[PHOTO] Looking west, Vermont Square

It might be perhaps disturbingly warm for mid-February, temperatures inching up above freezing, but yesterday it at least looked like a classic Canadian winter outside.

[PHOTO] Frozen yellow roses, Steven's

The frozen yellow roses, covered over with ice, outside of the front window of grocery store Steven's, looked terribly photogenic on Valentine's Day.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Centauri Dreams looks at the genesis of ocean worlds. Having a nearly massive star producing lots of radioactive aluminum when it supernovas might be surprisingly important.


• The Crux takes a look at languages newly forming in the world around us, starting with the Australian language of Light Warlpiri. What does this say about humans and language?


• D-Brief notes that researchers have managed to create cyborg rats whose motions are controlled directly by human thought.


• Gizmodo reports on the abandonment by Amazon of its plan for a HQ2 campus in Queens.


• JSTOR Daily shares the perfectly believable argument that people with autism should not be viewed as people incapable of love.


• At Lawyers, Guns and Money, Simon Balto writes about how the Ryan Adams scandal demonstrates the male gatekeeper effect in popular music.


• Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution comes up with a list of winners and losers of the Amazon decision not to set up HQ2 in Queens. (Myself, I am unconvinced New York City is a loser here.)


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel explains how, despite not interacting directly with normal matter, dark matter can still be heated up by the matter and energy we see around us.


• Window on Eurasia notes how, in many post-Soviet countries including the Baltic States and Ukraine, ethnic Russians are assimilating into local majority ethnic groups.

[URBAN NOTE] Five Toronto links: Quayside, St. James Town, condo safety, Coal Bin, homelessness

• Marco Chown Oved reports at the Toronto Star on how Sidewalk Labs wants to expand its vision for Quayside, taking over not only the entire Port Lands but taxation power, too.


• St. James Town has been having a terrible string of failures recently. CTV News reports on one of these.


• The recent "chair girl" episode, CBC Toronto notes, has highlighted again issues with Airbnb and with condo living.


• Chris Bateman at CityLab explores the history of the Coal Bin, an early 1970s "fern bar" in the Financial District that was the first singles bar open to women in Toronto.


• Peter Biesterfield writes at NOW Toronto about the scope of the Toronto homelessness crisis, and the lack of meaningful public action to deal with it.

[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: Oshawa, Chicago, Montréal, London, Bulawayo

• Rosie Di Manno writes at the Toronto Star about the import of the concert that Sting threw in Oshawa for newly unemployed GM workers there.


• Chicago is going to house some innovative new public housing designs, combining low-cost homes for access to physically attached libraries and their educational opportunities. WTTW reports.


• CBC takes a look at the desperate last gap of the Montreal Star, forty years ago.


• CBC reports on the mass excavation of tens of thousands of bodies, and their study by experts, conducted as part of a program of commuter rail construction at a site in London.


• Ozy looks at the decline of Bulawayo, the second city of Zimbabwe.

[URBAN NOTE] Five links about cities: dance, libraries, urban agriculture, density, H.P. Lovecraft

• Guardian Cities raises an interesting possibility: Could choreographers contribute to better-designed cities?


• CityLab considers if public libraries might taken on greater civic importance as archives for public data.


• Miguel Altieri argues at The Conversation that urban agriculture can improve food security in American cities, drawing from models in Cuba and Argentina.


• The more the density of residents and infrastructures increases, studies have found, the less the impact on the natural environment. Building up is green. Global News reports.


• At CityMetric, Mark Clapham considers the city as it appears in the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft.

[WRITING] Five writing links: notebooks, SF-LOVERS, journalism, editors, our world

• The Island Review took a look at the notebooks of four writers and one artist.


• Slate looks at the history of SF-LOVERS, arguably the first online SF forum from the era of Arpanet.


• This JSTOR Daily interview with Seymour Hersh on the future of American journalism was worth reading.


• Patricia Wrede wrote some wise words about the problems with writers' internal editors.


• Tatty Hennessey wrote at Open Democracy about the importance of telling stories to help make sense of our world.

[PHOTO] Five photography links: phones, Lindsay Lozon, Instagram, nature, lighthouses

• The Speed River Journal's Van Waffle writes about the positives of phone photography.


• Some time ago, Drew Rowsome wrote about the queer male photography of Lindsay Lozon.


• John Semley took issue at MacLean's with displays too completely curated for Instagram. What are they (mis)representing?


• JSTOR Daily notes how the advent of nature photography helped change the minds of Americans about the natural environment.


• CityLab looks at how the United States Lighthouse Society is actively cultivating Instagram likes, and why.