[PHOTO] Gazing southwest through snow and lights, Bloor and Bathust

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[PHOTO] Ice trees, Dupont Street west of Dovercourt Road

The winter Toronto has been having so far has seen quite a lot of snow--more, it has seen quite a lot of precipitation generally, slush and even rain--and the temperatures have been hovering just below freezing. When I got off the 161 Rogers Road bus last night at 11 o'clock, the trees were coated with ice, glittering under streetlights.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• The Crux notes the discovery of a second impact crater in Greenland, hidden under the ice.


• D-Brief notes new evidence that ancient Celts did, in fact, decapitate their enemies and preserve their heads.


• Far Outliers notes how Pakhtun soldier Ayub Khan, in 1914-1915, engaged in some cunning espionage for the British Empire on the Western Front.


• Kashmir Hill at Gizmodo notes how cutting out the big five tech giants for one week--Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft--made it almost impossible for her to carry on her life.


• Hornet Stories notes that, unsurprisingly, LGBTQ couples are much more likely to have met online that their heterosexual counterparts.


• At In Media Res, Russell Arben Fox imagines Elizabeth Warren giving a speech that touches sensitively and intelligently on her former beliefs in her Cherokee ancestry.


• Mónica Belevan at the Island Review writes, directly and allegorically, about the Galapagos Islands and her family and Darwin.


• JSTOR Daily looks at the economics of the romance novel.


• Language Hat notes the Mandombe script creating by the Kimbanguist movement in Congo.


• Harry Stopes at the LRB Blog notes the problem with Greater Manchester Police making homeless people a subject of concern.


• Ferguson activists, the NYR Daily notes, are being worn down by their protests.


• Roads and Kingdoms lists some things visitors to the Uzbekistan capital of Tashkent should keep in mind.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel makes a case for supersymmetry being a failed prediction.


• Towleroad notes the near-complete exclusion of LGBTQ subjects and themes from schools ordered by Brazil's president Jair Bolsonaro.


• Window on Eurasia notes a somewhat alarmist take on Central Asian immigrant neighbourhoods in Moscow.


• Arnold Zwicky takes a look at the Kurds, their history, and his complicated sympathy for their concerns.

[URBAN NOTE] Five Toronto links: TTC, trespassing, Ice Breakers, infrastructure, rooming houses

• Transit Toronto takes a look at the outline of the uploading agreement the city of Toronto has reached with Ontario on the TTC.


• Trespassing on TTC lines has been responsible for many hours' worth of delays. CBC reports
  
• NOW Toronto reports on the exciting Ice Breakers exhibition on the waterfront at Queens Quay.


• Spending so little on repairs creates a real possibility of accelerated collapse of Toronto infrastructure in the foreseeable future. The Toronto Star reports.


• Jason Miller at the Toronto Star notes how the housing crisis in Toronto makes more important the debate over what to do with illegal rooming houses.

[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: Sherbrooke, New York City, New Orleans, Nottingham, Cape Town

• The 2023 Jeux de la Francophonie, originally planned for New Brunswick, have been taken up--provisionally--by the Québec city of Sherbrooke. HuffPostQuebec reports.


• Carmen Arroyo at Inter Press Service writes about Pedro, a migrant from Oaxaca in Mexico who has lived in new York City for a dozen years without papers.


• CityLab notes evidence that natural disasters can indeed advance gentrification, looking at the example of New Orleans.


• Guardian Cities shares some cartoons by Carol Adlam about the English city of Nottingham, neither northern nor southern.


• Civil servant magazine Apolitical takes a look at how Cape Town managed to escape its threatened water crisis.

[NEWS] Five science links: ancient humans, animal minds, green Asia, generation starships, SN1987A

• Quanta Magazine notes that the deep learning offered by new artificial intelligences can help pick out traces of non-homo sapiens ancestry in our current gene pool.


• This sensitive article in The Atlantic examines the extent to which consciousness and emotion are ubiquitous in the world of animals.


• NASA notes evidence of the great greening of China and India, associated not only with agriculture in both countries but with the commitment of China to reforestation projects.


• Mashable examines the fundamental brittleness of closed systems that will likely limit the classical generation starship.


• SciTechDaily notes new observations of SN 1987A revealing a much greater prediction of dust than previously believed.

[NEWS] Five futurish links: Quadriga, Brexit, Facebook and Rohingya, basic income, friendship

• This CBC feature on the apparent loss of a quarter-billion dollars via the Quadriga cryptocurrency makes the whole business look incredibly sketchy to me. Why would anyone rational take such risks?


• At Open Democracy, Christine Berry suggests that after the Grenfell Tower catastrophe the idea of using Brexit to deregulate has become impossible. Is this a wedge issue?


• Vox notes the effort of Facebook to try to hold itself accountable for providing a platform for the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya.


• Inverse has a positive account of the guaranteed minimum income experiment in Finland, emphasizing the improved psychological state of recipients.


• The Atlantic notes that one major impact of Facebook is that, through its medium, friendships can never quite completely die.

[DM] Some news links: history, cities, migration, diasporas

I have another round-up post of links at Demography Matters, this one concentrating heavily on migration as it affects cities. An essay will come tomorrow, I promise!

• JSTOR Daily considers the extent to which the Great Migration of African-Americans was a forced migration, driven not just by poverty but by systemic anti-black violence.


• Even as the overall population of Japan continues to decline, the population of Tokyo continues to grow through net migration, Mainichi reports.


• This CityLab article takes look at the potential, actual and lost and potential, of immigration to save the declining Ohio city of Youngstown. Will it, and other cities in the American Rust Belt, be able to take advantage of entrepreneurial and professional immigrants?


• Window on Eurasia notes a somewhat alarmist take on Central Asian immigrant neighbourhoods in Moscow. That immigrant neighbourhoods can become largely self-contained can surprise no one.


• Guardian Cities notes how tensions between police and locals in the Bairro do Jamaico in Lisbon reveal problems of integration for African immigrants and their descendants.


• Carmen Arroyo at Inter Press Service writes about Pedro, a migrant from Oaxaca in Mexico who has lived in New York City for a dozen years without papers.


• CBC Prince Edward Island notes that immigration retention rates on PEI, while low, are rising, perhaps showing the formation of durable immigrant communities. Substantial international migration to Prince Edward Island is only just starting, after all.


• The industrial northern Ontario city of Sault Sainte-Marie, in the wake of the closure of the General Motors plant in the Toronto-area industrial city of Oshawa, was reported by Global News to have hopes to recruit former GM workers from Oshawa to live in that less expensive city.


• Atlas Obscura examines the communities being knitted together across the world by North American immigrants from the Caribbean of at least partial Hakka descent. The complex history of this diaspora fascinates me.