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description=10 posts published by Randy McDonald during November 2009;

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how, for, note, link, and, are, photo, the, meta, blogroll, religious, you, bit, more, detail, archive, november, 2009, dm, three, atlantic, canadian, articles, urban, two, changing, streets, universe, optimized, starships, blogs, like, torontoist, blogto, taking, local, news, to, new, level, erigal, my, husband, boutonniere, brief, on, meaning, of, swiss, minaret, ban, cat, shakespeare, prowls, expansion, lunar, nova, forum, can, be, pages, search, archives, categories,

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or drugs hookers and easy cash men with nowhere to go and nothing to do kill time until the shelters open or until sleep overcomes them in moss park bookending this 164 year old thoroughfare is enormous wealth elegant stone and brick mansions dot the northern tip vestiges of the moneyed and powerful who once lined both sides of the 3 5 kilometre stretch due south on lake ontario s sandy shoals bulldozers clear space for a 29 million public park to feature waterfalls and play structures street churches whose preaching was originally for the rich offer esl classes and counselling between prayers social housing gentrification immigrants magnificent parkland the country s highest concentration of homeless political activists acts of kindness acts of violence health centres ballparks and a hockey arena all share the two lane asphalt strip say hello to sherbourne skid row to some the ritz to others the most intensely torontonian of all toronto streets go read them both written by randy mcdonald november 30 2009 at 3 18 pm posted in assorted tagged with bloor street east church and wellesley church street neighbourhoods sherbourne street urban note link a universe optimized for starships centauri dreams lets us know that some people want to use black holes to drive starships working with colleague shawn westmoreland crane has been exploring a different and far more speculative option for upping the energy extraction levels what about using black holes for propulsion specifically crane and westmoreland ask whether hawking radiation from black holes can power a starship calculating that a black hole of about a million tons would be just the right size small enough to generate the needed hawking radiation while large enough to survive for the duration of a century long star crossing adam crowl has written fascinatingly about this in crowlspace crane and westmoreland s paper on using hawking radiation for this purpose has been kicking around on the net for a bit never quite making it to the top of the queue here but marcus chown gives it a good look in the latest new scientist so let s pause to examine it now rather than finding a nearby black hole the two suggest using a gamma ray laser powered by solar energy to create one the energy needed would be enormous calling for solar panels 250 kilometers across in close solar orbit a robert forward esque engineering challenge but if you could create such solar panels and let them soak up the needed sunlight to power up your black hole production facility you d wind up with something tiny that offered tremendous power says chown the resulting million tonne black hole would be about the size of an atomic nucleus the next step would be to manoeuvre it into the focal range of a parabolic mirror attached to the back of the crew quarters of a starship hawking radiation consists of all sorts of species of subatomic particles but the most common will be gamma ray photons collimated into a parallel beam by the parabolic mirror these would be the starship s exhaust and would push it forward crane and westmoreland think a starship powered this way could accelerate to close to the speed of light in a few decades fast enough that relativistic time dilation would occur and vast distances could be crossed by human crews interestingly a black hole starship like this should create gravitational waves that might be detectable here on earth assuming some nearby extraterrestrial civilization were using the technology if coalescing black holes and neutron stars ought to be producing low frequency gravitational waves a black hole starship should leave a gravitational signature at ultra high frequencies all i ll say is that star trek has established that some romulan starships use quantum singularities to generate power it s always slightly worrisome when scientists and thinkers imagine semi plausible pathways to trek technology don t you think written by randy mcdonald november 30 2009 at 2 57 pm posted in assorted tagged with links space science star trek link how blogs like torontoist and blogto are taking local news to a new level maryam siddiqi s national post blog posting argues that excellent group blogs like blogto and torontoist are far from destroying journalism sustaining that noble art and creating new vehicles with new methods for writers david topping has to postpone our phone chat so he can pursue a juicy tip that came to him via twitter in the midst of a hot story for our readership at least that i am writing up and turning out in the next hour if all goes well the 22 year old writes in an email he s also supposed to be preparing a presentation on t s eliot for a university of toronto class but he stops what he s doing to hastily assemble a story about the 20 year old outdoor mural of lee s palace a rock n roll bar being chipped off by workers so it can be replaced by a sign for a burrito joint the club will live on but will share the space with big fat burrito the twittering tipster danny glenwright gets his due credit in the resulting article when it s posted tuesday night topping is with marc lostracco one of the editors of torontoist the kind of ear to the ground youth oriented news gathering he s doing connecting tipsters to hipsters as it were not only explodes the myth of blogs as lazy at actual news gathering but it has the mainstream media looking over its collective shoulder even if many torontonians have never heard of them blogto and torontoist local news feeds or blogs or whatever you want to call them enjoy readerships in the hundreds of thousands per month deals to supply traditional print publications with content see sidebar and long term plans involving hiring professional journalists in the meantime they want you to check in at their sites as part of your breakfast routine somewhere between the morning paper and rush hour radio news despite a scare that saw torontoist almost shut down by its new york based parent company earlier this year before it was rescued by a trio of toronto based investors the citizen written news services have created a niche for themselves in the local media landscape one burrito review at a time not too bad for a bunch of more or less amateurs the sites pay token fees typically as low as 10 per post to their contributing writers and photographers usually students and people with day jobs most involved have no formal training as journalists and neither topping lostracco nor blogto publisher tim shore have spent a day in journalism school despite the sites reputations among toronto mainstream media editors for providing story fodder lostracco says the biggest challenge for us is to get our name out there for the most part people haven t heard of us and yes i do check these blogs and others every morning via my rss reader written by randy mcdonald november 30 2009 at 11 21 am posted in assorted tagged with blogging blogto journalism links torontoist photo erigal my husband s boutonniere my husband s boutonniere originally uploaded by erigal erin s photo is beautiful this is a shadow box i pressed the boutonniere separately and painted the dollar store shadow box with acrylics to frame it our wedding colours were blue and pale yellow written by randy mcdonald november 30 2009 at 11 17 am posted in assorted tagged with art photos brief note on the meaning of the swiss minaret ban the people who talk about the impending arrival of eurabia base their argument not only on the charitably pretended astronomically high birthrate of muslims but on the weakness and decadence of europeans unwilling to defend their proud traditions against arrogant incomers right some 57 5 percent of voters supported the ban the initiative was also supported by the required majority of cantons with 22 of switzerland s 26 cantons voting in favor of the ban the two city cantons of geneva and basel city rejected the proposal as did two french speaking cantons neuchâtel and vaud the organizers of the campaign managed to turn the dispute over minarets into a symbolic referendum on the influence of islam they did not speak much about minarets instead they talked about sharia law burqas and the oppression of women in the islamic world in the end even the prominent feminist julia onken supported the initiative the poster which the organizers used for their campaign showed a number of black minarets resembling rockets standing closely together on a swiss flag in front of the flag a woman stared angrily out from beneath a black burqa it was an image of a switzerland that had been taken over by islam minarets are symbols of power of a foreign religion argued politician ulrich schlüer who belongs to the svp s right wing the ban he said represents a clear statement against their spread the debate was largely divorced from the reality of switzerland although around 22 percent of the population is of foreign origin the country has so far had relatively few problems with its roughly 400 000 muslims most of them are liberally minded bosnians kosovo albanians and turks and their approximately 160 mosques are practically invisible burqas are seldom seen on swiss streets and there have never been serious calls for the introduction of sharia law the decision therefore does not reflect real problems in switzerland but rather a general feeling of unease toward islam the issue revolves around a deep seated fear that society s values could be in danger the recent victory in the swiss referendum of proponents of a cosntitutional ban on the construction of minarets demonstrates pretty strongly that not only the sort of anti muslim sentiment eurabianists say doesn t exist but that there s a fairly broad consensus on this across the political spectrum not that this sort of thing isn t evident across europe of course with everything from bans on conservative islamic clothing to restrictive immigration laws to strong pan european opposition to european union expansion to turkey demonstrating that yet again eurabianists aren t in contact with reality written by randy mcdonald november 30 2009 at 11 14 am posted in assorted tagged with clash of ideologies eurabia europe switzerland cat shakespeare prowls shakespeare prowls originally uploaded by rfmcdpei shakespeare must look fierce in this post as if he was walking on imported air past a pile of books he angrily tipped over as he narrowed his eyes at me but truly it s an illusion the books are scattered on the floor because of my ferocious housecleaning and the angle is responsible for the illusion of anger if anything he s quite the opposite of an alpha male timid and gentle written by randy mcdonald november 30 2009 at 11 08 am posted in assorted tagged with cats pets shakespeare meta blogroll expansion we ve two new blogs up on the blogroll globe and mail technology columnist matthew ingram s appropriately named mathewingram com work and the business writer stephen baker s the numerati enjoy written by randy mcdonald november 30 2009 at 10 02 am posted in assorted tagged with blogroll meta photo lunar nova walking along bloor street west past the university of toronto on the night of nuit blanche last month i looked up and saw the moon through the clouds shining ever brighter as it expanded from a single point stella nova lunar nova 1 originally uploaded by rfmcdpei lunar nova 2 originally uploaded by rfmcdpei lunar nova 3 originally uploaded by rfmcdpei the university of toronto admission center s crenellated tower is visible at the bottom of the third one written by randy mcdonald november 29 2009 at 9 45 pm posted in assorted tagged with astronomy bloor street west moon photos toronto university of toronto forum how religious can you be and how are you religious the question of my relationship to religion should i have one what sort of ethics should undergird it how postmodern can religiosity be while still being religious has been perplexing me of late one thing that get me thinking about the issue is a 1986 song by xtc dear god that i ve been thinking about lately i m not thinking of xtc really since andy partridge annoys me but of the sarah mclachlan cover version that demonstrates that she s damn good when she has bite the song s lyrics make the case that god s complicity in human suffering and humanity s many divergent and conflictual perceptions of god make the idea of god untenable i hope you got the letter and i pray you can make it better down here i don t mean a big reduction in the price of beer but all the people that you made in your image see them starving on their feet cause they don t get enough to eat from god i can t believe in you dear god sorry to disturb you but i feel that i should be heard loud and clear we all need a big reduction in amount of tears and all the people that you made in your image see them fighting in the street cause they can t make opinions meet about god i can t believe in you did you make disease and the diamond blue did you make mankind after we made you and the devil too i don t know if you noticed but your name is on a lot of quotes in this book and us crazy humans wrote it you should take a look and all the people that you made in your image still believing that junk is true well i know it ain t and so do you dear god i can t believe in i don t believe in if a god does exist that god would be the god of depeche mode s 1984 blasphemous rumours people who know me have noted that i ve quoted the chorus i don t want to start any blasphemous rumours but i think that god s got a sick sense of humour and when i die i expect to find him laughing any number of times it s a horrifying image the sort of thing that makes you wish that humans really could go through a technological singularity if only to give us a chance at deposing such a tyrant thankfully the dear god argument is risible in a universe with free will i chose to believe in that or a close simulacrum thereof many worlds interpretation or not there s no reason why bad things can t happen without the explicit direction of god assuming for the sake of this argument that the christian trinity of father son and holy ghost really is what s up out thataway there the argument that i first ran into in paradise lost that compelling people to believe strips their humanity from them makes perfect sense to me everyone knows how i like my ernest renan and it s not a stretch at all to go from there to the idea that a religion like any other philosophy has to be actively chosen and embraced in a daily even hourly referendum if it s to be meaningful that said religious or philosophical systems which discriminate against people who don t belong to the community who to name an extreme example could countenance punishing cacique haguey for refusing to accept the religion of the people who massacred his makes me wish again for a technological singularity that would let such a system be dealt with accordingly all this brings me to my concern my relationship to the ang...