[PHOTO] Grass wall, Ryerson University Student Learning Centre

As one Facebook commenter suggested, this must be hell to mow.

[PHOTO] Ten photos from the Lake of Shining Waters, Cavendish

The Lake of Shining Waters is an alternate name for Cavendish Beach's MacNeill's Pond, a fresh water pond separated from the Gulf by a single line of sand dunes and connected to it by a single stream. This alternate name comes from Anne of Green Gables, after a pond that Anne Shirley saw as Matthew Cuthbert took her to her new home at Green Gables. The pond that actually inspired L.M. Montgomery appears to have been located further west, at Park Corner, but this particular pond is a lovely one.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Beyond the Beyond links to an exhibition of art by a Brazilian inspired by War of the Worlds.


• blogTO shares photos of Vaughan's new library.


• Centauri Dreams reports on the difficulty of reaching Proxima b.


• The Dragon's Gaze reports on KS-39b, a hot Jupiter orbiting a subgiant.


• False Steps reports on a proposed late Soviet space shuttle.


• Inkfish notes a study suggesting that cuttlefish can count to five.


• Language Hat reports on efforts to revive indigenous languages in Australia.


• Language Log shares a sign in New York that combines Latin and Chinese scripts.


• The Map Room Blog notes a Korean movie about a mid-19th century mapmaker.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer wonders what the Trump meeting with Mexico's president was about, and is unimpressed by Jill Stein.


• Savage Minds sparks a discussion among its readers about what moment made them an activist for equality.


• Torontoist reports on how the Great Hall was saved.


• Understanding Society looks at a cutting-edge sociology anthology from 2008.


• The Volokh Conspiracy reports on the decision of an American court to allow a Muslim convert to Christianity to file a civil suit with a pseudonym.


• Window on Eurasia looks at Russia-Ukraine tensions, and wonders about the consequences of Karimov's death of Karakalpakstan and Uzbekistan generally.

[URBAN NOTE] Two links on the deadline issues of Bombardier with the Eglinton Crosstown

From the Toronto Star's Ben Spurr:

Rail manufacturer Bombardier has blown another deadline for the delivery of the first vehicle for Toronto’s Eglinton Crosstown LRT, but the company vows the latest delay won’t affect the opening of the $5.3-billion transit line.

Metrolinx, the regional transit agency for the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area, confirmed Wednesday that the Quebec-based manufacturer has yet to complete the test vehicle for the Crosstown. That means Bombardier has missed the end-of-August target date that the company said as recently as last month it was on track to meet.

“Bombardier was not able to deliver the pilot vehicle at the end of August. Metrolinx officials continue to work closely with Bombardier and track its progress,” said Anne Marie Aikins, a spokeswoman for Metrolinx, which is an agency of the provincial government.

“The latest information Bombardier has provided is that the prototype will be ready for testing within the next three to four weeks.”

According to Bombardier spokesman Marc-André Lefebvre, the pilot is in the “final phase of manufacturing” at the company’s Thunder Bay, Ont. plant.

From the Canadian Press, via MacLean's:

Bombardier is juggling challenges on two new fronts in Canada, temporarily suspending business jet production and falling behind in its delivery of a light rail transit prototype for Toronto’s Eglinton Crosstown transit line.

The aerospace and railway manufacturer says it plans to place workers at its Global jet completion centre in Montreal on furlough for an unspecified amount of time next year.

“It’s a minor adjustment to our completion activities that will be deployed in 2017,” spokesman Mark Masluch said Thursday.

He said the change — which follows last year’s move to cut production of the Global 5000 and 6000 models from 80 to about 50 per year — will better manage costs and address ongoing sluggishness in the business jet market.

A company source who spoke on condition of anonymity because he’s not authorized to speak said Bombardier is seeking to suspend production for 20 days in addition to the usual two-week shutdown during summer.

[URBAN NOTE] On the record-breaking heat in Toronto this August

blogTO had a brief note, linking to the CityNews report.

[I]t was the second-hottest summer on record in the GTA and the hottest August on record.

“So far we’ve had 36 days over 30 degrees,” 680 NEWS and CityNews meteorologist Natsaha Ramsahai said on Wednesday.

The record for the highest number of 30 C days or more was 44 days set in 1959.

August was the warmest one on record with a mean temperature of 24.4 C, beating the previous record of 23.8 C in 1959.

It also was the sixth-driest summer on record, as measured at Pearson, with 113 millimetres of rain for June, July and August.

John-Michael Schneider's National Post article went into more detail.

For passengers riding on Toronto’s subways, the combination of unbearable heat and no air-conditioning on roughly one quarter of trains made travel sticky and uncomfortable. Toronto Mayor John Tory recently accepted a Twitter challenge to ride on one of the TTC’s trains sans air-conditioning. Sweltering commuters endured temperatures as high as 34C in some subway cars.

GO Transit had to slow down its trains throughout the summer, adding delay times to their schedules. The change was a safety precaution, as areas on train tracks can bend and buckle under the extreme heat, and increase the risk of derailment for fast-moving trains.

The record temperatures in Ontario can also have significant health costs. A Health Canada study of five large Canadian cities found that high temperatures during June, July and August are correlated with increased deaths. One large-scale U.S. study of over 850,000 people in California found that a roughly six-degree increase in average temperatures corresponded to a 3.5 per cent increase in strokes, a 2 percent increase in all respiratory diseases, a 3.7 per cent increase in pneumonia, and a 10.8 per cent increase in dehydration.

Heat impacts on health are worse when high temperatures continue throughout the day and night. For nearly one quarter of all people in Ontario who do not have an air-conditioning system, warm nights are a barrier to finding relief from daytime heat. Households making less than $20,000 a year are the least likely to have access to cool space.

On especially warm days, cities like Toronto can become “urban heat islands” — places where air temperatures are a few degrees higher than surrounding areas. Urbanized areas tend to be built from dark, non-reflective materials that absorb radiation from the sun and gradually release the additional heat.

[URBAN NOTE] "Moss Park development sparks gentrification concerns"

The Toronto Star's Gregory Vendeville reports on the latest in Moss Park's gentrification wars.

Ray LoVerde spent his Saturday glued to his smartphone, photographing the many faces of Moss Park.

The 37-year-old, who lives in a homeless men’s shelter across the street, was one of eight artists hired by the city and The 519, a community organization that advocates on behalf of LGBTQ people, to portray locals and listen to their thoughts on a proposed transformation of the park and John Innes community centre.

The portrait series is one of the ways the backers of the redevelopment have sought the public’s input, along with standard community meetings and a survey of nearby businesses.

Although in its early stages, the plan — which comes at an estimated $80-100 million cost — has critics saying it will speed up the gentrification of the area.

[. . .]

On the weekend, he went out in search of subjects around 7:30 a.m. and didn’t discriminate, taking pictures of a couple walking their dogs, a gardener tending to a community plot and down-and-out people like himself, lounging at the corners of Queen St. E. and Sherbourne St.

The Chicago native ended up on the street for the first time in 2013. He struggled with drug addiction and was diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder, a condition that hampered his ability to work and cost him his job at a café, he said.

[URBAN NOTE] "Italians worry quake-struck town will be abandoned, lost forever"

CBC News' reports about the devastation of the Italian hill town of San Giovanni di Accumoli, recently ravaged by an earthquake, and how its inhabitants fear the community will end up disappearing unless it is repaired quickly.

Cold mountain spring water continues to pour out of old taps above a trough on the edge of the piazza in the small hamlet of San Giovanni di Accumoli in the Italian hills hit by last week's deadly earthquake.

Butterflies flit and bees hover next to deep purple flowers in gardens carefully laid out beside old houses overlooking a lush, green valley. But everything else in this small hamlet seems still, frozen in time.

Then you notice that the church on the other side of the piazza is missing one of its walls, now a pile of rubble on the ground, as if a giant claw had come in and swiped it away, exposing its innards: a dust-covered pulpit, a crucifix askew.

The seeming peacefulness of the place is in stark contrast to the violent heaving beneath the earth that brought it and so many other buildings down across the quake zone, entombing hundreds.

Across from the church another building is missing a hunk of wall, exposing the bedroom Adriano Piscatelli and his wife were sleeping in when the earthquake struck at 3:36 a.m. local time last Wednesday, killing at least 290 people.

"There was a devastatingly loud noise and then debris started falling on us from all over," he said. "We waited for it to finish and then we rushed out of the house and started calling all of the neighbours to see who was there.

"There was one who didn't answer."

[URBAN NOTE] "London's Subway Now Runs All Night, So Why Doesn't Yours?"

Wired's Aarian Marshall asks why more cities don't have all-night transit like London, and provides answers in a nice itemized list.

In London this week, a curious thing happened: A city gave its residents more public transit, not less. Welcome the Night Tube, London’s experiment in living a little. Two lines on the famed Underground are now running 24 hours a day, on Fridays and Saturdays. Two more lines will join the fun in the fall. The city’s transportation authority expects 100,000 extra riders each evening, and estimates the move will boost the local economy by $450 million.

Mobility! Rides home for sleepy workers after the bar closes, rides to work for the midnight shift! Cheesy songs! It’s enough to make any city jealous—not least Boston, which cut its weekend night service this spring, or Washington, DC, which is considering doing the same.

So why can Londoners get nighttime public transit service, and you can’t? Seven reasons.

1. $$$

No matter how sleepless your city is, ridership goes down at night. Fewer paying riders means spending more public money to subsidize each person’s trip. Boston officials said its now-cancelled night service cost $13.38 in subsidies per trip. Regular service? $1.43. Still, lots of important services cost the government serious money (keeping the roads smooth for cars, collecting garbage, healthcare…).

2. Maintenance

Paint chips, metal rusts, and many of America’s major transit systems are aging at a rapid clip. Cities say they need the time off for the maintenance that keeps everything running. (This is especially true on systems like the California Bay Area’s BART, which only has one set of tracks on each route.) Theoretically, the peace and quiet gives workers uninterrupted time to get their trains in order. In practice, though, a four-hour nightly shutdown can get eaten up by logistics, leaving workers with much less time for actual work. New York, which runs subways 24 hours , periodically shuts down sections of track for intensive repairs. It’s like ripping off a band aid.

[URBAN NOTE] "Toronto’s Baby Point seeks heritage status to fend off ‘monster homes’"

Jeff Gray's article in The Globe and Mail interests me, as I'm interested in old Baby Point.

The entrance to the enclave of Baby Point, nestled in Toronto’s west end near Jane Street north of Bloor Street, is guarded by stone gates. A little way inside, you find a cluster of 90-year-old Tudor-style homes ringed around some tennis courts and a log-cabin-style clubhouse.

On a recent weekday afternoon, the front lawns buzz with safety-earmuff-wearing landscaping crews – a clearer indicator of the area’s wealth than even the BMWs in the driveways. But all is not well in this exclusive neighbourhood, where some fear a coming wave of new buyers will tear down the area’s historical houses to build “monster homes.”

After the stucco-and-brick house at 68 Baby Point Road went up for sale earlier this year – later selling for $2.7-million – neighbours and local preservationists rushed to apply to have it designated as a heritage building, pointing out that it was built for Toronto Maple Leafs founder Conn Smythe, who lived there until his death in 1980. The proposal, which would block the new owner from tearing the house down or changing some of its heritage features, goes before Etobicoke York Community Council on Sept. 7.

But No. 68’s new owners say they just found out days ago about the push to designate their house, according to a friend who said they did not want to be identified.

“It’s a growing family, young family. They want to be able to make expansions or extensions to the house or rebuild it from scratch if they wish to. They paid $2.7-million for it and they don’t want to be controlled by anybody,” said the owner’s friend, Maz Ekbatani, a local real-estate agent, who will ask community council on Wednesday to delay their decision on his friends’ behalf.

[ISL] "Putin Sees Opening With Japan on World War II Island Dispute"

Bloomberg's article suggests a compromise such as desired by the Japanese, with a transfer of sovereignty over one or more of the islands, is not in the offing.

Russian President Vladimir Putin struck a conciliatory tone before talks with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on a territorial dispute that’s prevented the countries from signing a World War II peace treaty.

Resolving the conflict over four islands occupied by the Soviet Union in the final days of the war should be part of “setting the stage for the development of inter-governmental relations for the long term,” Putin said in an interview on Thursday as he prepared to meet with Abe at the Eastern Economic Forum in Russia’s Pacific port city of Vladivostok on Friday.

“We’re not talking about some exchange or some sale,” Putin said. “We are talking about finding a solution where neither of the parties would feel defeated or a loser.”

The two leaders, especially Abe, seem keen to show that momentum is building toward a settlement on the island spat. Abe said after the talks that he and Putin had a deep discussion about a peace treaty and that he has a good feeling about making progress with a new approach, according to the Kyodo news service. They’ll meet at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Peru in November and will continue talks when Putin visits Abe’s home prefecture of Yamaguchi in southern Japan on Dec. 15, Kyodo reported.

[DM] "On the ongoing depopulation of Cape Breton"

At Demography Matters, I blog about the ongoing and inevitable depopulation of Cape Breton.