Toronto, it’s time to come out of hibernation. Spring comes early as “May-like” weather is expected for the rest of March, according to an Accuweather meteorologist.
Starting with a high of 12 C on Monday, the warm temperatures are expected to continue through the week — with a high of 17 C on Wednesday — and through to the end of the month, Accuweather meteorologist Maggie Johnson said.
“These temperatures are closer to the average highs in May,” Johnson said.
To put them in perspective, the average highs for mid-March in the city are 2.5 C to 2.7 C, with the end of March at 7.8 C.
For this T-shirt weather, Johnson says we can thank a jetstream from the Southwest that’s pumping out a lot of warm air, while the coldest air will be “locked out of the city and lodged in northern Canada, north of Hudson Bay, for most of March.” We’ll see just one or two days of just above freezing temperatures in March, predicted Johnson.
The new movie “Interstellar” is set in a not-so-distant future, but distant enough that they’ve managed to build something still elusive in 2014: a spaceship that can travel between solar systems. Such starships have been a technological mainstay in science fiction for decades, but they remain a crazily complicated proposition in everything from propulsion to human reproduction.
Still, that hasn’t stopped researchers from trying. Last month, a bunch of rocket scientists, microbiologists and entrepreneurs gathered in Houston’s George R. Brown Convention Center to discuss—in level and serious tones—how to become a spacefaring civilization. The meeting is called the 100-Year Starship symposium, and it’s brought brains together once a year since 2011 to figure out what we need to do now if we want to have an interstellar spacerocket a century from now.
The group has made progress defining the challenges and pointing their noses toward solutions, but much work remains (like, say, building a starship). To quote Contact, it “sounds less like science and more like science fiction.”
Nonetheless, the 100-Year Starship adherents—backed by NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)—keep plugging away. At their most recent gathering, 7 major hurdles emerged from their three days of discussion.
If you are one of the 40 million people who enjoy reading or writing the mostly romantic werewolf, superhero or historical fiction stories found on Canadian startup Wattpad, you may also be contributing to the development of the next generation of artificial intelligence.
In a new paper called Augur: Mining Human Behaviors from Fiction to Power Interactive Systems, a group of Stanford University computer science researchers revealed that they used the Wattpad “corpus” – a collection of almost two billion words (or 600,000 chapters) written by regular people – to help a computer understand the world around it. The team intends to make the program they built, Augur, into an open-source tool that other researchers can build on.
“The basic idea is that it’s very difficult to program computers to understand the broad range of things that people do,” says fourth-year PhD student Ethan Fast, co-author of the paper (published as part of the upcoming Computer Human Interaction conference) and a member of Stanford’s Human-Computer Interaction Group. “Fiction has a lot of useful things to say about the world, and if you have enough of it, you can model it in much more depth than you could hope to manually.”
Until recently, Toronto-based Wattpad, founded in 2006, didn’t make its data available to researchers, and it may not have happened in this case if it weren’t for the intervention by co-founder Ivan Yuen, who knows members of the Stanford team. More than 200 million uploads (some stories, some just chapters) have been shared on Wattpad, the majority of its users are under 30 and they spend 13 billion minutes a month on the service. So far, the company, which has 112 employees, has raised more than $66-million (U.S.) in venture capital financing.
“When we started this in 2014, we knew there was value in the corpus, but we hadn’t really explored it too much,” Wattpad’s head of engineering, Jordan Christensen, says. “As we started working with the Stanford guys, it really opened our eyes a bit and now … through our own internal research and with partners, we are really starting to change the way we think about Wattpad.”
A remarkable transformation is taking place at Bay and Wellesley streets. As the former Sutton Place Hotel is being converted to a condo that will be known as the Britt, the original building has been stripped to its bones leaving only a concrete and steel shell.
It's actually rather hard to believe that a Brutalist building could be stripped in such a way. When the process is complete, the new condo will retain virtually no aesthetic similarities with its predecessor. If you didn't know that its skeleton was preserved, you'd never think this wasn't a brand new construction project based on the renderings.
This is an intriguing moment in the conversion process. The old hotel has almost completely been extinguished, and the bright yellow steel support beams exposed as the core of the building's structural integrity. Despite its former concrete appearance, this is a building with a future glass facade on its upper floors.
What's in a name? A lot if you're one of the biggest cities in the world. Even more if you're a place that's tended to struggle when it comes to a coherent identity that residents can get behind en masse. Toronto has never been short on diminutives -- from TO to the Tdot to YYZ -- but it wasn't until everyone took notice of Drake's "the 6" (or the 6ix, if you will) that the city finally had a cool nickname.
Don't get me wrong. When Kardinal Offishall belted out the "T dot comin much hotta" and "I'm from the T dot Oh / Rep it everywhere I go," there was loads of civic pride at work, but the reach of these songs and the nickname had no international. And, right or wrong, the best nicknames need to span beyond the borders of a place.
Toronto's nicknames have never been all that inspiring. "Hogtown?" No one wants to be named for the pork trade. "The Big Smoke?" Maybe in the Canadian context, but when it comes to North America, Toronto doesn't qualify for the title. "YYZ?" I always thought we could be more imaginative than an airport code.
Since "the 6" gained popularity, there's been plenty of discussion as to its origin. Does it refer to the common number in Toronto's two main area codes? As people are so quick to point out, the "4" is also common to 416 and 647. Here's the thing: it doesn't matter one bit what the nuanced etymology of the term is.
It only matters that Drake bequeathed the name to the city. Jimmy Prime was the first to use the nickname, but Drizzy made it famous.
You can tell a lot about a place by how it greets its visitors.
The goofy lights at Honest Ed’s tell customers “there’s no place like this place, anyplace,” Nathan Phillips Square encourages tourists to pose for photos in front of the TORONTO sign, and the CNE Midway has the monumental Beaux-Arts Princes’ Gates.
These are all big greetings for big places.
Somewhat overlooked in terms of welcome architecture is the Dufferin Gate at the west end of Exhibition Place. The concrete parabolic arch, erected in the late 1950s, was maligned from its inception as a “loopsided hoop” and “half an egg.”
For more than 50 years, the original Dufferin Street entrance to the CNE was flanked by a festive arch designed by G. W. Gouinlock, who was also responsible for a slew of other Exhibition Place buildings, including the current home of Muzik nightclub.
More, including photos, at Spacing.
There must be the odd Cape Bretoner wondering the past couple of weeks if building the Canso Causeway in 1955 to link to the Canadian mainland and the rest of the continent was really such a good idea.
A local campaign inviting Americans to move north to escape the horrors of a possible Donald Trump presidency began as a bit of sport and quickly became a worldwide online sensation. As a result, Cape Bretoners now know what Cuba must feel like these days, awaiting with hope and apprehension a deluge of Yanks and their culture.
Rob Calabrese, a local radio DJ, created the “Cape Breton If Donald Trump Wins” website. He kicked it off by telling Americans if “you decide to get the hell out of there, might I suggest moving to Cape Breton Island!”
He was soon buried in serious inquiries about how to do so. A local lawyer posted a YouTube video offering advice on immigration procedures. Visits to Cape Breton real estate pages jumped by almost 3,500 per cent.
Mary Tulle, CEO of Destination Cape Breton, said that for the corresponding period last year — Feb. 15 to Mar. 4 — “we had 9,360 website visits. This year, we’ve had 451,000.
As the saw bites into steel rail, a fountain of sparks pierces a dark subterranean soup thick with dust, musty smells, noise and mysterious winds.
On the street above, commuters used to comfortably whizzing through these tunnels while peering at their phones no doubt grumble as they board shuttle buses.
Down here, in a tunnel closed for a weekend of signalling and maintenance work, the man overseeing TTC subways is making the case to reporters that there is commuter gain in this frequently occurring closure pain.
“These weekends are worth their weight in gold,” Mike Palmer says in the tunnel between St. Clair West and Dupont stations, near a plaque marking a 1995 fatal subway crash that reminds staff of the safety-first motto.
“We can do so much more work in a 52-hour closure than two or three hours a night . . . It’s hot, dirty, cold, smelly, smoky. I pay tribute to the men and women who work down here — 366 nights this (leap) year — to do maintenance, good housekeeping, catch up with repairs, and laying cabling.”
One afternoon, 10-year-old Jeff Lemire bounded off the school bus, marched up the drive to his family’s farmhouse in Woodslee, Ont., and announced that he required a secluded place to work. Gathering up plank and nails, the future New York Times-bestselling graphic novelist scaled the huge maple that threw shade onto his father’s barn. With typical diligence, he hammered a seat between two branches.
In the months that followed, young Lemire spent every hour unclaimed by school, chores or sports perched up there—reading superhero comics, sending his mind elsewhere and creating his own stories. “Jeff just liked to be by himself with the quiet,” explains his mother, Mary Ellen.
Almost 30 years later, Lemire still craves solitude. In a modest studio tucked off Toronto’s Queen Street East, he logs eight to 10 hours a day bent over his drawing board. But he’s finding it harder and harder to get people to leave him alone. Success draws a crowd, and with Hollywood, CBC and book publishing giant Simon & Schuster all eager to share his stories, Lemire’s particular brand of success is on the brink of being impossible not to encounter. Soon, it won’t matter if you read comic books or not. You’ll have to climb a tree to get away from the guy.
Giller prize-winning author Joseph Boyden recalls vividly his first reaction to Lemire’s writing, “I thought, ‘Holy s–t—this is brilliant.’ ” Years later, Boyden has become a close friend. He still raves about Lemire’s ability to “take simple, classic stories and put his own stamp on them.”
At a glance, it’s hard to square such superlatives with the 39-year-old husband, father and comic book creator. Bespectacled and unassuming, Lemire seems entirely normal. In fact, he is a mutant. But not the sort with adamantium claws. His superpower is the ability to combine remarkable creative range, a Galactus-sized fan base and enormous critical appeal.
My second short fiction book, Finite Mental Elements, has been released on Amazon. This one is the same length as my previous, Quantums of the Mind, at 26k words.
For the next five days, Finite Mental Elements will be FREE.
Thereafter, it will, like Quantums of the Mind, be $.99.
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