[CAT] Shakespeare, side profile

[PHOTO] Four photos of the Anne Johnston Courtyard, December

The Anne Johnston Courtyard, lush in winter, has a spare beauty in December even before the snows come.

[URBAN NOTE] Five Toronto links: Church and Wellesley, Ontario Place, Junction, Airbnb, Kleinburg

• Jenna Moon talks about her experience living and loving in a Church and Wellesley that is starting to feel dangerous, over at the Toronto Star.


• Toronto Life notes the lights of the Winter at Ontario Place festival, transforming the west island into a fantastical array of shapes at night. I must go see it.


• Toronto Life profiles Nations Experience, an immense supermarket in the former Target Canada space in the Junction's Stockyards that looks to be as much a tourist attraction as a store.


• One Toronto condo owner is interviewed criticizing the new restrictions on Airbnb. (I wonder what his neighbours think.) The Toronto Star reports.


• In Kleinburg, in Vaughan region, the definition of "detached home" has been rewritten to better enable development. The Toronto Star reports.

[BLOG] Some Saturday links

• Anthropology net reports on the unveiling of Little Foot, a 3.6 million year old australopithecus skeleton.


• The Big Picture unveiled remarkable photos of the ongoing wildfires in southern California.


• Centauri Dreams shares a suggestion of Jim Benford suggesting we are not transmitting loudly enough to be picked up across interstellar distances.


• D-Brief notes the discovery of genes which appear to have some relationship to sexual orientation variation among human men.


• Daily JSTOR notes how DNA evidence can lead to false convictions.


• The Dragon's Tales shares some links about extrasolar visitor 'Oumuamua.


Joe. My. God. notes that an opposite-sex couple in Australia who promised to divorce on the advent of marriage equality have opted not to. Surprise, surprise.

• The Map Room Blog shares some maps examining the possibility of an electoral upset in the Alabama Senate race.


• Marginal Revolution points out the extent to which Chicago was a huge boomtown in the 19th century.


• The NYR Daily shares the proletarian art--literally--of Chaïm Soutine.


• Out There takes a look at how our ill treatment of gorillas bodes ill for our treatment of hypothetical less advanced aliens.


• Window on Eurasia notes that Moscow, without restrictions on urban migration, is starting to develop ethnic neighbourhoods. (I think this natural, and fundamentally a good thing, unlike the source.)


• Arnold Zwicky shares a report of a 1971 jam session of John Lennon with Frank Zappa.

[URBAN NOTE] Five notes: Saint John, Vancouver, Peterborough, Halifax, Point Hope

• The mayor of Saint John, in New Brunswick, wants to attract migrants from Canada's richer but more expensive cities. Global News reports.


• Vancouver wants to keep old businesses in its Chinatown going, so as to keep as much of the old community as active as possible. Global News reports.


• Peterborough's low-income community now has a periodical, The River Magazine, to represent their issues. Global News reports.


• Assembly of the first Arctic patrol ship in a planned program has been completed in the Halifax Shipyard. CBC reports.


• The Alaskan community of Point Hope now finds itself, at least partly because of global warming and the interests of financiers, with all of the Internet bandwidth it could ever want. The New York Times reports.

[NEWS] Five links about communication: Ontario Internet, Mohawk, Tatarstan, Iroquois, Catalonia

• TVO notes that slow Internet speeds cause real problems for people in rural Ontario, focusing here on the southwest.


• Kelly Boutsalis at NOW Toronto reports on new efforts to revive the Mohawk language.


• At Open Democracy, Bulat Mukhamedzhanov describes how a centralization in power in Russia away from Tatarstan threatens the future of the Tatar language in education.


• Ainslie Cruickshank reports on what seems to me to be an ill-judged controversy in a Toronto school over a folksong by Iroquois poet E. Pauline Johnson, "Land of the Silver Birch," calling it racist, over in the Toronto Star.


• This politico.eu article examining the polarized media landscape in Catalonia, and wider Spain, is disturbing. Is everyone really talking past each other?

[NEWS] Four science links: Venus and Earth, Greenland shark, maple syrup, black hole J1342+0928

• Does Venus have a much weaker magnetic field than the Earth because Venus, unlike the Earth, did not suffer a massive Moon-creating impact? Universe Today reports.


• M.R. O'Connor tells the story of how scientists managed to figure out how amazingly long the Greenland shark can live. The New Yorker has it.


• Climate Central notes how, thanks to global warming, maple syrup season is starting earlier every year and the heartland of production is moving ever more to the north.


• At Wired, Joshua Sokol reports on the distant and mysteriously massive black hole J1342+0928. How did it become so incredibly massive--780 million solar masses--when the universe was less than a billion years old?