[PHOTO] Emerald Park Condos, from the north

I recently revisited North York, at Yonge and Sheppard, and was in a position to see from the north the Emerald Park Condos just south of Sheppard. The striking design of these towers, as Urban Toronto noted back in 2011, clearly borrows heavily from the Emerald Towers built for the Kazakhstani capital of Astana..

[BLOG] Some Sunday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait suggests that strange markings in the upper atmosphere of Venus might well be evidence of life in that relatively Earth-like environment.


• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly raves over Babylon Berlin.


• Centauri Dreams considers, fifty years after its publication, Clarke's 2001.


• Crooked Timber considers Kevin Williamson in the context of conservative intellectual representation more generally.


• D-Brief considers "digisexuality", the fusion of the digital world with sexuality. (I think we're quite some way off, myself.)


• The Dragon's Tales considers evidence suggesting that the agricultural revolution in ancient Anatolia was achieved without population replacement from the Fertile Crescent.


• Drew Ex Machina takes a look at the flight of Apollo 6, a flight that helped iron out problem with the Saturn V.


• The Frailest Thing's Michael Sacasas is not impressed by the idea of the trolley problem, as something that allows for the displacement of responsibility.


• Gizmodo explains why the faces of Neanderthals were so different from the faces of modern humans.


• JSTOR Daily considers if volcano-driven climate change helped the rise of Christianity.


• Language Log considers, after Spinoza, the idea that vowels are the souls of consonants.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money engages in a bit of speculation: What would have happened had Clinton won? (Ideological gridlock, perhaps.)


• Lovesick Cyborg explores how the advent of the cheap USB memory stick allowed North Koreans to start to enjoy K-Pop.


• Russell Darnley considers the transformation of the forests of Indonesia's Riau forest from closed canopy forest to plantations.


• The Map Room Blog shares some praise of inset maps.


• Neuroskeptic considers how ketamine may work as an anti-depressant.


• The NYR Daily considers student of death, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross.


• Justin Petrone of north! shares an anecdote from the Long Island coastal community of Greenport.


• Personal Reflection's Jim Belshaw considers the iconic Benjamin Wolfe painting The Death of General Wolfe.


• The Planetary Society Blog's Casey Dreier notes cost overruns for the James Webb Space Telescope.


• pollotenchegg maps recent trends in natural increase and decrease in Ukraine.


• Roads and Kingdoms talks about a special Hverabrauð in Iceland, baked in hot springs.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel shares his own proposal for a new Drake Equation, revised to take account of recent discoveries.


• Vintage Space considers how the American government would have responded if John Glenn had died in the course of his 1962 voyage into space.


• Window on Eurasia considers the belief among many Russians that had Beria, not Khrushchev, succeeded Stalin, the Soviet Union might have been more successful.

[URBAN NOTE] Five Toronto links: Toronto Museum, First Nations, Ford, vacant lots, rent strikes

• John Lorinc at Spacing considers what is next for the Toronto Museum slated for Old City Hall, here.


• Will Toronto see an indigenous business district set up, perhaps near Allan Gardens or Christie Pits? NOW Toronto reports.


• Shawn Micallef considers what will happen to the few vacant lots left in downtown Toronto, over at the Toronto Star.


• Matt Elliott notes that the main legacy of the Doug Ford mayoralty in Toronto is a set of cautionary tales, over at Metro Toronto.


• Are rent strikes protesting rising rents going to become a big thing in Toronto, expanding from hard-pressed tenants in Parkdale? The Toronto Star considers.

[URBAN NOTE] Five Canada city links: Hamilton, London, Montréal

• This older CBC article looking at how many Torontonians, seeking affordable housing, are moving to Hamilton and in so doing transforming that city, is still very worthwhile.


• The question facing Hamilton city council, of how it will handle LRT funding given a Ford government, is pressing. Global News reports.


• $C 11 billion in funding for the first phase of a high-speed rail link between Toronto and London, via Kitchener-Waterloo, is nice. If only Wynne gets re-elected. Global News reports.


• I wish Montréal mayor Valérie Plante luck in her effort to bring major-league baseball back to her metropolis. Global News reports.


• Robert Everett-Green's take on Montréal as it is often depicted, as an idyllic mess, is worthy of note if perhaps not agreement. The Globe and Mail <a href="https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-the-idyllic-mess-that-is-montreal/><U>has it</u></a>.</li> </ul>

[NEWS] Five LGBT links: Village killings of the 1970s, Grindr, Fire Island, Steve Rogers' Brooklyn

• This long-form CBC article on a string of unsolved murders of gay men in the late 1970s is compelling, frightening reading.


• Daily Xtra recently shared a Body Politic article from the 1970s by the late great Robin Hardy on the mysterious killings of gay men at the time. (Visibility, as Hardy suggests, can save lives.)


• The suggestion that excessive dependency on Grindr and similar apps is not helping queer men form rewarding relationships does not sound inherently implausible to me. Vox has it.


• Hornet Stories shares a guide to Fire Island, here.


• Things With Wings looks at the history of New York City and Brooklyn and finds out that the neighbourhood where Steven Rogers lived in the 1930s and 1940s, Brooklyn Heights, was actually a mecca of out queer people and communities.

[NEWS] Five sci-fi links: HAL 9000, Space Seed on VHS, baseball on DS9, Civilization, AIs doing D&D

• How did the movie version of HAL 9000, from 2001, come about? And why does HAL sound so Canadian? The National Post reports.


• The official Star Trek website explains how the release of the episode "Space Seed" on VHS helped change the videocassette market of the 1980s, here.


• Deadspin explains how the central role played by the sport of baseball in Deep Space 9 underlined the ways in which that show was atypical Trek.


• Rock Paper Shotgun examines how many long-run civilization-building games, like Civilization, do a poor job of depicting stagnation and decline, and what this failure says about us now.


• The idea that the game that artificial intelligences need to learn to play is not chess but D&D--that games involving roleplaying are good tests for general intelligence--seems obvious to me. Aeon has it.