A Bit More Detail

• Matt Elliott at CBC Toronto asks what, exactly, the City of Toronto is doing to prepare for the increasingly erratic and dangerous weather hitting the city.


• NOW Toronto reports on how Jodie Emery plans to start expanding her marijuana empire, and her wider influence, after opening a new café in Kensington Market.


• This NOW Toronto article reporting on some of the restaurants of Little Jamaica, along Eglinton Avenue West, is informative.
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• I honestly have to say that I have taken note of Three Points Make Two Lines, down at Vaughan Road and St. Clair Avenue West. I will. Murray Whyte at the Toronto Star makes the case.


• Suresh Doss describes the Mnandi pies sold by Evis Chirowamhangu at Wychwood Barns.

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait looks at the bizarre extrasolar visitor 'Oumuamua, as does Centauri Dreams, as does Bruce Dorminey. Yes, this long cylindrical extrasolar visitor swinging around the sun on a hyperbolic orbit does evoke classic SF.


• The Boston Globe's The Big Picture shares some photos of autumn from around the world.
  
• D-Brief examines how artificial intelligences are making their own videos, albeit strange and unsettling ones.


• Dangerous Minds shares some Alfred Stieglitz photos of Georgia O'Keefe.


• Daily JSTOR takes a look at the mulberry tree craze in the United States.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper examining at water delivery to terrestrial planets in other solar systems. Worlds with as little water as Earth are apparently difficult to produce in this model.


• Hornet Stories profiles the gay destination of Puerto Vallarta, in Mexico.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the new vulnerability of Haitian migrants in the United States.


• The LRB Blog notes the end of the Mugabe era in Zimbabwe.


• The NYR Daily features a stellar Elaine Showalter review of a Sylvia Plath exhibition at the Smithsonian National Picture Gallery.


• Personal Reflections' Jim Belshaw reports on how the production of New England Cheese reflects the modernization of Australian agriculture.


• Roads and Kingdoms reports on the awkward position of Rohingya refugees in India, in Jammu, at a time when they are facing existential pressures from all sides.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel shares twenty beautiful photos of Mars.


• Towleroad shares a fun video from Pink, "Beautiful Trauma", featuring Channing Tatum.


• The Volokh Conspiracy notes that a Trump executive order threatening sanctuary cities has been overturned in court.


• Window on Eurasia notes one study claiming that the children of immigrant workers in Russia tend to do better than children of native-born Russians.

• Charley Ross reflects on the story of Carla Vicentini, a Brazilian apparently abducted from New Jersey a decade ago.


• The Everyday Sociology Blog reflects on the concept of anomie.


• Far Outliers looks at the southwest Pacific campaigns of 1942, and reflects on Australian-American tensions in New Guinea in the Second World War.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money reflects briefly on the disaster in Houston.


• The Map Room Blog links to two interesting longform takes on maps in fantasy.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer considers the extent to which urban policy has contributed to Houston's issues.


• Roads and Kingdoms tells the story of a Shabbat celebration in Zimbabwe, and of the country's Jewish community.


• Strange Company tells the story of the mysterious disappearance of Lieutenant Paul Byron Whipkey. What was done to him?


• Unicorn Booty reports on how the Supreme Court of India has found people have a legal right to their orientation.


• Window on Eurasia reports on the growing number of Russian citizens with Chinese connections.


• Arnold Zwicky talks about Tom Bianchi's vintage Fire Island photos.

• blogTO notes that Yonge and Dundas will soon be hosting a Zimbabwean meat pie restaurant.


• Beyond the Beyond links to a report regretful of past optimisim about geopolitics.


• Centauri Dreams considers extraterrestrial life and red dwarfs.


• Marginal Revolution looks at rent in Puerto Rico's public housing system.


• pollotenchegg maps economic change in Ukraine.


• Savage Minds calls for a decolonization of anthropology.


• Towleroad notes that the roommates of a gay Syrian refugee murdered in Istanbul are also receiving threats.


• The Volokh Conspiracy wonders what liberals will think of American Jews' religious freedom when the majority of practising Jews are Orthodox.

The new year has not been kind to the hydroelectric-dam industry. On January 11th, the New York Times reported that Mosul Dam, the largest such structure in Iraq, urgently requires maintenance to prevent its collapse, a disaster that could drown as many as five hundred thousand people downstream and leave a million homeless. Four days earlier, the energy minister of Zambia declared that Kariba Dam, which straddles the border between his country and Zimbabwe, holding back the world’s largest reservoir, was in “dire” condition. An unprecedented drought threatens to shut down the dam’s power production, which supplies nearly half the nation’s electricity.

The news comes as more and more of the biggest hydroelectric-dam projects around the world are being cancelled or postponed. In 2014, researchers at Oxford University reviewed the financial performance of two hundred and forty-five dams and concluded that the “construction costs of large dams are too high to yield a positive return.” Other forms of energy generation—wind, solar, and miniature hydropower units that can be installed inside irrigation canals—are becoming competitive, and they cause far less social and environmental damage. And dams are particularly ill-suited to climate change, which simultaneously requires that they be larger (to accommodate the anticipated floods) and smaller (to be cost-effective during the anticipated droughts).

[ . . . Kariba] has been nearly incapacitated by ongoing drought, which has lowered the reservoir’s volume to twelve per cent of its usual capacity. But if the reservoir is refilled, the dam faces the possibility of collapse. It was built in the late nineteen-fifties, and in the years since water flowing through the dam’s six floodgates has carved a three-hundred-foot-deep pit, or plunge pool, at its base. The plunge pool extends to within a hundred and thirty feet of the dam’s foundation; if it reaches the foundation, the dam will collapse. That seems hard to imagine now, with the reservoir at a record-low level. But the Zambezi River Basin, on which the dam sits, is the most susceptible of Africa’s thirteen basins to exceptional droughts and floods, and climate change is intensifying both.

Kariba’s collapse, like Mosul’s, would constitute an epochal event in the history of energy development—the dam industry’s Chernobyl. The ensuing torrent would be four times bigger than the Zambezi’s biggest recorded flood, in 1958, and would release enough water to knock over another major dam three hundred miles downstream, in Mozambique. At least three million people live in the flood’s path; most would die or lose their crops or possessions. About forty per cent of the electricity-generating capacity of twelve southern African nations would be eliminated.

The dam, four hundred and twenty feet tall and nearly two thousand feet wide, was built with financing from the World Bank to provide power for the copper mines of what was then Northern Rhodesia. The designers intended to make the dam impervious to a one-in-ten-thousand-year flood, but their calculations were based on only three decades of Zambezi flow data—a period too short to permit credible forecasting. This flaw became apparent in 1957, when the site, still under construction, was hit with a flood bigger than the designers’ worst-case projection. The planners hurriedly enlarged the spillway, but in 1958 the project was hit by another flood, twice as big as the previous one, so the spillway was expanded again. More recent projections, cited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, indicate that the Zambezi River Basin will experience still drier and more prolonged droughts and even bigger floods in years to come.

Zimbabwe plans to adopt the Chinese yuan as legal tender in return for debt cancellation worth about $40m - a move one economist predicted "has no future at all".

China has become the largest investor in Zimbabwe, which has been shunned by the West over its human rights record and is struggling to emerge from a deep 1999-2008 recession that forced the government to ditch its own currency in 2009.

Zimbabwe's Finance Minister Patrick Chinamasa announced the plan in a statement on Monday and said the use of the yuan "will be a function of trade between China and Zimbabwe and acceptability with customers in Zimbabwe".

[. . .]

However, according to one Zimbabwean analyst, the yuan has already been a legal tender for the past two years and Chinamasa's comments are rather puzzling.

"Nothing looks to change from this latest move," economist John Roberston told Al Jazeera.

"Yuan was included in the so-called multi-currency system a couple of years ago. It's nothing new. What is different is the attachment to debts. It seems that the government is trying to pass this on as a concession by China.

"But they don't need to make concessions. This is pretty meaningless as it stands."

For a country that has been largely left to its own fate, the sudden spike in international interest in Zimbabwe did not come from the high unemployment figures, the food shortages, the state persecution of vendors, the lack of medicines, the lack of cash - but from a lion named "Cecil" by conservationists.

Cecil was killed by a US dentist fond of hunting, who was once fined for killing a bear in his own country outside the permitted hunting area.

The lion's death has not registered much with the locals - and for most Zimbabweans the name is more associated with the British imperialist diamond digger Cecil John Rhodes, serving as a reminder that the country once bore the name Rhodesia.

Indeed for the Zimbabwe press this explains "the saturation coverage on the demise of his namesake", and they have been reminding us that tourism and hunting are "mired in elitism".

• At Beyond the Beyond, Bruce Sterling is impressed by outgoing Brazilian president Lula's interviews with leading Brazilian bloggers.


• James Bow mourns the passing of George Robitaille, the TTC employee photographed sleeping on the job. Making note of his medical conditions, Bow wonders about the Internet's ability to mobilize people for anything.


• Centauri Dreams examines how a team of Italian researchers have come up with a deep-space navigation system that makes use of the radio signals of pulsars to guide the craft.


• Daniel Drezner isn't happy with the increasingly untenable situation re: North Korea. What to do with that? Separate issue.


• At Halfway Down the Danube, Douglas Muir notes how Zambia was so much less marked by the massive Shaka-era population movements in southern Africa, and how the colonial-era concentration of the Zambian population has the salutary effect of giving most people direct access to markets and transportation.


• Language Log's Mark Liberman reports on the controversy surrounding the Royal Spanish Academy's language reforms, apparently including the abolition of two letters. (Hispanophones?)


• "Are video games art?" Matt Warren wonders. "Not yet," he concludes.


• Gideon Rachman is unimpressed by the contents of the latest revealed Wikileaks cables, noting that they mainly confirm established wisdom. Daniel Drezner is of much the same opinion.


• At The Zeds, Michael Steeleworthy defends Google Scholar as a valid research tool, as a good first step if nothing else.

• Amused Cynicism lets us know that instruction information on interrogation techniques given to newcomers at Guantanamo seems to have been lifted from a 1957 Air Force Study outlining the torture techniques used by China during the Civil War to extract confessions, even false one.


• Over at Centauri Dreams, fans of Einsteinian physics can rest easy that the laws of relativity still hold, thanks to two close-orbiting pulsars.


• Daniel Drezner blogs about the news that Munich-based printing firm Giesecke & Devrient, known for (among other things) printing the bills used by Zimbabwe, has stopped. Not that it will do much good, of course.


• Douglas Muir at A Fistful of Euros explores the question of which countries aren't likely to recognize Kosovar independence and breaks them down into different categories.


• Gideon Rachmann suggests that the 2008 American elections might look a lot like the 1976 one, and offers advice to Obama on how not to be the 21st century's first Jimmy Carter.


• Douglas Muir (again!) at Halfway Down the Danube writes about a friendly encounter that he had in the 1990s with a Japanese-Brazilian woman on Saipan, and her take on Japanese life.


• Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution wonders how Zimbabwe's trillion-percent inflation rate can possibly benefit the Zimbabwean government in any rational way. The answer, apart from noting that that foreign currency entering the country is confiscated, is that it isn't especially rational.


• Pure Product of America wonders about the fate of satire in a post-Bush world.


• Matthew Hague at Spacing Toronto has an extensive writeup of Pride in Toronto, including pictures.


• Noel Maurer at The Power and the Money links to Delong's defense of American independence, suggesting that Britain's democratization in the 19th century wasn't inevitable, and that without the example provided by anotehr Anglophone country it might have been fatally delayed. "It is one thing to be a Dominion in close alliance with and owing some degree of allegiance to a rapidly-democratizing Britain. It is another thing to be a colony of a superpower ruled by a corrupt coterie of landlords."


• Wis(s)e Words lets us know that Christipoher Hitchens has tried out waterboarding, and, yes, he thinks that it is torture. Good for him.

• Der Spiegel's English-language edition has a story describing how many skilled German Turks, employable but unable to find positions in Germany, are emigrating, mainly to Turkey or to the Anglophone world.


• The Baltimore Sun describes how Spain is reclaiming its Sephardic Jewish heritage, not only through in-depth historical studies and immigration but through tourism.


• Kangla Online has an article that seems to constitute a warning about the risks facing Vietnamese and Cambodian women who emigrate to South Korea to marry Korean husband, and of mass movements generally.


• In the wake of a suicide bomb attack on a Kandahar jail that freed hundreds of Taliban warriors, the Taliban is now swarming Kandahar.


• Robert Mugabe warns the opposition that if the ongoing election-related violence in Zimbabwe continues they will be arrested.


• The fatal shooting of two 25-year-old men as they sat in their car with a girlfriend in a gentrifying area of Toronto has thrown Toronto.