[CAT] Shakespeare, looking at the camera

[PHOTO] St. Peter's Island from above, July 2016

As the Westjet plane passed over Hillsborough Bay, I saw an island below. I thought, as I was snapping photos, that it might be Governor's Island, but after a moment's reflection on the geography of the area I realized it was St. Peter's Island.







The shape of St. Peter's Island, see above, is immediately recognizable in this Google Maps image.



St. Peter's Island is a low-lying island, its highest point reaching 9.1 metres. The waters of Hillsborough Bay around it are shallow, as seen particularly in the second photo in the series above. Apparently at low tide, it's possible to walk to St. Peter's Island on the exposed sands between it and Rice Point. At high tide, it can be reached by boat, one kayakers' website recommending a visit at St. Peter's Island as something that can fill an afternoon or an evening.

The main point of human interest on St. Peter's Island is its lighthouse, with a history going back to the mid-19th century. The island itself is currently uninhabited, though as the blog Sailstrait observed in a 2013 post it was once inhabited, by fishers and lighthouse operators.

St. Peter’s does not have the colonies of seals and cormorant, blue heron and eagle rookeries and is, for the most part thickly wooded. But St. Peters may have more human history for unlike Governor’s it had a long history of a resident population. In fact up to the middle of the 20th century there were homes and farms on the Island and the inhabitants numbered in excess of thirty in the 19th century. Most of these were members of the Taylor and Lund families. The Taylors, especially were associated with the marine history of the area. They operated a lobster cannery on the Island and served for three generations as keepers of the St. Peter’s Island light.

There was a light on the island from at least 1866 with the current building dating from 1881. The tower stands 38 feet with the light 48 feet above high water. The lighthouse originally stood at the western tip of the island marking the long reef extending into Northumberland Strait but in the winter of 1883-1884 it was re-located to its present site on the south side of the Island. The light required a keeper until October of 1947 when it was replaced by an unwatched electric light. Like other lighthouses on the Island it faces an uncertain future as the Department of Fisheries and Oceans is determined to get rid of as many lights as possible as St. Peter’s does not have a community or organization to take over responsibility for the light.

Sailstrait's post also includes photos from the author's own visit to the island. In these, St. Peter's Island is a place largely untouched, with forests reclaiming old fields and the lighthouse's approach unmarred by human detritus.

I can't help but marvel at this, an entire world so close to my childhood home but effectively unreachable. Our universe is vast.

[BLOG] Some Saturday links

• Antipope's Charlie Stross worries about the literal survival of Britons in the post-Brexit United Kingdom.


• D-Brief notes the discovery of an ancient corpse in China shrouded in cannabis.


• Dangerous Minds reports on a 1971 BBC documentary about New York City starring a pre-stardom Patti Smith.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a study mapping the changing clouds of the twin brown dwarfs of Luhman 16.


• The Dragon's Tales reports on drops in atmospheric oxygen over the past hundred thousand years.


• Language Hat reports on Italy's many dialects and their uses.


• Language Log engages with Trump's non-apology.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money looks at Ted Cruz's despair.


• The LRB Blog looks at the classic architecture of Eritrea's capital, Asmara.


• The Map Room Blog looks at Karen Margolis' art maps.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer continues to look at the Colombian referendum and notes on the difficulties of enabling the rule of law in Mexico.


• Peter Rukavina remembers Prince Edward Island's Teachernet.


• Window on Eurasia reports on a provocative argument about Russia's demographic past and its lop-sided urbanization.

[URBAN NOTE] "TTC labour complaint says union condoned illegal strike"

The Toronto Star's Ben Spurr reports on an allegation of a Nuit Blanche illegal strike by TTC workers.

The TTC has filed an application with the Ontario Labour Relations Board claiming that transit agency’s union condoned an illegal strike during Nuit Blanche.

Only a handful of subway operators signed up to work a special overnight shift in the early hours of last Sunday morning during Toronto’s annual all-night art party.

The TTC needed about 40 drivers for the overtime shift, but of more than 600 operators, only nine signed up, and the agency used supervisors to drive the trains instead.

The lower than expected take-up came a week before the implementation of TTC plans to eliminate the guard position on some of its subway trains, a move that union leadership vehemently opposes.

The Nuit Blanche shift was voluntary, but in a notice sent to employees Friday, TTC chief people officer Gemma Piemnontese said management had evidence in the form of social media posts that showed there was “a clear, concerted effort” to “illegally disrupt TTC service.”

[URBAN NOTE] "As Toronto rapidly evolves, Rail Deck Park is needed"

The Globe and Mail's Alex Bozikovic is entirely right about the demographic imperatives for a downtown Toronto park like the Rail Deck Park up for discussion.

In the late 1990s, the King-Spadina area of Toronto had 945 residents. My friend Brett Grainger was one of them: He lived with a roommate at 525 King St. W., above a pub called The Toad in the Hole. The block was “central, yet so hidden away, almost sleepy,” he recalls. “The neighbourhood vibe was seedy and urban, in a grungy, Montreal kind of way, and I loved it.”

Nobody was imagining a “Rail Deck Park.” Now, everything has changed.

King and Spadina is neither sleepy nor seedy. About 19,000 people now live in the one-square-kilometre area, a number that the city estimates could grow to 40,000. Brett’s old building has been gutted and rebuilt; the pub is now a Starbucks. One of the best chocolatiers in Canada is nearby. The sidewalks, which were always empty, are jammed with lunching Web developers and mothers on mat leave. A dozen new condo buildings have gone up within a block, and more are coming: If one developer gets its way, 525 King will be engulfed by a mountain-shaped stack of 630 apartment units.

Rail Deck Park, if it is built, will be a few steps away. This week, City Council voted unanimously to study the proposal for a 21-acre park above the rail corridor between Bathurst Street and Blue Jays Way, right in this neighbourhood. It would be expensive. It would be complicated. It would be big.

But not big enough. A 21-acre park, by itself, won’t match the galloping growth of this area, which is absorbing thousands of new housing units that Toronto’s established neighbourhoods are fighting to keep out and pumping up the city’s coffers in the process.

[URBAN NOTE] "University of Toronto conducting study to learn what makes Kensington Market tick"

Julien Gignac's exploration in The Globe and Mail about Kensington Market and this new study is just lovely. Gignac's photographs of the neighbourhood and its residents are a nice touch.

On a sunny recent weekday afternoon, a woman walked with her pet pigeon through Bellevue Square. To her left, a man played chinlone – a traditional Myanmar game – as lo-fi tunes emanated from a radio strapped to a vintage bicycle. Across the park on a shaded patio, people lounged on their lunch breaks, clinking drinks.

Kensington Market is a hub of eccentricity in the heart of downtown Toronto with a deeply rooted sense of multiculturalism and celebrated unconventionality. But the identity it’s famous for may be endangered. At the northern end of Augusta Avenue, trendy independent shops draw clientele to buy French cookware and macaron-making kits, a stark contrast to the endearing grit found elsewhere in the market.

The University of Toronto wants to formally understand the neighbourhood’s dynamic. That’s why the university’s ethnography lab is busy conducting a multiyear research project to document the Market’s rich history and changes caused by urban encroachment.

The area is so unique that researchers have committed to studying it as they would some faraway, exotic locale – the first time the lab has focused on an urban neighbourhood.

“It’s hard to find a more interesting place to study, both in terms of its real life socio-economic dynamics and processes of gentrification that are ongoing there,” said Dr. Joshua Barker, director of the Kensington Market project and vice-dean of anthropology at the university. He mentioned the “pressure” of development projects happening at each and every threshold of the neighbourhood, such as a new community housing complex that’s due to sprout up on the neighbourhood’s south border of Dundas Street, or a chain retail building in the works on Bathurst Street, to the west.

[ISL] The Atlantic on indigenous land tenure in Hawai'i

In "Native Soil", Brittany Lyte at The Atlantic describes how definitions of indigenous Hawaiian which require a certain percentage of indigenous ancestry threaten future generations with losing their ability to pass on their property. This definition has to change.

Natasha Boteilho lives in Oahu’s arid Waianae Valley on a jot of land held in trust for native Hawaiians. Here on Hawaii’s most densely populated island—where the highest per-capita homeless population in the United States continues to swell and the average price of a single-family home is three-quarters of a million dollars—that’s no small thing. The turquoise waters that lap against golden beaches lie next to jammed highways. Even the wildlife is exploding: A cacophonous feral-chicken epidemic provides the background noise to islanders’ daily lives.

Boteilho’s property was originally awarded to her grandfather by virtue of a federal law enacted in 1920 to stabilize a Hawaiian race left withering and landless after a century of colonization. Boteilho’s mother took over the land lease next, and then, in 2011, the homestead was passed on to her. A stay-at-home mother of three girls, the 39-year-old Boteilho resides with her husband and children in the three-bedroom house her grandfather built at the base of an eroded shield volcano.

But this is where Boteilho’s familial succession will end. None of Boteilho’s daughters—ages 2, 5, and 10—are eligible to inherit the land their great-grandfather settled in 1951. Simply put: They don’t have enough Hawaiian blood. “If I passed away tomorrow, my children would not be able to get my house,” Boteilho said. “That scares me.”

When Congress passed the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act of 1920, the native Hawaiian race was quickly vanishing. The legislation was a reaction to the large numbers of Hawaiians who had been forced off their lands when white businessmen moved to the islands during the early 1800s. The foreigners built sprawling pineapple and sugarcane plantations and imported a new working class to tend to them. The Hawaiians, meanwhile, receded to crowded urban zones where extrinsic diseases, for which they had no immunity, hacked away at their numbers. In 1778, when white men first set foot on the Hawaiian Islands, there were an estimated 683,000 full-blooded Hawaiians living there, according to the Pew Research Center. By 1919, that population was just 22,600. The Hawaiian Homes Commission Act attempted to combat the decline by creating a 200,000-acre land trust to serve as neighborhoods, farms, and ranches for those who could prove at least 50 percent Hawaiian ancestry.

“The Hawaiian race is passing,” testified Prince Jonah Kuhio Kalaniana’ole before the U.S. House of Representatives in 1920. “And if conditions continue to exist as they do today, this splendid race of people, my people, will pass from the face of the Earth.” A born royal and a delegate to Congress, Kuhio was the visionary sponsor of the law that established Hawaiian homesteading. Despite his fight for a lower blood quantum, the law specifies that Hawaiians are eligible to apply for 99-year land leases at $1 per year on the condition that they prove they are at least half-blooded Hawaiians. The law further stipulates that a homestead lease can be passed on to a leaseholder’s child or grandchild—so long as that heir can prove at least 25 percent Hawaiian ancestry.

[ISL] "Iceland’s Fishing Industry Roots for Rate Cut Amid Krona Gains"

Omar Valdimarsson's Bloomberg article on the dynamics of Iceland's fisheries is interesting.

While the world around it frets over ultra-low interest rates, Iceland’s fish export industry is rooting for another rate cut to maintain market share amid a strengthening krona.

"The appreciation of the krona is a large factor in the operations of fishing companies and can impact their bottom line," Heidrun Lind Marteinsdottir, managing director of Fisheries Iceland, an industry lobby, said in a telephone interview. "It is a risk that needs to be taken under special consideration and, if need be, acted upon."

Although fisheries is no longer the country’s main industry - tourism and aluminum smelting are now bigger revenue generators -- it still accounted for more than a fifth of all 2015 exports. But after enjoying a good run in the post financial crisis years, it is beginning to feel the squeeze from an appreciating krona as the economy gets back on track.

Iceland’s currency has gained more than 11 percent against both the dollar and the euro over the past 12 months and is expected to continue to rise by as much as 5 percent through 2017, according to Islandsbanki, the second largest lender on the island.

[LINK] "Being a nurse in the North is challenging, but ‘there are salary perks’—big ones"

Emily Burke of MacLean's reports on the high wages that nurses in the North can command.

Retaining nurses in any remote community in Canada is a challenge, but it’s particularly true in the Far North. To ensure that the most basic health needs are being met, governments must fly registered nurses up a few weeks at a time, so that there is a rotation of nurses working with the local population. Some of these communities have only a few hundred residents, no road access, and only visiting physicians.

The rotation of RNs is essential to the community, and so they are paid generously. For example, salaries of RNs in Ontario range between $21 and $40 per hour, while in the hamlet of Tuktoyaktuk on the coast of the Beaufort Sea in the farthest corner of Northwest Territories, RN jobs can pay in the range of $70 per hour, a percentage of which is a northern allowance provided by the government.

[. . .]

The best way to keep nurses in remote communities is to educate and train the people who already live there. This is precisely the role of Arctic College in Iqaluit, which offers both a two-year diploma for licensed practical nurses, and a four-year bachelor degree for registered nurses. Many of the students enrolled at Arctic College are Inuit, and some of the classes are being taught in Inuktitut. However, Arctic doesn’t graduate a high volume of nurses: in both 2011 and 2012, no nurses graduated at all.

[LINK] "How climate change is driving tourism in the Canadian Arctic"

In NOW Toronto, Nicholas Engelmann reports on how global warming is enabling a new era of mass tourism in the Arctic.

I am geared up: red Mustang float coat, four layers of polyester, waterproof pants, insulated rubber boots and gloves, radio harness and dry bag. I lean carefully through the port entrance, 2 metres above the teal water. Two nautical miles away on the horizon, a meniscus barely rising above the sea forms the low profile of Igloolik.

Cranes lower Zodiacs into the water and expedition staff are hopping in, starting engines, loading gear and readying to bring passengers ashore. A 1980s powerboat is bobbing 50 metres off the portside. Propped over its windshield is a video camera with a microphone in a pop filter, speckled grey, the colour of an Arctic fox in summer. Handling the camera in the chop is a 50-something man in an old fleece jacket and baseball cap.

I am aboard the MV Sea Adventurer, where I work as a guide and lecturer, and we're tracing the Northwest Passage. One week in and we arrive in the hamlet of Igloolik, one of the most isolated communities in the Canadian Arctic.

It's late summer, and we are the first passenger vessel of the season. In fact, we're the first to arrive on these shores since 2011. We navigated Fury and Hecla Strait, which is notorious for being covered ice but was remarkably clear for our voyage.

On the way, we passed the Crystal Serenity, which has been making headlines as the first full-sized cruise ship to navigate the Northwest Passage, and thereby ushering in the arrival of a new era of eco-tourism made possible by thinning ice and rising temperatures.

[PHOTO] "One photo, less than 1,000 words: Ken Pagan vs. Everybody"

Colin Horgan's essay at MacLean's, meditating on the power of photography and the dynamics of group identity and more in the story of one Blue Jay fan's thrown beer, caught my attention.

Four rows from the bottom and one row to the left of Canadian Press photographer Frank Gunn’s shot from Tuesday is a woman wearing a backwards baseball cap and a blue sweatshirt. The sweatshirt is a limited Blue Jays run by Peace Collective, a Toronto fashion company. Printed across the front is the phrase it has recently popularized: Toronto Vs. Everybody.

In front of her, head bowed, staring straight ahead, stands a man now identified as Ken Pagan.

In the bottom of the seventh inning of the Blue Jays wild card game against the Baltimore Orioles, someone threw a mostly full king can of Bud Light onto the field during play, narrowly missing Orioles’ left fielder Hyun Soo Kim as he tracked a fly ball. A moment later, this photograph was taken. And in the days that have followed, the picture consumed Toronto—because of what it shows as much as because of what it might not show.

In the hours that followed the incident, the people in this photo came to reflect the city as a whole, the majority of the faces within it marked with either incredulity or confusion. Seconds after the beer can nearly hit Kim, social media filled in equal measure with regret and remorse. When it emerged that during the same game, others had tossed not beer but racial barbs, the apologies redoubled. Toronto, so accustomed to having the finger pointed its way, so accustomed to apologizing for itself, that someone made it into a T-shirt slogan, quickly tread a well-worn path. We are sorry, everybody. But you see, while that crowd is us, also it is not. Only some of us are racists. Only one of us is a beer thrower.

[FORUM] What do you think is the explanation for the Fermi Paradox?

Because I seek distraction from the American situation, and because this is a question I'm interested in, I thought I'd raise the Fermi paradox. Universe Today's Fraser Cain had an article, "Where Are All the Alien Robots?", that touched on this. With advances in robotic technology, Von Neumann construction and deployment across galactic distances would seem inevitable.

It makes sense then, for us to eventually get around to sending a robotic spacecraft to another star. Based on our current technology, it’ll be incredibly complicated and expensive, but there’s nothing in the laws of physics that prevents it.

And if we’re going to send a robot to another star system, we might as well make it a factory, capable of creating another version of itself. Find an asteroid with all the raw materials to make more robot factories, and send them off to other stars, where they can make more copies, and so on, and so on.

What I’m describing is the concept of a von Neumann probe, named after the mathematician John von Neumann. He was investigating the implications of self-replicating robots in the 1940s, and imagined non-biological “Universal Assembler”, devices that could make copies of themselves.

Von Neumann didn’t apply the idea to spacecraft, but others like George “Spheres” Dyson understood that out in space, there was a nearly limitless amount of raw materials for spacecraft to build copies of themselves.

Even though the Milky Way measures 120,000 light-years across and contains 100 to 400 billion stars, self-replicating robot factories traveling at just 10% the speed of light could colonize the entire galaxy in about 10 million years. That’s the power of exponential exploration.

Think about it. All it takes is for a single clever alien engineer to craft a single robotic factory. That factory builds copies of itself which fly off to other stars. Once they get there, they build more copies of themselves, and so on and so on.

Seriously, in the 13.8 billion years that the Universe has been around, why didn’t a single alien engineer do this?

What is the explanation? I've touched on this before, here and here. What is the answer for the gap in our understanding of the universe implied by the Fermi Paradox?