[PHOTO] Three photos from the Cavendish Road, Prince Edward Island

The Cavendish Road, connecting North Rustico with Cavendish, can be exceptionally scenic, farmers' fields stretching to the shore and the Gulf picking up where the land leaves off.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• blogTO shares some photos of Toronto in the gritty 1980s.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper examining the habitable zones of post-main sequence stars.


• Far Outliers notes the ethnic rivalries among First World War prisoners in the Russian interior, and examines how Czechoslovakia got its independence.


• The Map Room Blog looks at the mapping technology behind Pokémon Go.


• pollotenchegg looks at how the populations of Ukrainian cities have evolved.


• Savage Minds considers anthropology students of colour.


• Transit Toronto notes
  
• Window on Eurasia suggests the post-Soviet states built Soviet-style parodies of capitalism for themselves.

[URBAN NOTE] CBC News on the recent train derailment in midtown Toronto

CBC News' Shanifa Nasser takes a look at the very recent train derailment in downtown Toronto. Since a huge stretch of track extending west to my street was involved, I'd think I'm entitled to some concern.

Two trains are travelling in opposite directions, one headed eastbound at 48 kilometres per hour and another westbound at 80 kilometres per hour, before sideswiping each other at a railway crossover in midtown Toronto.

Why did the westbound train operator see the stop signal so late? No, this isn't a high school math problem. It's a key point in the investigation into a Canadian Pacific train derailment that spilled 1,100 litres of diesel fuel near the residential Annex neighbourhood early Sunday morning.

New details emerged Monday as officials looked into the crash that left four rail cars leaning and damaged the tracks.

Neither train was speeding, the Transportation Safety Board says, and CP Rail ruled out mechanical problems, instead pointing the finger at human error, something it reiterated on Monday.

"After careful review, we determined that all track, equipment and signal systems worked as designed, and our preliminary investigation indicates human error is to blame," the railway said in a statement, adding, "We know one incident is too many."

On Monday, the union representing CP Rail workers called that conclusion "premature" but said it understands two of its workers are being investigated.

[URBAN NOTE] "Beach residents eagerly await Penny Oleksiak’s homecoming"

The Toronto Star's Verity Stevenson reports on how the Beach will celebrate the return of Olympic medallist Penny Oleksiak to her home.

It’s hard to tell whether Penny Oleksiak’s neighbours in the Beach cheered harder during her races than they will for her return.

Both are causes for fanfare.

“There’s a buzz on,” says Johanna Carlo, a board member of the Beach Village BIA, which is organizing a homecoming parade for Beach-area athletes on Sunday.

Oleksiak’s big return could be Tuesday at 5: 30 a.m., when Air Canada flights with athletes from several Canadian Olympic teams will land at Toronto Pearson.

The swimming team is one of them. The 16-year-old four-time Olympic medalist’s performance stunned us all watching at home, set the pace for Canada’s own performance in Rio and swept Toronto’s east end, where she’s from.

[URBAN NOTE] "Behind one Toronto library's seedy initiative with a lot of growth potential"

Metro Toronto's Mary Warren reports on Toronto's seed library, something I should take advantage of next year.

There’s a card catalogue at the University of Toronto’s Robarts Library that does more than help people look for books.

Instead, what people find inside can one day turn into everything from beans to watermelons.

It’s one branch of the Toronto Seed Library, where people can “borrow” seeds through a program aimed at bringing gardening to people who might not otherwise be able to dig in.

The city’s 22 branch network has been growing since 2012 and has dispensed at least 100,000 seed packets — many of them to new Canadians and people who might not otherwise be into gardening, like high-rise renters.

[. . .]

“Except where book libraries keep knowledge in the commons, seed libraries keep seeds part of the commons and accessible to everybody,” she said. “The idea is that, until very recently in history, you couldn’t buy seeds, everyone would just save and trade them amongst themselves.”

[URBAN NOTE] "Embrace new transit technology or else, U of T study says"

The Toronto Star's Jesse Winters notes the call to assimilate Uber into GTA transit planning.

Transit planners across the Toronto and Hamilton region can either embrace new and disruptive technology like Uber, or resign themselves to a future of endless gridlock compounded by striking taxi drivers and a gutted public transit system that hardly anyone uses, according to a new report by the University of Toronto’s Mowat Centre.

“That’s a pretty decent takeaway from the report,” said co-author Sara Ditta with a laugh.

While that dystopian vision comes from the report’s somewhat stylized worst-case-scenario description, Ditta said the themes underpinning it are serious and pressing.

“The fact is that shared mobility is here,” Ditta said. “It has and will continue to change how people travel, and policy makers need to take steps to address that.”

“Shared mobility” is the term Ditta and her colleagues use to describe the current shift away from personal ownership of things like bikes and cars toward shared use of those resources though apps such as Uber and Lyft, publicly-owned bike share programs and other innovations of the so-called “sharing economy.”

[URBAN NOTE] "CNE touts ‘extremely aggressive’ waste-diversion"

This human-interest story in the Canadian National Exhibition, by the Toronto Star"s Jessica Botelho-Urbanski, interests me. I am going this year, I know. (Will I try the food? Maybe.)

Even the “greenest” fair in North America couldn’t avoid throwing out an estimated 300,000 kilograms of waste on its first weekend, according to the facility’s services coordinator.

Brian Dow said over 18 days, from Aug. 19 to Sept. 5, the Canadian National Exhibition collects about 1.8 million kilograms of waste. The CNE also boasts an “extremely aggressive” waste-diversion program designed to offset the fair’s environmental impact, said general manager Virginia Ludy.

And though CNE staff says they’ve diverted about 86 per cent of waste from landfills in the last decade, they’re still looking for ways to improve.

“There’s still 14 per cent to get better at and hopefully at some point in time, we’ll get to a complete 100 per cent diversion,” Ludy said.

Food waste is especially focused upon, with at least 111 vendors in the food building this year, 26 food trucks scheduled to arrive next weekend and about 1.6 million visitors — most of them hungry — to the fair.

[URBAN NOTE] "Great Hall renovation shows Toronto is finally learning to appreciate its past"

I've been to the Great Hall, on Queen and Dovercourt, before. It's a wonderful performance space. Marcus Gee's article makes me glad that it's getting proper attention.

No earthquake, flood or hurricane destroyed old Toronto. No war laid it waste. Bulldozers and cranes knocked down scores of fine buildings in the rolling wave of destruction called urban renewal.

Countless Victorian houses fell to the wrecker’s ball. So did the old Trinity College, the grand General Post Office and the castle-like University Avenue Armouries. So did Chorley Park, the Rosedale mansion that was once the official residence of the lieutenant-governor.

Steve Metlitski shakes his head at the folly of it all. The developer, who comes from Belarus and arrived in Canada in 1989, was appalled when a friend took him to Guild Park atop the Scarborough Bluffs. Spread about its grounds are fragments from majestic buildings torn down in the post-war building boom: columns, arches, facades – the ruins of what once was. He thinks it’s “criminal, just insane” that Toronto was so careless with its architectural heritage.

Built in 1889, the Great Hall at Queen and Dovercourt was home to the first West End YMCA; most recently, it has served as a community arts centre and performance space. (Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail)
In his small way, Mr. Metlitski is trying to preserve a part of what is left. As the owner of Triangle Development, he is overseeing a painstaking, top-to-bottom renovation of one of Toronto’s last Victorian gems: the Great Hall at Dovercourt Road and Queen Street West.

Opened in 1890 as the first West End YMCA, the building has a colourful history in several chapters – first as the Y before the organization opened a new building up the road at College Street and Dovercourt in 1912; then as home of the Royal Templars of Temperance, a group that fought the scourge of alcohol abuse; then headquarters of the Polish National Union, when it published a Polish newspaper and took in Polish refugees of the Second World War; and finally, in the last couple of decades, as a community arts centre and performance space where musicians from Feist to Metric to Daniel Lanois came to play.

[AH] WI there was a Venus-sized planet between Mars and Jupiter?

In astronomer and writer Chris Impey's 2010 Talking About Life, an anthology of his interviews with leading experts in astronomy and related fields about extraterrestrial life, there was a passage in his interview with Debra Fischer that caught my attention for its alternate history potential. Solar systems, including our own, are apparently as densely packed with planets as possible.

DF: The amazing thing I learned when we discovered the Upsilon Andromedae system is that our Solar System s actually dynamically full of planets. When people who model the Solar System try to drop in an extra planet, the whole system goes into chaos--some planets are lost, some fall into the star, some are ejected, and then everything finally settles down. Each planet has its own gravitational domain and those domains are pushed up next to each other. Our Solar System resides on the verge of instability it's stable, but only just.

CI: Is this related to the numerical coincidence of their nearly geometric spacing?

DF: Bode's law? Yes. They clear out disks; many lines of evidence suggest that core accretion is the correct model. Then they begin to migrate in until they come into a zone; again, if they get any closer. they're ejected. When I noted this back in 2000, Hal Levinson raised his hand and said, "No, no, that's not true--there a place between Mars and Jupiter where a Venus-sized planet will survive." And I think, "How many simulations did you have to run to find that tiny little window? That doesn't count!" [Laughs](269-270).

The WI question is obvious. What if there was a planet the mass of Venus orbiting in our solar system between Mars and Jupiter?

This planet--call it *Ceres, after the largest dwarf planet orbiting between Mars and Jupiter--would be a big one. Venus is more than 80% as massive as the Earth. Such a massive planet would be able to hold onto its volatiles--its atmosphere, its water--in a way that a nearer Mars could not. This planet might even be massive enough to be geologically active. *Ceres might provide a relatively hospitable environment, more hospitable than Venus or even Mars.

It's important to not overstate this potential habitability. Whatever the precise nature of its orbit, *Ceres would also be very cold, orbiting outside of the orbit of Mars and likely even an elastic definition of our sun's circumstellar habitable zone. A sufficiently dense heat-retaining atmosphere might change things, but would it warm *Ceres enough?

Given *Ceres' location near the frost line of the solar system, and its high gravity, it's likely to have attracted and kept quite a lot of ice. Perhaps it will be an ocean world; perhaps it will be a world with a frozen surface on top of a planet-wide ocean, a super-Europa even. As seen in the night sky from Earth, its atmosphere and icy surface may make it very bright indeed.

Thoughts?