A Bit More Detail

• Centauri Dreams takes a look at how new technology makes access to deep-sky astronomical images easier than ever, allowing for the recovery of more data.


• The Crux considers the factors that make humans so inclined to believe in the existence of god and the supernatural, including our pattern-recognition skills.


• D-Brief sharesa the latest research into the origins of the atmospheric haze of Titan.


• Todd Schoepflin at the Everyday Sociology Blog has an intriguing post performing ethnography on the fans of the Buffalo Bills.


• At A Fistful of Euros, Alexander Harrowell notes one thing to take from the elections in Bavaria is the remarkable strength of the Greens, nearing the CDU/CSU nationally.


• io9 shares the delightful Alien-themed maternity photos of a British Columbia couple.


• JSTOR Daily looks at contesting visions of motherhood among American feminists in the 1960s and 1970s.


• Language Hat reports on "The Midnight Court", a poem written in the 19th century in a now-extinct dialect of Irish.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes one astounding possible defense of Saudi Arabia faced with Jamal Khashoggi, that his death was accidental.


• Christine Gordon Manley shares with her readers her words and her photos of Newfoundland's dramatic Signal Hill.


• The NYR Daily shares the witness of Käthe Kollwitz to the end of the First World War and the German Empire in 1918-1919.


• Casey Dreier at the Planetary Society Blog criticizes First Man for not showing the excitement of Armstrong and the other Apollo astronauts.


• Roads and Kingdoms reports on one woman's search for the Korean cornbread remembered by her mother as a Korean War refugee.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel shares images of some of the most distant objects in the universe images by us so far.


• Strange Company expands upon the interesting life of early modern English travel writer Thomas Coryat, who indeed does deserve more attention.


• Window on Eurasia wonders where protests in Ingushetia regarding border changes with Chechnya are going.


• Arnold Zwicky explores the fable of the forest that identified too closely with the wooden handle of an ax.

• The question of re-opening the storied intersection of Portage and Main, at the heart of Winnipeg, to pedestrian traffic is being hotly debated. The National Post reports.


• CityLab describes how the New York city of Buffalo is enjoying a huge boom in the creation of public art.


• Wired describes Chicago's Wild Mile, a new riverine habitat ingeniously created for the manmade North Branch Canal.


• The World Economic Forum reports that, on the theory that public transit is a public good, Estonia is making public transit free throughout the country, including in the capital of Tallinn.


• Guardian Cities notes the energetic effort of Oman to create, where five years ago there was just desert, the new city of Duqm.

Buffalo residents were treated to an unusual sight on Aug. 16, 1894: a detailed image of Toronto hovering over Lake Ontario.

Or rather, “a city in the air,” according to a November 1894 Arizona Republic newspaper article.

For about an hour during the mid-morning, Toronto, its harbor, and the Island to the south of the city were visible to those on the ground in Buffalo. Normally Toronto is only visible to those high up over Buffalo.

“A close examination of the map showed that the mirage did not cause the slightest distortion, the gradual rise of the city from the water being rendered perfectly,” said an August 1894 edition of Scientific American magazine.

Despite being approximately 93 km away, witnesses on that fateful day could see a few ships, and for the first 10 minutes, even count downtown church spires.

For sports fans, Buffalo might be best known as the home of the National Football League’s Bills and National Hockey League’s Sabres, which have the unenviable record of a combined zero wins and six losses in championship series. For others, Buffalo might be known as the third poorest city in the United States, trailing only Cleveland and Detroit, and yet one more example of a former industrial behemoth fallen on hard times in the heart of the U.S. rust belt.

But something seems to be stirring in Western New York. The area is undergoing more than $5.5-billion (U.S.) in new economic development, mostly in downtown Buffalo. Projects such as the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus, the recreational facilities at the Canalside park and SolarCity’s gigafactory, the largest solar panel manufacturing plant in the Western Hemisphere, are generating more than 12,000 new jobs over the next three years.

“It’s a really good problem to have and it’s changed the way we think about our community,” says Thomas Kucharski, president and chief executive officer of Buffalo Niagara Enterprise, a private, non-profit economic development organization. “We went from the whole four Super Bowls and two [Stanley] Cups and woe is us to [now] where people are a lot more optimistic than they have been.”

The business community buoys a large part of that optimism, with mixed-use buildings in the city – either proposed, under construction or completed – representing more than $990-million of investment. Among those are Avant, Buffalo’s first mixed-use hotel-office-luxury condominium high rise situated in a former federal building, and the Larkin Center of Commerce, which was previously a soap factory and is now home to almost 100 businesses and service providers.

The seven-storey Conventus Center for Collaborative Medicine, part of the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus, was completed last year by Ciminelli Real Estate Corp. on a two-acre site. Located on the northern edge of Buffalo’s central business district, Conventus will act as the link between the University at Buffalo school of medicine and biomedical sciences and John R. Oishei Children’s Hospital, when they are completed.

• City of Brass notes the lie that is Eurabia.


• Crooked Timber considers Creative Commons licenses as a crude kind of anti-spam technology.


• The Dragon's Tales looks at Ontario's interest in pioneering a guaranteed minimum income program.


• Far Outliers looks at the history of Korean prisoners of war in the Second World War in Hawai'i.


• Joe. My. God. notes the death of Nancy Reagan.


• Language Hat starts a discussion about the cost of designing fonts.
  
• Language Log notes the difficulties of some Westerners with learning Chinese compared to Western classical languages.


• Marginal Revolution notes the complexity of the new European Union-Turkey deal on Syrian migrants.


• Discover's Neuroskeptic notes that we are far from being able to upload content directly to our brains.


• Strange Maps notes how, in Turkish, different cardinal directions are associated with a different colour.


• Is Buffalo strongly anti-gay? Towleroad considers this finding, from a social media analysis.

According to census data analyzed by the New York Times, from 2000 to 2012 the number of college graduates between the ages of 25 and 34 in Buffalo jumped 34%—more than Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago.

If moving to New York City is like dating the most popular kid in your high school only to discover "all the blemishes that aren't visible when gazed upon from a distance," then Buffalonians will tell you that moving to their city is like dating the girl next door who's undergoing a She's All That-style transformation.

In 1900, Buffalo was the eighth largest city in the country and had the most millionaires per capita in the world. In the first half of the 20th century, with the opening of the Barge Canal, Buffalo’s shipping and manufacturing boomed. The city was also the world’s largest supplier of grain. Things started to unravel in the 1960s after the opening of the Saint Lawrence Seaway; shipping went elsewhere, and eventually so did other industries. Over the next couple decades, the city’s population plummeted, and many homes and buildings were left vacant.

Part of attracting a younger demographic involves filling in those vacancies through programs like the Buffalo Building Re-Use Project, which provides loans for businesses to improve property downtown, and the Urban Homesteading Program, which offers $1.00 abandoned homes for qualified applicants.

It also requires jobs. In 2012, Governor Andrew Cuomo pledged a so-called “Buffalo Billion” for economic development in the city. The continued construction on the state-of-the-art Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus is bringing new jobs and development to the surrounding downtown area. And sometime next year, Elon Musk’s SolarCity, a $750 million factory designed to produce high-efficiency solar panels, will employ thousands.

All these initiatives are starting to pay off. According to The Buffalo News, incomes in the Buffalo Niagara region grew about 1.5% a year (after inflation) between 2003 and 2013—double the average annual increase nationwide during that time. In 2003, per capita personal income in the region was 11% lower than the national average, but by the end of 2013, it was $44,301, just 1% less.

Ten years ago, everyone thought the wait was over. There was a game-changing plan to re-establish downtown Buffalo as the transit center of Western New York. A part of the empty Aud and the area around it would have been transformed into a regional transportation hub, bringing together passenger rail, light rail, and buses. Local politicians even secured money and drew up detailed plans for the building’s repurposing. The Buffalo News quoted then-mayor Anthony Masiello as saying: “This sends a very strong signal we’re no longer talking about concepts…We’re going to start delivering on what we’re talking about for the Buffalo Inner Harbor.”

It never materialized, the Aud was demolished, and the entire idea of such a downtown project vanished with the building. Buffalo was left with a hole in the ground and its meager Amtrak station hidden under the I-190.

Now, Buffalo faces what some suggest may be a new key to energizing the region: high-speed rail.

Groups involved in the planning, including CSX and the New York State Department of Transportation, have discussed faster trains, higher trip frequency, and more reliable service. All this would be within the Empire State Corridor, a two-track line that stretches from Niagara Falls to New York City, with emphasis on the stretch between Albany and the Falls.

Planning is still in early stages, says Hal Morse, executive director of the Greater Buffalo-Niagara Regional Transportation Council. A corridor-wide environmental impact statement on the effects and feasibility of high-speed rail, he says, is expected in the summer of 2012. Localized studies will follow, and after those, construction.

[. . .]

In the beginning, higher-speed trains would still share tracks with regular passenger and freight trains. The finished product, Morse says, would be a third track to be used exclusively for high-speed trains. A small part of that third track has already been built outside Rochester.

“When you’re bringing the external transportation to the region—for example the high-speed rail project—one of the things that we do is try and coordinate how will we achieve the vision for this region,” Morse says. “We’re also working closely with the Canadians. We’ve been building this mega-region concept that incorporates the greater Toronto area and Upstate New York. And when you combine that population base it’s really significant and substantially growing.”

“Who knows how much service would actually increase with high-speed rail,” says Dr. Daniel Hess, associate professor in the School of Architecture and Planning at UB. Hess, like Foster, recognizes high-speed rail’s potential. “It would have to be really terrific service, really priced right, in order to greatly increase the number of people coming to Buffalo by rail.”

He says that if it does materialize, Buffalo can handle the increase in visitors that Morse and the NYSDOT predict. “Can NFTA handle the number of people that would be coming on rail? Right now I think absolutely,” he says.

Hess teaches classes on transportation planning, and has experience in researching travel behavior, or people’s choices about where, when, and how they travel. He, too, warns that any decisions on high-speed rail, at both the city and state level, must be approached cautiously. Often, Hess says, American travelers in Western Europe will experience the region’s efficient high-speed trains and demand that the same system be built back home.

“Where rail works best is at its arrival and departure points you have a lot of activity happening. You travel from the center of London to the center of Paris on high-speed rail, and when you arrive in the center of Paris there’s an enormous density of activity,” Hess says. The closest example of such a system stateside is the Boston-New York City-Washington, DC corridor, which is different in more than one way from the Empire Corridor. “The problem with cities like Buffalo is the central city, the central core, has really lost its bang as the nerve center of the region,” Hess says. “If you were to arrive in downtown Buffalo on the rail, there isn’t necessarily so much there for you.”