Dave Kordalewski

Name: Das Gasthaus
Neighbourhood: The Danforth
Contact info: 107 Danforth Ave., 647-352-5044, info@dasGasthaus.ca, www.dasgasthaus.ca
Owners: Ruthie Cummings and her silent partner (and brother) Christopher Cummings
Chef: Andrew Taylor, who used to be the executive chef at the posh Cambridge restaurant Langdon Hall

The Food: Northern German pub food, including smoked herring, house-made sausages and charcuterie boards sold by the metre and half-metre. On the weekend brunch menu, potato rosti comes topped with bacon, gouda and a sunny-side-up egg.

The Drinks: The focus is on German brews and local craft beers, including two rotating taps. There’s also a short wine list.

The Place: A casual bistro with mismatched chandeliers, green velvet upholstery, traditional German paintings by the owner’s sister and a heavy wooden bar.

The Numbers:
• 100 per cent of the dishes have German names (with English descriptions)
• 36 seats, including six at the bar
• 30 more seats to come on a back patio
• 12 beer taps with seven German imports and five Ontario craft options

The post Introducing: Das Gasthaus, a new German pub on the Danforth from a former Langdon Hall chef appeared first on torontolife.com.

In case you haven't heard, Toronto's favourite outdoor drinking spot is endangered. That's right, cops are finally planning to bust people for openly consuming alcoholic beverages in Trinity Bellwoods Park, which, to be kind of fair, is illegal. Other cities are a bit puritan about outdoor drinking, too, but there seemed to be this sense that Bellwoods was protected by good energy, somehow. Some might say a good thing can't last forever. Others say it's a load of BS and Toronto the Good needs to unbunch its prim, proper panties. Whatever the case, we're either going to have to start being insanely covert about drinking in our beloved belle woods, or find a new place to get debaucherous.

Here are five alternate outdoor havens in which to thwart the po-lice and continue to get your drink on outdoors in Toronto.

Cloud Gardens
Stressful day at the office? Can't stand the overly-aggressive typing sounds emanating from the cubicle next door? If you work downtown near Yonge and Queen, simply slip out during your coffee break and guzzle a lil moonshine from a wrinkled paper bag in these magical cloud gardens. There's a lots of cover as you walk to the top of the waterfall works, and there will probably be other people indulging elsewhere in the gardens at the same time as you. You'll come back perked up, refreshed, and sassy, ready to tolerate the remainder of the day.

Marilyn Bell Park
Marilyn Bell Park is an idyllic spot for evening beverages. It's always a few degrees cooler near the lake, and Marilyn Bell is right on the water near the foot of Jameson Ave. It comes fully equipped with benches to camp out on, and if you feel like getting frisky, you can always sneak off to the side of its surrounding trails. It's in a relatively discreet area, too, and somewhat po-po free. I would still recommend keeping it on the D.L. by disguising your beverage in order to avoid trouble, though, just in case.

Cherry Beach
Obviously, there's got to be a beach on this list. Cherry Beach, at the foot of Cherry St. just south of Unwin in the east end, is a clear choice. You don't have to make a watery trek on the ferry to get there, but it's still right on the lake. It's got chill vibes, people of all stripes hang out there, and there's lots of opportunity for cute dog watching. Best of all, if you happen to make it your double watering hole on a Sunday afternoon, you can catch Promise at Cherry Beach, which is a full-on electro dance party.

Christie Pits pool
Pool hopping at Christie Pits is technically just as illegal as imbibing in Bellwoods...but I don't really care? Life is short; summer is hot. I see no other necessary extenuating facts. The park has lots of space to roam around and, technically, drink in, but the pool has a curly yellow waterslide, so. I'm going to be a mom for a sec, though, and suggest there's at least one person present who will be cognizant of the possibility of drowning and protect the others. A sexy lifeguard, if you will.

Polson Pier
While it's a pain from an accessibility standpoint (at least via the TTC), the area surrounding the Polson Pier Entertainment Complex bears one of the best views of the Toronto skyline, which attracts droves of people on hot summer nights to the rickety boardwalk at the pier's edge. While it can get busy when there's a concert at the Sound Academy, sitting by the water with a few beers is unlikely to attract much of a heat score. And the view really is superb.

BONUS

Crothers' Woods
Ain't no love in the heart of the city. But there is a little forestation going on, and it provides great cover for getting boozy in secret. Crothers' Woods is located just northeast of the Bayview Extension and Pottery Road, just a quick jaunt from Broadview Stn. or bike ride from just about anywhere in the city. The one caution here is that there's no lighting at night, so you'll have to make use of this one for day drinking only.

Happy outdoor cocktail hour.

Photo by bending light on Flickr

New from The Guardian:

Microsoft has collaborated closely with US intelligence services to allow users’ communications to be intercepted, including helping the National Security Agency to circumvent the company’s own encryption, according to top-secret documents obtained by the Guardian.

…The NSA has devoted substantial efforts in the last two years to work with Microsoft to ensure increased access to Skype, which has an estimated 663 million global users.

One document boasts that Prism monitoring of Skype video production has roughly tripled since a new capability was added on 14 July 2012. “The audio portions of these sessions have been processed correctly all along, but without the accompanying video. Now, analysts will have the complete ‘picture’,” it says.

Last week, BART workers went on strike, shutting down the region’s major mass transit service for a few days. The strike has ended with what will ultimately be a victory for labor. What’s notable here though is the response from the Silicon Valley plutocrats who actively wanted the union crushed.

Tech blogger Sarah Lacy summed up her own attitude and that of many others in an interview with Marketplace:

Sarah Lacy, founder of tech news site Pando Daily, which is based in San Francisco, said “If I had more friends who were BART drivers, I would probably be very sympathetic to their cause, and if they had more friends who were building companies they would probably realize we’re not all millionaires, and we’re actually working pretty hard to build something.”

She said the BART strike exacerbated what she sees as a philosophical divide in the Bay Area. “People in the tech industry feel like life is a meritocracy. You work really hard, you build something and you create something, which is sort of directly opposite to unions.”

If I only cared to know working people, maybe I’d understand. But I’d never slum that much since my vision of meritocracy sees working-class people as below contempt. It’s hardly a wonder that Sam Biddle at Gawker calls Lacy “a free market monster.” But at least she has the right friends for a free market monster!

Kevin Roose has the big picture here:

Anti-union views aren’t unique to Silicon Valley gazillionaires — they’re shared by free-market boosters everywhere. But comments like Lacy’s and White’s in response to the BART strike revealed something new. Namely, portions of the tech community are not only observing the destruction of unions as a long-term sociopolitical trend, but actively cheering it on as an example of an intellectual “maker” class beating out working-class “takers.” The old Silicon Valley anti-unionism came from narrow corporate self-interest; the new seems more broadly ideological.

“The notion that ‘These workers are expendable’ is a fundamentally different attitude toward workers than ‘Let’s make sure they have these benefits so they don’t want to unionize,’” Berlin said.

In other words, it’s not Silicon Valley’s rejection of organized labor that should surprise us. It’s the class hostility that now often rides along with it.

The anti-union libertarianism that coincides with the workplace culture of Silicon Valley that also demands tremendous sacrifices from their own workers is a terrible plague upon the United States and the world, in part because it facilitates sociopaths like Steve Jobs to not care if the workers making his products in China are killing themselves and in part because of the attitudes toward workers shown by Silicon Valley during the BART strike.

Microsoft is shuffling personnel to better align divisions with company-wide goals.

Todd Klassy

We've heard rumblings of an imminent Microsoft reorganization for some months; today, it came to pass. CEO Steve Ballmer has announced the company's new shape and its new approach to developing products.

The reorganization sees an end to the product-based divisions such as "Windows and Windows Live" and "Microsoft Business Division." What Ballmer wants instead is "One strategy, one Microsoft." To do this, the company is being organized by function. Microsoft will have four engineering teams—operating system, apps, cloud, and devices—and then a number of company-wide groups for Marketing, Business Development and Evangelism, Advanced Strategy and Research, Finance, Legal, HR, and Operations. Here are the main groups:

• Terry Myerson, formerly head of the Windows Phone team, will take charge of the Operating Systems Engineering Group. This group will manage all operating system development, from phone to console to PC to cloud. The team will also own certain core cloud services.
• Julie Larson-Green, formerly head of Windows engineering, will take charge of the Devices and Studios Engineering Group. This group will manage the development and supply chains of all Microsoft devices, from mice to Xboxes, and will also be the home of all music, video, gaming, and entertainment teams.
• Qi Lu, formerly of the Bing team, will run the Application and Services Engineering Group. This will house productivity and communication software (such as Office and Skype) and search.
• Satya Nadella, formerly president of the Server and Tools division, will head the Cloud and Enterprise Engineering Group. This group will own data center and database software. It will also continue to be responsible for developer tools.
• Eric Rudder, formerly chief technical strategy officer, will lead the Advanced Strategy and Research Group, focusing on new technology trends and trustworthy computing.
• Tami Reller, formerly the chief marketing officer and chief financial officer in the Windows division, will lead a new Marketing Group that will also centralize all advertising.
• Tony Bates, formerly Skype CEO, will run the Business Development and Evangelism Group, both working on partner relationships (such as those with Nokia, Yahoo, and PC OEMs) and evangelism and developer outreach.
• Amy Hood will continue as chief financial officer, and the Finance Group will now centralize all finance operations that were previously managed within each division.

The Dynamics division will continue to stand somewhat apart from the rest of the company due to what Ballmer calls its need for "special focus."

Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Much has been said and will continue to be said about the necessity of Spike Lee's English-language remake of Park Chan-wook's Vengeance Trilogy flagship film Oldboy.

Read more...

"It has meant different things to me at different times in my life [...] Anytime I am struggling, in tough times or having to make a big decision, it is something I always come back to."

Dallas, Texas
7 October, 1974

[Redacted]

I doubt this letter will mean too much to you now – you can't even focus your eyes, yet, but maybe, years hence, it may mean something to you. So, I hope your father and mother will keep this for you until it does mean a little more to you.

You may or may not get to know me – your Grandfather – that is in someone else's hands. But just in case you do not – I'd like to leave a few ideas with you. Ideas, I may say, that I tried to germinate in your father's mind with varying degrees of success.

To begin with you are very welcome to this sad, tattered and abused old world. We really haven't done a very good job of preserving it for you. On the contrary we have plundered it of its wealth of minerals and oils, polluted its streams and even the very air we depend on for the very breath of our lives – and we've done this with our eyes wide open and with the knowledge that we were doing it! How we explain this, I really don't know except to say that I, for one, am sorry for it.

We have not learned, even, to live with our fellow men. Instead we have perfected more means to annihilate him – to wipe him (and ourselves) from the face of the Earth.

We produce record crops of grains and other foodstuffs, but still much of the world goes to bed on empty stomachs and thousands starve to death every day.

It's a strange and confusing world we leave to you. I only hope you can do a better job with it than we have done.

But, in spite of what I've said, there is much, in life to enjoy – to relish. There is also much that can be done to make life worth while and living worth the "candle." There is a rich heritage of literature and music that awaits your investigation – it's there for the taking – in the libraries of the country and in the archives of the museums. There is poetry and prose – enough to fill all the hours you can spare to listen to them and more knowledge, on every conceivable subject, than you can assimilate in a lifetime. It's all there just waiting for you to ask for it or to seek it out. Don't overlook it or pass it up for less important or less meaningful pastimes.

Most important of all is ability to savor life, to taste of it in as many variances as you can – while you can. Life never looks so short as when you look back on it. Unfortunately you cannot do this until it has passed you by. So, as you go through life, don't overlook the "Lily in the Field," the newborn puppy, the fledgling bird – for they are as much (or more) of life as the tall buildings, the shiny automobiles and the possessions we tend to place so much importance upon. If you can do just this much – life will be more meaningful for you.

When your Dad was born I was busy playing soldier, World War II was history – but recent history – and in which I had a small part. But then I lacked both the knowledge and the wisdom that comes from experience. Now, at 56, I think of what I might have done – and didn't. But all of us are blessed with "20/20" hindsight.

If I could package (with ribbon) those gifts that I would most like to give you, I would. But how do you package integrity, how do you wrap honesty, what kind of paper for a sense of humor, what ribbon for inquisitiveness?

But, since there is no way I can give you any of those things, I can in this year of your birth, wish that you will find some wisdom and some guidance from these words, and, perhaps my wish for a bright new life for you will, eventually, come to reality. At least I hope so – with all my heart.

Love,
Grandad.

In 1980, artist Tom Van Sant arranged 90 mirrors in the Mojave Desert at angles precisely calculated to overexpose the sensors on NASA’s Landsat II satellite 600 miles overhead and produce the image of a human eye 2.5 kilometers wide.

Two years later Van Sant commissioned the National Research and Resource Facility for Sub-Micron Structures at Cornell to etch the image of an eye a quarter-micron wide into a salt crystal:

The first image was 100,000 times larger than a human eye, the second 100,000 times smaller, two renderings of the same image that differ in scale by a factor of 10 billion.

“So the same artist who made the smallest drawing ever has also made the largest,” Richard Feynman told an audience. “Let’s go up another scale, the same amount again, another hundred thousand, and then try to draw an eye: Where would we have to draw it? Well, it turns out that it’s there — it’s a beautiful eye in the heavens, namely Saturn with her rings!”

More information at Van Sant’s website.

On one of the world's most dangerous roads, Pakistani drivers deliver supplies 150 miles into northwestern Pakistan. In 2011, Al Jazeera English made this 25-minute documentary that followed one of the trucks across the Lowari Pass. I didn't think I was going to watch the whole thing, but it turned out to be worth the time.

Some days make it particularly evident how telemarketers and Nigerian royalty spammers stay in business…

A long-elusive aviation innovation prize that has never had a winner in its 33-year existence has finally been claimed after a team of Toronto engineers built and then flew a human-powered hover bike.

The latest killing in the name of Google+: Google Latitude.

Google announced plans today to retire the location reporting and tracking service Latitude—and the company will instead encourage customers to direct their geolocation-reporting energies to Google+. Judging by Google's recent activity, this "Attack of the Google+ Blob" is far from over.

To the Internet's shock and dismay, Google also killed off Reader on July 1. Google's initial reasoning was that the service has been little-used. Google later explained that it thinks Reader is actually no longer a fit for the times we live in, where people can simply be Google+ users instead and get their news from their social media feeds, subscribe to brand pages, and forget their RSS salad days.

Google announced back in June 2011 that it had a cryptic but benign-sounding plan to put "more wood behind fewer arrows." This meant less effort on kooky Google Labs inventions, better user experiences, and more iterations on products people actually use. Well, make that "products Google wants people to use"—notably, Google+.

Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Pollution in Beijing during the construction of its Olympic stadium.

DOE

Coal is the least efficient of the fossil fuels in terms of the amount of energy gained vs. CO₂ released. Burning it also releases numerous toxic chemicals and particulates, which can exact a cost on a country's population in terms of reduced life expectancy and increased health costs. Figuring out the exact cost of coal use, however, is challenging because of a combination of different pollution controls and the mobility of the population.

Thanks to an unusual combination of policies (some completely unrelated to pollution), China has accidentally provided the opportunity to put an exact number on the human cost of coal use. And that number turns out to be staggering: 5.5 years of reduced life expectancy that, when spread over the half-billion people of northern China, means a loss of 2.5 billion life-years.

The Huai River line

There are two key policies that turned China into a giant natural experiment on the impact of coal. The first is that, until recent years, China has had laws in place that severely limited the mobility of its citizenry. People didn't tend to move around, so they continued to live (and die) near the site of their exposure. That makes lifetime exposures easy to estimate, and it ensures that local health and mortality records could be directly connected to these exposures.

Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Insurance companies may not cover schools which allow their teachers to carry firearms.

Here is How the Dismal Science Got Its Name, one of my favorite videos from the Great Economists course at MRUniversity.

It is perhaps no accident that the ardour for liberty is no longer expressed through political channels. Its main outlets are morally ambiguous figures such as Mr Snowden and Bradley Manning, the US soldier who gave classified documents to WikiLeaks. Technology will pose new challenges for all states. We are not in a world of John le Carré’s spies but one resembling CIA TV series Person of Interest, where states claim power over us ostensibly to prevent us coming to harm. But we cannot navigate this terrain by reinstating a form of moral hegemony where the rights of Americans count more; and the rest of the world be damned.

That is from Pratap Bhanu Mehta in the FT, the whole thing is excellent but the first two sentences cited above are the most striking of them all.

A government policy to promote coal use in Northern China has cut the life expectancy of some 500 million people by more than five years, on average.

That comes from a big new study in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, which used a quasi-natural experiment to quantify the health effects of air pollution from coal use.

From Brad Plumer, here is more.

A new low for California’s generally disgraceful prison system:

Doctors under contract with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation sterilized nearly 150 female inmates from 2006 to 2010 without required state approvals, the Center for Investigative Reporting has found.

At least 148 women received tubal ligations in violation of prison rules during those five years – and there are perhaps 100 more dating back to the late 1990s, according to state documents and interviews.

[...]

The allegations echo those made nearly a half-century ago, when forced sterilizations of prisoners, the mentally ill and the poor were commonplace in California. State lawmakers officially banned such practices in 1979.

In an interview with CIR, Heinrich said he provided an important service to poor women who faced health risks in future pregnancies because of past Caesarean sections. The 69-year-old Bay Area physician denied pressuring anyone and expressed surprise that local contract doctors had charged for the surgeries. He described the $147,460 total as minimal.

“Over a 10-year period, that isn’t a huge amount of money,” Heinrich said, “compared to what you save in welfare paying for these unwanted children – as they procreated more.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes was a very smart guy, but you know, he really shouldn’t be used as a model for everything…