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Every summer for at least the past two decades, the Confederation Centre of the Arts has hosted a noontime musical show in its outdoor amphitheatre presented by its Young Company. This year it was The Voices of Canada.
Sep. 16th, 2016
[BLOG] Some Friday links
Sep. 16th, 2016 01:05 pm- Centauri Dreams and The Map Room each report on the ESA's Gaia satellite mapping project of the galaxy.
- The Dragon's Gaze reports on the hunt for hot Jupiters.
- Marginal Revolution suggests that the Mexican peso has weakened because of Trump.
- The Planetary Society Blog notes China's successful launch of its Tiangong-2 space station.
- Savage Minds considers deviance for women in Bangalore, after Margaret Mead.
- Torontoist considers what Toronto college and universities are doing to address sexual violence.
- Window on Eurasia suggests that the Turkic peoples of the North Caucasus are moving towards the use of a shared language.
blogTO let me know about a new book sale by the Toronto Public Library.
I won't be able to make it, but perhaps you will?
I'm not saying that the Friends of Toronto Public Library North Chapter and the Friends of Toronto Public Library South Chapter are exactly in a competition to see who can clear out the most stuff and make the most money - but it certainly has the feel of sibling rivalry.
We can all thank them though for having their clearance sales on different weeks so we don't have to choose. This is a great opportunity to buy a lot of interesting books, CDs and DVDs at some really affordable prices (half price at North York Central and all items 10 - 50 cents at Toronto Reference Library).
Did you know the Friends have raised over $2 million in support of Toronto Public Library programs? In 2015 the Friends donated $165,000 to Toronto Public Library, their largest combined donation in their 22 year history. Faithfull supporters of children's literacy the Friends allocate their donation to Leading to Reading, Elementary School Outreach, Storytime Outreach, Young Voices and Family Literacy Day.
I won't be able to make it, but perhaps you will?
NOW Toronto's Kate Robertson reports on how Ontario Place was brought back to life.
What do you do when you have less than 12 months to plan an enormous music and art festival?
That's the question Rui Pimenta and Layne Hinton of Art Spin bike tours faced when they got the green light to host In/Future on Ontario Place's largely abandoned West Island.
"Immediately realizing the scale of it, we started reaching out to creative partners," says Hinton.
Not that it was their first rodeo. Curators Pimenta and Hinton had taken 300 or so people to the site last summer for one of their art tours, so they were on familiar territory. And since 2009, Art Spin has commissioned artists and musicians to create site-specific works in some of the city's unlikeliest pockets, from rickshaw residencies to a pit behind the Tower Automotive Building on Sterling Road. Participants pedal in a mass ride to each installation or performance.
But now they had 14 acres to program with a small team and an even tinier budget, so they knew they needed help. Pimenta contacted the Small World Music Festival, a world music fest now in its 15th year.
"We were so excited by the site from our early visits, we felt the best way to do this was to bring potential partners on site for visits," he says. "Once they saw it, they were either convinced or they weren't. If they were, they started presenting ideas for what they would want to do and where they would want to do it. So things unfolded very organically that way."
Dave LeBlanc's article in The Globe and Mail can be thought of as a counterpoint to Richard Longley's May NOW Toronto article.
A number of years before I introduced myself in these pages – and I have been writing for The Globe for over 13 years – I learned about the possible demolition of the Concourse Building at 100 Adelaide St. W.
I was devastated. In a city with few examples of colourful, expressive Art Deco architecture, its loss would have cut deeper than the loss of a Modernist building (something I also defend vehemently).
Today, I am jubilant. And my joy comes from looking at a well-executed example of façadism. An architectural Frankenstein’s monster, if you will. Something Toronto architect Robert Allsopp at DTAH has called “urban taxidermy” as the bile collected on his tongue. It’s true: The old 1928 skyscraper doesn’t even display the same number of floors any longer. To accommodate the higher ceiling heights of the new, 40-storey, knife-edge tower by Kohn Pederson Fox behind it, the former 16-storey tower now reads as a 14-storey tower.
And I don’t care.
In an essay titled The Ethics of Facadism: Pragmatism versus Idealism, Robert Bargery suggests that our unease with façadism lies in its deception. A building’s façade, he writes, should be “an outward expression of the anatomy and organization of the building.
“At its most extreme, there is in this view a quasi-religious quest for revealed truth.”
The Globe and Mail carries Joanna Smith's Canadian Press article. In theory, I've nothing at all against the idea of making the national capital bilingual.
Liberal MP Denis Paradis thinks it sounds obvious enough: Canada is an officially bilingual country, so its national capital should be too.
“I do think that it would be a good thing that Ottawa shows that there are two official languages in the country,” Paradis, who represents the Quebec riding of Brome-Missisquoi, said in an interview.
That’s why he would like to raise the idea with colleagues on the House of Commons standing committee on official languages, which he chairs, when MPs return to Parliament Hill next week.
The notion of making Ottawa officially bilingual — which Paradis says would not involve changing any federal laws — is one that has come and gone and come again over the decades.
It has sparked passionate debates between those who want stronger protections for the rights of the minority French-speaking community in Ottawa and those who fear it would cost too much and further restrict access to jobs in a city where bilingualism is already a frequent requirement for a job in the federal government.
The Toronto Star and the CBC have more on the apparently overwhelming local opposition to this plan to remake a signature building in Ottawa.
Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson says it's back to the drawing board on a proposed modern addition to the historic Château Laurier hotel, and even the city councillor who favoured it at first is backtracking after a wave of angry public feedback on the designs.
The plan — proposed by Larco Investments, which two years ago bought the iconic building in downtown Ottawa just steps from Parliament Hill — would be to move its parking lot underground and add up to 200 rooms in an addition designed by Peter Clewes, one of the leading architects in Toronto's condo boom.
The City of Ottawa and the National Capital Commission would need to approve the plan before it could move ahead.
[. . .]
Asked Thursday to expand on his thoughts, Watson said he doesn't think the modern design of the addition blends well enough with the old hotel.
"Well I'm not all that impressed with [the design], to be perfectly honest. The Château Laurier is an iconic heritage property in the downtown core, and the images that I've seen really don't blend well, in my opinion. And I've heard an awful lot of feedback, most of it negative, from the public. My hope is that we reach some compromise, as we always try to, between the developer, the NCC, the city and the public," he said.
The Toronto Star's Jennifer Pagliaro reports on the costs involved with the proposed Rail Deck Park. All I can say is that, if Toronto wants something nice, sooner or later it's going to have to pay for it.
To achieve the Mayor John Tory-backed vision of a 21-acre park decked over the downtown rail corridor, city staff estimated it will cost at least $1.05 billion to build.
That is a very preliminary estimate ahead of engineering work and a feasibility study for a massive signature park the mayor has staked his name on. That does not include the cost of purchasing the necessary air rights over the corridor from various rail companies.
The staff report to Tory’s executive committee, which meets next week, found that a park stretching 850 metres from Bathurst St. to Blue Jays Way is technically feasible. Staff have yet to do any detailed work on the exact costs or how to pay for it.
They are recommending $2.4 million be earmarked for initial work in 2017, most of which will pay for staffing costs and consultants. It is recommended that $1.2 million of that funding come from a city-wide reserve dedicated for new parkland.
“Today’s staff report demonstrates important progress on this complex project, and reinforces my belief that this park is both entirely feasible and entirely necessary,” Tory said in an emailed statement. “This project has been met with huge support and I am determined to get it done.”
Myer Siemiatycki's call in Torontoist for higher property taxes, to finance municipal operations and to deal with growing inequality, makes perfect sense to me.
Sometimes events collide to reveal truths too long unspoken. Now we know.
Toronto’s real problem is an impoverished municipal government in a city of unprecedented private wealth. It is odd that mounting evidence of municipal dysfunction now occurs at the same time that new records are set month after month for city real estate values. Public services and infrastructure in Toronto have hit crisis point at the same time that City Council refuses to adequately tax the higher reaches of record level residential property values.
The most recent list of Toronto troubles is long. Sweltering subway cars. Sweltering, perhaps soon to be freezing, school classrooms. New condo towers with recurring power blackouts due to inadequate city infrastructure. Not enough crossing guards at our schools. Not enough bus drivers to get kids there.
Then there’s the unfulfilled dream list. No money for long overdue transit improvements, for the glitzy new downtown park recently “announced,” or the City’s entire capital spending backlog now pegged at $29 billion. There is also the recurring annual hole of $500 million in the City’s operating budget to cover day-to-day expenses.
The City quite simply does not have enough money to go around. Public facilities literally crumble and break down, public services decline, public jobs can’t find people willing to work for wages that put even the poverty line out of sight. And our infrastructure deficit grows.
In my morning links post, I mentioned that both Centauri Dreams and The Map Room reported. on the ESA's Gaia satellite mapping project of the galaxy. Centauri Dreams had explained the import of this project.
We live in a science fiction world.
The European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite has delivered a catalog of more than a billion stars — 1142 million, to be more specific — as it continues the work of mapping our galaxy in three dimensions. To be sure, we can expect much more from Gaia, but the September 14 data release is a milestone, offering distances and proper motion for more than 2 million stars. The mission’s first public release collects 14 months of data, from July 2014 to September 2015.
“The beautiful map we are publishing today shows the density of stars measured by Gaia across the entire sky, and confirms that it collected superb data during its first year of operations,” says Timo Prusti, Gaia project scientist at ESA.
To get an idea of Gaia’s long-term promise, recall that we are looking at the galaxy with Hubble-like precision. We may have more than a billion stars in today’s release, but 400 million of these are appearing in a catalog for the first time.
The image is downloadable in a variety of file sizes. Fifteen scientific papers describing the Gaia data are to appear in a special issue of Astronomy & Astrophysics. Those interested in digging into Gaia’s first data release can gain access here.
A collaboration of 450 scientists and software engineers known as the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC) is charged with turning the satellite’s raw data into reliable stellar positions. ESA explains just how much of an upgrade Gaia represents in this news release, which discusses not only the billion-star catalog, but the two million stars represented both in Gaia’s work and the earlier Hipparcos catalogs, which are now more than two decades old. Combining the data allows scientists to sort out not just the physical movement of stars in the galaxy but also parallax effects caused by the star’s apparent position during a year-long Earth orbit of the Sun. A combined Tycho-Gaia Astrometric Solution is the result.
We live in a science fiction world.
[META] What blogs do you read?
Sep. 16th, 2016 11:57 pmWhat sites do you visit regularly? What are you into?
Let me know in the comments.
Let me know in the comments.