[PHOTO] Looking towards Etobicoke from Hanlan's Point

Yesterday I did my traditional circumnavigation of the Toronto Islands, heading from east at Ward's Island to west at Hanlan's Point. More photos from my trip are up at my Flickr page, and at Instagram.

It was really lovely yesterday.

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• News of Proxima Centauri b spread across the blogosphere yesterday, to Discover's D-Brief and Crux, to Joe. My. God., to the Planetary Society Blog, and to Centauri Dreams and The Dragon's Gaze.


• blogTO notes the impending opening of Toronto's first Uniqlo and suggests TTC buses may soon have a new colour scheme.


• The Dragon's Gaze discusses detecting exo-Titans and looks at the Kepler-539 system.


• Marginal Revolution notes Poland's pension obligations.


• The Map Room Blog looks at how empty maps are of use to colonialists.


• Steve Munro examines traffic on King Street.


• The NYR Daily looks at what an attic of ephemera reveals about early Islam.


• Otto Pohl announces his arrival in Kurdistan.


• The Russian Demographics Blog and Window on Eurasia note that more than half of Russia's medal-winners at the Olympics were not ethnically Russian, at least not wholly.


• Window on Eurasia looks at Ukraine's balance sheet 25 years after independence and considers if Belarus is on the way to becoming the next Ukraine.

[URBAN NOTE] "Where Does Ottawa’s New Transit Funding Fit In Toronto’s Budget?"

Steve Munro begins his analysis of the new federal funding for Toronto transit.

With many Huzzahs! the federal government announced the details of funding for many projects in Toronto and other parts of Ontario under its new Public Transit Infrastructure Fund. This first step concentrates on “state of good repair” (“SOGR”) projects, especially as they relate to the TTC whose capital budget has been constrained by Toronto Council’s willingness to raise new revenues for only a few pet projects.

Press reports, together with the usual tub-thumping from Mayor Tory, imply that we are about to see a huge leap in work on TTC infrastructure upgrades. This sounds good, but the truth is not quite so simple, or as photo-op worthy.

The TTC’s Capital Budget can be a forbidding document, even in the short version that is online. The full version, with detailed descriptions of every project, fills two large binders. A fundamental problem, as we have heard every year for some time now, is that the total value of the ten-year Capital Plan is not completely funded, and there is a shortfall over that period of close to $3 billion. This does not include projects with their own earmarked funding such as the Spadina Subway Extension (aka “TYSSE”) or the Scarborough Subway Extension (“SSE”).

The main issues facing the City of Toronto and the TTC are:
•Almost all ongoing funding for Capital spending has dried up at both the Provincial and Federal levels with only the Gas Tax flowing on an annual basis. This amounts to about $160 million from Ottawa and $70m from Queen’s Park (an additional $90m in Provincial funding goes to the Operating Budget).
•City borrowing is constrained by a debt ceiling target such that no more than 15% of the Property Tax income is required to service the City’s debt. Major projects added to the budget in recent years, notably the Gardiner Expressway, have pushed the City right to that line leaving no headroom to finance additional projects until the early 2020s.
•City Council has not been willing to raise additional revenues either through the property tax, or other mechanisms allowed by Queen’s Park, to service new debt beyond the 1.6% Scarborough Subway levy, and Mayor Tory’s proposed 0.5% levy to help fund some other capital needs.
•Queen’s Park announces a lot of transit funding, but this focuses on areas outside of Toronto. Even within Toronto, it flows mainly to Metrolinx, not to the City and TTC. All of the new funding is for Capital projects, not for day-to-day operations.

There is much, much more at his blog.

[URBAN NOTE] "The life and death of Peter Dickinson and The Inn on the Park"

At Spacing Toronto, Chris Bateman writes about a brilliant young architect, dead too soon, and the hotel he designed.

Peter Dickinson was dying when he designed the Inn on the Park.

From a bed in Mount Sinai hospital, his body weakened from cancer, Dickinson listened to Four Seasons co-founder Isadore Sharp explain his idea for a new flagship location at Leslie and Eglinton.

Sharp’s sixteen acre site was directly opposite the west branch of the Don River, next to Sunnybrook and E. T. Seaton parks, and rose gently to a hill in the middle. It was outside the core, but Sharp hoped to lure guests to the picturesque location.

After securing the land, Sharp approached Dickinson, who had previously designed the company’s first motor lodge on Jarvis and Carlton streets.

The hotelier explained he could only afford to build a 200-room complex, but that the design should be able to accommodate expansion.

“He sketched on a pad the way the hotel looked when it opened,” Isadore Sharp told Globe and Mail architecture columnist, Adele Freedman. “This building, when it opened, was identical to the sketch.”

[URBAN NOTE] "WMDs in the west end of Toronto?"

Anti-nuclear activist Zach Ruiter writes about the latest campaign against the nuclear processing plant on Lansdowne just north of Dupont, just west of me.

Toronto's west end has a new nuclear neighbour. General Electric Hitachi announced August 19 that it plans to sell its Canadian nuclear operations, including its uranium pellet plant on Lansdowne, to BWXT Canada Ltd., a subsidiary of Lynchburg, Virginia's BWX Technologies, which operates one of only two facilities in the U.S. licensed to process highly enriched uranium.

BWX Technologies is the prime contractor in charge of the U.S. Department of Energy's 13,000-hectare nuclear weapons testing laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico.

Among the "recent accomplishments" listed on the company's website: the manufacturing of the grapefruit-size plutonium cores used in the W88 thermonuclear warhead designed for the Trident II submarine-launched ballistic missiles.

If BWXT acquires the necessary licence and regulatory approval from the federal government, it will take over GE Hitachi's operations and 350 employees at three plants in Toronto, Peterborough and Arnprior. BWXT's Cambridge plant was recently awarded a $103 million contract to supply the first eight of 32 steam generators for the refurbishment of the Bruce Nuclear Generating Station in Tiverton.

The GE Hitachi plant at 1025 Lansdowne, north of Dupont, processes 53 per cent of all the nuclear fuel used in Canada's nuclear reactors. Drums of yellowcake uranium dioxide powder are trucked into Toronto and transformed into ceramic pellets for use in fuel rods at the Pickering and Darlington reactors.

I've blogged at length about my support for the plant. I see nothing in the article to justify a change of opinion.

[URBAN NOTE] "Behind the scenes of Toronto’s $15,000 capybara caper"

The Toronto Star's Robin Levinson King goes into detail about the recent hunt for the capybaras of High Park.

This is the true story of Bonnie and Clyde.

No, not the infamous outlaws who went on an armed robbery spree during the Great Depression. This is about the two endearing but evasive capybaras who escaped from the High Park Zoo, prompting a media frenzy and month-long search and rescue mission.

Lost in the park’s 400 acres of forest, ponds and trails, the mischievous rodents evaded capture for 36 days and cost the city at least $15,000 in services and overtime for about 30 employees, according to emails from the city’s parks and recreation division obtained through access to information laws.

It all began the morning of May 24, when the capybaras, which had been purchased for a total of $700 from a Texas breeder, were dropped off at their pen in High Park Zoo.

Zookeepers had hoped to exchange the duo, who are capable of breeding, for lonely old Chewy, High Park’s OG capybara. But Bonnie and Clyde, as they were later nicknamed by city staff, had freedom in mind and went on the lam.

[URBAN NOTE] "A seat at the bar: Issues of race and class in the world of specialty coffee"

Savage Minds hosts an essay by William Cotter and Mary-Caitlyn Valentinsson looking at the cultural and ethical complexities of specialty coffee.

If you’re in academia, you probably have a very close relationship with coffee. For most Americans, coffee feels like a necessary part of our day, crucial to our higher-order cognitive functioning. Coffee has been a staple in American households and workplaces for over 100 years, and coffee as a commodity is one of the most widely traded and profitable items on the international market (Pendergrast 1999). In early 19th century, coffee served as a strong index for the elite classes of American society. It was expensive, often challenging to obtain, and was consumed primarily within prestigious social circles. However, the increasing reach of white European imperialism and the fine-tuning of the mechanisms of colonial trade and exploitation led to such resources becoming accessible to a wider range of consumers. In less than a century, the notion of coffee as a beverage consumed in the drawing rooms of the upper crust eroded. Coffee instead became a ubiquitous fixture of the American working class, tied to notions of cheery productivity and the booming prosperity of the American labor force (Jimenez 1995).

Despite the place of coffee as a common fixture in the American psyche, there is an accumulation of evidence to suggest that the social meaning of coffee is again shifting. Today, it seems that coffee is being enregistered (Agha 2003), or is coming to be seen as, a symbol of a “higher class” America. But instead of the narrowly defined American elite of the past, coffee, and specifically “specialty” or “craft” coffee, is becoming an increasingly important part of the “yuppie”, “hipster” experience. Craft coffee in the United States is an industry of skilled artisans, focused on delivering handmade products to their communities. This reorientation in the American coffee industry towards a more craft-focused ideal is closely tied to the emergence and growth of independent micro-roasters and coffee shops that offer a “local”, community-centered alternative to the mass market coffee franchises that have until recently dominated the landscape of American coffee consumption (Roseberry 1996).

But specialty coffee, like other craft industries in the United States, comes with a high price tag. While the $.99 cup of coffee still exists, the world of specialty coffee is limited to those who can economically participate in the industry by paying $5 or more for a cup of coffee. This conspicuous consumption indexes an investment in not just the coffee itself, but also in how the coffee is grown, harvested, roasted, and brewed. At the same time, consumption of specialty coffee reifies the divide between the $.99 cup of coffee and the $5 cup of coffee. This is one way in which forms of stratification tied to wider issues of race and class in the United States become concrete.

The physical spaces that specialty coffee shops and roasters occupy play an important role in the wider landscape of the industry. In many cases, specialty coffee storefronts are opening their doors in urban areas undergoing gentrification. The white yuppies and hipsters at the vanguard of these changes hold an economic status that makes a five dollar cup of coffee affordable, something that in many cases cannot be said for the historical residents of these areas.

The symbiosis between the consumption-based desires of this new upper-middle class and the services provided by the specialty coffee industry creates a situation in which craft industries feed off these larger urban development projects. Gentrification encourages new specialty establishments. At the same time, the existence and proliferation of specialty coffee, in these locations, further encourages gentrification through the availability of the commodities that the new upper-middle class feel they “need”.

[URBAN NOTE] "One Tiny Ski Town Is Defying Japan’s Scary Population Slump"

Bloomberg's Chris Cooper and Katsuyo Kuwako report on how a Hokkaido ski town, Niseko, has avoided depopulation thanks largely to an embrace of the wider world. The performance relative to the rest of Hokkaido, or to small Japanese communities generally, is notable.

Japan’s shrinking population has weighed on the world’s third-biggest economy, alarmed government forecasters and turned some rural communities into veritable ghost towns.

Not so in Niseko, a ski resort community on the nation’s mountainous, northern island of Hokkaido that’s prospering in the face of all the demographic gloom.

The local government has embraced immigration in a way the national government hasn’t. The area’s booming economy has spurred investment in luxury hotels, restaurants, and shops--and attracted local and expat workers who’ve become full-time residents. Niseko’s population grew 2.9 percent last year to 4,952 compared with 2010 levels, the highest mark in four decades. Nationwide, the population slid 0.7 percent over the same period.

“There haven’t been any other towns that have been this successful before,” said Tatsuya Wakao, a consultant at Fujitsu Research Institute. "They did a good job in recognizing the need for foreign tourism."

True, not every rural community is blessed with the ski slopes and hot springs that Niseko enjoys. Should the town’s much larger neighbor Sapporo win its bid to host the Winter Olympics in 2026, Niseko would host the Alpine events for the games and enjoy an economic windfall.

That said, other Japanese ski resorts and tourism centers have fallen on hard times and Niseko offers broader lessons to all struggling rural towns about the power of savvy and sustained marketing as a rising middle class in Asia broadens the region’s tourism opportunities.

[NEWS] Some links about the discovery of Proxima Centauri b

The first confirmation I had of the discovery of Proxima Centauri b came from James Nicoll, who shared the European Southern Observatory's announcement that the Pale Red Dot search program bore spectacular fruit.

"ESOcast 87: Planet found around closest Star" (Watch on YouTube)

Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy, Jennifer Ouellette at Gizmodo, and Franck Marchis at the Planetary Society Blog provided among the first blogged reactions I saw on my Facebook feed. Marchis' summary of what led to the discovery deserves reproduction.

We now know of 3,374 exoplanets, an enormously large number, given that we discovered the first one only in 1995. Like the cartographers of the seventeenth century, who slowly build a map of our world, astronomers are drawing a map of our galactic neighborhood. We think we have a good handle on the location of nearby stars—that is, ones that are less than 50 light-years away. We know their distance, size, temperature, and if they are multiple systems or single stars, for example; but ultimately what we would really like to add to this 3D map of the galaxy are the planets in orbit around these stars.

The Pale Red Dot group was particularly interested in finding planets around Proxima Centauri, the star closest to the Sun. Proxima Centauri is only 4.25 light-years away, so it’s in our cosmic backyard. Because of its small mass, it’s too faint to be seen with the naked eye, and was discovered only in 1915. At the end of the 1990s, astronomers tried to detect potential large planets in orbit around this star using the radial-velocity method and came back empty-handed.

In the article published today in Nature, a group of modern astronomers reported on what they learned by using two high-precision radial-velocity instruments: HARPS at the 3.6m telescope of La Silla and UVES at the VLT 8m class telescope, both part of the European Southern Observatory. Several of these observations were done as part of other programs that took place between 2000 and 2016, but from January 2016 to March 2016, the team collected what we call high-cadence data, a fancy way to state that the star was observed once per night to increase its chance of detecting a tiny variation in its motion (about a meter per second, or the speed of a human walking) that might be caused by the presence of a small planet.

This ambitious program has paid off beyond our wildest dreams in that we have now unambiguously detected a planet with a minimum mass 1.3 times that of Earth orbiting the star right in the middle of the goldilocks zone (0.05 AU). I am not a specialist in radial-velocity measurement, but this detection seems quite convincing in that it has a false-alarm probability of less than 0.1% and uses a careful comparison of star activity (done by using additional small telescopes during the survey) that are known to mimic the signal of a planet. That is a very significant new data point to add in our cosmic map.

This world, Marchis notes, is not necessarily an Earth analog. Its tidal locking to Proxima aside, as is Proxima Centauri's nature as a very active flare star, we know only basic data about Proxima Centauri b: "The planet’s MINIMUM mass is 1.3 Earths because we don’t really know the orientation of the orbital plane with respect to the observer. (The radial-velocity method provides a measurement of m sin i, with i being the inclination of the system with respect to us.) Assuming random orientations of orbital planes, we have a 90% probability that the true mass is less than 2.3 times the minimum mass, so 3 Earths. In short, this could be a super-Earth or something more exotic, like a baby-Neptune."

Even so, this is huge. The nearest star to our own hosts a potentially Earth-like world? The Dragon's Gaze was quick to link to the discovery paper, but it was when I saw the news appear on Joe. My. God. that I knew this was big.

Centauri Dreams' Paul Gilster reacted at length, going back to Proxima's first appearance in science fiction in 1935 and noting the many potential issues with Proxima Centauri b being truly habitable.

We have a long way to go before knowing whether a planet around a red dwarf like this can truly be habitable. Tidal locking is always an issue because a planet this close to its host (Proxima Centauri b is on an 11.2-day orbit) is probably going to have one side fixed facing the star, the other in permanent night. There are papers arguing, however, that tidal lock does not prevent a stable atmosphere with global circulation and heat distribution from occurring.

And what about Proxima’s magnetic field? The average global magnetic flux is high compared to the Sun’s (600±150 Gauss vs. the Sun’s 1 G). Couple this with flare activity and there are scenarios where a planet gradually has its atmosphere stripped away. A strong planetary magnetic field could, however, prevent this erosion. Nor would X-rays (400 times the flux the Earth receives) necessarily destroy the planet’s ability to keep an atmosphere.

And then there’s the matter of the planet’s origins, and how that could affect what is found there. From the paper:

…forming Proxima b from in-situ disk material is implausible because disk models for small stars would contain less than 1 M Earth of solids within the central AU. Instead, either 1) the planet migrated in via type I migration, 2) planetary embryos migrated in and coalesced at the current planet’s orbit, or 3) pebbles/small planetesimals migrated via aerodynamic drag and later coagulated into a larger body. While migrated planets and embryos originating beyond the ice-line would be volatile rich, pebble migration would produce much drier worlds.

Discover's blogs provided good coverage, D-Brief looking up the Alpha Centauri system's more notable appearances in science fiction and Crux summing up the data.

The question of habitability has been coming up. The Pale Red Dot team engaged in a Reddit AMA about their discovery, while co-discover Ignas Ribisi analyses the potential for habitability, and liquid water, at length. (Much depends on how this world is tidally locked, it turns out.) In a charming poetic analysis, Sean Raymond also examines the question of how the planet is in synchronous orbit with its sun. Gizmodo, meanwhile, published an article suggesting that Proxima's flares need not pose a challenge for life on Proxima b, that the phenomenon of biofluorescence--briefly, using proteins to absorb high-energy light and retransmit it in less harmful forms--could well be present.

New Scientist has an enlightening article that, among other things, looks at the background to the planet's discovery and hints at more.

Astronomers will still want to turn their scopes towards Proxima Centauri – to confirm that the planet is real, and avoid a repeat of an earlier embarrassment. Despite initial excitement, the claimed discovery in 2012 of a planet orbiting neighbouring Alpha Centauri B now looks to have been a mistake.

[Mikko] Tuomi and his colleagues have done everything they can to avoid that happening again. He first saw signs of Proxima b in 2013, when looking at data taken by the Very Large Telescope at Paranal Observatory in Chile between 2003 and 2009. “I spent weeks trying to make the signal go away, trying to show that it was caused by the star’s activity or pure measurement noise rather than a planet,” he says. But the team became increasingly convinced.

To confirm the find, the group examined data from other telescopes and in January this year began the Pale Red Dot campaign, using another instrument in Chile – the HARPS planet-searcher at the La Silla Observatory. The observations lasted 60 nights, but the team was confident of a discovery after just 10 nights of data, says Tuomi. “It was as predicted by the previous observations. We knew this was going to become a year to remember for exoplanet science.”

“I think this is a very solid thing,” says Snellen. “For me personally, this is the scientific discovery of the year, maybe of the decade.”

The team also saw signs of a second potential planet around Proxima Centauri, a super-Earth with an orbit of between 60 and 500 days. If such an outer planet exists, it might be possible to observe it, says Tuomi.

What can be said but that we need--want--so much more data? What is Proxima Centauri b actually like? Could it be Earth-like? Are there oceans, life?

I, and the Earth, await more.