A Toronto Transit Commission bus driver was slashed with an "edged weapon" at Eglinton station after leaving a washroom early Saturday.
Const. David Hopkinson, spokesperson for the Toronto police, said the TTC operator was cut by a man when he exited a bathroom, he tried to defend himself, and protective gear he was wearing took the brunt of the edged weapon.
The assailant pulled a silver handgun on the operator, who was forced back into the bathroom. The operator then locked the bathroom door and the assailant fled on foot.
The assailant is described as a white man, about six feet tall, 180 lbs, with shaggy, short brown hair and scruffy facial hair. He was wearing a black hoodie.
Every once in a while I hop out of Toronto, land in some other city with some other light- or heavy-rail transit system, and look around at different ways of getting around by rail, whether it's on the ground, under it, or above it all.
Cities aren't supposed to be hollow. Cities are meant to be vibrant places, full of people doing popular things - otherwise, what's even the point of the city existing at all? Nevertheless, over the last seventy years, North America has seen many of its cities hollow out. Some managed to hang on; some, like Toronto, ended the 20th century better off than they'd started. Some, like Kansas City, Missouri, are trying to climb back up.
Like other major North American cities, Kansas City operated a substantial streetcar network in the years immediately following the Second World War, at its height running nearly two hundred PCC streetcars on a system comparable in length to Toronto's, today. Also like most other major North American cities, Kansas City dismantled its streetcar system in the 1950s as suburbanization and ubiquitous automobile ownership demolished its foundation. Kansas City was especially vulnerable to this because, hell, look at a map - aside from the rivers that frame downtown, there are no appreciable geographic barriers anywhere around it. Kansas City had room to sprawl, and so it sprawled. Rapid transit was hard-pressed in dense cities; in the midcentury Midwest, it didn't have a chance. Some of KC's streetcars found second lives in cities like Toronto or San Francisco, but plenty of them ended up just being scrapped.
That was how rail transit in Kansas City stood for nearly sixty years, but it's different now. North and south, cities are rebuilding lines that previous generations tore out. As I write this, Kansas City is home to the newest streetcar system in North America - and it'll only be that way for another couple of weeks, until Cincinnati's starts running in early September.
I was in Kansas City to attend the 74th World Science Fiction Convention earlier this month, but I was sure to make time for a brand new streetcar.
The mayor of an Ontario border city that was unwittingly visited by 1,500 wayward Americans over the weekend said he’d like them to come back someday — but this time with money, clothes and passports.
“I think we can use this to boost tourism from our neighbours,” said Sarnia Mayor Mike Bradley. “Come for a visit, we’ll take care of you and this time you can stay longer.”
Bradley said it cost his municipality more than $8,000 to deal with the wave of unexpected visitors who were on inflatable rafts and boats — attending the annual Port Huron Float Down — when they drifted off course Sunday due to high winds and strong currents.
But Bradley is not asking for that money back, although a fundraising campaign — started by an American — had raised more than US$2,300 by Wednesday afternoon.
“I think it’s a wonderful gesture,” Bradley said. “The City of Sarnia can survive — our budget is over $130 million a year and we can absorb these costs — but the gesture that they appreciate what happened is important and welcomed.”
Freedom is the original promise. Once upon a time, we were born to a thousand paths…
Most lessons in life are learned the hard way. Some, however, are learnt with delight. Such has been Manhattan’s gift to me, a lesson in freedom, courtesy of a grid dreamed up 200 years ago.
I am new to the city, the alien progressively giving way to the resident – a transient resident, alas, a freed mother making a home away from home for a little while. But lessons, like fairy tales, never leave us as long as we continue to tell them.
We learn freedom from its boundaries. From the constraints we encounter and respect, and from those we create and overcome. From the limits to what we can do and from the infinite possibilities we find within. And so from home to school to work, every morning I walk the grid. Well, my little piece of the grid. 15 streets to cross and seven avenues. I know every sidewalk and every corner along the way by now. But I will never walk every one of the 13 million possible paths on my diagonal – life is just a taster. As it is, I tend to retrace a dozen favourite ones. Our brains are like fields that have been ploughed for a thousand years, a few synapses programmed to ignite along familiar sinews, all other options long left dying along the banks. Freedom as a neuronal illusion.
And so my story goes. Freedom on the grid, it first seems, comes from never having to stop. Never having to plot one’s trajectory ahead: so many crossings and no obstacles on the way. Red Hand on the street, take the avenue. Red Hand on the avenue, take the street. The Walking Men push me along. No need to decide, my feet have taken over. I can walk fast, free to roam on automatic pilot, free to buy into the choices made in my stead. The grid is its own GPS, three minutes per avenue, one per street. It is the destination that matters. I will be there in 32 minutes. Freed from calculations and hesitations, I can let my mind wander. Back in Oxfordshire where I usually live, I can walk any which way I like through my endless meadows of forgotten paths. My little choices here and there, to avoid a bank of buttercups or take the sun sideways, now seem random, pointless.
To be sure, my Manhattan power-walk hits hindrances on the way. Take the myriad doormen who seem to wait for my passing by to spray the pavement in front of their building. Admittedly, I smile. This is my little bit of Greece-on-the-Hudson, my father would feel at home. Still, it can be slippery, you know! Each one seems to have perfected a different strategy. Respectfully turning the jet away on Fifth, waiting till the last second to avoid you on Park, turning it off on 18th street, ignoring you, semi-circling around you, aiming above you, what’s next? And will that little bit of pavement really be shinier tomorrow? In this silent game, I wonder whose freedom is being tested anyway.
There’s something so attractive about wandering aimlessly through the city, taking it all in (especially if we’re wearing Hermès while we do it). We all, deep down, want to detach from our lives. The flâneur, since everyone wants to be one, has a long history of being many different things to different people, to such an extent that the concept has become one of these things we point to without really knowing what we mean—a kind of shorthand for urban, intellectual, curious, cosmopolitan. This is what Hermès is counting on: that we will associate Hermès products with those values and come to believe that buying them will reinforce those aspects of ourselves.
The earliest mention of a flâneur is in the late sixteenth century, possibly borrowed from the Scandinavian flana, “a person who wanders.” It fell largely out of use until the nineteenth century, and then it caught on again. In 1806, an anonymous pamphleteer wrote of the flâneur as “M. Bonhomme,” a man-about-town who comes from sufficient wealth to be able to have the time to wander the city at will, taking in the urban spectacle. He hangs out in cafés and watches the various inhabitants of the city at work and at play. He is interested in gossip and fashion, but not particularly in women. In an 1829 dictionary, a flâneur is someone “who likes to do nothing,” someone who relishes idleness. Balzac’s flâneur took two main forms: the common flâneur, happy to aimlessly wander the streets, and the artist-flâneur, who poured his experiences in the city into his work. (This was the more miserable type of flâneur, who, Balzac noted in his 1837 novel César Birotteau, “is just as frequently a desperate man as an idle one.”) Baudelaire similarly believed that the ultimate flâneur, the true connoisseur of the city, was an artist who “sang of the sorry dog, the poor dog, the homeless dog, the wandering dog [le chien flâneur].” Walter Benjamin’s flâneur, on the other hand, was more feral, a figure who “completely distances himself from the type of the philosophical promenader, and takes on the features of the werewolf restlessly roaming a social wildness,” he wrote in the late 1930s. An “intoxication” comes over him as he walks “long and aimlessly through the streets.”
And so the flâneur shape-shifts according to time, place, and agenda. If he didn’t exist, we would have had to invent him to embody our fantasies about nineteenth-century Paris—or about ourselves, today.
Hermès is similarly ambiguous about who, exactly, the flâneur in their ads is. Is he the man (or woman?) looking at the woman on the balustrade? Or is she the flâneur, too? Is the flâneur the photographer, or the (male?) gaze he represents? Is there a flâneuse, in Hermès’ version? Are we looking at her? Are we—am I, holding the magazine—her?
But I can’t be, because I’m the woman holding the magazine, being asked to buy Hermès products. I click through the pictures of the exhibition Hermès organized on the banks of the Seine, Wanderland, and one of the curiosities on view—joining nineteenth-century canes, an array of ties, an Hermès purse handcuffed to a coatrack—is an image of an androgynous person crossing the road, holding a stack of boxes so high he or she can’t see around them. Is this flânerie, Hermès-style?
St. Paul Island's mammoths were a vulnerable population that probably never numbered more than 30, [one researcher] estimates. Pinpointing the cause of their extinction "just sort of underscores the precariousness of small island populations to what seems like fairly subtle environmental change."
Even today, the crater lake that the researchers studied is only a metre deep. The researchers drilled through the ice in winter, into the layers of sediment deposited on the bottom of the lake over thousands of years.
There they found mammoth DNA, spores of fungi that can only live in the fresh dung of large mammals like mammoths, and the remains of aquatic insects that contain chemical information about water levels over the lake's history.
Together, the data pinpoint the time of extinction at 5,600 years ago — about 900 years after the date of the youngest mammoth remains ever dug up on the island — and chronicle the deterioration of the lake during the last days of the mammoths.
The result doesn't just solve a longstanding mystery about a puzzling extinction.
It may also be a warning about the seriousness of a problem that has never been linked to extinctions in the past, but is relevant for human communities in our own age of rapid climate change, rising seas and a coastal flooding[.]
Just because an exoplanet is in a star’s habitable zone, however, does not mean it can host life. It simply means that if the exoplanet featured a similar atmosphere and surface pressure as the Earth, the planet could sustain liquid water. Unfortunately, we know nothing about Proxima b’s atmosphere.
For an exoplanet to be potentially habitable, scientists consider more than just whether or not it can host water. The star around which the exoplanet orbits needs to be of a particular type—one that burns long enough to allow life a chance to evolve, and emits appropriate amounts of ultraviolet radiation.
Additionally, the exoplanet must have significant similarities to Earth. The Earth Similarity Index (ESI) is a way to measure this likeness, and it places objects on a scale of zero to one, where one is Earth itself. The closer to 1.0, the more similar the exoplanet is to our home. The measurement takes into account radius, density, escape velocity, and surface temperature.
No other planets in our solar system are Earth-like; however, in addition to being the nearest of the 44 potentially habitable exoplanets we’ve found, Proxima b also has the highest ESI.
[I]t’s not an Earth twin, no matter what the headlines say, and neither are any other planets scientists have found. Hot Jupiters may be cool; planets that rain glass may be a hit at parties; “Super-Earth” may be fun to say. And getting the full census of exoplanets is valuable. But most scientists, Messeri has found, really just want to find another Earth. Research priorities reflect that. The Kepler Space Telescope, which has discovered more planets than any other enterprise, was “specifically designed to survey a portion of our region of the Milky Way galaxy to discover dozens of Earth-size planets in or near the habitable zone,” according to NASA.
The search for an “Earth Twin” is the quest for a platonic ideal, says Messeri. “It allows us to imagine Earth at its best, Earth as we want to imagine it, Earth that isn’t hampered by climate change or war or disease,” she says.
In other words, Earth as we’ve never known it and never will. If scientists found a twin planet, Pure Earth would become, in our minds, a real place that still exists, somewhere out there.
But we haven’t discovered that place. And we might not ever. On a quest for the perfect partner, you usually find someone who’s pretty cool but yells at you when they’re hungry, or hates your mom. After you sign on to the perfect job, you discover that you’re supposed to wash everyone’s coffee mugs. In that way, finding Proxima Centauri b while searching for Pure Earth is just like every human quest for perfection.
“What we’ve actually found is something more real,” says Messeri, “and less ideal.”
[F]inding a planet that is greater in size and mass than Earth, but significantly less than that of a gas giant, does not mean it is terrestrial. In fact, some scientists have recommended that the term “mini-Neptune” be used to describe planets that are more massive than Earth, but not necessarily composed of silicate minerals and metals.
And estimates of size and mass are not exactly metrics for determining whether or not a planet is “habitable”. This term is especially sticky when it comes to exoplanets. When scientists attach this word to extra-solar planets like Proxima b, Gliese 667 Cc, Kepler-452b, they are generally referring to the fact that the planet exists within its parent star’s “habitable zone” (aka. Goldilocks zone).
This term describes the region around a star where a planet will experience average surface temperatures that allow for liquid water to exist on its surface. For those planets that orbit too close to their star, they will experience intense heat that transforms surface waster into hydrogen and oxygen – the former escaping into space, the latter combining with carbon to form CO².
This is what scientists believe happened to Venus, where thick clouds of CO² and water vapor triggered a runaway greenhouse effect. This turned Venus from a world that once had oceans into the hellish environment we know today, where temperatures are hot enough to melt lead, atmospheric density if off the charts, and sulfuric acid rains from its thick clouds.
For planets that orbit beyond a star’s habitable zone, water ice will become frozen solid, and the only liquid water will likely be found in underground reservoirs (this is the case on Mars). As such, finding planets that are just right in terms of average surface temperature is intrinsic to the “low-hanging fruit” approach of searching for life in our Universe.
Studying this planet could reveal something important about the timeline of life in the universe, and whether we earthlings are early to the party. That’s because stars like Proxima Centauri are the future of the universe. Called red dwarfs, these make up the majority of stars in the galaxy, and they live about 1,000 times as long as our sun.
In a paper made public last month, Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb looked at the cosmic implications of life surrounding red dwarfs. Loeb calculated that if life is just as likely to form around these stars as sun-like ones, then the vast majority of life in the universe has yet to be born, and we earthlings are not just early, he said, but “premature.”
That's because scientists believe eventually, all the raw materials for star formation will be used up and all the stars will die, leaving a dark universe of dust and black holes. For most of the trillions of years stretching between now and cosmic darkness, red dwarfs will be the only game in town.
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