imminent end of Hong Kong's autonomy under Chinese rule.

A Hong Kong bookseller suspected of being kidnapped from the city by Chinese authorities has appeared on television, saying he clandestinely traveled to the mainland to avoid raising attention to assist police with an investigation of his colleagues.

Lee Bo, also known as Lee Po, is one of five men detained in China who are linked to a Hong Kong bookstore and its parent company Mighty Current that sell books critical of the Communist Party elite. Lee vanished from Hong Kong in late December, sparking allegations he had been abducted. Chinese police confirmed he was on the mainland in January, without explaining how he crossed the border without travel documents or passing through Hong Kong immigration.

“After what happened to Mighty Current, I wanted to secretly go to the mainland to resolve whatever issues there were with the company and then secretly go back to Hong Kong,” Lee said in an interview on Hong Kong-based Phoenix Television. “I came to the mainland to assist with the judicial investigation, and I had to incriminate some people. I was really scared that if these people found out, they would cause harm to me and my family.”

The disappearance of the booksellers fanned concerns in Hong Kong about China’s encroachment on the city’s autonomy supposedly guaranteed to the former British colony under the “One Country, Two Systems" principle hammered out when it was returned to China in 1997. The cases have also garnered international attention because Lee holds a British passport and another of the missing, Gui Minhai, has Swedish nationality, with both of those governments pressuring China for information on the men.

Gui, disappeared from Thailand in October. He re-emerged in China in January saying in a televised confession that he had voluntarily turned himself into authorities over a fatal 2004 traffic accident. Gui appeared on Beijing-backed Phoenix TV on Sunday, with a new confession. He said that he had avoided rules on importing books into China, partly by changing their covers and putting them in dark nylon bags to evade X-rays.

[URBAN NOTE] "Mexico’s Chinampas – Wetlands Turned into Gardens – Fight Extinction"

Emilio Godoy's Inter Press Service feature looks at the persistence of the chinampa style of agriculture, even in the middle of the densely urbanized Valley of Mexico.

David Jiménez grows two kinds of lettuce and other fresh produce on his “chinampa” or artificial island just under one hectare in size in San Gregorio Atlapulco, on the south side of Mexico City.

“We can get five or six harvests a year. Lettuce can grow in 30 days,” Jiménez, the president of the six-member La Casa de la Chinampa cooperative, told IPS with evident enthusiasm. The cooperative operates in Xochimilco, one of Mexico City’s 16 boroughs.

The ejido – land held in common by the inhabitants of a village and farmed cooperatively or individually – where Jiménez has his farm covers 800 hectares, and is home to 800 farmers who mainly grow vegetables. Half of the ejido is made up of chinampas.

The system of chinampas dates back to the Aztecs, long before the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors in the 15th century. The technique creates small, rectangular gardens reclaimed from Mexico City’s marshy lakebed by piling up soil on a mat of sticks, using wattle as fencing and willow trees at the corners to secure the bed.

The chinampas are rich in muck and decaying vegetation, which provide nutrients for the crops, while the ditches between them give the plants continuous access to water. As a result, the vegetables grown there are especially rich in nutrients.

The chinampas, which help feed the 21 million people who live in Greater Mexico City, are in the boroughs of Milpa Alta, Tláhuac and Xochimilco.

Worked by some 5,000 farmers, the chinampas cover a total of 750 hectares. The system is profitable, because they produce a combined total of around 80 tons a day of vegetables.

[MUSIC] Beyoncé, "Formation"

I may well not belong to the core demographic targeted by Beyoncé's "Formation". I've still be listening to the song on repeat, playing the striking video over and over again over the past week. It really works for me.

"Formation #BlackLivesMatter iSLAY Remix* - Beyoncé Knowles #SB50 #Slay" (Watch on YouTube)

(I've gotten interested in the guest stars, too. Messy Mya strikes me as overrated. Big Freedia' videos and songs, though, I like. In this bounce singer's exuberant non-heteronormative gender presentation, the music's exuberant sexuality, and the close relationship with place, he really evokes a latter-day Sylvester for me.)

Recognizing that I'm approaching this song as an outsider in so many ways, I have to defer to Naila Keleta-Mae's op-ed for Vice's Noisey, "Get What's Mine: "Formation" Changes the Way We Listen to Beyonce Forever". "Formation" is a complex song, musically and lyrically and visually, that works so well at doing so many things. It's danceable; it's political.

Beyoncé’s a performer. That said, she’s invited us to watch her get free in “Formation” but she also needs us to witness—to “get” it; to get her as an artist. What we’ve witnessed, with the release of “Formation,” is a master class in how pop artists can clearly articulate political views that differ from the mainstream without being labeled didactic and marginalized by the media. And “Formation” couldn’t be quietly relegated to the ether of the internet because it’s such a good pop song. Its mainstream trap beat is skillfully created by producer Mike WiLL Made It; the lyrics, co-written with Rae Sremmurd’s Swae Lee, provide just the right amount of braggadocio, sex and cute one liners; the looks, styled by Shiona Turini and Marni Senofonte, got the attention of bloggers, and the video direction by Melina Matsoukas delivers just the right artsy-pop-documentary feel.

“Formation” is a notably complex meditation on female blackness, the United States of America, and capitalism. And the blackness that this song and video articulates is not some kind of abstract, cool, costume that can be put on and taken off at will. This female blackness is specific.

It’s “My daddy Alabama, Momma Louisiana / You mix that negro with that Creole make a Texas bama.” It’s 26 brown-skinned black women of multiple shades and shapes dancing in step. It’s dark basements and large mirrors where queer black male hips twerk and revel. It’s sun aversion, high collared dresses, corsets and spread thighs. It’s Messy Mya’s voice from the grave asking what happened to New Orleans. It’s black women’s braless breasts bouncing in hallways lined with bookshelves and brocade. It’s homes underwater because 11 years ago Hurricane Katrina broadcasted to the world that systemic and institutionalized anti-black racism was still state-sanctioned and real. “Formation” is Big Freedia, the queen of bounce music, announcing on behalf of Beyoncé and herself that, “I did not come to play with you hoes / I came to slay, bitch.” It’s Gucci Spring 16, Chanel pre-fall, vintage, and custom clothing. It’s declarations of the coming of a black Bill Gates. It’s a breadth of black cosmologies that means that worship happens on streets, verandas, floats, churches and parking lots. “Formation” is blue hair, piercing eyes and rows of snatched wigs for sale. It’s black hetero marriages where wives are non-monogamous and reward their good lovers with Red Lobster, shopping trips, chopper rides, and the possibility of radio play. It’s the words ‘Stop Shooting Us’ spray-painted on a wall. “Formation” is a magical place where police cars sink under the weight of female blackness; where white riot squads surrender to black boys’ rhythmic complexity; and where black girls play ring games unbothered and uncontained. “Formation” is a newspaper called The Truth with a picture of Martin Luther King Jr. and the words “Why was a revolutionary recast as an acceptable Negro leader?” “Formation” is a warning to mainstream media not to attempt to strip Beyoncé of the politics born of her Creole Texas Bama blackness. But it’s also a warning to black folks to lay off the respectability politics that obsessively dissect and admonish Beyoncé for things as absurd as her daughter’s hairstyles (which, for the record, Beyoncé likes with “baby hair and afros.”)

The impact of “Formation” is derived precisely from this rich multivocality. Mae Gwendolyn Brooks argues that black women writers have long used multiple voices in their work because it allows them to “communicate in a diversity of discourses.” Not as a means to integrate into the white mainstream but instead to “remain on the borders of discourse, speaking from the vantage point of the insider/outsider.” In “Formation,” black women’s bodies are literally choreographed into lines and borders that permit them to physically be both inside and outside of a multitude of vantage points. And what that choreography reveals is the embodiment of a particular kind of 21st Century black feminist freedom in the United States of America; one that is ambitious, spiritual, decisive, sexual, capitalist, loving and communal.

[DM] "Some thoughts on the demographics of Japan and path dependency"

At Demography Matters, I speculate that Japanese conservatism may have locked the country on a path to inevitable population decline. Even if radical change unexpectedly came, it might come too late.