A Bit More Detail

• CityLab notes how the effort of exurban Innisfil to use Uber as a substitute for mass transit did not work as expected.


• HuffPost Québec looks at how the Québec government is prioritizing the REM suburban light rails over the proposed Pink Line.


• Yellowknife may see the construction of a decidedly green four-story building. CBC North reports.


• CityLab looks at the experience of Miami Beach in using public art to put itself on the map.


• Guardian Cities looks at how the city of Plovdiv, second-largest city in Bulgaria, is trying to attract past emigrants from the country.

• MTLBlog reports from each borough of Montréal to see what a monthly rent of $C 1000 can get a hopeful tenant. The results will shock you, especially if you are used to Toronto rents (or higher!).


• The Alberta city of Lethbridge hopes, coming the 2020 census, its population will finally reach the mark of one hundred thousand residents. Global News reports.


• The northern Canadian town of Tuktoyaktuk is literally falling into the Arctic Ocean, as the ground crumbles while the sea rises. The National Post reports.


• The aging of the population of taxi drivers of Hong Kong leaves open the question of who, or what, will take their place. Bloomberg reports.


• CityLab reports on the remarkable ambition of the new transit plan of Berlin.

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait notes that Israeli non-profit SpaceIL plans to launch a lander to the Moon in February.


• Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber writes about the material power of ideas and knowledge in 2019.


• D-Brief shares the latest images from Ultima Thule.


• Earther notes that temperatures in the Arctic have been higher than they have been for more than one hundred thousand years, with moss spores hidden by ice caps for millennia sprouting for the first time.


• Far Outliers notes the economic importance, in the early 20th century, of exports of tung oil for China.


• JSTOR Daily notes the uneasy relationship of many early psychoanalysts with the occult.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes an alarming report from California showing how the police have been deeply compromised by support for the far right.


• Gillian Darley at the LRB Blog writes about a now-forgotten Tolstoyan community in Essex.


• Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution notes a new book by Kevin Erdmann arguing that the United States has been experiencing not a housing bubble but a housing shortage.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel notes the Boomerang Nebula, a nebula in our galaxy colder than intergalactic space.


• Eugene Volokh at the Volokh Conspiracy looks at libel law as it relates to the Covington schoolboys' confrontation.


• Window on Eurasia notes a window, in the early 1990s, when the independence of the republic of Karelia from Russia was imaginable.


• Arnold Zwicky free-associates around blue roses, homoerotic and otherwise.

• 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.

• Is a mysterious chair in Dartmouth a legacy of the Halifax Explosion? Global News reports.


• Who is Googling Winnipeg, and why? Global News reports.


• The Nunavut capital of Iqaluit faces a serious prospect of water shortages, as its water source Lake Geraldine cannot support growing consumption. CBC reports.


• Guardian Cities reports that the old Tsarist-era palaces of St. Petersburg face a grim future unless someone--artists, say--can rehabilitate these edifices.


• Guardian Cities shares photos of the subway stations of Pyongyang.

• CBC notes how 17 Inuit have been hired by Parks Canada to guard the site of the wrecks of Franklin's ships.


• That the Inuit who pointed the world to Franklin's ships also knows of Franklin's burial cairn does not surprise me.


• Nunavut's communities are set to have much faster Internet through new satellite connections.

• Bloomberg reports on how Canada-Mexico relations will be tested by NAFTA and Trump.


• Canada, the 2016 Census reported, is marked by noteworthy linguistic diversity (Tagalog does particularly well.)


• Vice notes how Galen Weston's opposition to the minimum wage increase for workers at Loblaws is not in his self-interest.


• Vice's Motherboard looks at how greenhouse agriculture in Nunavut could help drastically reduce food insecurity in that territory.

“The first moment, you don’t even believe it.” Jonathan O’Neil, a geologist at the University of Ottawa, is referring to his research team’s recent discovery of evidence that the oldest known life on Earth may, in fact, be embedded in rocks in Quebec’s far north. “You say, ‘That can’t be.’ So you reanalyze it, and you get the same result. You redo it again, again, again, and you come back with the same results, and you start to believe it.”

The breakthrough, which gained international attention when it was published in the journal Nature in early March, could be one of many discoveries soon to come from the Canadian Arctic. Opening this summer in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, is the Canadian High Arctic Research Station (CHARS), a Plexiglas, quarter-billion-dollar wonder of the northern world. Firs announced in 2007 under Stephen Harper, the station has so far attracted 200 research applicants from countries as far afield as Argentina, South Korea and Australia, all hoping to explore what lies beneath the tundra.

“They’re lining up at the door,” says David Scott, president of Polar Knowledge Canada, the government agency overseeing the project. “Growth chambers” for cultivating specimens, wet labs with cranes for lifting mammals, a dive centre for filling scuba tanks, triplexes for housing researchers—the station cost eight times more to erect than the Perimeter Institute, a science hub in Waterloo, Ont. One popular research area will be geology, as the Arctic holds rock formations rich with information about climate change and, in the case of the Hudson Bay area where O’Neil did his research, the history of life on Earth. O’Neil dated the fossils of ancient bacteria at 4.3 billion years old (although skeptics say they don’t look a day over three billion), suggesting that life existed before the planet had oxygen or oceans, and that life could just as easily have started in other barren parts of the universe.

Aside from prompting research, CHARS is a chance for Canada to stake its claim to the Arctic. The station is opening in a year when the Arctic Council, which negotiates land rights between eight Arctic countries, is looking for a new chair—the United States will step down in May after holding the position for two years. It also comes just before Canada submits a claim for the Arctic continental shelf in 2018 (competing with Russian and Danish claims). While the Canadian Forces have already boosted their presence with exercises in Nunavut including at Alert, the government will emphasize that “We the North” by opening the all-inclusive station for nerds.

For Canadian Inuit leaders, creating a unified written language system out of 12 dialects and two existing writing systems, one word is proving more important than the rest.

“Asijjiiniaqtut” — roughly translated as “give and take.”

That’s because everyone is having to compromise in order to progress toward an agreed-upon code that can be conveyed by someone in the western Arctic village of Tuktoyaktuk and understood in Clyde River on the eastern coast of Baffin Island, or written in the northernmost Nunavut village, Grise Fiord, and read in the Quebec community of Kuujjuaq.

[. . .]

Christian missionaries arrived long ago in the eastern Arctic with a system of syllabic writing — the Inuit script we still use today, using triangles, humps, dots and squiggly lines — while a Roman writing system took hold in the western Arctic. About a century later, the federal government tried and failed to institute a single system based on the Roman alphabet.

In the ensuing years there were attempts to standardize the two systems, but they were adopted by some and resisted by others. Advocates of a unified system say the status quo hinders communication between far-flung communities, affects the quality of the education system and limits Inuit access to jobs.

“Inuit have always functioned as one, but because of the government system invisible borders have divided us,” said Jeannie Arreak-Kullualik, a member of the Atausiq Inuktut Titirausiq task force that is consulting on the changes.

“We’re trying to unify so that we can eliminate those barriers because we all have the same challenges, which is to keep our language and culture alive and get more education for our children.”

• blogTO praises the food court of Village by the Grange.


• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly talks about the importance of self-care in times of stress.


• The Dragon's Gaze notes that KIC 8462852 does seem to have faded throughout the Kepler mission.


• The Dragon's Tales notes that Planet Nine may be especially faint in the infrared and looks at the challenges mapping polar regions on Titan.


• Imageo notes how melting of the ice cap continues in the Arctic Ocean.


• Language Hat reports on a new script for the Fulani language.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes that people who blame identity politics for the victory of Trump were not exactly non-supporters of the main.


• Marginal Revolution considers the consequences of bribing the American president.


• The NYRB Daily shares Charles Simic's deep concerns for the future of the United States.


• Jim Belshaw's Personal Reflections discusses Australia as a target for immigration and calls for honesty in discussions on migration.


• Peter Rukavina reports on the visit of then-Princess Elizabeth and her husband 65 years ago.


• Whatever's John Scalzi makes the fair point that he can hardly be expected to know what his Trump-era novels will be like.


• Window on Eurasia compares Russia's happiness with Trump's election to its elation over Obama's in 2008, and looks at how Russia is facing decline on a lot of fronts.