[PHOTO] Morning glory, wire fence, Dupont Construction Supplies

This photo was easily the most popular of the several I took yesterday morning as I wound myself around my neighbourhood doing my laundry. So, I'm sharing it again.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper noting how Tau Ceti's debris disk is not like our solar system's.


• Language Hat talks about writers who want anonymity.


• Joe. My. God. notes the return of homophobic protesters in France.


• The Map Room Blog shares hazard maps of various Yukon communities.


• Marginal Revolution notes that India's biometric smartcards work, and notes diversity does not reduce economic growth.


• Peter Rukavina shares some late 1990s photos of cows taken with an early digital camera.


• The Volokh Conspiracy notes the recent controversy over Ruth Bader Ginsburg.


• Window on Eurasia argues Russia might invade Ukraine more openly before January but also suggests that Russia is quite brittle.

[URBAN NOTE] "First signs appear of a rising tide of young Hong Kong emigrants"

Another South China Morning Postarticle by Peter Guy looks at the risk of large-scale emigration by young Hong Kongers.

According to a Chinese University of Hong Kong survey featured this month in the SCMP, about 40 per cent of Hongkongers want to move away from the city. One in 10 prospective emigrants is making actual plans to do so. Respondents cited dissatisfaction with the government, crowded living conditions and major and political and social disputes as the main reasons for their plan.

The survey showed that younger people had a stronger desire to move abroad than their older counterparts. About 57 per cent of those between 18 and 30 said they had emigration plans compared with just 26 per cent of those aged 51 and above. Taiwan was also the most preferred destination with 16.3 per cent of respondents picking the island. Australia and Canada came in second and third place.

SSNo foreigner would ever relocate here for a senior position unless they received a housing allowance. That’s why there are so many listings for flats renting for HK$70,000 and more

Many of those looking to leave Hong Kong said factors such as larger living areas, higher democracy and freedom levels influenced their choices.

The city’s affordability problem will persist because it is unlikely that real incomes will rise high and fast enough for average citizens to be able to afford liveable flats. It is even more ludicrous to expect prices to fall by half. It won’t be long before 188 square foot flats become 150 then 100- a twisted, dystopic scene that local developers cruelly photoshop into their luxury websites.

[LINK] "Iran Is Stuck With China to Finance Its Oil Dreams"

Bloomberg's Marc Champion describes how, even after sanctions, Iran remains dependent on China in the face of Western reluctance.

Amid the snake-infested marshlands on Iran’s border with Iraq, the control room monitoring North Azadegan oil field is manned entirely by Chinese technicians. In central Tehran, hundreds of Chinese pour out at noon from the telecommunications company Huawei to its canteen. There are now so many Chinese expatriates here, some say they outnumber all other nationalities combined.

A decade of international sanctions aimed at blocking Iran’s nuclear program has left China the country’s dominant investor and trade partner. Now, with those restrictions formally lifted, a more pragmatic Iranian government has been trying to ease dependence on China, only to find itself stymied by hard-line resistance and residual U.S. sanctions.

“China has done enough investment in Iran,” said Mansour Moazami, who was deputy oil minister until taking over as chairman of the massive Industrial Development & Renovation Organization this year. “We will provide opportunities and chances for others.”

The tension illustrates a more nuanced situation in post-sanctions Iran than is often presented. Many in the U.S., including Donald Trump, portray Iran as the big winner from last year’s nuclear sanctions deal as European companies rush into one of the world’s last big, untapped emerging markets. Yet in Tehran, the government is attacked for failing to deliver and pandering to a still hostile West.

Western investors have been slow to arrive, forcing Iran back into the arms of the Chinese. That’s especially true in the energy sector, where pressure to increase production is intense. Elsewhere, Western clearing banks still refuse to do business with Iran for fear of falling foul of non-nuclear U.S. sanctions that remain in effect, meaning Western companies can’t raise project finance.

[LINK] "U.S. Carbon Dioxide Emissions Hit New 25-Year Low"

The Wall Street Journal's Rebecca Smith notes falling carbon dioxide emissions from the US, a consequence of, among other factors, shifting energy production methods. This news item should bring us some hope.

U.S. carbon dioxide emissions fell to a new 25-year low during the first six months of 2016, helped in large part by power plants switching from coal to natural gas and renewable sources of electricity, according to a Wednesday report by the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Mild weather also played a role. Many regions across the country experienced higher-than-normal temperatures last winter, which reduced demand for heating fuels, the agency said.

Energy-related carbon emissions in the first half of the year were 2.53 billion metric tons, the lowest since the same period in 1991. Full-year emissions for 2016 are on pace to be 5.18 billion metric tons, which would be the lowest on record since 1992, according to the latest federal projection.

The numbers mean the U.S. is on track to reduce energy-associated carbon emissions by at least 1.5% this year compared with a 3% drop last year.

“They’re not huge decreases, but our carbon intensity is going down as a nation,” said Allen McFarland, an analyst with the U.S. Energy Department. “Carbon intensity has been generally falling since 2005.”

[URBAN NOTE] "Tourists Could Destroy Venice—If Floods Don't First"

Simon Worrell's National Geographic interview with author Salvatore Settis, author of a book arguing that much of the current touristification of Venice both threatens its future as a living city and augurs ill for other metropolis, is thought provoking.

Most of us who have seen Venice have gone there as tourists. According to you, we are part of a “plague” that is destroying the city. Should we stay away?

The fact that many tourists are willing to go to Venice is in itself a good thing. I am against any system whereby the number of entry tickets to the city is limited. The minute you would have to pay to enter the city if you are not a citizen, Venice would already have been turned into a theme park. That is precisely what I don’t want to happen.

But Venice cannot be a city that lives only from tourism. The reason Venice had its glory is because the city and Venetians were able to develop over centuries a number of productive activities. Why can’t we promote the same thing in Venice today? Approximately 2.6 citizens abandon the city every day. Venice now has 54,000 inhabitants, which represents a loss of 120,000 people in the last 50 years.

Meanwhile, the cost of living in Venice is increasing every day. Young people cannot afford to buy or rent an apartment in Venice, so they are moving to neighboring places. In Switzerland, where I taught for some years, federal law mandates that in every city, even the smallest village, you cannot have more than 20 percent of [houses owned as] second homes. The reason why the Swiss government decided to do this is precisely not to encourage this loss of local identity. If the citizens abandon Venice and it becomes only a tourist location, it will lose its soul.

You describe several ways in which cities can die. Give us a brief summary and explain how Venice is threatened by what you call “self-oblivion.”

First, when an enemy destroys them, like Carthage, or when foreign invaders colonize violently, as happened with the conquistadores in Mexico or Peru. But the most dreadful danger for a city now is loss of memory. By loss of memory, I mean not forgetting that we exist, but who we are.

Long before Venice, an example is Athens, the most glorious city in classical Greece. It completely lost its memory and even its name. In the Middle Ages nobody knew where Athens was because the name of the city got totally lost. It was called Setines, or Satine, which was a barbarized form of the name. In Athens, there was no culture or memory of the city’s past glories. Sometimes visitors from Byzantium would travel to Athens and ask, “Where is the place where Socrates used to teach? Where is the place where Aristotle used to teach?” Nobody could answer them.

[LINK] "First heterosexual civil partnership in British Isles celebrated"

The Guardian's Owen Bowcott describes the first heterosexual couple to acquire a domestic partnership in the United Kingdom. All I can say is that if the United Kingdom wanted domestic partnerships to be viable, on the model of France, they would have been opened up long before now to opposite-sex couples.

The first opposite-sex couple in the British Isles to go through a civil partnership ceremony have celebrated their union in Douglas, the capital of the Isle of Man.

Adeline Cosson, 24, and Kieran Hodgson, 22, wanted to “keep it simple” rather than have a traditional wedding. They are considering getting married at a later date.

Civil partnerships, which were introduced in 2004 for same-sex couples following lobbying by equal rights campaigners, are not available for heterosexual partners in the UK.

A London couple, Charles Keidan and Rebecca Steinfeld, are going to the court of appeal in November to argue that denying opposite-sex couples civil partnerships breaches their human rights.

But the Isle of Man, which is not part of the UK and decriminalised gay sex in the 1990s, made civil partnerships available to everybody this summer.

[LINK] "John Weir on the Controlling Effect of Trump’s ‘Locker Room Talk’"

Towleroad shares author John Weir's take on the idea of "locker room talk", examining it from a needed queer perspective. This kind of language is meant to exclude more people than you might think. An extract:

So you have a lot of white guys sitting around on a tour bus talking, reminiscing about their past sexual aggressions, planning their upcoming sexual aggression; and then they get off the bus and there is footage of that aggression.

It was not as violent as gang rape, but it stuck to standard scenarios of how gang rape is represented in innumerable movies and novels and TV shows produced and written and directed by men; and it was sexual harassment.

Watching it – only once – I thought about how, since I hit puberty (I’m 57 years old), I’ve repeatedly been in social situations – not locker rooms! *living* rooms – where one man, or a group of men, whom I have just met, whom I am “getting to know,” has/have said stuff about women not so different from what Trump said to Bush.

It is, indeed, inevitable, that conversation: I walk into a room of men I don’t know, and sooner or later, one of them turns to me and makes a sexual comment about a woman or all women. Not like, “She’s hot!” But more like Trump saying, “I moved on her like a bitch.”

I’m a gay guy, and I’m talking here – I assume! – about straight men. Straight guys are constantly policing each other’s heterosexuality, even still, and they want to know, as quickly as possible, whether or not the new guy is a fag.

[LINK] On the durable massive rings of exoplanet J1407b

Universe Today's Matt Williams reports on a finding that the massive rings possibly detected around an exoplanet are viable.

Back in 2007, astronomers observed a series of unusual eclipses coming from a star 420 light years from Earth. In 2012, a team from Japan and the Netherlands reasoned that this phenomena was due to the presence of a large exoplanet – designated J1407b – with a massive ring system orbiting the star. Since then, several surprising finds have been made.

For example, in 2015, the same team concluded that the ring system is one-hundred times larger and heavier than Saturn’s (and may be similarly sculpted by exomoons). And in their most recent study, they have shown that these giant rings may last for over 100,000 years, assuming they have a rare and unusual orbit around their planet.

In their previous work, Rieder and Kenworth determined that the ring system around J1407b consisted about 37 rings that extend to a distance of 0.6 AU (90 million km) from the planet. They also estimated that these rings are 100 times as massive as our Moon – 7342 trillion trillion metric tons. What’s more, while J1407b’s existence is yet to be confirmed, they were able to rule out the possibility of it having a circular orbit around the star.

As a result, there were doubts that such a ring system could exist. Given the fact that the planet periodically gets closer to its star, the ring system would experience gravitational disruption. Therefore, Steven Rieder (of the RIKEN institute in Japan) and Matthew Kenworth (of Leiden University in the Netherlands) set out to assess how long such a ring system could remain stable for.

For the sake of their study, titled “Constraints on the Size and Dynamics of the J1407b Ring System“, they conducted a series of simulations using the Astrophysical Multi-purpose Software Environment (AMUSE) framework. In the end, their results showed that a ring structure with an 11 year orbital period and a retrograde orbit could survive for at least 10,000 orbits.

In other words, the ring system that they hypothesized back in 2012 could endure for 110,000 years. As Reider (the lead author on the paper) explained in a statement, the results were surprising, but happened to fit the facts[.]

[LINK] "Ethiopia Alleges Oromo Protesters Receiving Support From Egypt"

Bloomberg's William Davison reports on the Ethiopian allegation that ethnic Oromo protesters are being covertly supported by Egypt.

Ethiopia’s government suspects Egyptian elements may be backing Oromo protesters as rivalry over control of the Nile River intensifies, Communications Minister Getachew Reda said.

Authorities in Cairo may be supporting the banned Oromo Liberation Front, or OLF, that organized a spate of attacks last week across Ethiopia’s most populous region, which led to the declaration of a state of emergency on Sunday, he told reporters Monday in the capital, Addis Ababa.

“We have ample evidence that trainings have happened, financing has happened in Egypt, the jury is still out whether the Egyptian government is going to claim responsibility for that,” Getachew said. “Nor are we saying it is directly linked with the Egyptian government, but we know for a fact the terrorist group OLF has been receiving all kind of support from Egypt.”

Egypt’s government has claimed Ethiopia’s construction of a hydropower dam on the main tributary of the Nile contravenes colonial-era treaties that grant it the right to the bulk of the river’s water. Ethiopian officials reject the accords as obsolete and unjust.

[LINK] "An Atlantic Canadian speech pattern, explained"

CBC News' Lindsay Bird reports on an odd Viking inheritance.

Say it on your inhale: "yeeeeeeeah."

If that felt like second nature, chances are you're from Atlantic Canada, where this peculiar speech pattern prevails. And this habit of inhaling a 'yes', 'no,' or 'hmmm' even, has a name: ingressive pulmonic speech.

"It's really interesting. It's a phenomenon you don't find in too many of the world's languages, but [in] a big geographical zone," said retired Memorial University professor Sandra Clarke, an expert on the special inhale.

Ingressive pulmonic speech is widespread throughout Atlantic Canada, down into Maine, and then stretches across the North Atlantic to encompass Scotland, Ireland, Iceland and Scandinavia, and as far east as Estonia.

[. . .]

"Where it seems to have come from originally, is probably what we now call Scandinavia. The Vikings were the ones who probably brought it to Scotland and Ireland," she said, adding the large influx of Scottish and Irish likely transported it to Canada's East Coast.