[PHOTO] Sixteen photos of the Pillars Picnic (#pillarspicnic, #keepthepillarsTO)

I got late Sunday night to the Pillars Picnic, delayed by an unexpected partial shutdown of the Yonge subway line and by a necessary stop at the Black Eagle for burger and friends. The Pillars Picnic had been advertised in a NOW Toronto article, as a musical bidding farewell to the pillars in a patch of waste ground at Queens Quay and York Street in Harbourfront. The plans of the city of Toronto to build a Claude Cormier-designed park here for this burgeoning condo neighbourhood meant that these pillars, legacies of a York Street on-ramp for the Gardiner, were to go. I personally like the pillars--they evoke for me, in miniature, the modernist Stonehenge Confederation Bridge assembly yard in Amherst Point on Prince Edward Island--and supported the campaign to keep them. That campaign failed, sadly, but at least there was the concert.

(The artists performing when I arrived were Ivy Mairi backed by Matthew Bailey. They put on an excellent set.)

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait takes a look at an evocative corner of the Pelican Nebula.


• Centauri Dreams considers if a supernova might have kickstarted hominid evolution by triggering wildfires.


• D-Brief looks at how scientists examined binary asteroid 1999 KW4 during its flyby on May 25th.


• JSTOR Daily reports on the development of the radical abolitionism of William Blake.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money looks at centrism as not neutrality but rather as an ideology of its own.


• Marginal Revolution suggests that legal emigration is more common from right-wing dictatorships than from left-wing ones. Is this actually the case?


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel notes that an image passed off as a hole in the universe a billion light-years wide is actually a photo of nebula Barnard 68.


• Window on Eurasia suggests that Ukraine, rather than trying to position itself as a bridge between West and East, should simply try to join the West without equivocations.


• Arnold Zwicky takes a Zippy cartoon and moves on to explore the wider world from it.

[URBAN NOTE] Seven Toronto links: Port Lands, Ontario Place, churches, mass transit, Scarborough

• Guardian Cities takes a look from afar at the controversy over Google in the Port Lands of Toronto.


• CityLab looks at the debate over the future of Ontario Place in the Doug Ford era.


• Richard Longley at NOW Toronto looks at how six churches in downtown Toronto have survived the condo boom.


• The City of Toronto has blamed the Ontario government for the delayed transition to Presto. The Toronto Star reports.


• Matt Gurney writes at TVO about how Toronto, having coasted by on surplus capacity, is now facing a transit crisis.


• Osobe Waberi writes at The Discourse about the transit desert that dominates much of Scarborough.


• A fourth subway stop has been proposed for the already expensive Scarborough subway extension. The Toronto Star reports.

[URBAN NOTE] Five Montréal links: Québec, real estate, Berri, Dorchester Square, Airbnb

• La Presse writes about the lack of rapport between the government of Québec and the metropolis of Montréal, and the looks at the consequences of said.


• A new CMHC study suggests that, between rising prices for housing on the island of Montréal and improved transit off-Island, it might be cheaper for many to live on the mainland. The Montreal Gazette reports.


• Turning the abandoned Berri bus station into a distribution depot sounds like a good idea to me. CTV News reports.


• The newly renovated Dorchester Square looks lovely. Global News reports.


• The Montreal Gazette looks at new strict rules on Airbnb that will hopefully limit the impact on the rental housing sector.

[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: Hamilton, Halifax, London, Helsinki, Rustavi

• Some new high-rise housing developments in Hamilton are lacking in permits. Global News reports.


• Halifax is currently undergoing public consultations to see what is to be done with a statue of controversial British governor Cornwallis. Global News reports.


• Guardian Cities looks at how the ring-tailed parakeet has come to thrive in its adopted home of London.


• Guardian Cities reports on how the city of Helsinki has solved its problem with homelessness by automatically giving people in need housing.


• Open Democracy looks at the Georgian city of Rustavi, during the Soviet era dependent on a single industry like many others and left to cope with the collapse of this economy in the post-Soviet era.

[NEWS] Five sci-tech links: NASA climate, Starlink, CO2 on the seabed, moving Earth, neutrino beams

• Evan Gough at Universe Today notes that the long-term climate predictions of NASA have so far proven accurate to within tenths of a degree Celsius.


• Matt Williams at Universe Today notes how the launching of satellites for the Starlink constellation, providing Internet access worldwide, could be a game-changer.


• Eric Niiler at WIRED suggests that Texas--and other world regions--could easily sequester carbon dioxide in the seabed, in the case of Texas using the Gulf of Mexico.

Matteo Ceriotti explains at The Conversation how, as in The Wandering Earth, the Earth might be physically moved. https://theconversation.com/wandering-earth-rocket-scientist-explains-how-we-could-move-our-planet-116365ti

• Matt Williams at Universe Today shares a remarkable proposal, suggesting Type II civilizations might use dense bodies like black holes to create neutrino beam beacons.