[PHOTO] Turtles and boxed flowers, Allan Gardens, Toronto

Just as I did this December past, and in December 2014 with my parents, I stopped by to see the turtles.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• blogTO lists some of the most dangerous bus routes on the TTC, at least from the perspective of criminal activities.


• The Broadside Blog lauds the very tangibility of vinyl.


• Centauri Dreams considers SETI search strategies.


• Crooked Timber looks at the politics of hair in slavery societies.


• D-Brief considers LISA, the space-based gravitational wave observatory.


• The Dragon's Gaze notes a Chinese proposal to launch a Hubble-like telescope into orbit.


• The LRB Blog examines the fragile economy built by refugee entrepreneurs in Greece.


• Marginal Revolution notes the predominance of women in technical education in Sweden.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer can't understand the insanely self-destructive fiscal policies of West Virginia, cutting necessary state spending while subsidizing big business.


• Spacing Toronto's John Lorinc is skeptical of the idea that progress will be made on regional transit given the massive confusion.

[LINK] More on the possible location of Planet Nine

The Dragon's Tales linked to an arXiv preprint of a paper, "Coralling a distant planet with extreme resonant Kuiper belt objects", that aims to constrain the possible location of Planet Nine.

The four longest period Kuiper belt objects have orbital periods close to small integer ratios with each other. A hypothetical planet with orbital period ∼17,117 years, semimajor axis ∼665 AU, would have N/1 and N/2 period ratios with these four objects. The orbital geometries and dynamics of resonant orbits constrain the orbital plane, the orbital eccentricity and the mass of such a planet, as well as its current location in its orbital path.

The Planetary Society Blog's Emily Lakdawalla has more analysis.

Malhotra points out that because the orbits of the extremely distant Kuiper belt objects like Sedna, 2010 GB174, 2004 VN112, 2012 VP113, and 2013 GP136 are so eccentric, then they are likely to have had close encounters with the putative planet. Close encounters with a massive planet change orbits of smaller worlds. It's relatively easy for small worlds, so tenuously connected to the Sun, to get ejected from the solar system entirely. If there is an undiscovered distant planet affecting their orbits, the fact that the little worlds still remain in our solar system means either that they've had relatively few encounters, or else they're protected from close encounters with the planet by being in resonances. This is how Pluto is still a member of our solar system even though its orbit crosses Neptune's: because Pluto orbits the Sun twice for every three times Neptune does, Pluto and Neptune are never actually close to each other, so Neptune doesn't get a chance to eject Pluto.

Armed with this hypothesis, Malhotra, Volk, and Wang investigated whether the worlds we know about could be in resonances with the one that Batygin and Brown suggested. In short, they can. It's complicated because we have short observational arcs on these distant, slow-moving worlds, so the analysis has to include a detailed understanding of the uncertainties on the worlds' orbits. The analysis suggests that Sedna's orbital period is in a 3:2 resonance with the putative planet; 2010 GB174 in a 5:2; 2994 VN112 in a 3:1 resonance; 2004 VP113 in 4:1; and 2013 GP136 in 9:1.

If all this is true (and I should note here that the paper has not been peer-reviewed yet), Malhotra et al.'s work constrains the mass and location of the possible planet in different ways than Batygin and Brown's does. In this new paper, in order to keep the smaller worlds corralled into resonant orbits, the possible planet has to have a mass of at least 10 times that of Earth. The orbital plane can be one of two: either inclined at 18 degrees or 48 degrees. In the low-inclination case, the orbit eccentricity would be less than 0.18; in the high-inclination case, it could be much larger. There are many places along the possible orbits that the putative planet could not be, or else it would have close encounters with the discovered worlds.

The data, Lakdawalla and the authors note, is still uncertain. This constrains the possible location of Planet Nine, and does not provide proof of its existence. It merely demonstrates that, if Planet Nine exists, this is what it will hve to look like.

[LINK] "How Do We Terraform Venus?"

As much as I agree with the implicit optimism of the title of Matt Williams' Universe Today article, I would suggest that a more realistic one is that we can't. All the schemes depend on technologies that, while imaginable, are also massive.

The first proposed method of terraforming Venus was made in 1961 by Carl Sagan. In a paper titled “The Planet Venus“, he argued for the use of genetically engineered bacteria to transform the carbon in the atmosphere into organic molecules. However, this was rendered impractical due to the subsequent discovery of sulfuric acid in Venus’ clouds and the effects of solar wind.

In his 1991 study “Terraforming Venus Quickly“, British scientist Paul Birch proposed bombarding Venus’ atmosphere with hydrogen. The resulting reaction would produce graphite and water, the latter of which would fall to the surface and cover roughly 80% of the surface in oceans. Given the amount of hydrogen needed, it would have to harvested directly from one of the gas giant’s or their moon’s ice.

The proposal would also require iron aerosol to be added to the atmosphere, which could be derived from a number of sources (i.e. the Moon, asteroids, Mercury). The remaining atmosphere, estimated to be around 3 bars (three times that of Earth), would mainly be composed of nitrogen, some of which will dissolve into the new oceans, reducing atmospheric pressure further.

Another idea is to bombard Venus with refined magnesium and calcium, which would sequester carbon in the form of calcium and magnesium carbonates. In their 1996 paper, “The stability of climate on Venus“, Mark Bullock and David H. Grinspoon of the University of Colorado at Boulder indicated that Venus’ own deposits of calcium and magnesium oxides could be used for this process. Through mining, these minerals could be exposed to the surface, thus acting as carbon sinks.

However, Bullock and Grinspoon also claim this would have a limited cooling effect – to about 400 K (126.85 °C; 260.33 °F) and would only reduce the atmospheric pressure to an estimated 43 bars. Hence, additional supplies of calcium and magnesium would be needed to achieve the 8×1020 kg of calcium or 5×1020 kg of magnesium required, which would most likely have to be mined from asteroids.

[LINK] "An Ancient Volcanic Cataclysm Spun Mars Off Its Poles"

Universe Today's Evan Gough looks at new research suggesting a catastrophic history for Mars.

According to a new research paper from Sylvain Bouley at the University of Paris-South, and his colleagues, it may have been a massive, ancient outpouring of molten rock that threw Mars off kilter and helped change Mars into what it is today.

The Tharsis region is an ancient lava complex on Mars that dates back to between 4.1 billion and 3.7 billion years ago. It’s located in Mars’ Western Hemisphere, right near the equator. It’s made up of three huge shield volcanoes—Arsia Mons, Pavonis Mons, and Ascraeus Mons. Collectively, they’re known as Tharsis Montes. (Olympus Mons, the largest volcano in the Solar System, is not a part of the Tharsis complex, though it is near it.)

Tharsis is over 5,000 km across and over 10 miles thick, making it the largest volcanic complex in the Solar System. That much mass positioned after Mars was already formed and had an established rotation would have been cataclysmic. Think what would happen to Earth if Australia rose up 10 miles.

The new paper, published on March 2nd, 2016, in the journal Nature, says that the position of the Tharsis complex would have initiated a True Polar Wander (TPW.) Basically, what this means is that Tharsis’ huge mass would have forced Mars to shift its rotation, so that the location of Tharsis became the new equator.

It was thought that the emergence of Tharsis made Martian rivers—which formed later—flow the direction they do. But the study from Bouley and his colleagues shows that Martian rivers and valleys formed first—or maybe concurrently—and that the Tharsis TPW deformed the planet later.

The authors of the study calculated where the Martian poles would have been prior to Tharsis, and looked for evidence of polar conditions at those locations. The location of this ancient north pole contains a lot of ice today, and the location of the ancient south polar region also shows evidence of water.

The Nature paper is here.

The Tharsis region is the largest volcanic complex on Mars and in the Solar System. Young lava flows cover its surface (from the Amazonian period, less than 3 billion years ago) but its growth started during the Noachian era (more than 3.7 billion years ago). Its position has induced a reorientation of the planet with respect to its spin axis (true polar wander, TPW), which is responsible for the present equatorial position of the volcanic province. It has been suggested that the Tharsis load on the lithosphere influenced the orientation of the Noachian/Early Hesperian (more than 3.5 billion years ago) valley networks and therefore that most of the topography of Tharsis was completed before fluvial incision. Here we calculate the rotational figure of Mars (that is, its equilibrium shape) and its surface topography before Tharsis formed, when the spin axis of the planet was controlled by the difference in elevation between the northern and southern hemispheres (hemispheric dichotomy). We show that the observed directions of valley networks are also consistent with topographic gradients in this configuration and thus do not require the presence of the Tharsis load. Furthermore, the distribution of the valleys along a small circle tilted with respect to the equator is found to correspond to a southern-hemisphere latitudinal band in the pre-TPW geographical frame. Preferential accumulation of ice or water in a south tropical band is predicted by climate model simulations of early Mars applied to the pre-TPW topography. A late growth of Tharsis, contemporaneous with valley incision, has several implications for the early geological history of Mars, including the existence of glacial environments near the locations of the pre-TPW poles of rotation, and a possible link between volcanic outgassing from Tharsis and the stability of liquid water at the surface of Mars.

[LINK] "A vision for Western Sahara and the Moroccan protest movement"

At Open Democracy, Mohammed Ben Jelloun links the fate of Western Sahara to a democratization of Morocco generally.

Some claim Morocco's 20 February protest movement has largely failed as a transformational social movement capable of articulating an alternative discursive and coherent challenge to the regime. They say that a striking constant feature of the movement was its fragmented centrifugal leadership and horizontal mobilisation.

These observers are correct in claiming the protest movement did not manage to articulate a strong alternative discourse to that of the monarchy, especially in its traditional and religious appeal. However, they fail to correctly assess what they describe as the ideological fissures that amplified the 20 February movement's weakness. Indeed, the fissures are not only those between radical leftist Marxists and the banned Islamist al-Adl wal Ihsane, but also predominantly between the annexationist nationalists (PSU) and the separatist internationalists (pro-Polisario voices), via the Islamist neutralists (AWI). More importantly, the critical fissure is not between diverse philosophical orientations but one between ideologies as such and a strictly pro-democratic politics.

This normative approach to the Western Sahara conflict is largely inspired by the political theory of John Rawls. Since the international community cannot realistically guarantee political self-determination for the Sahrawi population, I argue they should be at least guaranteed maximal political democracy in whatever outcome of the current conflict.

The idea is to have opposite wills to freedom work for democracy, and to have democracy promotion depend on rational hopes and fears

I am not pleading for self-governance in the sense of true autonomy or true confederation. Nor do I claim some global individual right to democratic self-determination as distinct from an internal or collective self-determination. Leaving the options relatively open, I ask for much more: if autonomy is to prevail then it should be an autonomy within a fully and strictly democratic Morocco, and if confederation is to prevail then a confederation within a fully and strictly democratic Western Sahara.

I am not suggesting the Sahrawis should give up on their hope for freedom, only that they should think along different lines and make the best of a situation where the justice of international law is stubbornly refuted by French and US geo-strategic concerns. The international community should make the present stalemate work for a democracy owed the Sahrawi people, give them a push in the footsteps of democratic Tunisia, so they do not have to be ruled by an authoritarian regime, be it theocratic or military.

The suggestions to follow are not about simply trading freedom for democracy; they aim at favouring democratic freedom over undemocratic freedom. The idea is to have opposite wills to freedom work for democracy, and to have democracy promotion depend on rational hopes for next-best freedom and rational fears of the worst unfreedom. I first argue it is for the UN Security Council both morally defensible and politically feasible to promote a pro-democracy approach in the Western Sahara conflict. I then turn the political culture of the Arab uprisings against the geo-strategic argument and draw on Rawlsian insights to outline context relevant characteristics, principles, and values of constitutional democracy.

[LINK] "“Take My Iraqis and Give Me Some Syrians” – Europe to Turkey"

Baher Kamal's Inter Press Service article is exceptionally critical of the EU-Turkish refugee deal, and perhaps not unfairly.

In a yet another violation of international laws and their own human values, 28 European countries have just agreed with Turkey to open a new “bazaar” of refugees, this time using the old barter system. i.e. Iraqis and Afghans in exchange of Syrians.

See what happened: the leaders of the 28 member states of the European Union met on 7 March in Brussels with Turkey’s prime minister, Ahmet Davutoğlu, to bargain a new refugees deal.

According to the summit’s draft agreement, the EU will send back to Turkey all Iraqi and Afghan refugees who came and may come to its territories from Turkish camps, in exchange for taking some of the hundreds of thousands Syrians refugees that are stuck there.

This exchange of human beings includes the payment to Ankara of three billion euro over three years—to be added to other 3,000 billion euro offered to Turkey last November–, and a EU promise to facilitate the entry of Turkish citizens to Europe, let alone the usual rhetoric of thinking of an eventual membership of Turkey in the European club.

[LINK] "Newfoundland and Labrador premier on economic state: ‘It’s terrible’"

MacLean's carries a Canadian Press article noting the dire state of post-oil boom Newfoundland and Labrador, so bad that apparently the province may return to receiving equalization payments.

Newfoundland and Labrador’s premier made clear Tuesday his province’s precipitous drop from national economic leader to fiscal basket case, as his Liberal government set a grim course with its first throne speech.

“It’s terrible,” Premier Dwight Ball said.

“There’s no one even close to us when you look at other provinces,” he told reporters outside the legislature. “We’ve never seen this ever before in our history.”

Fixing the mess, and an “unprecedented” $2-billion deficit, will start with a budget in April or May, Ball said. He signalled that everything from tax hikes to job losses and spending cuts are on the table.

Ball also raised the E word — as in equalization. It was a proud day as Newfoundland and Labrador, powered by oil and mining earnings, became a “have” province for the first time in 2008. It stopped receiving equalization payments that Ball now says would come in handy. The complexities of related requirements, however, mean little help is available so far, he told reporters.

“We’re at Ottawa’s door for all the programs that are in place.”

[LINK] "Ontario chipping in $16 million toward 5G jobs"

The Toronto Star carries Albert Gea's Reuters article noting the latest stages in Huawei's investments in Ontario for 5G technology. With provincial government funding, of course.

The Canadian arm of Chinese telecom giant Huawei is getting up to $16 million from Ontario taxpayers to help create 250 new jobs developing the next wave of 5G smartphone technology.

Premier Kathleen Wynne said Tuesday that the deal — which had its roots in her 2014 trade mission to China — further cements a strategic partnership with the firm which has research and development facilities in the province.

Huawei Technologies is investing $303 million in the project, establishing new research laboratories in Markham and Waterloo and expanding its research facility in Ottawa.

Ontario’s contribution is “laying the foundation for sustainable growth for years to come” and building the
province’s reputation as a leader in the knowledge economy, Wynne said at the company’s office in Markham.

The $16 million is from the province’s $2.7 billion “jobs and prosperity fund” aimed at bolstering innovation and boosting Ontario’s exports.

[LINK] "Canadian porn producers face an increasingly competitive marketplace"

Jacob Serebin's article in The Globe and Mail about the problems specific to the Canadian porn industry amused me. May they continue to develop their niches!

Wholesomeness isn’t a word that’s usually associated with pornography, but that’s how Kate Sinclaire describes what she does.

“I’ve often compared what I do to the organic movement,” Ms. Sinclaire says. She’s the founder of Ciné Sinclaire and Cherrystems, two Winnipeg-based websites that offer what she calls feminist porn.

“We’re really concentrating on making sure that performers are well respected while doing the work,” she says.

Her product is inclusive, featuring body types and gender identities that aren’t often found, or aren’t treated with respect, in traditional pornography.

While Ms. Sinclaire says it’s just the right thing to do, it’s also good business.

The Internet has led to a drastic increase in porn consumption, but creators haven’t benefited, and it’s been a struggle to figure out how to get people to pay for something they easily get for free.

For Ms. Sinclaire, the answer is to offer something different.

[VIDEO] Underground with TTC repair crews, courtesy of Torontoist and Giordani Ciampini

In his Torontoist feature "What Does the TTC Do During Weekend Subway Closures?", Chris Bateman took a look

They’re the cause of ire amongst subway riders. They bring about dreaded shuttle buses, inconvenient rerouting to destinations, and confusion for those who don’t often take transit and can’t figure out where to go.

Ah, the scheduled subway closure.

For the remainder of the year, the TTC is planning more than 30 closures—some weekend-long—across stretches of both Lines 1 and 2. (Yes, we hear your collective sigh.)

This weekend, the Yonge-University-Spadina subway was closed between St. George and Lawrence West stations. But while platforms were empty of commuters, activity below ground didn’t stop.

To get a better sense of what goes on during these foreboding subway closures, we headed underground.

The article also includes Giordano Ciampini's short two-minute video "Transit and all the Fixin’s".

Transit and all the Fixin's from Giordano Ciampini on Vimeo.

"Like."

[META] Blogroll expansion!

Only two this time.

• Anglican priest, SF/fantasy fan, and former Torontonian Rachel Kessler blogs at Rev Rachel Rambles. Most recently she has blogged about Room, examining it as a metaphor for growing up.


• The Fifteenth is the blog of former Livejournaler Steve Roby, containing short reviews of books, television, and other forms of pop culture. I liked his review of a book on David Bowie that concentrated on the post-Scary Monsters period of his career.