[PHOTO] Three photos of construction on Yonge between Bloor and Wellesley

The construction on Yonge Street is never-ending, and somewhat dramatic at night.

[BLOG] Some Sunday links

• Charlie Stross at Antipope asks his readers an interesting question: What are the current blind spots of science fiction? What issues and themes need to be addresses by contemporary writers?


• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait notes the discovery of three planets around young star HD 163296, and his role in the identification of one as a possibility.


• Crooked Timber notes the strange ways in which the predictive text function of Gmail echoes the all-quotations language of the Ascians of Gene Wolfe.


• D-Brief notes an ambitious plan to survey the Andromeda Galaxy for signs of powerful laser beams used by extraterrestrial intelligences for communications or transport.


• Joe. My. God. notes the plan of China to launch an artificial mirrored satellite into orbit to provide night-time light for the city of Chengdu.


• Allan Metcalfe at Lingua Franca considers some of the words candidate to be considered the best word for 2018.


• Marginal Revolution links to a paper suggesting that global economic divergence ended, after a century and a quarter, in 1990, and that there has been subsequently rapid economic convergence in the globalized neo-liberal era.


• Alex Carp at the NYR Daily reviews Jill Lepore's new book, These Truths: A History of the United States, examining the importance of fact and of narrative in forming identities.


• Jason Davis at the Planetary Society Blog looks at the challenges involved in returning a sample from asteroid Ryugu.


• Drew Rowsome takes a look at the recent books of Raziel Reid and Jesse Trautman, noting how each delineates some of the contours of contemporary queer male life.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel explains how we can estimate that there are two trillion galaxies in the universe.


• Window on Eurasia notes the various inter-ethnic disputes over interpretations of ancient history in the North Caucasus.

[URBAN NOTE] Five Toronto links: marijuana, Presto, Downtown Relief Line, police, Jennifer Keesmaat

• Toronto Life shares some photos showing Toronto scenes from 10/17, the day of marijuana legalization.


• The Presto system continues to underperform, with among other things a high--even worsening!--failure rate. The Toronto Star reports.


• The Downtown Relief Line, arcing east and north from Osgoode station on the Yonge line to Pape on the Danforth, has finally gotten approval following the completon of an environmental assessment. CBC reports.


• In the aftermath of the Church and Wellesley serial killer scandal, Toronto Police has finally assembled a permanent Missing Persons Unit. CBC reports.


• Enzo DiMatteo at NOW Toronto interviews mayoral candidate Jennifer Keesmaat, letting her make the case that her vision makes her uniquely qualified to become the next mayor of Toronto.

[NEWS] Five Canadian politics links: Ontario, western Canada, the North

• iPolitics notes that Ontario may come out ahead with a federal carbon tax, here.


• Last month's essay of Stephen Maher at MacLean's suggesting the Doug Ford government's approach to energy and the carbon tax will cost Ontario more than it might save looks positively prescient.


• I agree entirely with the argument of Karl Nerenberg at Rabble.ca that CBC should cover the municipal elections in Ontario: Local democracy matters, too.


• Global News reports that a recent Ipsos poll suggests western Canadians tend to identify more closely with their province than with their wider country. (Is this not the case generally in Canada, I wonder?)


• The Canadian program aiming to make food affordable in the north is, as minister Dominic Leblanc admits, in desperate need of reform. CBC reports.