Art Gallery of Ontario

Back in the day

 

 

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Art Gallery

via Toronto Before by Aladone on 8/22/08

 

 

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Toronto Swallows Farmland

Thanks to the Toronto Star's use of Google Maps

Fourth Olympics in Third Sport

Cool story about transition fron MBA to Olympic swimmer to triathlete to modern pentathlete.

Yes We Canoe

 

 

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Yes We Canoe

via Torontoist by David Topping on 8/21/08

Some fifty-odd canoeists and kayakists collected on Lake Ontario last night to show some local water-based support for Canada's Olympic canoe and kayak teams.

The get-together, brainstormed over beers by Jeff Needham of the Complete Paddler and David Newland, included paddlers from the Harbourfront Canoe and Kayak Centre, The Complete Paddler, Canoe.ca, and the Virtual Voyageurs Canoe Club. The group congregated on the shore at 5:30 and spent two hours paddling around the lake and islands, stopping only when patriotism demanded it.

Newland, the newly-appointed Editor-in-Chief of fittingly-titled news site Canoe.ca, was hoping that the stunt would help Torontonians consider the beauty of their city, "rather than pining for the wilderness." For now, though, his biggest goal is using the CanWest empire he's part of to get word of the paddle out to the athletes in Beijing. Someone should also tell Olympic silver medalist Jason Burnett that we fully intend to seek out a trampoline and jump on it ecstatically. For Canada.

Photo by Jeff Needham

 

 

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Getting to Ireland Park

 

 

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Getting to Ireland Park

via Spacing Toronto • understanding the urban landscape by Dylan Reid on 8/21/08

Ireland Park is a lovely, moving park recently created at the foot of Bathurst Street, at the south base of the Malting Silo buildings near the ferry to the island airport. Statues, monuments and an interpretive station commemorate the landing of thousands of desperate Irish immigrants, many of them sick, escaping the Irish famine in 1847. Spacing has written about the park both in our print magazine, before the park was opened, and online.

The weird thing, though, is there is no officially permitted way to actually get to the park.

The obvious entrance is along the quay from the foot of Bathurst Street. But there's a prominent sign at this entrance saying "DANGER: KEEP OFF", presumably because the quay is crumbling and considered unsafe. So to get to the park this way, you have to disobey a municipal sign and engage in behaviour officially deemed risky (although, really, the quay is in decent enough shape and doesn't seem to offer any real danger).

There's another entrance through a driveway, but this one is through a municipal urban forestry site and is even more forbidden, with a sign saying "Private Property: No Trespassing".

The Malting Silo site, meanwhile, is thoroughly fenced off, so there is no access there.

It seems pretty bizarre to build a park but not provide any permitted way to actually get to it. In practical terms it's easy to get there, of course — you just walk along the quay — but citizens shouldn't have to break regulations in order to access their parkland.

 

 

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The Christie Pits Riot and the birth of multicultural Toronto

The Christie Pits Riot and the birth of multicultural Toronto

via Posted Toronto by Rob Roberts on 8/15/08

(Toronto Archives; fonds 1266, Globe and Mail Collection, item 30791)

By Brianna Goldberg, National Post

The picture seen above, the only image of the anti-Semitic rampage known as the Christie Pits Riot, wasn't published in 1933. By newspaper standards of its time, the frantic image taken by a photographer at the Globe was deemed too streaky to print, for all the movement it captured.
Four papers wrote about the riot. Their details were streaky, too: Hours of violence. Bricks and pipes. Blood. And, of course, the swastikas.
For Jews, the story became something passed between family members as legend; it became a symbol of the second-generation Canadian Jews who asserted themselves.
But to the city at large it is coming to mean more, a symbol of the first stages of a multicultural Toronto. Sunday, Heritage Toronto unveils a plaque to commemorate the 75th anniversary of its anti-Jewish violence.
The story goes like this:
The first summer after Hitler came to power in Germany, Toronto temperatures blasted past the thermometer's 100 F mark for many, many days as Canada suffered through the deepest moment of the Depression.
Many Jews in Toronto, most working in stifling warehouses near Spadina Avenue's garment district, were deemed not welcome by resorts in Northern Ontario, and thus made a weekend routine of shooting eastward along the Queen Street streetcar to cool relief at the shores of Kew Beach.
The locals complained that the Jewish visitors were littering orange peels. The locals complained they were changing into their bathing suits in the open air. And, soon, the locals more menacingly expressed their displeasure by taking a cue from the headlines they would have read about Hitler, and founded their own "swastika clubs."
The only thing that prevented a riot from happening along the shores in those days of the swastika clubs was the swift action of a few police officers, and an agreement brokered by the mayor that "officially," but certainly not effectively, disbanded the swastika clubs.
So when the all-Jewish Harbord Playground baseball team took the pitch against the non-Jewish St. Peter's team for the city's semi-finals in the coming weeks, the swastika supporters and those they aimed to intimidate were there in force and ready to scrap.
The first game on Aug. 16, 1933, came and went amidst catcalls, pushing, shoving, and a shirt waved around with a swastika sewn into the back.
But it wasn't until the second game, after St. Peter's caught the ball for the final out of the game, that local anti-Semitic thugs, part of a group called The Pit Gang, stood up on a small hill behind the field and unfurled a bed sheet painted with a black swastika.
Jewish supporters rushed the toughs holding the sheet. Nazi supporters rushed the Jews. Residents around the park (who, census statistics show, were overwhelmingly WASPs) spilled out of their homes and into the street armed with broom handles. And so began the six-hour riot.
This is where the newspaper reports start to diverge, and urban myth takes over.
Dr. Levitt says the legend goes that trucks were commandeered, and trolled along roads in the traditionally Jewish neighbourhood of Kensington Market as passengers called out that Jews were being attacked in the Pits.
People grabbed whatever they could find — a brick, a pipe, brass knuckles, a pool cue — and ran north to become a part of the swarm in the park.
Some say there were hundreds. Or else thousands. Or else tens of thousands there that night.
And the legend, according to Dr. Levitt, says it was the first time Toronto's Jews stood up for themselves.
It was this richness of the Christie Pits folklore that motivated literary journalist Judy Stoffman to chair a committee that would create a definitive Heritage Toronto plaque in the first place.
"I just kept coming across novels and short stories that use the riot as a background, and I was intrigued by the way it had entered the consciousness of the city," she said. "Traumatic historical events like that... they trouble you. They trouble the writers. And I was puzzled why there was no marker for an event like that."
Ms. Stoffman got the go-ahead from Heritage Toronto, and invited academics and politicians to be part of a committee to make the plaque. She said they endlessly edited its wording, and even fund-raised for it to be made. Sunday, they will unveil the piece of bronze, which makes a place in the city's official history for the night of racial violence.
National Post columnist Robert Fulford wrote the forward to Levitt and Shaffir's book on Christie Pits. In it, he laments his own ignorance of the riot, and ascribes it to his theory that "colonies, by nature, lack self-awareness and a sense of their own past; they believe that matters of note happen elsewhere."
Now, 20 years later, he still describes it as "a very small event in the history of the world."
"Nobody will ever think of it as a great Canadian event," he says. "But in a way, it was an expression of the multiculturalism that would be, in the future.

T-Shirt Design of the Day

for some reason I find this terribly amusing. I think it's like the Calvin & Hobbes cartoons of snowmen in the front yard.

T-Shirt Design of the Day

via The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century : Joey deVilla's Personal Blog by Joey deVilla on 8/13/08

Here's a great t-shirt design fans of sports, monster movies or Gahan Wilson-esque humour — it's titled Foam Monster in Emotional Reunion with Severed Limb:

Click the image to visit the T-shirt's order page.

A taste of the other Danforth

My 'hood makes the Globe...

island mirror

island mirror

via [daily dose of imagery] on 8/12/08

Boats at Toronto's Island.
In case you are wondering; although it might look it, this not an HDR image in the classic mixed exposures sense of the word. It's only one exposure and is processed in Lightroom 2 (Just like yesterday's photo)

How to Access Pandora From Anywhere in the World

Woot!

 

 

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How to Access Pandora From Anywhere in the World

via Wired Top Stories by Scott Gilbertson on 8/11/08

Thanks to legal restrictions, the free music streaming service, built on the Music Genome Project, Pandora is available only in the United States. It's OK, we've got some tips to getting around the restriction by setting up a proxy to make it look like you're from the United States, even if you're not.

 

 

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How Do You Like Them Apples?

 

 

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How Do You Like Them Apples?

via Taste T.O. - Food & Drink In Toronto by Sheryl Kirby on 8/12/08

Got fruit? Many older houses in Toronto sport a fruit tree of some kind in the yard. From mulberries to apples, sour cherries to pears, backyards across the city offer a trove of hidden seasonal treasure. But in the recent real estate boom, plenty of people find themselves moving into a property that includes fruit trees in the yard and don't know what to do with the things. Especially when it comes to harvesting the stuff. Even if they manage to pick their fill, there's usually a lot left over – some for the birds and squirrels, but even more that goes to waste.

An organization called not far from the tree aims to change that, allowing homeowners to share their harvest with local charities, and with volunteers who will come and harvest the fruit in exchange for a share of the crop.

The project started last year when Laura Reinsborough volunteered at the Green Barn Farmers Market and found herself in charge of harvesting apples from the orchard at Spadina Museum to sell at the market. "I had never picked an apple before," explains Reinsborough, "and all of a sudden I had this apple-selling business on my hands. And it just kind of grew from there."

Partner Suzanne Long now runs the museum/market aspect of the project, which includes a weekly drop-in harvest on Saturday mornings and selling the rare, heritage apples from the museum's gardens at the market in the afternoon. Museum staff give demos and tours of the gardens, and volunteers help to pick fruit from the trees, many of which are over a hundred years old. Much of that fruit goes back into the museum, to be used in cooking demos in the Victorian kitchen, but the extra fruit is transported by bike or cart to the market, just over a kilometer away, and profit from the produce sales are funneled back into the museum's garden.

Meanwhile Reinsborough has taken on an even more ambitious project, which is the residential fruit harvesting arm of not far from the tree.

Currently working only in Ward 41, which is Reinsborough's neighbourhood, and allows her to transport the donated fruit by bicycle, residents can register their tree with the organization and a team of volunteer fruit gleaners will come by, with all the necessary gear, including ladders, bags, and rakes for clean-up, and will harvest ripe fruit from the tree. Homeowners who are also animal lovers can also request that a certain amount of fruit be left on the tree for local birds and squirrels.

All harvested fruit is split three ways, with one third to the homeowner, one third divided up among the gleaners, and the final third taken by Reinsborough to a local charity, either the Wychwood Open Door Program, or NaMeRes, a 61-bed native men's residence shelter. Since NaMeRes is open 24 hours, many harvests are scheduled for early evening so Reinsborough can drop off the fruit on her way home, although she's been known to freeze more perishable fruit such as cherries when she can't do the delivery right away.

Since the beginning of July, not far from the tree has done an average of 2 to 3 harvests per week, and just last week broke the one thousand pound mark in terms of fruit harvested. "I'm having a great summer!" Reinsborough laughs as she calculates these numbers in her head.

Currently the residential harvest program is only available in Ward 21/St. Clair West, although the group will register trees from anywhere in the city. Reinsborough admits to being overwhelmed by the amount of interest in the project and realizes that the scope of a city-wide project is too big for one girl on a bike to handle. Her hope is that not far from the tree will eventually develop into a network of neighbourhood-based fruit tree initiatives across the city, all harvesting local fruit and sharing it with local charities.

In the meantime, owners of residential fruit trees are encouraged to contact the group to register their tree(s), even if they're not in Ward 21. And anyone interested in volunteering can do so in one of two ways. The Saturday morning events at Spadina House are drop-in style – just show up, sign a volunteer waiver and get picking. To volunteer for the residential harvests, simply contact the group via their website, where gleaners are added to a mailing list and receive notification about upcoming harvests.

It may take a few years before the every fruit tree in the city is accounted for and harvested, but the benefits of a program like not far from the tree are far-reaching. Homeowners have someone to help them harvest (and eat) their backyard fruit; charities get free, fresh fruit to feed or distribute among their clients; and local people who volunteer to be gleaners get to enjoy being part of the harvest and reap the benefit of a bag of apples or apricots for their hard work. And everyone can be satisfied in knowing that tons of local, usually organic, food that would otherwise go to waste will be put to good use.

Photos 1 and 4 are from the not far from the tree flickr photo stream.

 

 

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Map of the Week: A view of Upper Canada's infancy

 

 

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Map of the Week: A view of Upper Canada's infancy

via Map of the Week by Toronto Star on 8/7/08

Elizabeth Simcoe traveled to Upper Canada with her husband John Graves Simcoe after his appointment as first British governor of the colony in 1791. They would stay for the next five years.

As well as her more famous diary, Simcoe produced a series of sketches and watercolours of the traveled areas along the St. Lawrence and Lake Ontario, then a string of tiny settlements perched on the edge of the wilderness.

At least one was painted on birch bark. Some of her subjects still exist, like the Scadding Cabin, now at the CNE grounds. Some are recognizable from natural features, like Queenston and Cootes Paradise. Others have vanished, like the Long Sault rapids near Cornwall, which were drowned to make way for the St. Lawrence Seaway.

More images can be found at the online exhibit of Simcoe's work at the Ontario Archives site.

Click on image to see map.

 

 

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"Is Google Making Us Stupid?": sources and notes

 

 

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"Is Google Making Us Stupid?": sources and notes

via Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog by nick on 8/7/08

Since the publication of my essay Is Google Making Us Stupid? in The Atlantic, I've received several requests for pointers to sources and related readings. I've tried to round them up below.

The essay builds on my book The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, particularly the final chapter, "iGod." The essential theme of both the essay and the book – that our technologies change us, often in ways we can neither anticipate nor control – is one that was frequently, and deeply, discussed during the last century, in books and articles by such thinkers as Lewis Mumford, Eric A. Havelock, J. Z. Young, Marshall McLuhan, and Walter J. Ong.

The screenplay for the film 2001: A Space Odyssey was written by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke. Clarke's book 2001, a lesser work than the film, was based on the screenplay rather than vice versa.

Scott Karp's blog post about how he's lost his capacity to read books can be found here, and Bruce Friedman's post can be found here. Both Karp and Friedman believe that what they've gained from the Internet outweighs what they've lost. An overview of the University of College London study of the behavior of online researchers is here. Maryanne Wolf's fascinating Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain was published last year by Harpercollins.

I found the story of Friedrich Nietzsche's typewriter in J. C. Nyíri's essay Thinking with a Word Processor as well as Friedrich A. Kittler's winningly idiosyncratic Gramophone, Film, Typewriter and Darren Wershler-Henry's history of the typewriter, The Iron Whim.

Lewis Mumford discusses the impact of the mechanical clock in his 1934 Technics and Civilization. See also Mumford's later two-volume study The Myth of the Machine. Joseph Weizenbaum's Computer Power and Human Reason remains one of the most thoughtful books written about the human implications of computing. Weizenbaum died earlier this year, and I wrote a brief appreciation of him here.

Alan Turing's 1936 paper on the universal computer was titled On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem. Tom Bodkin's explanation of the New York Times's design changes came in this Slate interview with Jack Shafer.

For Frederick Winslow Taylor's story, I drew on Robert Kanigel's biography The One Best Way and Taylor's own The Principles of Scientific Management.

Eric Schmidt made his comments about Google's Taylorist goals during the company's 2006 press day. The Harvard Business Review article on Google, "Reverse Engineering Google's Innovation Machine," appeared in the April 2008 issue. Google describes its "mission" here and here. A much lengthier recital of Sergey Brin's and Larry Page's comments on Google's search engine as a form of artificial intelligence, along with sources, can be found at the start of the "iGod" chapter in The Big Switch. Schmidt made his comment about "using technology to solve problems that have never been solved before" at the company's 2006 analyst day.

I used Neil Postman's translation of the excerpt from Plato's Phaedrus, which can be found at the start of Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. Walter J. Ong quotes Hieronimo Squarciafico in Orality and Literacy. Clay Shirky's observation about the printing press was made here.

Richard Foreman's "pancake people" essay was originally distributed to members of the audience for Foreman's play The Gods Are Pounding My Head. It was reprinted in Edge. I first noted the essay in my 2005 blog post Beyond Google and Evil.

 

 

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Oz concerned about lack of fraggers - who knew?

No frangers, no frozen at somber athletes' camp

Summer Time Skyline, 1973

Summer Time Skyline, 1973

via Toronto Before by Aladone on 7/31/08

Supply and demand at the gas pump

 

 

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Supply and demand at the gas pump

via The Progressive Economics Forum by Marc Lee on 7/24/08

One of my favourite comics explains the economics of gas prices:

 

 

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Metrocide: A Tale Of Sixty Cities

 

 

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Metrocide: A Tale Of Sixty Cities

via Torontoist by David Topping on 7/24/08

Is Toronto a dangerous city? And is it getting worse? This week for Metrocide, Torontoist is examining a sea of homicide data and trying to come up with conclusions based not in fear or fantasy but fact.

Photo of Calgary by D'Arcy Norman.

Ever since Toronto earned its reputation as a safe city, safe has tended to be a relative term—safe compared to Detroit, safe compared to New York, safe compared to Chicago. Comparisons between individual cities' crime rates are at once useful and flawed; while they help contextualize a city by putting it into dialogue with others, they also "provide no insight into the many variables that mold the crime in a particular town, city, county, state, region, or other jurisdiction" (so says the FBI). But insofar as they measure the effects of crime, rather than their causes, city-to-city comparisons are a good basis for determining relative safety, and—especially when it comes to homicide rates—play a large role in shaping public perception.

Today, we'll look at how Toronto's recent homicide rates stand up to thirty-four American cities and twenty-seven Canadian ones.

A Note on Statistics

Today, we're comparing Toronto to American and Canadian cities only. Not that we wouldn't like to toss worldwide cities into the mix, of course, but there are some problems with doing so. No over-arching body (say, the United Nations) seems to have homicide data for individual cities (rather than (whole countries) measured in any consistent way. Second, if we researched cities on an individual basis (say, picked twenty large European cities based on size), it is unlikely that each would measure homicides and homicide rates the same way as every other city or country did. (Would negligent manslaughter count in the numbers? Would non-negligent manslaughter? Infanticide? Will they provide rates, or just numbers? And if it's just numbers, will they provide a population that the rate can be determined from?) Geography is an issue, too: as we've shown in the past two days, homicide rates change for Toronto depending on what you define "Toronto" as. At this point, thus, accurately comparing worldwide cities is unfortunately beyond the scope of this week's project.

Fortunately, Statistics Canada and the FBI do make good statistical bedfellows; so far as we can see, their data measures cities in the same way for determining the same data. So: how does Toronto's homicide rate compare to American cities'?

Extraordinarily well; Toronto's numbers absolutely pale in comparison to American cities. Its metropolitan homicide rate in 2006 was lower than every American city with a population above 500,000 (charted above). And of the seventy-two American cities with populations over 250,000, Toronto's 2006 metropolitan homicide rate (1.8 per 100,000) was lower than every other city except for Plano, Texas—the wealthiest city in the United States—which had a homicide rate of 1.6 per 100,000.

In Canada, the picture is different. (Do note the change in scale from the American cities chart, and that this chart lists 2007 homicide rates.) Canadian cities, overall, do quite well in comparison to American ones in terms of homicide rate, regardless of geographical proximity; in 2006, Windsor's homicide rate (1.5) was thirty-one times smaller than Detroit's, and in the same year, Toronto's homicide rate (1.8) was fourteen times smaller than Buffalo's.

But, as we noted in March, and as was widely-reported last week, Toronto still holds its own against other Canadian cities. Of the twenty-six Canadian cities with a Central Metropolitan Area (CMA) population above 100,000 (charted above), Toronto's homicide rate in 2007 (2.0) ranked ninth highest, tied with Saint John. Of the nine cities in Canada with a CMA population above 500,000, Toronto's homicide rate in 2007 ranked fifth highest—with a lower rate than Winnipeg, Edmonton, Calgary, Vancouver—and is not far from Montreal, Hamilton, and Ottawa's rates (for all three, 1.6 homicides per 100,000). No large city in Canada had as good of a year for homicides as Quebec City had in 2007: of a population of about 750,000, it had no homicides whatsoever. Even if that was in part the result of good fortune—the last year it hadn't had a homicide before 2007 was 1962, its violent crime rate is similar to Toronto's, and it will unfortunately not be able to repeat the feat this year—the Québec capital consistently has a homicide rate that is on the low end of Canada's larger cities.

Sources

Canadian cities' 2007 metropolitan homicide rates are from the just-released Statistics Canada report. 2006's rates can be found in last year's report.

American cities' homicide rates are from the FBI, via Wikipedia.

 

 

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Heritage Toronto walking tours this weekend: Bâby Point, and in the Footste...

 

 

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Heritage Toronto walking tours this weekend: Bâby Point, and in the Footsteps of Black Victorians

via Spacing Toronto • understanding the urban landscape by Matthew Hague on 7/24/08

This weekend's Heritage Toronto walking tours are a great way to get out and explore the city (free + no reservations required):

Bâby Point: 10 000 Years of History
Saturday, July 26 - 1:30 PM

Leaders: La Société d'histoire de Toronto
Start Point: SW corner of Jane St and Bâby Point Rd/Annette St
Finish Point: Near Old Mill Subway Station
Duration: Approx. 2 - 2.5 hours
Walk Difficulty: Long walk with slopes, many stairs and some rough ground

Explore some of Toronto's First Nations and French history with this tour of the area named after the estate of James Bâby, an early French settler. Hear about the Seneca village of Teiaiagon, the Carrying Place trail and the first French fort in what is now Toronto. Tours will be offered in English and French.

- - - - - - - - - - - - -

In the Footsteps of Black Victorians
Sunday, July 27 - 1:00 PM

Leaders: Mackenzie House Museum
Start Point: South St. Lawrence Market, 95 Front St E at Jarvis
Finish Point: Mackenzie House, 82 Bond St, S of Dundas St
Duration: Approx. 2 hours
Walk Difficulty: Average walk on sidewalks

In the 19th century, Toronto was a centre of antislavery organizations and Black cultural and political activities. Hear about the men and women of the community as we visit some of the sites known to them.

Spacing is pleased to be the promoting sponsor of the Heritage Toronto walking tours.

Photo by Bobcatnorth

 

 

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The real reason for French immersion

Dan Gardner's column is intresting - especially seeing as my older brother went to French immersion for a bit and then I went to enrichment. My parents = social snobs? Hmm.

zooming in green

...and the neat thing is that I think it was taken right here...

zooming in green

via [daily dose of imagery] on 7/21/08

Biking on Don Valley track.

Sand Wars

Eons ago, I read a book on a related topic by a Cdn author with the quirky name of Silver Donald Cameron - which spoke of the issues of retaining beaches - which mostly comes down to 'stealing' the sand from where the ocean wants to take it - at great cost to all concerned - the beach, the taxpayers, and the next town down the shore...

Sand Wars

via Pruned by Alexander Trevi on 7/16/08

(Houses on stilts on Nags Head, North Carolina. Photo by Stephan Delfour-Given/AFP/Getty Images.)

In a familiar story that may yet become all too familiar to everybody in a climate-changed future, the Italian cities of "industrial Brindisi" and "elegant, baroque Lecce" are battling each other over sand.

Quoting The Guardian:

Faced with losing the pristine San Cataldo beach to creeping Adriatic sea currents, the town of Lecce in Puglia arranged to dig up 200,000 cubic metres of sand out at sea in front of neighbour - and rival - Brindisi. But with EU-funded work set to start proud locals in the port city of Brindisi rose up in protest, with 10,000 signing a petition to stop the digging, hundreds forming a human chain along their own, eroding, beach, and fans at a local football match unfurling a banner stating: "Don't touch the sand."

As interesting as this tale of mineral piracy is, it would be moreso if we were to hear that a landscape architecture firm has been commissioned to do some sort of project to be sited on this stretch of contested coastline.

Not only will they have to maneuver through a potentially explosive political landscape but the designers must simultaneously attend to the physical forces at work in this coastal landscape — such as beach erosion and surfzone currents — that, while much is now known about them relative to just a few decades ago, are still largely mysterious.

Maybe there is a competition for a new beachfront promenade or another Trump golf course or one of those so-called eco-towns or just a sprawling mansion for a chief executive and his family as a summer retreat from the city. The project site is no longer in Puglia but in a barrier island, such as North Carolina's Nags Head, pictured above. It's a mobile landscape, a fragile terrain always in danger of collapse, where everything is beyond the control of engineering. Entrants will have to navigate between programs of containment and resilience, between settlement and retreat, between conflicting ideas of permanence and impermanence.

And all entries will be the best projects ever. Obviously.

In any case, to return back to Italy, after Lecce was ordered to stop digging for sand, officials there were asked where they will now get their material from? The will import it from economically desperate Albania — which, of course, means that it will be another case of the rich exploiting the poor to maintain their quality of life and the exploited is left with a degraded landscape.

In the Archives:
Climate Ghettos

Related:
The Retreating Village

Tech and the Olympics

Cool article about R&D, Innovation and the Olympics.

Bad Ideas in Regulation: Food Safety

Ottawa washes hands of food safety: "A government plan to transfer key parts of food inspection to industry so companies can police themselves will put the health of Canadians at risk, according to leading food safety experts who have reviewed the confidential blueprint."

Oh. Because it's worked so well in other areas...

Visualizing. Me.

Clearly I need to write more, and/or input some of my own thinking here instead of just re-posting. On the other hand, I did create this site primarily as a data dump for stuff I thought was "neat." Oh well.

Urban bees in Toronto

Map of the Week: Urban bees

via Map of the Week by Toronto Star on 7/10/08

For most city dwellers, beekeeping is pretty much out as a hobby, at least pursued close to home. Ontario law forbids hives within 30 metres of a property line on the other side of which is a dwelling, park or place of public assembly, or within 10 metres of a highway. For most city dwellers, that pretty much crushes the idea of a back yard hive, as appealing as the idea might seem (or appalling, to the neighbours).

But two sites near the city's downtown (map link) are home a total of 22 working beehives: the roof of the Royal York Hotel (which Daphne Gordon wrote about in June) and the Brick Works near Bayview Ave. and Pottery Rd. The Brick Works site is much the largest, with 19 hives. At the seasonal peak, that means about 880,000 bees.

The area surrounding a beehive necessarily plays host to the bees. The distance bees fly to gather pollen varies, but a 1992 study found that they readily fly four kilometers in all directions, which means that gardens from Flemingdon Park to the CNE grounds are being visited by working bees.

So my place is almost in range!

After Beijing 08, the fight for human rights must go on

Provocative ads for Amnesty International.
Weight lifting
Archery
Swimming

Clever, but it's also interesting to think how the West's credibility on these matters (you know, torture and the like) by the US's actions in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.

What T.O. should learn from Other Cdn Cities

We could be even better
I like the street food, the local museum concepts and the waterfront. Comparing Vancouver's waterfront with Toronto's is just depressing. The winter fest is tough - the weather doesn't consistently work as well as it does in Quebec.

Storm Clouds pix

via Torontoist by Miles Storey on 6/23/08

It's been a particularly tempestuous June this year, with storms rolling in under blue skies and dropping torrents of rain on the city before dissipating or meandering eastwards. There have even been reports of tornadoes touching down in southern Ontario.

The picture above, taken yesterday from the Harbourfront Centre, shows a storm system approaching the city from the east. The funnel shape in the centre is actually heavy rain and possibly hail falling on western suburbs.

Photo by Miles Storey

Reader-based review of Harper's Defence Policy

Harper's Secrecy-First Defence Policy: A reader writes

via inkless-wells « WordPress.com Tag Feed by Paul Wells on 6/22/08

If the Prime Minister is to be discouraged from dumping major policy documents onto the Internet in the middle of the night at the end of the session six weeks after they should have been ready, the only thing that will do the trick is the knowledge that such clandestine behaviour will not spare him the journalistic scrutiny he is clearly trying to avoid. My own poor effort was not going to do do it. And I am sad to say that after a spate of early stories simply recording the fact of the late-night document dump, Harper's instinct has been confirmed by a near-total lack of journalistic scrutiny. (The Ottawa Citizen's David Pugliese, as is almost always the case, remains the honourable exception. Here is his blog post on the defence plan. I suspect more is on the way.)

So I was really grateful to get an email this morning from Inkless comment-board regular MikeG, who — puttering in his spare time on a sunny weekend — has produced the most detailed analysis of the Harper defence plan's spending projections that I have seen. He even made charts and graphs. And what they show is curious: while $490 billion sure looks like a heck of a number, it amounts to a gentle budgeted decline in Canada's defence effort, compared against major allies, over time.

I'll close by pointing out that a defence policy isn't only a policy for spending. It's a set of choices about what that money will buy. Since we're all planning to snooze on that set of choices in the Parliamentary Press Gallery, perhaps Inkless readers will care to read the policy themselves and discuss the choices the Harper government has made.

Democracy: not only can you do it yourself, I'm afraid you're pretty much going to have to. Thanks once again to MikeG.

Cambridge Solar Collector Art Performance

Event Guide: Cambridge Solar Collector Performance

via Spacing Toronto • understanding the urban landscape by Shawn Micallef on 6/20/08

WHAT: Solar Collector — A solar powered, web-connected, interactive sculpture

WHERE: 100 Maple Grove Road, Cambridge, Ontario (Google map)

WHEN: Saturday, June 21, 8:30PM

If you are in the mood for a summer solstice party with a technological twist on Saturday night, head to the lawn of the Waterloo Regional Operations Centre in Cambridge and see the command performance launch of Solar Collector, a new public art sculpture that allows people to program light patterns through a web interface. The work is by Gorbet Design Inc., the folks behind P2P (or Power to the people), the interactive artwork installed on the front of the Drake Hotel back in 2004 (see Spacing's "History of our Future" issue in 2005, p. 41). It consisted of a large bank of light switches located on the south side of Queen Street that connected to lights fixed onto the Drake's facade, allowing people to write, or draw, whatever they wanted. If you can't make the performance on Saturday, you can experience Solar Collector on any other evening as well.

In a collaboration between the community and the sun, Solar Collector gathers human expression and solar energy during the day, then brings them together each night in a performance of flowing light.

We invite you to celebrate the summer solstice at the launch of Solar Collector on June 21st. Bring an evening picnic out to the grassy lawn under the apple trees, and enjoy live music to accompany the sculpture's performance (More details here).–

Twelve aluminum shafts rise from the grassy hill in front of the Waterloo Regional Operations Centre. Their graceful shape reflects the angles of the sun through the year. The tallest shaft is perpendicular to the sun at winter solstice, when the sun is low in the sky. The flattest shaft faces the high sun at summer solstice.

Each shaft has three sets of lights, along with three solar panels. During the day, the solar panels collect the sun's energy in a battery within each shaft. At the same time, the Solar Collector website collects light compositions — patterns in light that are created by the community through a simple web interface.

Each night at dusk, a performance begins of all the compositions collected that day. The flowing waves of light are a visual reflection of the sine waves that describe the sun's movement through the sky.

When the day's patterns are through, the performance moves on to a series composed collaboratively from all the patterns ever created. The length of the performance is a reflection of the weather and the seasons, as the shafts use up their energy and fade out late in the evening, one by one.

Photo by Gorbet Design Inc.

How the U.S. Got Its Canadian Copyright Bill

Ah, Lobbying - quite possibly the marketing activity with the highest ROI activity of all

How the U.S. Got Its Canadian Copyright Bill

via Michael Geist Blog by Michael Geist on 6/15/08

My weekly technology law column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) examines the role that U.S. pressure played leading up to the introduction of Bill C-61 last week. I argue that the bill is the result of an intense public and private campaign waged by the U.S. government to pressure Canada into following its much-criticized digital copyright model. The U.S. pressure has intensified in recent years, particularly since there is a growing international trend toward greater copyright flexibility with countries such as Japan, New Zealand, and Israel either implementing or considering more flexible copyright standards.

The public campaign was obvious. U.S. Ambassador to Canada David Wilkins was outspoken on the copyright issue, characterizing Canadian copyright law as the weakest in the G7 (despite the World Economic Forum ranking it ahead of the U.S.). The U.S. Trade Representatives Office (USTR) made Canada a fixture on its Special 301 Watch list, an annual compilation of countries that the U.S. believes have sub-standard intellectual property laws. The full list contains nearly 50 countries accounting for 4.4 billion people or approximately 70 percent of the world's population. Most prominently, last year U.S. Senators Dianne Feinstein and John Cornyn, along with California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, escalated the rhetoric on Canadian movie piracy, leading to legislative reform that took just three weeks to complete.

The private campaign was even more important.

Sources say that emboldened by the successful campaign for anti-camcording legislation, U.S. officials upped the ante at the Security and Prosperity Partnership meeting in Montebello, Quebec last summer. Canadian officials arrived ready to talk about a series of economic concerns but were quickly rebuffed by their U.S. counterparts, who indicated that progress on other issues would depend upon action on the copyright file. Those demands were echoed earlier by the USTR, which, according to documents obtained under the Access to Information Act, made veiled threats about "thickening the border" between Canada and the U.S. if Canada refused to put copyright reform on the legislative agenda.

Faced with unrelenting U.S. pressure, the newly installed Industry Minister was presented with a mandate letter that required a copyright bill that would meet U.S. approval. The government promised copyright reform in the October 2007 Speech from the Throne and was set to follow through last December, only to pull back at the last hour in the face of mounting public concern.

In the months that followed, Prentice's next attempt to bring the copyright bill forward was stalled by internal cabinet concerns over how the bill would play out in public. The bill was then repackaged to include the new consumer-focused provisions such as the legalization of recording television shows and the new peer-to-peer download $500 damage award. The heart of the bill, however, remained largely unchanged since satisfying U.S. pressure remained priority number one. Just after 11:00 a.m. last Thursday, the U.S. got its Canadian copyright bill.

The multi-tasking virus

So true.

The multi-tasking virus

via Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog by nick on 6/13/08

In an essay written for Tim Ferriss's blog, Josh Waitzkin, the former chess champion who was the subject of the book and subsequent film Waiting for Bobby Fisher, writes of his recent experience in returning to his alma mater, Columbia, and sitting in on a class taught by Dennis Dalton, "the most important college professor of my life." Dalton, writes Waitzkin,

was describing the satyagraha of Mahatma Gandhi, building the discussion around the Amritsar massacre in 1919, when British colonial soldiers opened fire on 10,000 unarmed Indian men, women and children trapped in Jallianwala Bagh Garden. For 39 years, Professor Dalton has been inspiring Columbia and Barnard students with his two semester political theory series that introduces undergrads to the ideas of Gandhi, Thoreau, Mill, Malcolm X, King, Plato, Lao Tzu. His lectures are about themes, connections between disparate minds, the powerful role of the individual in shaping our world. Dalton is a life changer, and this was one of his last lectures before retirement.

But it was the audience's reaction that left an even greater impression on Waitzkin:

Over the course of a riveting 75-minute discussion of the birth of Gandhian non-violent activism, I found myself becoming increasingly distressed as I watched students cruising Facebook, checking out the NY Times, editing photo collections, texting, reading People Magazine, shopping for jeans, dresses, sweaters, and shoes on Ebay, Urban Outfitters and J. Crew, reorganizing their social calendars, emailing on Gmail and AOL, playing solitaire, doing homework for other classes, chatting on AIM, and buying tickets on Expedia (I made a list because of my disbelief). From my perspective in the back of the room, while Dalton vividly described desperate Indian mothers throwing their children into a deep well to escape the barrage of bullets, I noticed that a girl in front of me was putting her credit card information into Urban Outfitters.com. She had finally found her shoes!

When the class was over I rode the train home heartbroken, composing a letter to the students, which Dalton distributed the next day. Then I started investigating. Unfortunately, what I observed was not an isolated incident. Classrooms across America have been overrun by the multi-tasking virus. Teachers are bereft. This is the year that Facebook has taken residence in the national classroom. Students defend this trend by citing their generation's enhanced ability to multi-task. Unfortunately, the human mind cannot, in fact, multi-task without drastically reducing the quality of our processing.

That minds wander is not news - "wandering" may well be the default setting for our brains - but the scale of it today does seem to be something new and remarkable.

The anachronistic Brewers Retail

The anachronistic Brewers Retail

via Wellington Financial Blog - News, Views & Purviews by Mark McQueen on 6/13/08

As InBev launches a US$46 billion hostile bid for Anheuser-Busch, the iconic Bud may no longer be sporting an American flag. That's something we long became comfortable with here in Canada, as Labatt, Molson and Sleeman have all been acquired by foreign-based brewers. ...

But unlike the U.S., these foreign acquisitions have had a particular impact in Ontario. The former Brewers Retail (now The Beer Store), you see, is owned by the very foreign firms that also own the former Labatt, Molson and Sleeman franchises. What this means is quite straightforward: the owners of The Beer Store do what's best for their brands, and the rest of the world is at the back of the bus.

To whit, when it was discovered that "walk in cooler" beer stores (Yonge and Summerhill, for example) were increasing sales of small brands such as Brick, Mill Street and Moosehead, among others, the owners switched gears. Enough with that floormap. Most new stores are now "handy pickup" type outlets (Yonge and Lawrence, for example). Most of what you see now is a sea of beer produced by the same people that own the store. Conventiently inside the front door of the handy pickup outlets are the cases of the big three (Canadian, Coors Light, Blue, Bud and Sleeman). If you want to pick something else, feel free to ask a rep. But the delightful packaging of independent brewers is largely hidden from view, just like 20 years ago when the forbidden fruit rolled out from behind a wall on metal rollers. With this change in store setup, guess what happened to the sales of independent brewers? Right back down again. The oligarchy preserved their marketshare grip, all in the name of customer convenience. At least the convenience of the customers who buy the owner's particular brand of beer.

Which begs the question, why won't the Ontario government give local brewers the same opportunity to succeed as local vintners? The fact that our beer distribution system is owned by foreigners is not entirely different than the fact that Cognos or Dofasco have gone the same route.

What is different about this situation, however, is the impact the oligarchy has on the ability for the two dozen Ontario microbrewers to flourish. Lakeport, Creemore, Upper Canada and Sleeman all had varying degrees of success, and all started out extremely small. There is a chance that Mill Street or Wellington Brewery, for example, could replicate that success.

Let's give the next generation of Brew Masters a chance, and allow them to sell their beer at grocery stores. At least for a start.

Mapping Toronto's campers

Map of the week: Where the campers are

via Map of the Week by Toronto Star on 6/11/08

This week's map (link) is much simpler than last week's, and to a certain extent inspired by the weekend's heat wave: the percentage of the population in the GTA that received a provincial park camping permit last year, by postal area.

Durham Region is strongly represented.

Pickering, Ajax, Whitby and especially Oshawa are full of campers, it turns out, as is the Yonge St. corridor between Richmond Hill and Newmarket. There are also outdoorsy neighbourhoods downtown, where the Ontario park system is popular in High Park, the Beaches, the U of T area and the Islands.

The GTA's most enthusiastic campers can be found in M8X, in the Bloor St. W. and the Humber area of the former city of Etobicoke, where 4.4% of the population was issued a park permit last year.

The Ministry of Natural Resources issued almost 271,000 park permits last year, of which about 74,000 went to GTA residents. About 14,000 park users came from Quebec, and 4,500 from Manitoba. Over 16,000 came from the U.S., the largest groups from New York and Michigan.

Nerd box:

This week, we're displaying most of the suburban (but not rural) communities in the GTA. There are a total of 177 postal areas displayed, with just over 2,000 individual points. With this big a map, we're pushing the limits of how many polygons GoogleMaps can display. (The issue isn't the number of polygons so much as the points it takes to display them, which is why the maps are roughly drawn.). It may take 10-15 seconds to load