[PHOTO] Three photos of the Great Hall, Union Station

[PHOTO] Across Hamilton Harbour (#hamont)

[PHOTO] Disembarked, Niagara Falls train station

VIA Rail's $C 23 one-way ticket to Niagara Falls makes use of the convenient Maple Leaf train that crosses the Canadian-American border at Niagara Falls. When the train arrives at the Niagara Falls station, the passengers who had intended to go to Niagara Falls disembark along with the VIA Rail crews, while the Amtrak crews who take the Maple Leaf across the border get on.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• In an extended meditation, Antipope's Charlie Stross considers what the domestic architecture of the future will look like. What different technologies, with different uses of space, will come into play?


• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait looks at the new SPECULOOS exoplanet hunting telescope, specializing in the search for planets around the coolest stars.


• The Crux looks at the evolutionary origins of hominins and chimpanzees in an upright walking ape several million years ago.


• D-Brief notes the multiple detections of gravitational waves made by LIGO.


• The Dragon's Tales looks at the development of laser weapons by China.


• Karen Sternheimer at the Everyday Sociology Blog looks at the gap between social theory and field research.


• Gizmodo shares an interesting discussion with paleontologists and other dinosaur experts: What would the dinosaurs have become if not for the Chixculub impact?


• Hornet Stories notes the ways in which the policies of the Satanic Temple would be good for queer students.


• io9 notes how the Deep Space 9 documentary What We Leave Behind imagines what a Season 8 would have looked like.


• Joe. My. God. reports that activist Jacob Wohl is apparently behind allegations of a sexual assault by Pete Buttigieg against a subordinate.


• JSTOR Daily takes a look at the uses of the yellow ribbon in American popular culture.
  
• Language Hat shares an account of the life experiences of an Israeli taxi driver, spread across languages and borders.


• Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns and Money makes deserved fun of Bret Easton Ellis for his claims to having been marginalized.


• Marginal Revolution considers, briefly, the idea that artificial intelligence might not be harmful to humans. (Why would it necessarily have to be?)


• The NYR Daily considers a British exhibition of artworks by artists from the former Czechoslovakia.


• Peter Rukavina looks at gender representation in party caucuses in PEI from the early 1990s on, noting the huge surge in female representation in the Greens now.


• The Signal looks at how the Library of Congress is preserving Latin American monographs.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel explains how Einstein knew that gravity must bend light.


• Window on Eurasia explains the sharp drop in the ethnic Russian population of Tuva in the 1990s.

[URBAN NOTE] Seven Toronto links: High Park, rent, Sri Lanka, vertical farm, Zizek vs Peterson

• The cherry blossoms of High Park are expected to start blooming earlier than expected, perhaps reaching peak bloom in a week's time. blogTO reports.


• blogTO notes that someone was trying to rent out a bed in an occupied apartment for a rent of $C 600 a month.


• A Toronto Star investigation reveals the prominence of ghost hotels, enabled by Airbnb, in making the rental housing market that much more difficult.


• At NOW Toronto, Liam Barrington-Bush considers what renters in Toronto can learn from their activist counterparts in Berlin and Barcelona.


• Aparita Bhandari wrote at The Discourse about how Sri Lankans living in Scarborough responded to the recent terrible bombings.


• blogTO writes about the new vertical farm set to be built at University of Toronto's Scarborough campus.


• The VICE account of the debate between Slavoj Zizek and Jordan Peterson reveals much.

[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: Mississauga, Montréal, Thunder Bay, Port-au-Prince, London

• The City of Mississauga is encouraging residents to take part in a postal campaign to push for independence from Peel Region. Global News reports.


• A Montréal city councillor wants the city to try to get a world's fair in 2030. CTV reports.


• April Lindgren at The Conversation considersthe important role that local media in Thunder Bay can play in dealing, with, among other issues, Indigenous concerns.


• Amy Wilentz considers at The Atlantic whether France, after the devastation of Notre-Dame in Paris, should perhaps contribute to the reconstruction of the cathedral of Port-au-Prince, a decade after its destruction in the earthquake that devastated an already poor ex-French Haiti.


• Ben Rogers at Open Democracy makes the case for seeing London, despite its position as a global city, as also a metropolis inextricably at the heart of England, too.

[AH] Five #alternatehistory maps from r/imaginarymaps: UK-Dutch, Patagonias, Virginia, Japan, Europe

• This r/imaginarymaps map imagines a united Anglo-Dutch state. Could such have ever have occurred?


• This r/imaginarymaps map, one in a series, imagines a Patagonia divided between multiple rival powers perhaps after the Guyanas. Could Patagonia, only recently incorporated into Argentina and Chile, have seen something like this?


• This is a perhaps-optimistic depiction of the territory that a #Virginia independent of the United States might have held. In a no-US timeline, how far could it have gotten?


• This r/imaginarymaps map sees the Empire of Japan as a bulwark against Communism in Asia, even taking Australia and New Zealand under its aegis. Too, see its protectorate over the Russian Far East.


• This r/imaginarymaps map, imagining a European Federation circa 2004, makes an important point: The earlier that Europe unifies, the more geographically restricted its membership will be.