[PHOTO] Three photos from the Pier 27 condo complex, Toronto

The Pier 27 condo complex, at the foot of Yonge Street on the Toronto waterfront, is architecturally stunning. What else can be said of the audacity used to build these towers?

[VIDEO] "Riding the 514 Cherry streetcar from the Distillery District almost to Dufferin"

"Riding the 514 Cherry streetcar from the Distillery District almost to Dufferin" (Watch on YouTube)

This video chronicles the view looking out a generally southfacing window on the streetcar of my Sunday evening trip west on the new 514 Cherry streetcar route, from the Distillery District west to the Dufferin Loop. It cuts out just short of the Dufferin Loop, unfortunately, but the view of the booming and increasingly condo-ized neighbourhoods lying along King Street is complete.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Bad Astronomy reports on the discovery of two hot Jupiters and what this means.


• Centauri Dreams looks at hot Jupiter K2-33b.


• D-Brief notes that pollution has reached even the bottom of the Mariana trench.


• Dangerous Minds notes a 1971 BBC documentary that was actually respectful towards the young.


• The Dragon's Gaze looks at tidal locking for gas giants.


• The Dragon's Tales links to a report suggesting mammals developed night vision in order to fend off dinosaurs.


• Language Log examines how Brexit is pronounced.


• Marginal Revolution notes that artworks were a good investment in occupied France, and observes that marijuana legalization has not increased marijuana usage in Colorado.


• pollotenchegg maps the decline of the Basque language in Spain.


• The Russian Demographics Blog notes changing patterns in news acquisition among the young and the old.


• Savage Minds takes an anthropological look at the Ramadan fast, the post being written by two Muslims.


• Torontoist notes that an artist has painted the names of the Orlando victims on the streets of Church and Wellesley.


• Window on Eurasia looks at North Caucasian perceptions of the Russian state.

[NEWS] Some Wednesday links

• The BBC reports from Asmara, Eritrea's capital, on the eve of war.


• Bloomberg notes the economic problems of Hong Kong and Singapore, looks at the final day of campaigning in the Brexit referendum, and notes the interim president of Brazil's desire to oust Rousseff.


• Bloomberg View takes issue with the rejection of nuclear energy in the name of the environment and reports on how Russians are being hurt by their association with Putin.


• The CBC reports on the ongoing trial of Led Zeppelin over the authorship of "Stairway to Heaven".


• The Globe and Mail notes the homophobia of a rural Manitoba MP.


• The Independent notes a poll suggesting most Brexit supporters believe the referendum will be fixed.


• MacLean's notes the demand of a northern Ontario First Nation for mercury to be cleaned up.


• At Medium's Mel, Jay Rachel Edidin writes about the fears for their husband post-Orlando.


• The National Post notes that the Commonwealth is not going to replace the EU for the UK.


• Open Democracy argues for a right to online anonymity.


• The Toronto Star notes the visit of Prince Edward and his wife to the Union-Pearson Express.


• U.S. News and World Report suggests/a> Clarence Thomas may not speak much because he's afraid of his native Gullah surfacing.


• Wired looks at online mockery of Trump's campaign finance issues.

[URBAN NOTE] "Trump Tower Toronto To Be Sold Off After Debt Default: Report"

Huffington Post Canada's Daniel Tencer reports on the good news. I want this man's name out of my city's maps, thank you.

The Globe and Mail reports that the Trump International Hotel & Tower Toronto is on the verge of being sold to an unnamed new owner after its current one failed to pay back a $260-million construction loan last year.

The sale will likely mean the Trump name will disappear from the building.

Donald Trump himself doesn’t own the Toronto tower — it belongs to Talon Developments, which licensed the Trump brand for the skyscraper, and hired a Trump-owned company to run the property.

Talon’s clients are “no longer interested in the Trump brand” because Trump himself has damaged it, company lawyer Symon Zucker said.

“It’s more important for him to be president than run a successful business,” Zucker told the Toronto Star last month.

[URBAN NOTE] "Waukesha, Wis., plan to tap into Lake Michigan called 'wrong decision'"

The CBC News' Greg Layson reports on the controversy surrounding the idea of allowing the Wisconsin city of Waukesha, just outside of the Great Lakes drainage basin, access to the Great Lakes water. Even with the requirement to return an equivalent among to the Great Lakes, this sets a worrisome trend.

A panel representing governors of the eight states adjoining the Great Lakes unanimously approved a proposal from Waukesha, Wis., which is under a court order to find a solution to radium contamination of its groundwater wells. The city says the project will cost $265 million Cdn for engineering studies, pipelines and other infrastructure.

Waukesha is only 27 kilometres from the lake but just outside the Great Lakes watershed. That required the city of about 72,000 to get special permission under the compact, which prohibits most diversions of water across the watershed boundary.

Paterson immediately took to Twitter to denounce the decision. His peninsula town, the self-proclaimed Tomato Capital of Canada and home to hundreds of greenhouses, is surrounded by Lake Erie.

"This should not be allowed," Paterson told CBC News. "I'm really disappointed it happened. That was unexpected. I actually thought the governor of Michigan was going to side with us. He even bailed."

The Michigan Senate adopted a resolution last month opposing Waukesha's request. Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder went against that and voted in favour of Waukesha's plan Tuesday.

[PHOTO] On how photographing something helps enhance its memory

Megan Garber's "The Joy of Instagram" points to a new study that, among other things, reinforces my stance. What is at all wrong with prosthetic memory?

Is there any genre of image that better captures the current technological moment than the sea of screens, at a concert or a rally or a show, thrust upward to document a shared experience? The layering of the lights—reflecting an event in the moment, and capturing it for later—neatly conveys the frenetic beauty of life as it’s lived at the dawn of the Internet age. And the anxieties, too, because, you know: Does documenting something cheapen it? Does that sea of screens take something meaningful away from the stage they are aimed at? Does our impulse to snap and Insta and tweet and otherwise capture the events of our lives denude those events, and by extension those lives?

According to a new paper: Nope. Kristin Diehl, an associate professor of marketing at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business, and a team of colleagues wanted to put those ideas to the test. So they conducted a series of lab experiments and field tests designed to measure people’s enjoyment of events when they documented them, as opposed to when they didn’t. And their results, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and reported by Time, suggest that longstanding anxieties about the ‘grammification of experience may be misplaced: Capturing experiences through photos, the team found, far from compromising people’s enjoyment of those experiences, actually seemed to amplify that enjoyment. A photographic mindset doesn’t seem to prevent people from “living in the moment,” as the old accusation goes; it might actually help them to do that living.

“What we find is you actually look at the world slightly differently, because you’re looking for things you want to capture, that you may want to hang onto,” Diehl explained of the study’s results. “That gets people more engaged in the experience, and they tend to enjoy it more.”

The paper, "How Taking Photos Increases Enjoyment of Experiences", is here.

[PHOTO] "Instagram Now Has Half a Billion Users"

Bloomberg's Sarah Frier reports. That Instagram is so tightly integrated with Facebook is, I'm sure, an added bonus for that social network.

Instagram passed 500 million users, and growth is accelerating as the photo sharing app clears a hurdle that has stalled competitors.

The most recent 100 million users joined up faster than the previous 100 million, indicating the app owned by Facebook Inc. won't be hindered any time soon by the growth plateau that plagues competitor Twitter Inc. Instagram said daily active users have reached 300 million. That's about double what Snapchat Inc. and Twitter see.

Facebook bought Instagram in 2012 for about $750 million. Since then, the photo network has grown exponentially due to the ease of sharing images—a medium that can cross language barriers and create connections between people even without formal social ties. About 80 percent of Instagram's users come from outside of the U.S.

Instagram was able to rely on the world's largest social network to assist growth, while tapping into Facebook's advertisers to start ramping up its business. In the last year, Instagram started focusing on being a destination for photos and video from events.

"It's all about knowing what's happening in the world right now and coming to Instagram as a media destination,'' Kevin Systrom, the company's chief executive officer, said in an interview with Bloomberg Television's Emily Chang. He understands that he's echoing words also said by Twitter Chief Jack Dorsey. "What social media outlet doesn't say this? That's the great opportunity of our time.''

[URBAN NOTE] "Toronto police Chief Mark Saunders apologizes for 1981 gay bathhouse raids"

CBC reports on this apology for the 1981 bathhouse raids, something that's nice if rather too late in coming to be particularly meaningful.

Toronto police Chief Mark Saunders made a historic apology today for raids on four gay bathhouses in the city 35 years ago.

Saunders, who made the apology during his annual Pride reception at police headquarters, was joined by members of the LGBT communities.

"The 35th anniversary of the 1981 raids is a time when the Toronto police service expresses its regrets for those very actions. It is also an occasion to acknowledge lessons learned about the risk of treating any part of Toronto's many communities as not fully a part of society," Saunders said.

On Feb. 5, 1981, officers armed with crowbars and sledgehammers raided the bathhouses and arrested some 300 gay men.

Those who owned or worked in the bathhouses were charged with keeping a common bawdy house and patrons were charged with being found in a common bawdy house.

[URBAN NOTE] "4 new GO stations and all 6 SmartTrack stops announced"

Via blogTO, I learned of this news. CBC had good coverage.

Four new GO train stations have been proposed for Toronto, the province announced today.

Two of those stations would also be used by Toronto's SmartTrack rail line. An additional four stops on SmartTrack were also revealed on Tuesday.

​The new stops represent a significant addition to the GO Transit network — and an even more significant push forward for SmartTrack, the proposed subway-like rail transit plan that will run on GO train tracks.

The four GO stops would be at Bloor Street West and Lansdowne Avenue, Spadina Avenue and Front Street West, in Liberty Village, and at St. Clair West and Keele Street — all along the Barrie and Kitchener GO Transit lines. All are planned to be opened within a 10-year time horizon.

The SmartTrack would share stops in Liberty Village and St. Clair and Keele, as well as four east-end stations:

the Don Yard/Unilever area, between Cherry Street and Eastern Avenue
Gerrard Street East near Carlaw Avenue
Lawrence Avenue East between Kennedy Road and Midland Avenue
Finch Avenue between Kennedy and Midland.

[URBAN NOTE] Four links on the flawed idea of the Scarborough subway extension

Spacing Toronto's John Lorinc was angry.

How many times do we have to bang our heads against the wall before we finally get the message?

Apparently, based on Friday’s little news nugget about the Scarborough subway’s inflated cost, that number is not a small one.

In this city, we don’t learn from our mistakes. Rather, we learn only how to make them again, and again, and again. As the old saying goes, history repeats itself first as tragedy and then as farce. But Toronto needs a third phase, because we’re now out there in post-farce terrain.

There’s really only one thing to say about John Tory’s insistence on pressing ahead with a $2.9 billion, one-stop subway extension that will serve fewer people than many of the city’s bus routes and cost 45% more than initially projected?

How, Mr. Mayor, can the City be so ignorant? Or fiscally irresponsible, for that matter?

Steve Munro fisked a minister's defense of the project.

Brad Duguid, Ontario’s Minister of Economic Development & Growth, also the de facto spokesman for the Scarborough Liberal Caucus, was on CBC’s Metro Morning talking about the planned Scarborough Subway Extension (SSE) and its fast-inflating estimated cost.

Duguid had been quoted in the press a few days earlier as saying that downtown elitists have been opposed to the SSE from the start echoing the divisive us-versus-them context for so much of this debate. He likes to sound oh so reasonable, but his message is full of half-truths and puffery designed to support the “we don’t get our share” chorus so common from Scarborough pols and others.

The [subway] project has been on the books for 30 years.

Well, no, it hasn’t. The TTC’s original plan for Scarborough was that an LRT corridor would run northeast all the way to Malvern. (See Once Upon a Time in Scarborough and The Scarborough LRT That Wasn’t). More recently, the Transit City plan included an LRT network for Scarborough, and this received the endorsement of Council. Only when former Mayor Ford chose to use the potential of a subway as bait did Council change its mind.

If anyone has a plan for a subway from Kennedy to STC that has more status than the back of a napkin or a fantasy map, I’ll be happy to see and comment on it.

Jean-Pierre Boutros at Torontoist wondered why Tory agreed to this, and called for a reevaluation.

There is plenty of blame to go around for it, including the perpetually campaigning provincial cabinet, which is making Metrolinx’s mission statement more meaningless each day; 24 members of 2013’s rudderless Toronto City Council, swayed by then-TTC chair Karen Stintz and current TTC chair Josh Colle; City of Toronto and TTC staff, who regrettably engaged in decision-based fact making. I also blame myself, because my earlier opposition should have been broadcast publicly as an individual taxpayer, rather than urgently discussed in City Hall offices.

Regardless, the one person who owns it all now is Toronto’s sophomore mayor, John Tory. The billion-dollar cost increases, the property tax hikes, imposing another decade of duct tape and hope upon riders of the Scarborough RT: all of these mistakes are Tory’s preferences.

Politically, the word “Tory” suggests government restraint, governing without waste, valuing taxpayer money held in trust for the public. Mayor Tory has run on this repeatedly, in many campaigns over a long political career, and he can still be a Tory in the truest sense. As Brian Mulroney once famously said, “You had an option”—and Tory still has one.

As Metrolinx’s CEO Bruce McCuaig told Toronto Life in 2014, “Council has the right to reverse its choices.” He also said that the Scarborough LRT was the best solution, as “we’d already invested $80 million in the project.” Since McCuaig shared his opinions two years ago, Tory has somehow cut out two (out of three) subway stations while adding $1 billion to taxpayers’ bills, all without a shovel breaking ground.

Last decade at Queen’s Park as opposition leader, Tory would have railed against such awful decision making. Last term on Newstalk 1010 as a radio talk show host, Tory would have said such waste should cause heads to roll. Now, at City Hall as mayor, Tory insists, “We just need to build something,” and major transit projects devolve into retail therapy, using my credit card.

Edward Keenan at the Toronto Star notes the profound lack of economic sense behind the project should kill it.

If you were intent on spending $2.9 billion to serve Scarborough and the city, what could you do?

Well, you could take $900 million to buy a fleet of 50 Russian Mi-26 troop transport helicopters, capable of carrying well over 7,500 people an hour from Scarborough Town Centre to Kennedy station in less than two minutes, or all the way to Toronto City Hall in under five minutes. And then you could use $625 million to alsobuy every single person who lives in Scarborough a pony. And then with the $1.375 billion you have left over, you could halve the Toronto Community Housing repair backlog, to ensure 5,000 units of affordable housing aren’t condemned.

Don’t the long-suffering people of Scarborough deserve helicopters, ponies, and housing?

Does that sound absurd? Well here’s the really absurd part: you could do all that for the newly announced price of building a single one-stop extension to the Bloor-Danforth subway line.

On Friday, it was revealed that now that people have studied actually tunnelling and constructing the six-kilometre Scarborough subway extension — rather than just working from the hazy crayon line drawings on which the project was approved by three levels of government and on which tax increases were imposed — the price will now be in the range of $2.9 billion, and almost one-third increase on the previous guesstimate.

This number should kill this project. Period. There is no way to justify spending that much money to serve this few riders.