The New York Times' Carol Pogash describes a cat café in the California city of Oakland that also helps place cat in new homess.

The Cat Town Cafe & Adoption Center, which opened in late October and has arranged 52 cat adoptions so far, claims to be the first permanent cat cafe in the United States. Customers line up for locally brewed strong ( Read more... )

Facebook's Ned was kind enough to link to this very insightful San Francisco Chronicle article from 1985 taking a look at the consequences of gentrification in San Francisco. I have seen many of these processes at work in different Toronto neighbourhoods in my decade here. Documentation of this going on earlier in North America history is ( Read more... )

• blogTO shares vintage postcard images of Toronto in the 1970s.
• Centauri Dreams notes a proposed method for detecting exomoons, by detecting the disruptions that they cause in their parent worlds' magnetic fields on the pattern of Io's disruption of Jupiter's magnetic fields.
• The Dragon's Tales notes a new paper suggesting that Enceladus' geysers are ( Read more... )

The News-Observer featured an interesting article by one Tim Johnson examining the consequences of large-scale migration from Mexico's Yucatán peninsula to the United States (specifically to the San Francisco area). All sorts of things have been brought back: money, crime networks, cultural influences.

Wander into Cafe Rex in Oxkutzcab, Mexico, ( Read more... )

Kevin Roose's New York article suggesting that San Francisco is evolving into a cultural and economic centre outshining New York City is interesting, and worthy a full read.

It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment that San Francisco morphed into bizarro-world New York, when it went from being the city’s dorky, behoodied West Coast cousin to being, ( Read more... )

• Acts of Minor Treason's Andrew Barton shares a photograph of a San Francisco streetcar
  
• Eastern Approaches describes how the Serbian ambassador to Turkey was cut off by the protests.
• Geocurrents' Asya Pereltsvaig traces the etymology of book in different world languages.
• GNXP's Razib Khan notes that imagined far futures where humans are recognizably ( Read more... )

Geocurrents' Martin Lewis has a post up that takes a look at population density in the San Francisco Bay Area and its intersections with mass transit. I thought it worthwhile to highlight it given the critical importance of population density in debates on transit in the Greater Toronto Area.

A sound urban system, environmentalists now argue, is ( Read more... )

• 80 Beats links to a profile of Taiwanese computer programmer Kevin Wang, the man whose humourous animations of news events have created for him a worldwide fandom.
• At Centauri Dreams, Paul Gilster discusses the implications of theories of planetary formation suggesting that the number of free-floating planets far exceeds the number of star-orbiting ( Read more... )