A communications mast went up in Shawville this week; this morning, workers were installing equipment at its top (see photos above). Since the mast is immediately adjacent to Telebec’s telephone exchange building, it’s a fair guess that this is going to be a cell tower. If so, this means competition for Rogers/Fido: the Rogers tower went up a bit more than two years ago (before that, cellphones strained to get one or two bars from distant towers). So this can’t be a bad thing. (Do Bell or Telus phones use Telebec towers?)

Warning: local electoral district neepery ahead.

The federal electoral district maps have now been finalized for B.C., Quebec and Saskatchewan, so it’s time I had a look to see what constituency I’ll be voting in in the next election.

Last year I mentioned that the Federal Electoral Boundaries Commission for Quebec proposed a new, sprawling constituency of Hautes-Laurentides—Pontiac that would encompass a number of disparate, sparsely populated districts, including ours (see map). Thanks to considerable pushback at public hearings, that has now changed.

Instead, the Commission’s final report creates a new federal district of Pontiac, which comprises the following:

• The MRCs of Pontiac and La Vallée-de-la-Gatineau, including the Kitigan Zibi and Rapid Lake reserves;
• Most of the MRC of Les-Collines-de-l’Outaouais, except for L’Ange-Gardien and Notre-Dame-de-la-Salette, which are included in Argenteuil—La Petite-Nation; and
• Two sections of the City of Gatineau: a section in Aylmer and Hull north of Boulevard des Allumettières and west of Boulevard des Grives, and a chunk of Gatineau sector northwest of a line running along Boulevard La Vérendrye, Autoroute 50, and Montée Paiement.

So, compared to the Commission’s original proposal, we’re reunited with La Pêche and Pontiac, but we’re also lumped in with some fast-growing suburban areas of Gatineau.

Meanwhile, instead of one urban riding and two urban-rural hybrids, we get two urban ridings — Hull—Aylmer and Gatineau — with two rural-hybrids, with Argenteuil—La Petite-Nation taking in the Gatineau districts of Masson-Angers and Buckingham. (Gatineau doesn’t have enough population for three ridings, but too much for two.)

Urban-rural hybrid ridings can be controversial, in that one side of the riding can tend to overwhelm the other. So will rural west Quebec overwhelm the Gatineau suburbs, or will it be the other way around?

By subtracting the 2011 census populations for the rural districts, which are easy to look up, we find that the Gatineau suburbs make up only 29 percent of the riding’s population.

You’d think that would mean that rural interests would predominate, but consider that the 38 percent of the riding in Les-Collines-de-l’Outaouais includes a lot of commuters. Les Collines is also, like the Gatineau suburbs, growing fast: up 10 percent from 2006 to 2011. It’s a community of interest halfway between the city and the relatively frontier areas of Pontiac and La Vallée-de-la-Gatineau, whose populations are stable rather than growing, as well as considerably less affluent.

What we have in this new riding of Pontiac, then, is a balance between three roughly equal populations: a deep rural area (Pontiac and La Vallée-de-la-Gatineau, 34,888), a near-rural area that encloses bedroom communities like Chelsea and Wakefield (40,585), and newly built urban subdivisions (31,026).

Whoever gets elected to represent this riding is in for one hell of a juggling act, but it’s a better compromise than the Commission’s original proposal to create a gargantuan all-rural mega-constituency to which our region would have been connected by only a single remote highway. It’ll also keep us with other rural areas with substantial English minorities (Les Collines is about one-quarter English, for example). I’m happy with the outcome.

Wired Map Lab has the story of Ian Silva, who’s been posting astonishing road and transit maps of the imaginary Koana Islands to Reddit; the Islands now have their own section on the site, replete with a travel guide. It’s as serious an undertaking as William Sarjeant’s Rockall, Jerry Gretzinger’s Ukrainia, or Austin Tappan Wright’s Islandia.

I admit it: I love geofiction — creating imaginary worlds through maps — and I always get excited when I encounter a great new mapmaker. This is no exception.

In an article published this week in the Washington Map Society’s journal, The Portolan, map collector Stefaan Missinne has announced the discovery of a small, engraved globe that he says is the first to depict the New World. From the WMS’s press release:

The previously-unknown globe, which is about the size of a grapefruit, was made from the lower halves of two ostrich eggs, and dates from the very early 1500s. Until now, it was thought that the oldest globe to show the New World was the “Lenox Globe” at the New York Public Library, but the author presents evidence that this Renaissance ostrich egg globe was actually used to cast the copper Lenox globe, putting its date c. 1504. The globe reflects the knowledge gleaned by Christopher Columbus and other very early European explorers including Amerigo Vespucci after whom America was named.

The Lenox Globe — also known as the Hunt-Lenox Globe — was cast in 1510; interestingly, prior to this announcement, it was the only map or globe to contain the phrase hic sunt dracones — here be dragons. This globe has the phrase as well. In the Washington Post coverage, two map experts — John Hessler and Chet Van Duzer — are quoted expressing a certain amount of skepticism (especially about the purported da Vinci connection). I also suspect caution is warranted here: the history of antique maps contains several examples of groundshaking discoveries that turn out to be dubious at best.

Photo credit: The Portolan, Washington Map Society.

The inclusion of a showing of Song of the South, an unquestionably racist movie that Disney has suppressed for decades, in LoneStarCon 3’s animation programming track is as controversial and problematic as the film itself. See Making Light’s thread on the situation.

Now, you could argue that Song of the South is worth showing as part of a Worldcon’s anime and animation programming track, because Film History. But you could equally argue for a live on-stage demonstration of the production of plutonium hexafluoride using dioxygen difluoride, because Science. In neither case should you ever proceed without appropriate precautions.

Which is to say that yes, Song of the South is to animation history what FOOF is to organic chemistry: handle with extreme caution. If you must show this movie, you don’t do it bare — without commentary, context or discussion — and you don’t show it at noon on Saturday. You wouldn’t show Triumph of the Will without some serious unpacking of its historical baggage. This movie is no different.

(Yes, I have seen the movie — probably during its 1980 release, which would have made me eight years old.)

Update 4:47 PM EDT:

Just got email from senior #LoneStarCon3 person confirming that they’re pulling SONG OF THE SOUTH. A statement will go up within an hour.

— P Nielsen Hayden (@pnh) August 21, 2013

Update, 6:15 PM EDT:

#LoneStarCon has withdrawn its presentation of Disney's Song of the South. For the full statement, see http://t.co/ffxFPe8OHC

— LoneStarCon 3 (@LoneStarCon) August 21, 2013

An interview at Black Gate with four editors of year’s-best fantasy, horror and science fiction anthologies answers a question I’ve often had: how do these editors manage to read all the stories being published today and still have a life? About a year and a half ago I tried doing that myself, but quickly discovered how mad that was: there’s simply too much out there. As David Hartwell explained to me when I asked him about this at Readercon last month, you read every story, but you don’t necessarily finish every story.

When the news broke that a 14-foot African Rock Python had killed two small boys in Campbellton, New Brunswick, reptile keepers were astonished — and some of them were suspicious. Many things didn’t make sense to us: how could the snake constrict two boys at once, they wondered, without them waking up? Why, after constricting them, did the snake release them?

As more news filtered out, it became clearer how it happened. The boys had been to a petting zoo the previous evening and presumably still smelled strongly of farm animal, which offered a plausible explanation to anyone who’s been chewed on by their pet snake because they had the smell of rodent (or fish, or earthworm) on their fingers. And the preliminary autopsy results indicated asphyxiation. The remaining mysteries do not strike me as impossible: the boys could have been sleeping very close together (they were described as inseparable); it can be awfully difficult to wake small children up; and snakes do release after constriction if they can’t swallow them — a 14-foot python can kill an adult but not swallow one.

Even so, some people still insist — usually in the comments of news articles and social media posts, look around and you’ll see it — that there’s something fishy about this: that the snake could not have been responsible. Without actually coming out and saying it, they’re essentially saying that the boys were murdered and the snake was planted to cover up the crime.

Truthers, in other words, have come to the reptile community.

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Version 4.0 of Yojimbo, Bare Bones’s information organization software for the Mac, was released today; the update mainly adds support for a new data sync system (version 3 used MobileMe; Bare Bones can’t get sync working with iCloud). I’ve been using Yojimbo since the first version to store all kinds of bric-à-brac, from story ideas to passwords. Yojimbo 4 costs $30 for a single-user licence and $20 to upgrade from a previous version; syncing requires a $2.99/month subscription. Via Macworld.

Pushing standard images to high-resolution displays (like Apple’s Retina displays) isn’t terribly pretty. Pushing high-resolution, Retina-compatible images to standard displays isn’t terribly nice, because you get pointlessly large file downloads (possibly over mobile: yay!). Using JavaScript to detect browser resolution is too late: you’ve already loaded both images before the JavaScript loads.

Enter HTML5. Last year WebKit added experimental high-resolution display support to the proposed CSS4 spec with the image-set element, allowing stylesheets to differentiate between low- and high-resolution images depending on the screen resolution. This year it’s been added to the <img> tag itself, allowing the HTML code itself to specify a higher-resolution image for displays that can handle it. All preliminary, of course, and WebKit browsers only so far, but promising.

Andy Drizen’s Tube Map Live (iTunes), a free iOS app (native iPhone and iPad versions) that shows the real-time positions of London Underground trains on the iconic Tube map, using official data. Hypnotic visualization, but the app essentially promotes Drizen’s £1.99/$2.99 Tube Tracker: tapping on trains or stations calls up an advertising popup. Via TUAW.