Oct. 27th, 2016

rfmcdonald: (photo)
Inscribed scallop shell #toronto #agakhanmuseum #hindustan #india #iran #quran #scallop #shell


Of the various artifacts at the Aga Khan, this--an inscribed scallop shell--is the most awe-inspiring for me. The skill that it took to inscribe so much delicate calligraphy in a fragile seashell is astounding.
rfmcdonald: (Default)

  • blogTO warned yesterday of impending snowfall.

  • Centauri Dreams considers if planets in the circumstellar habitable zones of red dwarfs, like Proxima Centauri b, might tend to be ocean worlds.

  • Crooked Timber tries to track down the source of some American electoral maps breaking down support for candidates finely, by demographics.

  • D-Brief shares stunning images of L1448 IRS3B, a nascent triple stellar system.

  • Joe. My. God. notes the advent of same-sex marriage in Gibraltar.

  • Lawyers, Guns and Money notes that, the last time the Cubs won, Russia was run by Romanovs.

  • Maximos62 meditates on Bali as a plastic civilization.

  • The NYRB Daily reflects on how the Beach Boys have, and have not, aged well.

  • Personal Reflections' Jim Belshaw looks at un- and underemployment in Australia.

  • Torontoist looks at what we can learn from the dedicated bus routes of Mexico City.

  • Understanding Society looks at economics and structural change in middle-income countries.

  • Window on Eurasia notes one man's argument that Russians should be privileged as the only state-forming nation in the Russian Federation, and shares another Russia's argument against any idea of Belarusian distinctiveness.

rfmcdonald: (Default)
NOW Toronto's Peter Biesterfeld reports on how Ontario's policies have lead to a marked worsening of poverty.

After decades of intensifying austerity and eroding income supports, social assistance in Ontario is now so wretchedly inadequate that people are unable to feed themselves properly, retain their housing or maintain their health.

Total benefit income for those who depend on Ontario Works (OW) and the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) locks nearly 895,000 Ontarians into deep poverty, according to Ontario’s Social Assistance Poverty Gap (PDF), a May 2016 report authored by Kaylie Tiessen, an economist with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA).

The report shows that the poverty gap – the difference between total benefit income of people on OW and ODSP and the poverty line – has grown by 59 per cent for a single person and between 30 and 40 per cent for families since 1993. In 2014, almost two-thirds of Ontario households reliant on social assistance experienced food insecurity – inability to feed oneself or one’s family adequately.

It’s a similar story for the working poor.

On October 1, the province announced a 15-cent hike in minimum wage to $11.40 an hour. The 1.5 per cent increase, which the Liberals have indexed to the Consumer Price Index, adds up to annual earnings for a person on minimum wage that’s about $800 above the poverty line in Ontario, which is $19,930.

But that’s still about 17 per cent below a living wage when you factor in the rising costs of food and housing, says Deena Ladd, a coordinator with the Workers’ Action Centre.
rfmcdonald: (Default)
The Toronto Star's Betsy Powell reports on how Toronto city council has opted not to look into trying to gain Expo 2025. Thank God!

The city’s executive committee has voted to accept a staff recommendation not to pursue a world’s fair, despite intense lobbying by an ardent downtown city councillor alongside business and community leaders.

Deputy Mayor Denzil Minnan-Wong moved the motion Wednesday evening that the committee adopt the conclusion of senior city staff that the risk of hosting Expo 2025 outweighed potential benefits.

“We can’t afford to get this wrong, the cost escalations could be huge,” Minnan-Wong told committee members. A consultant’s report found it would cost close $1.9 billion to stage an Expo.

“If you were to ask any residents if your choice was to build more transit or to have a world’s fair, which would you choose? I think the choice would be pretty obvious to the public, they would choose more transit.”

The final decision lies with city council next month.
rfmcdonald: (Default)
Torontoist's David Hains shares my exasperation in regards to Scarborough's continued uncertainty over what sort of mass transit it wants.

The most vociferous political supporters of the Scarborough subway now oppose the proposed route for the $3.56 billion one-stop extension.

Glenn De Baeremaeker (Ward 38, Scarborough Centre), who John Tory named his “subway champion” on City Council, and Liberal MPP Brad Duguid opposed the current route at a local community meeting, as reported by Inside Toronto. De Baeremaeker called the route “a horrible imposition on our community,” because of five years of construction that would include dust, noise, and other difficulties.

The proposed route, which would go east from Kennedy Station and along McCowan to Scarborough Town Centre, would involve expropriation of local residences and businesses. In July, De Baeremaeker successfully moved a motion that would also protect the Frank Faubert Wood Lot during the construction phase. This move could add millions to construction costs.

Neither De Baeremaeker nor Duguid is willing to give up on the subway, with the MPP saying that seeing it cancelled would only happen over his dead body. They favour an alternate route proposed by a retired Scarborough planner, which would see an elaborate bend west of McCowan before swerving back east. The plan has not been studied by city staff and costs have not been analyzed.
rfmcdonald: (Default)
Torontoist's Tricia Wood argues in favour of a much better rail network for not just the Greater Toronto Area, but all of southern Ontario.

I just spent a week in London—the really big one, in the United Kingdom. There are many lessons to learn from such a large and complex transit system as London’s, but what stood out to me was how well-connected the city is to everywhere else.

Here in Toronto, we have nothing that compares to that. Not even close. Regional intercity transit is one of the weakest links in the transportation network in southern Ontario. It reveals our politically lazy reliance on the car to get us everywhere we want to go.

Over-reliance on the car is an important environmental issue. It’s also an economic one. Toronto, the greater Toronto region, and all of southern Ontario each has much unrealized economic potential. Our subpar productivity is routinely noted.

Southern Ontario contains several important cities: Toronto, Hamilton, Kitchener, Waterloo, London, St. Catharines, Windsor, Barrie, Mississauga, Brampton, Kingston, and Ottawa. The area has a combined population of over 12 million, which is over 90 per cent of the province’s population.

Train service throughout the region is pretty limited. To or from Toronto, you can take commuter GO trains to Barrie, Brampton, and Mississauga.
rfmcdonald: (Default)
National Geographic's Brian Clark Howard describes a new study that demonstrates how bees, that epitome of a swarm intelligence, learn.

Bee see, bee do. At least that's the conclusion of research published earlier this month, showing that bumblebees learn to solve problems by watching each other.

In the first study of its kind in insects, scientists constructed experiments that challenged bees to pull strings in order to access rewards of nectar. It's a technique that has long been used to test cognition in various vertebrates, but hadn't yet been tried with insects.

[. . .]

The first step was proving that bees could learn to solve a simple problem. But what's more interesting is that other bees that hadn't encountered the problem before picked up the ability to solve it more quickly when they had a chance to watch a trainer bee that had already figured out the puzzle.

Further, that knowledge was shown to spread from bee to bee throughout a colony, even if the first bee that figured out the trick died.

The scientists hoped their study would shed light on a bigger picture: how social learning spreads through a population. That might even have implications for the evolutionary roots of culture in human beings, they noted.


The study in question is available here.
rfmcdonald: (Default)
National Geographic's Ed Yong reports on some amazing research findings from the Galapagos, examining the culture of the sperm whales of the area. This knowledge carries with it some notable implications: Is what happened to the Galapagos' prior population of sperm whales a form of genocide?

Since 1985, Hal Whitehead had been leading a team to the Galápagos Islands to search for sperm whales, which gather there in the thousands. The researchers tracked the animals with underwater microphones, day and night, for two to four weeks.

Their recordings revealed that the whales belonged to two distinct vocal clans—large groups that each call using their own dialect. The Regular clan makes a train of regularly spaced clicks, while the Plus-One clan leaves a short pause before their last click. The two clans share both genes and oceans—they are distinct only in their vocal culture.

In the 1990s, for some reason, the whales started to vanish. By 2000, the whales had completely gone, and Whitehead ceased his annual expeditions.

Then, in 2011, a colleague in the Galápagos told the team that the sperm whales had apparently returned. Whitehead’s team, including Mauricio Cantor, Shane Gero, and Luke Rendell, went back in 2013 to listen for themselves.

They did, indeed, find sperm whales, sighting more than 4,400 individuals across two years. But none of these were from either the Regular or Plus-One clan, which were around in the 1980s. Instead, they belonged to two different groups that were heard elsewhere in the Pacific but were previously rare or absent around the Galápagos: the Short clan, which makes a brief train of clicks, and the Four-Plus clan, whose calls have a base of four regular clicks.
rfmcdonald: (Default)
Via 3 Quarks Daily I found Grigori Guitchounts' article in Nautilus making the case for research into the mechanisms of corvid intelligence.

The animals of neuroscience research are an eclectic bunch, and for good reason. Different model organisms—like zebra fish larvae, C. elegans worms, fruit flies, and mice—give researchers the opportunity to answer specific questions. The first two, for example, have transparent bodies, which let scientists easily peer into their brains; the last two have eminently tweakable genomes, which allow scientists to isolate the effects of specific genes. For cognition studies, researchers have relied largely on primates and, more recently, rats, which I use in my own work. But the time is ripe for this exclusive club of research animals to accept a new, avian member: the corvid family.

Corvids, such as crows, ravens, and magpies, are among the most intelligent birds on the planet—the list of their cognitive achievements goes on and on—yet neuroscientists have not scrutinized their brains for one simple reason: They don’t have a neocortex. The obsession with the neocortex in neuroscience research is not unwarranted; what’s unwarranted is the notion that the neocortex alone is responsible for sophisticated cognition. Because birds lack this structure—the most recently evolved portion of the mammalian brain, crucial to human intelligence—neuroscientists have largely and unfortunately neglected the neural basis of corvid intelligence.

This makes them miss an opportunity for an important insight. Having diverged from mammals more than 300 million years ago, avian brains have had plenty of time to develop along remarkably different lines (instead of a cortex with its six layers of neatly arranged neurons, birds evolved groups of neurons densely packed into clusters called nuclei). So, any computational similarities between corvid and primate brains—which are so different neurally—would indicate the development of common solutions to shared evolutionary problems, like creating and storing memories, or learning from experience. If neuroscientists want to know how brains produce intelligence, looking solely at the neocortex won’t cut it; they must study how corvid brains achieve the same clever behaviors that we see in ourselves and other mammals.
rfmcdonald: (Default)
Earlier today an article by one Geeta Dayan in The Guardian, "San Fran-disco: how Patrick Cowley and Sylvester changed dance music forever", popped up on my feed. Patrick Cowley was an innovative producer, Sylvester was a singer with an unearthly falsetto, and before each died of AIDS in the 1980s (Cowley in 1982, Sylvester in 1988) they made, together and separately, fantastic music. Their 1982 hit "Do You Wanna Funk" is especially noteworthy.



Writing about a discovery of some of Cowley's early synthesizer music from the 1970s, Dayan makes the case that San Francisco in the early 1980s was a centre for hugely interesting innovation.

The early synthesizer experiments, with Royalle’s sultry voice flickering in and out of the mix, foreshadowed Cowley’s prescient disco music to come, fusing euphoric vocals with a synthesized pulse to reach massive, almost unbearable peaks. His epic 16-minute “megamix” of I Feel Love, which managed the seemingly impossible feat of improving on Giorgio Moroder and Donna Summer’s original track, and upbeat tracks like Menergy and Megatron Man became instant classics.

“I think we knew we had something special, even way back then,” says Hedges. “The music was pop sounding, but definitely with an artistic edge to it. People were going nuts for it, in England, especially … the Pet Shop Boys were quoted in the press several times that Patrick Cowley influenced their music, which you can hear in this electronic pop music.”

The music also hails back to a different, more freewheeling time in San Francisco. Longtime San Francisco resident Rob Bregoff, who knew Cowley, remembers paying $235 to rent a three-bedroom apartment in the Haight district in the 1970s. Split between room-mates, that meant each person paid less than $100 – a far cry from the tech industry-fueled San Francisco of today, which now holds the dubious distinction of the highest rents in the US. “It was a time when everything was forced out into the open,” says Bregoff. “All social mores were being questioned.”

As the 1970s progressed, Trocadero Transfer and Dreamland in SoMA, I-Beam in Haight-Ashbury, and the City disco in North Beach – all gone now – became key spots for disco. “When the Trocadero Transfer opened and got their all-night permit, it ushered in a New York-style all-night party in San Francisco in a club – a regular club that was open every weekend and around the clock,” says Steve Fabus, who DJed at the Trocadero in the late 1970s and 1980s, and at the nearby Endup.


And then, this was all killed by the onslaught of the AIDS epidemic. Entire record companies, and their audiences, disappeared. Joshua Gamson's The Fabulous Sylvester provides a good perspective on this phase of San Francisco's history. One year, people were around; the next, they could be gone. We have what remains, but what could have been!
Page generated Jul. 6th, 2025 12:07 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios