Toomas Karmo

Monday, 8 January 2018

Toomas Karmo: Our Biggest Cyberproblem Since Y2K: Debian GNU/Linux Observations

Quality assessment:

On the 5-point scale current in Estonia, and surely in nearby nations, and familiar to observers of the academic arrangements of the late, unlamented, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (applying the easy and lax standards Kmo deploys in his grubby imaginary "Aleksandr Stepanovitsh Popovi nimeline sangarliku raadio instituut" (the "Alexandr Stepanovitch Popov Institute of Heroic Radio") and his grubby imaginary "Nikolai Ivanovitsh Lobatshevski nimeline sotsalitsliku matemaatika instituut" (the "Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky Institute of Socialist Mathematics") - where, on the lax and easy grading philosophy of the twin Institutes, 1/5 is "epic fail", 2/5 is "failure not so disastrous as to be epic", 3/5 is "mediocre pass", 4/5 is "good", and 5/5 is "excellent"): 4/5. Justification: Kmo had time to develop the necessary points to reasonable length.

Revision history:

All times in these blog "revision histories" are stated in UTC (Universal Coordinated Time/ Temps Universel Coordoné, a precisification of the old GMT, or "Greenwich Mean Time"), in the ISO-prescribed YYYYMMDDThhmmZ timestamping format. UTC currently leads Toronto civil time by 5 hours and currently lags Tallinn civil time by 2 hours.

20180125T2152Z/version 3.1.0: Kmo made some very tiny changes in the interest of clarity - changes on the borderline between the substantive and the cosmetic. He reserved the right to make nonsubstantive, purely cosmetic, tweaks over the coming 48 hours, as here-undocumented version 3.1.1, 3.1.2, 3.1.3, ... .
20180123T0530Z/version 3.0.0: Kmo added various points about CERT and about his own choice of security tools. He also corrected a very bad typo (he had said that he was running Debian GNU/Linux 9.2, when in fact he was running 9.3), and corrected minor typos and infelicities. - He reserved the right to make nonsubstantive, purely cosmetic, tweaks over the coming 48 hours, as here-undocumented version 3.0.1, 3.0.2, 3.0.3, ... .
20180109T0325Z/version 2.0.0: Kmo uploaded a fine-grained outline at the top of his page, pushing the coarse-grained outline downward. He hoped to finish converting this fine-grained outline into coherent full-sentences prose at some point in the next 48 hours.

20180108T0037Z/version 1.0.0: Kmo had time to upload just a coarse-grained outline. He hoped to proceed to a fine-grained outline within the coming 2 hours.

[CAUTION: A bug in the blogger server-side software has in some past months shown a propensity to insert inappropriate whitespace at some points in some of my posted essays. If a screen seems to end in empty space, keep scrolling down. The end of the posting is not reached until the usual blogger "Posted by Toomas (Tom) Karmo at" appears. - The blogger software has also shown a propensity, at any rate when coupled with my erstwhile, out-of-date, Web-authoring uploading browser, to generate HTML that gets formatted in different ways on different downloading browsers. Some downloading browsers have sometimes perhaps not correctly read in the entirety of the "Cascading Style Sheets" (CSS) which on all ordinary Web servers control the browser placement of margins, sidebars, and the like. If you suspect CSS problems in your particular browser, be patient: it is probable that while some content has been shoved into some odd place (for instance, down to the bottom of your browser, where it ought to appear in the right-hand margin), all the server content has been pushed down into your browser in some place or other. - Finally, there may be blogger vagaries, outside my control, in font sizing or interlinear spacing or right-margin justification. - Anyone inclined to help with trouble-shooting, or to offer other kinds of technical advice, is welcome to write me via Toomas.Karmo@gmail.com.]

The first week in 2018 January brought news of what seems to be the biggest problem in information-technology security since Y2K, comprising the "Meltdown" and "Spectre" vulnerabilities.

****

Here are the basics:

Authoritative descriptions of the vulnerabilities are written at the USA's "National Cybersecurity Federally Funded Research and Development Center" (under the non-profit "Mitre Corporation"), as a handful of CVE documents. (CVE is short for "Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures".) Meltdown is covered in CVE-2017-5754. Spectre is covered not in one CVE, but in two: CVE-2017-5753 (to be thought of as reporting Spectre in "Variant 1") and CVE-2017-5715 (to be thought of as reporting Spectre in "Variant 2"). An easy way of checking the USA government's Computer Emergency Readiness Team (CERT) stance on all three CVEs is through the monitoring of https://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/584653 ("Vulnerability Note VU#584653", incorporating hyperlinks to appropriate writeups for CVE-2017-5754, CVE-2017-5753, and CVE-2017-5715). It is an advantage that the just-mentioned page gets updated roughly daily (and in fact more often than another pertinent CERT discussion, the less detailed "Alert" at https://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/alerts/TA18-004A). Helpfully, the incorporated hyperlinks lead to documents maintained by the USA's National Institute of Standards and Technology - the same people as we have perhaps come to know, in a way, through their work on spectroscopy standards, or again through their longstanding time-signal (shortwave station WWV) outreach.
Of the two, Meltdown is more readily blocked than Spectre.
Meltdown is largely, though not completely, confined to Intel CPUs.
Spectre affects not Intel alone, but most or all contemporary CPUs (and so, in particular, affects also Intel's highest-profile competitor, AMD, as well as most or all Intel CPUs from 1995 onward).
The assertion made early in 2018 January at some USA government-agency level, that an effective response to Spectre might require outright CPU replacement, seems no longer to be being made at USA government-agency level, and in particular is being avoided in current writing from CERT. (So perhaps even the deeper of the two vulnerabilities, namely Spectre, can be fully or partly blocked at the level of some thing or things in coding, such as an eventual kernel revision, or more radically an eventual revision in CPU microcode - even while retaining the current, 2017-and-earlier, CPU hardware designs?)
As far as I can see, CERT is silent at the moment on the Google "reptoline" software solution. It might be useful to check reptoline discussions in the general I.T. press over the coming weeks.

****

I can help with just one thing, as a conceivable future low-level cyber consultant. That one thing is the construction of a humble, single-user Debian GNU/Linux workstation, such as might be appropriate for a classical philologist, a lawyer, a geopolitics analyst, a physicist, or a mathematician. Trying to be helpful, I offer a few notes from my own narrow perspective. Perhaps these notes will serve as a point of comparison for people using GNU/Linux distributions other than Debian, whether for my own narrow purposes or for something in the broad information-technology mainstream (such as sysadmin work on a Web server).

****

On the same Ontario working day as I noticed the BBC starting coverage of Meltdown and Spectre, Debian rolled out a Meltdown repair, i.e., a repair for CVE-2017-5754 (without, however, repairing either variant of Spectre, i.e., without repairing either CVE-2017-5753 or CVE-2017-5715).
I was advised on that day of the Debian repair by e-mail from Yves-Alexis Perez within the Debian Project, transmitted from security@debian.org at UTC=20170104T2233Z, and received at my Toomas.Karmo@gmail.com a couple of minutes later.
Within an hour of receiving the e-mail alert, I had my Debian 9.3 GNU/Linux "Stable" (codenamed, within the Debian Project, "Stretch") updated, via my usual command uuu (my personally concocted root bash-shell alias for the harder-to-type apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade).
In the course of this updating, my system wrote to screen (as was to be hoped) a message saying that I was currently running a kernel older than a kernel now being made available on my system, and that I should therefore reboot.
I encountered no problem in rebooting.
I chose for the moment to keep not one but two old kernels on my system even after the reboot, thereby giving my Debian 9.3 GNU/Linux system the configuration displayed in the following /usr/bin/xterm session:

$
$pwd
/boot
$
$ls -l vmlinu*
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4204320 Sep 18 21:34 vmlinuz-4.9.0-3-amd64
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4212512 Dec 22 19:39 vmlinuz-4.9.0-4-amd64
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4216608 Jan 4 06:12 vmlinuz-4.9.0-5-amd64
$

A subsequent check of currently running processes confirmed that I was indeed, as desired, running the most recent of the three kernels by now sitting on my hard drive:

$
$date -u
Tue Jan 9 03:24:12 UTC 2018
$
$cat /proc/version
Linux version 4.9.0-5-amd64 (debian-kernel@lists.debian.org) (gcc version 6.3.0 20170516 (Debian 6.3.0-18) ) #1 SMP Debian 4.9.65-3+deb9u2 (2018-01-04)
$

I continue to monitor, occasionally, the situation regarding the still-outstanding vulnerabilities (namely, CVE-2017-5753, or Spectre in Variant 1, and CVE-2017-5715, or Spectre in Variant 2). I use for this occasional monitoring https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/CVE-2017-5753 and https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/CVE-2017-5715.
I also find it mildly interesting to run /usr/bin/debsecan, in addition to my more usual security tools /usr/sbin/chkrootkit, /usr/bin/rkhunter, /usr/bin/clamscan, and /usr/sbin/lynis. (Yes, yes, I know, or at least I kinda-sorta know: there are arguments for installing lynis in some cunning way, perhaps quite outside /usr/sbin, perhaps onto a mere USB stick, and not even doing the install from the behind-the-times Debian "Stretch" repositories. And the pertinent partition on that USB stick might be mounted read-only, with the stick physically detached from the machine when lynis is not being run. I really do have to improve my work here. Maybe my improvements will come very soon indeed, maybe not.) The simple debsecan reveals 1821 CVE notices, issued by Mitre as against myu personal workstation presently comprising 2168 Debian packages, all from Debian GNU/Linux 9.3 (and at the moment not running any software of any kind from outside Debian). Of these CVE notices, fully 118 are from the year 2018. One might expect the generated list to show CVE-2017-5753 and CVE-2017-5715 (Spectre and Spectre) while omitting a mention of the now-addressed CVE-2017-5754 (Meltdown). Alas, however, all three are in the generated list - at least, on the naive way in which I am so far running debsecan.

[This is the end of the current blog posting.]

Toomas Karmo: A Fourth Resolution for the 2018 New Year

20180125T2208Z/version 1.3.0: Kmo made some small changes in substance, most notably by supplying somewhat better legal background on the controversial 2008 sale of the David Dunlap Observatory. - He reserved the right to make nonsubstantive, purely cosmetic, tweaks over the coming 48 hours, as here-undocumented version 1.3.1, 1.3.2, 1.3.3, ... .
20180123T1915Z/version 1.2.0: Kmo made some small changes in substance in the existing text, and added a graphic. - He reserved the right to make nonsubstantive, purely cosmetic, tweaks over the coming 48 hours, as here-undocumented version 1.2.1, 1.2.2, 1.2.3, ... .
20180109T0116Z/version 1.1.0: Kmo improved his fine-grained outline.

20180109T0033Z/version 1.0.0: Kmo had time to upload a duly polished fine-grained outline. He hoped to convert this into full-sentences prose at some point in the coming 36 hours, perhaps through a series of incremental uploads.

I have now made a fourth, relatively minor, resolution for the 2018 New Year. My intention is to supplement the three rather more serious resolutions I published here on blogspot just after the New Year.

****

Before setting out my fourth resolution, I give its wider context.

When life was still normal at Ontario's David Dunlap Observatory and Park, i.e., DDO&P (that is to say, up to the troubled summer of 2008), two species of large mammal dominated our woodland. We had white-tail deer (Odocoileus virginianus, I presume), and we had coyotes (Canis latrans, I presume).

In respect of the deer, I maintained a reserved stance, even while mindful of the admiration which those DDO&P creatures were getting in our Observatory and Town-of-Richmond-Hill communities. Graceful though our deer were, they had also a habit of attacking perennial borders. As the person then mainly doing the DDO&P gardening, I was able to protect our six main roses, flanking the entrance to the main dome, with companion plantings of Lavandula angustifolia. (This is one of the lavenders.) There was not, on the other hand, enough time or money to plant Lavandula angustifolia in significant quantities near the Administration Building, were most of our perennials were. Consequently, we had incursions, with the white-tails evidently preferring blossoms to leaves, and among the blossoms specially selecting phlox and daylilies.

During this period, my diplomatic sympathies lay less with our deer than with our coyotes. Here, at least, were true colleagues - posing no threat to perennials, and moreover engagingly shaggy, shy, brainy, and melodious!

I recall a pre-2008 night on which I was rostered as "Observer", and on which we for some reason had not one but two "Telescope Operators", or "T.O.'s". The coyotes were in full voice, having perhaps succeeded in bringing down a deer. (I would in my then frame of mind have thanked them for it, were they capable of reading diplomatic cables.) The two T.O.'s and I, hearing the racket, went out to the main dome catwalk and howled along with them. - I have read somewhere (though I have not bothered to check this) that when humans howl to coyotes, the coyotes realize in their brainy way what species is addressing them, and accordingly howl a specially constructed response, not used by them when howling merely amid their own kind.

And I remember one very cold winter night, on which I think I was again "Observer", and the roster was following its normal custom of providing the Observer with just a single supporting T.O. Since the sky was overcast, the T.O. and I finished our work and left, walking south from the Administration Building toward the car park. To our surprise, several coyotes approached us, as they normally (being timid) would not. I talked to the closest one, for a minute or two, and fancied myself securing a hearing. I think that these habitually invisible animals were clever enough to have formed the thought that in such bitter weather humans might be inclined to look kindly on them, and might therefore now be inclined to toss a bit of food onto their snow. Since, however, humans should not feed wild animals except when lives are at risk, the T.O. and I kept to ourselves the scraps of food which I think we were carrying.

With the miseries of 2008 and subsequent years, triggered by the University's controversial sale of DDO&P to Corsica Development Inc. in defiance of Jessie Donalda Dunlap's 1932 Deed of Indenture, my attitude to the deer shifted. (When I write "controversial", I have in view several points, including the fact that the legal theory behind the sale never got tested in court. Ontario Superior Court was indeed looming, a little after the year 2000. Then, however, the Dunlap heirs, having already been enduring 15 or 20 or so years of University of Toronto pressure, caved in, reaching an out-of-court settlement.) I found myself able to think of the deer in a sympathetic way when, in the course of our many bad events, they really did appear to face a life-threatening emergency.

In 2010 or so, Corsica Development Inc. had ploughed up some of the modest DDO&P fieldland, adjacent to the more extensive DDO&P woodland. This made the deer unable to forage effectively. (Fortunately, Corsica was called to account by the municipality, and I think did not repeat its mistake in subsequent years.) Several of us conservationists mounted a rescue operation. We secured the services of a gentleman (since moved away) whose property helpfully abutted DDO&P. My assigned job was to enter the grounds - illegally, in the breach of a personal 2008-07-30 police prohibition - and scatter corn cobs.

I suppose this will forever be one of the cherished memories from my long decades in Canada: twilight is closing in; and one has the special, sickening, Soviet-Estonian feeling of legal exposure, with the so-to-speak KGB for once having the law on their own side; and then silently, under the trees, there approach bucks with huge antlers. They are not particularly shy. They are even intelligently appreciative of the food which their worried human visitor is about to toss onto that clean snow, projecting in their movements a certain impatience to get fed. In their eerie setting of failing Canadian sky, the bucks looked and behaved almost like farm animals. One might have thought them overgrown calves, or slimmed horses, except that they sported magnificent head-racks. One in consequence felt rather inclined to overlook the attacks which they or their female consorts had in some past summers mounted on our phlox and daylilies.

In our various 2008-onward DDO&P conservationist troubles, I eventually contracted the bad habit of doing comic impressions of one of our municipal politicians, when safely outside the Town Council chamber. At some subsequent point, I realized that such impersonations, although comic, were far from constituting correct behaviour. I accordingly made myself an undertaking to cease and desist. This promise I have pretty much managed to keep, catching myself in general after just the first couple of parodic syllables, and reminding myself that "I hold it all in - I restrain myself - for the sake of my brothers the coyotes."

I herewith formally declare to myself that I will be behaving correctly, at all future times, for the sake not of the coyotes alone, but of the coyotes and the deer.

****

It is in such a context, then, that I now approach Mr V.V. Putin. Realizing that I wronged Town Council behind their back with my comic impersonations, I am now realizing also that I have been wronging Mr V.V. Putin here on this blog, by disrespectfully writing "Vovan Vovanich" or "Vovan Vovanitch" or "Vovan Vovanitsch". "Vovan V." is underworld argot. It is the sort of thing you call a criminal associate in Russia - as you perhaps might, if counterfactually and hypothetically a member of the old-fashioned London underworld, call your accomplice in extortion "Sam the Grease", and your voluptuous brace of lady friends "Babs" and "Bubbles".

So enough of this, say I, respectfully, to the Kremlin. For the sake of peace, I retract "Vovan V.", even while continuing duly and warily mindful of the contemporary Kremlin's overall criminality,. No, say I, by way of a fourth New Year 2018 resolution: there is now to be no "Vovan V.", here at blogspot. Henceforth, here at blogspot, I am to use simply "Mr V.V. Putin" - or at worst, in a wan and fleeting glow of just the mildest levity, "Gospodin Vladimir Vladimirovitch".

I am strengthened in my resolution by recent photos on the Web, showing Mr V.V. Putin attending the 2018-01-07 Orthodox Christmas liturgy. I do hope copyright law allows my showing a couple of them, by way of a screenshot from one of my Debian GNU/Linux 9.3 desktops (under Gnome), in which I have launched the /usr/bin/firefox browser:

Clockwise, from lower right: a /usr/bin/firefox window, showing Alamy stock material from http://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-vladimir-putin-at-the-orthodox-christmas-church-service-in-novo-jerusalemnovoerusalimski-44240097.html, or from a similar page; a second /usr/bin/firefox window, showing material from http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/47457; a /usr/bin/xterm window, showing some interesting private flat-ASCII ("plain *.txt") casenotes. Alamy explains that Mr Putin was attending the "Novo-Jerusalem (Novoerusalimski) Voskresenski monastery near Moscow". The kremlin.ru site indicates that on the occasion of its own photo, Mr Putin had travelled a long way out from Moscow: "The President attended a Christmas mass at the Church of the Intercession of the Holy Virgin in the village of Otradnoye on the outskirts of Voronezh. The service was attended by local parishioners and children from the church orphanage." - I hope, subject to correction by others, that through merely putting onto blogspot a screenshot showing a couple of browser windows, I am conforming to copyright law on images. (It is a bit like this, that if I photograph a street with a billboard of municipal politician I.M.Reel-Bigge, with Mr Reel-Bigge's face in all its glory, I am not thereby making an improper use of his expensively procured studio portrait. My reasoning - I am here subject to correction by jurists - is that my photo is in legal terms of the street, and is not a mere reproduction of what Mr Reel-Bigge bought from the photo studio.) - Many will complain that I am being too nice to Mr V.V. Putin. The complaint will be that he is using the trappings of religion in exactly the calculated, self-serving way familiar from the politics of North America. Well, say I in response, be that as it may: liturgy is still liturgy. If all of us have our motives probed when we are in church, few of us will end up looking good. (As it says in the de profundis psalm, in the KJV translation: "If thou, Lord, shouldest mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand?") - I may as well take this small opportunity not only to thank the kremlin.ru team for publishing Voronezh liturgical photo material, but also to suggest to them that Mr Putin pay me a visit. Russia has been continuing, this past week, to monitor my blogspot writing. I would respectfully submit that FSB or SVR are likely to have been among my readers. If, however, we are to have a visit, then let it be done not just now, but when I am safely settled "Back Home", I hope in the near vicinity of Tõravere (as explained this week in my long, fancy, now-polished "Operatsioon Kodune Koli/Operation 'Eastward Ho!'" blogspot posting). My visiting foreign dignitary sits in the armchair by my envisaged Rumford fireplace; I sit in another chair; and we have a nice, sensible, 45-minute chat, more about religion than about politics. - Tartu Observatory personnel would in this scenario likely be upset by the presence, near their very gates, of so many guys in shades and black suits, each sporting an enormous bulge at the breast pocket. The strong presence of our own earnest little Mossad-or-Shin Bet-or-MI6-or-MI5, the "Kaitsepolitsei", is not likely to go down well either. Still worse will be the massive buzzing of choppers, both Kaitsepolitsei and foreign. But well, what the heck: you can't please everyone. - As is usual with blogspot publishing, the image can be enlarged by mouse-clicking.

[This is the end of the current blog posting.]

Monday, 1 January 2018

Toomas Karmo: DDO Conservation: Advisory to Police

Quality assessment:

On the 5-point scale current in Estonia, and surely in nearby nations, and familiar to observers of the academic arrangements of the late, unlamented, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (applying the easy and lax standards Kmo deploys in his grubby imaginary "Aleksandr Stepanovitsh Popovi nimeline sangarliku raadio instituut" (the "Alexandr Stepanovitch Popov Institute of Heroic Radio") and his grubby imaginary "Nikolai Ivanovitsh Lobatshevski nimeline sotsalitsliku matemaatika instituut" (the "Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky Institute of Socialist Mathematics") - where, on the lax and easy grading philosophy of the twin Institutes, 1/5 is "epic fail", 2/5 is "failure not so disastrous as to be epic", 3/5 is "mediocre pass", 4/5 is "good", and 5/5 is "excellent"): 4/5. Justification: Kmo had time to develop the necessary points to reasonable length.

Revision history:
All times in these blog "revision histories" are stated in UTC (Universal Coordinated Time/ Temps Universel Coordoné, a precisification of the old GMT, or "Greenwich Mean Time"), in the ISO-prescribed YYYYMMDDThhmmZ timestamping format. UTC currently leads Toronto civil time by 5 hours and currently lags Tallinn civil time by 2 hours.

20180103T1907Z/version 2.2.0: Km corrected an incorrect date reference in connection with his 2016 blogspot "Essay on Sorrow". - Kmo transmitted this content as e-mail at UTC=20180103T1916Z, to info@yrp.ca, marlene.therrien@opp.ca, Virginia@VirginiaMacLean.com, dbronskill@goodmans.ca, with cc to MPozzebon@metrusdev.com, info@observatoryhill.ca, info@marel.to, officemayor@richmondhill.ca, vito.spatafora@richmondhill.ca, brenda.hogg@richmondhill.ca, greg@gregberos.com, tom.muench@richmondhill.ca, castro.liu@richmondhill.ca, david.west@richmondhill.ca, karen.cilevitz@richmondhill.ca, godwin.chan@richmondhill.ca clerks@richmondhill.ca, rmoridi.mpp.co@liberal.ola.org, attorneygeneral@ontario.ca, cballard.mpp.co@liberal.ola.org, bmauro.mpp.co@liberal.ola.org, ynaqvi.mpp.co@liberal.ola.org, commissioner@eco.on.ca, premier@ontario.ca, justin.trudeau@parl.gc.ca, andrew.scheer@parl.gc.ca, thomas.mulcair@parl.gc.ca, elizabeth.may@parl.gc.ca, Majid.Jowhari@parl.gc.ca, nuntiatura@nuntiatura.ca, archbishop@archtoronto.org, david@donnellylaw.ca, anne@donnellylaw.ca, nationaltrust@nationaltrustcanada.ca, KZarzour@yrmg.com, newsroom@yrmg.com, news@nowtoronto.com, editorial@torontolife.com, Newsroom@globeandmail.ca, gmason@globeandmail.com, city@thestar.ca, hmallick@thestar.ca, jfiorito@thestar.ca, letters@macleans.ca, letters@torontolife.com, ptyson@skyandtelescope.com, Toomas.Karmo@gmail.com. In 2018-01-03 phone conversations with the RCMP, Kmo did not succeed in obtaining an RCMP e-mail address. He therefore used the standard RCMP Web contact form, writing at UTC=20180103T1927Z the following: ((QUOTE))Dear Sirs: I have to report supicious corporate activity in Richmond Hill, Ontario, involving a mortgage taken out by Corsica Development Inc., in the David Dunlap Observatory heritage-conservation matter. I learn from telephone consultations with the RCMP today that corporate fraud is strictly in the territory of OPP, whom I have already contacted. But here the case (if there is a case at all) is complex, involving multiple considerations not fully confined to fears of fraud, and perhaps ultimately falling within the joint competence of OPP and RCMP. Instead of sending the RCMP a long report from this "http://www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/cont/comment-eng.htm" interface, I would suggest the RCMP e-mail me or phone me. It will help to first have a look at my long report, in its entirety. For your convenience, and the convenience of officials and lawyers, and the like outside RCMP, I have uploaded the entire long report to my http://toomaskarmo.blogspot.com (posting of 2017-01-01 or 2017-01-02, headed "DDO Conservation: Advisory to Police". Once we are in e-mail or phone contact, we can consider what to do next. You may, for example, next wish me to visit some RCMP Detachment, perhaps in Newmarket. ((/QUOTE))
20180103T1740Z/version 2.1.0: Kmo adjusted a few nuances, while also correcting some small number of typos.
20180103T0217Z/version 2.0.0: Kmo finished converting the point-form outline into coherent full-sentences prose. He reserved the right to make tiny, nonsubstantive, purely cosmetic tweaks over the coming two hours, as here-undocumented versions 2.0.1, 2.0.2, 2.0.3, before transmitting e-mailing his words to the various desks needing to see them.
20180102T1745Z/version 1.1.0: Kmo fine-tuned the point-form outline, adding material regarding the possible nature of a future reconciliation with lawyer Virginia MacLean.
20180102T0313Z/version 1.0.0: Kmo had time to upload a point-form outline of a letter he proposed to send to the three pertinent levels of police. He hoped to finish converting this outline into coherent full-sentences prose by UTC=20180102T2000Z, and to transmit the full-sentences prose to the three levels of police, with appropriate ccs to appropriate lawyers, appropriate officials, and appropriate other parties.

1. Background to My Specific Problem

Mindful of the citizen's responsibility to report suspicious things, I write to the three pertinent levels of policing (to YRP, to OPP, and to RCMP) regarding Ontario's David Dunlap Observatory and Park (DDO&P) heritage-conservation file. I regret being a little late in doing this, deferring to the New Year what I had hoped to complete just before Christmas.

Of the roughly 76.5-hectare historic DDO&P Richmond Hill greenspace, 32 hectares is now slated for subdivision development by a commercial entity, "Corsica Development Inc.", within the general fold of "DG Group" (a corporation linked to the DeGasperis family, and known until 2015 April as "Metrus").

When I write "slated for development", I have in mind the fact that the envisaged subdivision is running behind its announced schedule. We were told many months ago that the project would be "coming in the spring of 2017". Then the advertising changed, announcing instead an autumn arrival. Upon checking the main promotional Web site, http://myobservatoryhill.ca, at UTC=20180102T2100Z, I still find the wording "Opening Fall 2017". A quick inspection from Bayview Avenue, just south of Hillsview Drive and just north of Fern Avenue, reveals graded, possibly paved, streets, and street lamps, but no houses. In my last night-time inspection from Bayview, some days before Christmas, I did not see any of those street lamps emitting light. The fact that http://myobservatoryhill.ca lacks an appropriate update might in some investigative minds trigger the suspicion that all is not now going smoothly. (To avoid a libel suit, I not only remark herewith that this is my own private suspicion, but that I am happy to have my views corrected - optimally either (1) by an e-mail communication from the developer or (2) by a blogspot comment from the developer, at my http://toomaskarmo.blogspot.com, under the 2018 January posting headed "DDO Conservation: Advisory to Police".)

Over the past months, I have recorded my various observations and fears regarding DDO&P at the just-mentioned blog.

As can be seen from an examination of my various relevant blogspot entries, I have since 2007 done what I could in a vain effort to keep Corsica Development Inc. out of DDO&P - or, failing that, then at any rate to keep Corsica's malign lights more than just a couple of hundred metres away from the telescopes. With the telescopes vulnerable to light pollution, and with the biggest of the three current telescopes the largest on Canadian soil, we face here probably the largest national cultural-heritage crisis of the past decade.

The police will be able to see from my various blogspot postings that I have lost the bulk of my life savings, expending around 500,000 CAD or 550,000 CAD, without in all this effort managing to save so much as a single tree.

The police will also be able to see from my various blogspot postings, and from their supplementary reading outside blogspot, in my http://www.karen-vs-toomas-blog.ca/ and http://www.karen-vs-toomas-legaldocs.ca/, that I have suffered an attempted law suit, settled out of court, by a pro-subdivision municipal politician, Ms (now Ward Councillor) Karen Cilevitz. This particular legal matter has been responsible for roughly one-tenth of my overall financial loss.

In reviewing the older parts of my blogspot blog, the police should particularly note the posting of 2016-04-26, headed "Essay on Sorrow - Its Anatomy and Its Remedies". Within that posting, the police, if they are trying to establish the general, broad, contextual, picture, should note my reference to a recipient of this week's correspondence-with-police, lawyer Ms Virginia MacLean (Q.C., L.S.M.). Ms MacLean is, I stress, not directly connected with my present main topic. For present purposes, she figures only in background, context, and periphery. But I do think it proper to say at this early, context-establishing, stage, the following: should my present letter lead to a widely scoped police enquiry, then journalistic background on Ms MacLean can be had by the police analysts from https://www.yorkregion.com/news-story/1441621-lawyers-frustrated-at-richmond-hill-omb-hearing/. This item is a 2012-09-11 community-newspaper article by Marney Beck, headed "Lawyers frustrated at Richmond Hill OMB hearing". As far as I can see from my own observations in the OMB hearing room, Ms Beck reported Ms MacLean's surprise 2012-09-10 legal manoeuvre, and its wider legal significance, accurately.

Also within that "Essay on Sorrow" posting, the police analysts - if, I repeat, they find themselves trying to establish the general, broad, contextual, picture, in some widely scoped investigation - should note my reference to conceivable anomalies at the University of Toronto (the owner of DDO&P until 2008). I make the reference in a passage in which I choose as my key words the following: has claimed to have seen a relevant University document, asserting an ongoing University contractual or quasi-contractual stake in the envisaged sale of homes.

2. My Specific Problem

Having written up the background, I can now turn to my main present task, by writing up my specific problem.

I am writing specifically about a mortgage, taken out by Corsica, which looks to my untrained eye odd, and continues to look odd as I make some enquiries. (I have consulted, among others, a couple of people close to the real-estate world, and in the last few days also (briefly, informally) an American private investigator - unfortunately for my casework, however, not (as it now appears to me) standing relevantly close to that particular world.)

I made my worries as clear as I could in my blogspot essay of 2017-12-18 or 2017-12-19, headed "As Christmas of 2017 Approaches".

In that same essay, I tried to deal as systematically as I could with my other, perhaps irrational, fears, which touch even on the FSB and SVR overseas - the fear of murder or injury by unfriendly parties (this is more, to be sure, a Canadian than an overseas, FSB-or-SVR, fear), and the fear of fresh Canadian litigation (perhaps this time round, not by Ward Councillor Karen Cilevitz at all: instead, I feel nervous about the prospect of legal attack by the developer, and (as I this week reflect) from the ostensibly 2012-conservationist lawyer Ms Virginia MacLean).

To keep my present letter to the police reasonably short, (1) I respectfully recommend that the police read my 2017-12-18/2017-12-19 posting itself, and nevertheless (2) I here reproduce the core of my 2017-12-18/2017-12-19 argument. I reproduce it here as a precaution, in case the police lack the time for doing much work on the 2017-12-18/2017-12-19 posting.

Here, then, is a verbatim reproduction of the core of what I had to say via blogspot on 2017-12-18 or 2017-12-19:

/.../ the Big Mortgage. Is all well here, or must we now be vigilant against the possibility of corporate crime? Since, as I will explain in a moment, I have my fumbling, purely amateur, reasons for suspicion, I document everything. Proceeding with due regard to my responsibilities as a citizen stumbling across things that might eventually prove police-significant, I use the blogspot.com servers now, and use e-mail later this week, to draw the documentation I herewith create to the attention of the three relevant levels of policing:

to the York Regional Police (their normal remit is municipal nuts-and-bolts, such as break-and-enter, or again domestic violence; so they are the first port of call in DDO&P matters);
to the Ontario Provincial Police (their normal remit includes cases concerning provincial roads; I do not know at what exact point the YRP remit ends and theirs begins);
to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), who I believe have a special interest in 'Ndràngheta.

Here, then, is my documentation:

What I am calling the Big Mortgage was taken out from the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC), as a loan for 135,000,000 CAD to Corsica Development Inc. The Debenture is to be viewed in the Land Registry as instrument YR2601618. It was registered, in association with the Property Identification Number ("PIN") 03144-0876, on the Friday which was 2016-12-23 at "11:13" (this must mean "EST"), making the UTC instant of registration 20161223T1613Z). In "Schedule A" of this instrument is a reference to "Demand Debenture dated December 21, 2016".
There is, as far as I can understand from the paperwork, no schedule of repayment to CIBC. CIBC can for its part demand immediate repayment of the principal, I think in full, at any time.
The interest rate on the loan may or may not make sense. Having tried to consult with around four potentially knowledgeable individuals so far, I am left puzzled. The rate is 21 percent - in other words far more than what one might encounter in what I gather to be ordinary small-business practice. A real-estate expert, whom I shall call "Signora Abruzzo", and who has the advantage of having recently been one of Canada's more eminent realtors, offers me the non-lawyerly opinion that this rate is legal, although (says "Signora") a bit on the high side. "Signora" adds, in what seemed to me reasonable when we were exchanging our e-mails, that Corsica would be expected to pay high interest. On this forensic detail "Signora's" argument was that Corsica as a corporation (whatever, I would add, the private affluence of its directors) holds no relevant assets beyond its 32 development-zoned hectares.
On the other side of the debate, however, stands another person, "Monsieur Flippingue", who has been near some real-estate operations without herself or himself doing the actual flipping. "Monsieur Flippingue" calls my attention to the odd timing. Why, s/he asks, is the loan taken out in December at all (let alone on the very last business days before Christmas), when the various construction trades seek payment for their labour and materials later - namely, when the weather is warming up? Why have a loan on the books so early, in a dormant season, when the said loan is so expensive? Monsieur Flippingue additionally argues for me that an expensive CIBC loan does not make terribly good sense, when Corsica is anchored in a presumably dense network of family-friendly contacts. If, asks "Monsieur", money has to be put up, then why can it not be put up from somewhere within those two family empires, at some more advantageous rate? (I do from the Web know the combined DeGasperis-and-Muzzo wealth to be on at least the order of 2,000,000,000 CAD or 3,000,000,000 CAD. This - to recall lexicographer Dr Samuel Johnson's remark in the context of a squalid brewery civil-law case - is "wealth beyond the wildest dreams of avarice".)

I must at this point allay the possible fury of the Corsica Development Inc. legal team, notably including Mr David Bronskill, and indeed offer Mr Bronskill the opportunity to deepen our municipal big-P Peace. In, as the police perhaps say, "an abundance of caution", I propose to alert him via e-mail later this week to this present blog posting. I am proposing to ask him to notify me by the evening of the Friday which is 2018-01-05 if I have strayed into some putative tort, for instance into some putative tort of defamation, whether against the DeGasperises, against the Muzzos, or against that DeGasperis-Muzzo creation which has in legal formality been (and I am conjecturing still is) Mr Bronskill's client, Corsica. I propose to take it that if I do not hear from Mr Bronskill by the evening of 2018-01-05, either in the style "Yes, danger of tort, because..." or in the style "No answer for you yet, since my group needs more time to consider...", then I am off the legal hook. It is most helpful to have such an assurance if you are, like me, too poor to be able to justify spending money retaining your own lawyer.

But more importantly, I propose to suggest to Mr Bronskill that he write me a pleasant, reasonably friendly, letter, helping to reduce present tensions, and so to build our occasionally elusive Peace. Here is a possible model. I offer it not as a model of saintly good temper, but as the kind of thing that would be humanly attainable, and therefore would be reasonable. The Peace project has to take people more or less as they are /.../

(In subsequent paragraphs, which I perhaps need not reproduce here, I offer Mr Bronskill, in his presumed continuing capacity as a spokesperson for Corsica, a couple of models, or templates, for a possible letter. My idea is that Mr Bronskill can clear the air by telling the police and me, and through my blogspot the general public, how the Big Mortgage came to be. Perhaps there is no corporate crime here at all, but simply something having to do with the harmless mechanics of taxation, or some such thing - even though the mortgage was oddly taken out just before 2016-12-25 (this to my subjective mind suggests an attempt to escape attention), rather than (as one might conceivably from a tax-law perspective expect) just before 2016-12-31.)

3. Concluding Remarks

I now respectfully suggest that each of the three levels of police make a note-to-file, regarding what I have just herewith communicated to them, in case my communication helps in any detective work that they hypothetically speaking may be undertaking, whether now or in the future. Mr Bronskill's hoped-for reply, which might clear up apprehensions, could usefully become a further note-to-file, and he should accordingly feel very free to copy the police on anything he sends me.

I would now be grateful for a terse written acknowledgement, via e-mail or papermail, from each of the three policing levels (YRP, OPP, and RCMP). Unless otherwise instructed, I will take such a terse acknowledgement as an indication that I need do nothing further at the given level of policing at this time, and in particular that I need not at this time spend money on printing my letter out at a cybercafé and conveying the resulting hard copy to the pertinent police office.

I am proposing to wait for a police acknowledgement until the morning of 2018-01-16 (TUE). If there is at that point no acknowledgement, I will take further appropriate civic action - perhaps (a) using Canada Post with registered mail against signature of recipient, but perhaps instead (b) calling in person at the relevant police reception desk(s), with my printout(s), and thereupon courteously requesting the appropriate receipt(s).

4. A Postscript Regarding Ms Virginia MacLean, Q.C., L.S.M., as a Person of Peripheral Police Relevance

This would be a helpful stage for Ms MacLean to act on my repeated requests to explain to me and the conservationist-cum-environmentalist public her pro-subdivision OMB "Summation Day" speech of 2012-09-10. When she does so, the context of hypothetical police Big-Mortgage casework might be altered somewhat, and so I will presumably be finding it correct to communicate her explanation to police and the conservationist-and-environmentalist public in my usual ways - to the public by blogging, and to the police through paired blogging and e-mail. Should her explanation prove adequately full (illness on 2012-09-10? confusion on 2012-09-10, as through a misunderstanding of her always stoutly conservationist client's intentions? fear, as a conceivable response to conceivable incoming blackmail, on 2012-09-10? something else, that I have so far failed to envisage, on 2012-10-09?), I can then stop grumbling and pay her outstanding, approximately 10,000 CAD, bill. I have the resources to make such a payment to her, even though it lies at the outer margins of what is financially safe for me, and even though I am not the party formally owing the money to her. (In formal terms, Ms MacLean's debtor is her distressed and puzzled 2012 conservationist client, the Richmond Hill Naturalists. - For possible police benefit, I add here that the Naturalists maintain a Web presence at http://www.rhnaturalists.ca/.)

In difficult situations, it is necessary to search out the positive elements, in other words the feasible paths forward, with due diligence.

In the case of my 2014 would-be-litigant, Ms (later that same year, Ward Councillor) Karen Cilevitz, I have in the present Christmas season noted - this was in my blogspot posting of 2017-12-18 or 2017-12-19) that Karen is likely now to have learned appropriate lessons from her 2014 attempted legal action against me, and further that she is likely now to be receiving some degree of guidance and mentoring from one or more of at least four not-completely-unqualified members of Town Council.

It is not hard to find corresponding positive factors in the case of Ms MacLean.

Dominating Ms MacLean's particular case is one overwhelming fact: she is not an ordinary, hardscrabble, member of the Bar of Ontario (what we call in Estonian a nurgaadvokaat, or "lawyer-who-practices-in-a-corner"). Rather, she is a Medallist of the Law Society of Upper Canada and a past President of the Ontario Bar Association. Such a person cannot have risen to such a professional height through a career of intimidation, bluster, posturing, slant, and spin. I generally speaking reject the crude, vulgar aphorism "Scum rises." Instead, I reflect upon a quite abundant life experience, from my youth at Oxford onward, through Australia, Singapore, the United States, and Canada - with the Estonian diaspora and the more serious reaches of the Catholic world also significant themes, year upon year upon decade. This life experience has taught me that it is not the scum that rises (except, conceivably, in the commercial world, in which my experience is limited, and of which I therefore have a kind of dread). What it has taught me is that it is, by and large, the industrious, honest, public-spirited, good-humoured, and intelligent who get ahead. We therefore have much to hope for in the case of Ms MacLean.

Coupled with, as I rather confidently picture it, strong moral qualities must in her case be significant gifts of intellect. If I cannot quite, in my own intellectual limitations, see a way for her to bring healing and clarity to our conservationist situation, she perhaps (seeing further than I) can see a way.

Taking a lunge in the dark - where she, I reiterate, is liable to possess a kind of night vision lacking to me - I offer the following lines of reflection:

Let us suppose that it was indeed Fear that drove Ms MacLean into her 2012-09-10 betrayal of the conservationist-cum-environmentalist case at the Ontario Municipal Board, in an unexpectedly brief speech unexpectedly conceding some subdivision development.

If it was Fear, the source of the fear is liable to continue existing even now, five years and almost four months after the momentous podium speech with its (legally fatal?) concessions. And yet the very fact that I am herewith myself writing openly, in a brutal frankness, and even at some mild personal risk, may blunt her Fear.

If I have managed to blunt it enough in this piece of writing, she will at some stage prove able to take some suitable person into her confidence. It will be emotionally and psychologically difficult for her to talk with me directly, much though I would welcome this. But she can summon the strength for visiting the appropriate level of police.

YRP, as a municipal police force, is not to be fully trusted in a matter as complex and delicate as DDO&P.

OPP, as a provincial authority, is also not to be fully trusted, since DDO&P has its provincial implications. - One recalls here what I was told regarding the person I code-named "Mr or Ms or Dr or Prof. or Sir or Dame I.Seem-Powerful", in my blogspot Essay-on-Sorrow from 2016-04-26: there is reason to fear an ongoing University of Toronto commercial involvement in DDO&P, the controversial 2008 sale to Corsica notwithstanding. Anything involving the highest reaches of the (immensely networked) University pretty inevitably involves also some high reaches of the provincial government. Not for nothing does the St George campus physically adjoin the Legislature lawns. Always a good question in forensics is: Who plays golf with whom; who sits down with whom to cocktails or dinner?

That leaves the RCMP.

Let Ms MacLean, then, herself, quietly and confidentially, show the RCMP my various abrasive, dangerous, almost-but-not-quite defamatory blogspot writings. (I say "not quite" because I can reach for the impregnable "Truth Defence" if hauled into civil court. Where the truth is told - even where it is abrasively told - there is no slander, no libel.) Let Ms MacLean, as may prove emotionally healing and even in her conceivable circumstances emotionally necessary, vent mightily at the Mounties, denouncing me within their walls with all the vitriol at her command. Let her future private complaints regarding me, say I today, become ever so vituperative, ever so fulsome - and then let the RCMP ask their own questions of her, gently. The truth will eventually come out, in that private RCMP interview.

Following such an interview, an eventual correct public resolution would be one in which the RCMP call her and me in together, for a quiet three-way follow-up conference. At the end of our follow-up three-way, I publish to the Web, very likely here on blogspot, what I have learned regarding her hitherto merely conjectural Fear. If the explanation seems to me and the RCMP clear, complete, and free of slant and spin, then in my capacity as Richmond Hill Naturalists principal donor, I proceed (I repeat) to pay the roughly 10,000 CAD which I believe the Naturalists still owe Ms MacLean.

The sources of her presumed Fear (as I am privately and subjectively, in an exercise of forensic speculation, picturing it) will for their part be furious. But what can they now do? Ms MacLean will be able to argue to them, perhaps through some such trusted intermediary as the RCMP, along the following lines: "Doctor Karmo, that jerk now leaving for Estonia, drove me to it, and I simply had to start taking advice from the Mounties." Her unpleasant discussants will for their part, even in their fury, recall a truth of Canadian life drilled into all in this rather happy country from school days onward (may Estonia, as a young democracy, grow to be as fortunate as that older democracy which is Canada!): Although you can fool around with this person and that person - although you can choose to render yourself ungovernable by school principals, church ministers, and the like - you don't fool around with the Mounties.

As a supplement to my offered lines of reflection, I do have to add here, to allay conceivable misapprehensions, that I have never myself been in the bad books of the Mounties. I have been helped in significant ways by them twice, and in a further trivial way once. I therefore think of them as the Royal Canadian Mounted How-Are-You-This-Evening-Sir Police.

[This is the end of the current blog posting.]

Toomas Karmo: The Visually Brightest Stars (Fresh RASC Publishing Initiatives)

Two copies of the same publication? Not. On the left is the traditional Royal Astronomical Society of Canada (RASC) Observer's Handbook, in its 2018 edition. On the right is something new as of 2018, a USA version. Promotional writeups may be found on my Society's Web server at https://www.rasc.ca/handbook.

20170103T2001Z/version 2.3.0: Kmo made some small changes of substance, most notably by (i) expanding his discussion of the "+9P" or "+8P" flag for our Sun (we need to take account of large Kuiper Belt objects, including larger Kuiper Belt objects farther out than Pluto), and (ii) giving a better estimate of the lifetime of the Sun, were the Sun to be powered by the sadly transient Victorian mechanism of gravitational contraction rather than by the robust modern mechanism of nuclear fusion. - Kmo reserved the right to make tiny, nonsubstantive, purely cosmetic, tweaks over the coming 48 hours, as here-undocumented versions 2.3.1, 2.3.2, 2.3.3, ... .
20170103T0158Z/version 2.2.0: Kmo corrected various small points, on the boundary between the obvious typo and the misleading error-of-substance. - He reserved the right to make tiny, nonsubstantive, purely cosmetic, tweaks over the coming 48 hours, as here-undocumented versions 2.2.1, 2.2.2, 2.2.3, ... .
20170103T0140Z/version 2.1.0: Kmo corrected an embarrassing small mistake. He had wrongly asserted the South Celestial Pole to move along the horizon for an observer on the Earth's equator. In reality, the South Celestial Pole is for all observers stationary (falling below the horizon for observers north of the Earth's equator, and sitting somewhere above the horizon for observers south of the Earth's equator). - Kmo reserved the right to make tiny, nonsubstantive, purely cosmetic, tweaks over the coming 48 hours, as here-undocmented versions 2.1.1, 2.1.2, 2.2.3, ... .
20180103T0100Z??/version 2.0.0: Kmo, running a bit late, finished converting his point-form outline into coherent full-sentences prose. He reserved the right to make tiny, nonsubstantive, purely cosmetic, tweaks over the coming 48 hours, as here-undocumented versions 2.0.1, 2.0.2, 2.0.3, ... .
20180102T0311Z/version 1.0.0: Kmo had time to upload a polished point-form outline. He hoped to finish converting this outline into coherent full-sentences prose, through a series of incremental uploads, by UTC=20180102T2000Z.

In almost every year from 2001 or so onward, I have helped the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada (RASC) produce annual updates of its Observer's Handbook "Brightest Stars" article. (The sole exception was one exceptionally harsh year in the David Dunlap Observatory and Park (DDO&P) conservation casework, in which time and energy seemed to run out.)

For much of this long period, I was the junior literary partner of the late Prof. Robert F. Garrison. This is the mourned authority whose rich scientific career I examine in a blogspot posting of 2017-08-14 or 2017-08-15, headed "Prof. Robert F. Garrison Remembered (1936-05-09/2017-08-13)". In the last couple of years, with Prof. Garrison's illness and death, I have been lead author, supported under this new arrangement by Prof. Richard Gray (in the Department of Physics and Astronomy of Appalachian State University) and Fr (Dr) Chris Corbally (in the Vatican Observatory Research Group, I presume juridically anchored in Città del Vaticano, but in practical terms anchored in Arizona).

For 2017, and again for 2018, our work in the printed Handbook has been supplemented by an online publication, which in its 2018 version can be downloaded for free as https://www.rasc.ca/sites/default/files/Bright_Stars_extra_rows_2018.pdf. In the current arrangement of our work, the printed Handbook deals in a necessarily cursory way with 286 stars, while a table within the PDF deals in a more extended way with those 286, while adding a further 28.

Both the 286-star set and the extended (286+28 =) 314-star set fairly represent what can be seen, without gross effort, by a reasonably healthy naked, perhaps bespectacled, eye from some reasonably secluded suburban park, even in such a light-polluted suburb as Richmond Hill. From the David Dunlap Observatory lawn in its present state (a subdivision, however, might be coming), you can perhaps push down a little beyond our self-imposed 314-star limit, if the moon is new or scant and your eyes are satisfactory. You cannot, however, push much further down without reaching for binoculars.

I used to put it to myself approximately thus: Here I stand, on the DDO lawn or on the DDO dome catwalk, quite isolated from the lights even of Hillsview Drive, and with the bulk of Richmond Hill largely behind a generous 600, 700, or 1000 metres of field and woodland. Under these not-too-good and not-too-bad conditions, I can make out, as pretty much the limit of what is to my bespectacled eyes feasible, eta Cassiopeiae. This modest star "η Cas", at a visual magnitude somewhere between 3.4 and 3.5, is about as faint as stars get in our 286-star (printed-edition) selection. It is a little off the sprawling, blazingly bright, reclining chair which we casually think of as Cassiopeia, lying beside the short arc linking reclining-chair α Cas to reclining-chair γ Cas. (You have to populate the sky with acronyms, folks, so as to remember those Bayer letters which come up everywhere in astronomical literature and astronomical maps. The celebrated reclining chair is "BAGD", for β-α-γ-δ Cas, or with a slight increment in visual effort "BAGDE", for β-α-γ-δ-ε Cas. If you a little perversely add in the modest star now under contemplation, however, you get "BAηGDE" - in a reasonable Estonian-or-Latin pronunciation "baa- eig-de").

****

The Handbook is venerable, having first appeared as a 108-page volume under the editorship of Prof. Clarence Augustus Chant (1865-1956; in the 1930s, Prof,. Chant became the Founding Director of DDO, going into retirement upon his facility's May 1935 opening ceremony). As of 2018, the Handbook as a printed volume comprises just over 350 pages.

This 2018 New Year marks a significant new stage in Prof. Chant's venerable enterprise, over and above the already-mentioned production of an online supplement. Now, in 2018 for the first time, the print version is being issued in a pair of parallel editions. Alongside the traditional print version, as much used in Canada, there is this year a "USA Edition". Where the Canadian print version contains, ahead of its many properly technical chapters, a "Guest Editorial: The RASC at 150", the USA print version features in that same place a more USA-appropriate guest editorial, by John J. Goss, promoting the "Astronomical League" which serves America as its loose RASC equivalent. There are similar divergences, created with a view to the particular needs of American readers, in a list of star parties in the two print editions. I suspect there are similar divergences in some other presentations of resources for hobbyists and educators.

The bulk of the content is however, of necessity nation-neutral. Our long table of the brightest stars covers the entire sky, right down to the South celestial pole (stationary on the horizon, as the night advances, should you be on the Equator - for instance, on the open sea just south of Singapore - but stationary all through the night below it if you are in Canada, in the United States, or in Mexico). Such things as lists of eclipses, and lists of meteor showers, are likewise suited to the needs of a global readership. The table of planetary occultations, common to the two print editions, concentrates on events visible from North America and Hawai'i.

****

Over the last few months, I put a lot of effort not only into updates and expansions of the 314 entries in our online brightest-stars table, but additionally into something we have not attempted in previous years - namely, into an online essay highlighting the specially unrepresentative character of the visually brightest stars.

It is sometimes said, in a kind of popular-science National Geographic or USA Public Broadcasting System spirit, that our own Sun is an "average star". This is misleading. Our Sun, being a stable core-hydrogen-fuser of temperature type "G", is in its visible outer layers (much) hotter than the visible outer layers of what is believed the most common of the temperature types, "M".

Here is an adaptation of the traditional temperature-types mnemonic, arranged from the hottest of the traditionally familiar types down to the coldest of the traditionally familiar types: OABFGKM - "Oh Be A Fine Gymnast, Kiss Me". (Well, strict tradition did unfortunately say "Girl".)

"O" remains nowadays the hottest. But at the cool end there are as additions, accommodating recently discovered brown dwarfs, "L", "T", and (most recently of all, and I think so far only thinly populated by discoveries) "Y". Further, there are special traditional classification letters "R" and "N" (more recently consolidated under the single letter "C") and "S". These denote certain not-very-hot stars presenting chemical anomalies, notably (in the case of the erstwhile R and N, or nowadays C) an excess of visible-layers carbon. It is thus necessary to replace the old mnemonic with the following: "Oh Be A Fine Gymnast, Kiss Me (Right Now, Smack; or to be more up-to-date Chomp, Smack), Like This, Yowee."

A really full mnemonic would additionally have to accommodate the hot, heavily mass-ejecting, Wolf-Rayets, or "W" stars ("Wow! Oh Be A Fine...").

But I must put these details of temperature types (strictly speaking, of temperature-driven spectroscopy features) aside. My main point here is only that our familiar Sun, plus our familiar visually bright night-time stars, as prominent from what I remember of the DDO lawn and catwalk, are in a statistical sense unrepresentative. In the online essay, as I wrote it to supplement the two parallel 2018 printed Handbook editions, I develop my point at length.

I would like to reproduce the greater part of the essay here, changing a few words and adding quite a few further comments. These are such comments as can reasonably be added in the informal and relaxing setting of the blogosphere, while being less appropriate in the more formal setting of the Handbook.

I will use boldface italics, like this, for the essay as it appears online, and [ordinary lightface type in square brackets, like this] for my various additions or overwrites.

I will leave out here just one major thing, a (perhaps for my present readership somewhat dry) discussion of traditional star names and the current International Astronomical Union star-names legislation.

****

This sample of 314 stars, our own Sun included ("Sample S"), is found to lie in a region, around 3000 [light years] in radius, essentially confined to the sandwich-filler, or "thin disk", part of the overall galactic disk.

[Our Galaxy is a "barred spiral", dominating our "Local Group" of a couple of dozen galaxies, along with the similarly dominant glorious small-telescope spiral galaxy which is M31. Our Galaxy - similar in its size to M31, and larger than many - comprises a sandwich of two thin pita breads, with an exceptionally star-rich, yet exceptionally thin, filling. Around this buzzes a big, rarefied, spherical halo of distinctively ancient stars. There is additionally invisible, or "dark", matter, readily deduced from the unexpectedly speeds of the stars we see, as each of them orbits the centre-of-mass of the aggregate mass its particular closed-curve orbit encloses: the pull of gravity, and therefore the observed speeds, are found to be too high if all the matter in our Galaxy is presumed visible.]

Of the few Sample-S interlopers born outside the sandwich filling, and now temporarily passing through it on orbits oblique to the thin disk, the best known is α Boo. [This is the prominent star, "Arcturus", reached by following the arc of the Big Dipper Handle. As one says in DDO dark-lawn lectures, "Arc to Arcturus" (and thereafter, as one leaves Bootes for Virgo, closer to the Richmond Hill horizon, "Straight on to Spica").]

It is convenient here to use the term "Population P" for the ensemble of non-brown-dwarf, non-white-dwarf, stars in the much larger, 3000-[light-year] radius, subdisk-of-the-thin-disk from which our (tiny) Sample S is drawn. This P-region is itself only a (tiny) fraction of the overall galactic thin-disk region, [around 50,000 light years in radius]. [On this scale, our own Solar system fades into insignificance, with the Moon a mere light-second away from Earth, the Earth a mere eight light-minutes away from the Sun, and Jupiter a mere 40-odd light-minutes away from the Sun. Typical prominent DDO lawn-or-catwalk stars are a mere few tens or hundreds of light-years away. It is, to be sure, possible to impress DDO tourists by exhibiting the "Summer Triangle" of Deneb, Vega, and Altair, and remarking that whereas so-prominent Vega and Altair are on the order of 20 light-years away, Deneb - it looks scarcely less bright than Vega and Altair! - lies at an uncertain, yet hefty, distance, being somewhere between 1000 and 3000 light-years away. It is also helpful to remember that M31, so easily seen from even blazingly bright downtown Toronto on autumn evenings through even the poorest binoculars, is about 2.5 million light-years away. - Our Galaxy, and M31, and with it our whole Local Group, diminish into insignificance on a cosmic scale, since the visible universe runs outward to a radius of around 10 thousand million light-years. Beyond that prodigious radius - if, as has since the 1980s been thought, the Big Bang was swiftly followed by a dramatic cosmic "Inflation" - is a part of the universe presently invisible, and with every passing second coming incrementally more and more into the range of visibility. - Our own Galaxy is thought to harbour a hundred thousand million or more, but not as many as a million million, stars. The number of galaxies in the currently visible universe is considered comparable (by sheer coincidence) to the number of stars in our own (anomalously big?) Galaxy.]

Sample S, being formally defined by an apparent-magnitude cutoff as opposed to a distance cutoff, is itself far from statistically representative of Population P. (a) In P, the O stars are vanishingly rare. A tabulation by Glenn Ledrew, in JRASC 95 (2001), pp. 32ff, suggests an O-star frequency within P of just 0.00003%. By contrast, O stars comprise a hefty 2% of S. A similar overrepresentation occurs for the B, A, F, G, and K stars, with Ledrew’s tabulation suggesting that these [temperature types] might have a respective frequency within P of 0.1%, 0.6%, 3.2%, 8.0%, and 12.9%. (A small caveat: unavoidable rounding errors make our various percentages, throughout this discussion, capable of adding up to 99% instead of 100%, or to 99.9% instead of 100.0%.) By contrast, these five types comprise 28%, 19%, 9%, 13%, and 21%, respectively, of S. (b) In P, something on the order of 76% or 78%–different authorities are perhaps mildly discrepant–must be M stars. (Ledrew’s tabulation, in particular, suggests an M-star frequency of 78.2%.) Only a few of these (the Ledrew tabulation suggests 0.04%) have evolved to beyond the main-sequence stage of stable core hydrogen fusion. By contrast, the M stars comprise just 7% of S. All of them have evolved beyond the main sequence, having started their lives as types hotter than M or K.

[Folks, I would like to do this better. "JRASC" is our very own publication, the Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. But more careful work would involve digging into the properly authoritative catalogue of our solar region - I think that these days it is Gliese-Jahreiss - and punching buttons on one's own calculator.]

The statistically anomalous character of S is further illustrated by the fact that in S, in each of the Big Six [temperature types] hotter than M [that is to say, in each of the six "Oh Be A Fine Gymnast, Kiss" types], the stars that have ended stable core hydrogen fusion (and so have evolved [into one of the specially high-power-output luminosity classes] are in the numerical majority. In Ledrew’s tabulation, the percentages of evolved stars in F, G, and K, as a percentage of the overall respective F, G, and K populations, are just 2.0%, 2.5%, and 3.8%. Consistently with this, the 1991 Gliese-Jahreiss catalogue of the nearest 1000 stars (containing, we admit, [even white dwarfs]) assigns less than 1% of its population to [the specialliy high-power-output luminosity classes].

[It is perhaps helpful here to interject that there are two foundational aspects stellar taxonomy, so far as basic spectroscopic observation (as at the pre-2008 DDO) can go: there are on the one hand the temperature "types", on the other hand the luminosity, or intrinsic-power-output-rating, "classes". For present blogspot purposes, it is enough simply to remark that the power-output-rating classes get denominated V, IV, III, II, Ib, and Ia, with additionally "0" for very rare, exceptionally powerful, stars - and with VI for a class of anomalously low-power stars. I will here leave out the white dwarfs, and also those major discoveries of the last 20 years which are the brown dwarfs. Our Sun is technically of temperature type G (more precisely, "G2", being in one of the hotter subdivisions of "G") and luminosity class V. Stars begin their stable, core-hydrogen-fusing lives in class V. In later age, they temporarily evolve into some higher-power-output class, as their stable fusing of core hydrogen comes to an end. Stars of types K and M fuse their hydrogen so slowly, in a low-temperature regime, that however close the time of their birth may happen to be to the Big Bang, they have nevertheless not yet managed to evolve out of class V.]

Sample S – so rich, we stress, in varieties of star statistically infrequent within Population P – harbours physical extremes. Although the extremes are for the most part not written into our table, they can be studied easily, from such sources as Prof. James Kaler’s http://stars.astro.illinois.edu/sow/sowlist.html:

Around 58 of our 314 each radiate, across the full spectrum from X-ray through [ultraviolet] and optical to [infrared] and radio, at least as much power as is radiated by 10,000 Suns. The most dramatic is ζ Ori, with a [full-spectrum power output] of 375,000 Suns – making ζ Ori notable not within S alone, but even within the overall Galaxy. Several others are not far behind, among them ζ Pup (360,000 Suns, suggests Kaler, as of 2008 July revising his earlier, circa-1999, suggestion of ~750,000 Suns). Just two stars in Sample S, nearby τ Cet and nearby α Cen B, radiate more feebly than our Sun, each at about 0.5 of the Sun’s [full-spectrum power output]. – The principal determinant of stellar [power output], for any given phase in stellar evolution, is mass, with even small variations in mass translating into large variations in [power]. The exceptional luminosities of ζ Ori and ζ Pup, in particular, are a consequence of their exceptionally high respective masses, 20 [times the solar mass] and 40 [times the solar mass]. (Kaler now suggests 40 [solar masses] for ζ Pup, while having previously suggested 60 [solar masses]. He additionally notes from the literature the lower suggested value of 22.5 [solar masses]. – Theory does predict, although our small Sample S does not manage to illustrate, the possibility of masses up to the Eddington stellar mass limit, somewhere above 100 [solar masses], and even of some "super-Eddington" stars. Eddington's limit is by definition attained when luminosity rises to high as to make the outward radiation push, tending to tear a star apart, exceed the inward gravitational pull.)

We use the flags "+nP" (n = 1, 2, ... ) for companions of sub-stellar mass, such as have been found outside our solar system, in an accelerating tempo of discovery that has eventually reached even the tiny Sample S, from the 1990s onward. Such companions are typically planets, but could in principle also be brown dwarfs. We do not attempt here to define formally the difference between a planet and a brown-dwarf companion. [In the 2018 online table, as interested readers can see for themselves, are two occurrences of "+2P" and ten occurrences of "+1P". Our own Sun would traditionally have flown the flag "+9P", but here (in light of the 2006 August International Astronomical Union demotion of Pluto from "planet" to "dwarf planet") is instead flagged "+8P". Admittedly, in the case of the Sun one could argue - disregarding, in this suggested line of argument, mere asteroids on the scale of Ceres or smaller - that Pluto AND other big Kuiper-belt objects count as "companions of sub-stellar mass", and that therefore an appropriate flag is something like "+10P" or " or "+11P" or (cautiously) "+>9P".]

/.../

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I may as well finish with an expression of puzzlement, which some prof somewhere might some day be able somehow to address - perhaps even by posting a comment through the present blogspot interface, in conformity with the commenting rules as laid out here on 2016-04-14 under the heading "Background FAQ, regarding purpose and conduct of this blog".

The core of those rules is the requirement that any commenter give, within the comment body text, her or his personal name, her or his municipality of residence and nation of residence, and a functioning personal e-mail address. I would reserve the right to authenticate the identity of the commenter, by sending a mail to the offered e-mail address, in those conceivable cases in which the commenter's real identity seems somehow uncertain, in other words in which there is some fear of impersonation.

Here is my puzzle: why does type M appear to be more heavily populated than types L, T, and Y? What guarantee have we that the M stars really predominate?

The problem seems particularly acute once we note that the brown dwarfs in L, T, and Y are hard to observe, and therefore hard to tally for statistical analysis. To make matters worse, they are liable to a fading-out which may, for all I myself know at this stage, be early and severe. In contrast with stars in the hotter types, stars in L, T, and Y obtain their (feeble) power output in just one of two ways:

they undergo gravitational contraction, translating the gravitational potential energy lost upon falling-inward into the increased kinetic energy of their atoms or molecules (and therefore into raised temperatures: the faster the atoms and molecules are moving, the hotter is the star, and therefore the more power it is radiating - in the case of L, T, and Y, always largely at infrared, rather than at even yellow, orange, or red wavelengths);
they fuse deuteriuim (as opposed to the more common, no-neutron, isotope of hydrogen) into helium.

The first process is notorious for not lasting long. If it was this that was the source of our Sun's heat (such was one prominent opinion in Victorian, and therefore pre-nuclear, astrophysics discussions), our Sun could shine for only on the order of 10 million years. The accepted actual age of the Sun is 4,600 million years.

Even the second process (say I a little timidly this week, subject to professorial correction) does not last long on the cosmic scale.

So how do we know that the cosmos is not populated with an abundance of not-yet-observed brown dwarfs, each of them by now quite finished releasing energy from the (notoriously brief) process of gravitational contraction, and by now likewise quite finished with the fusing of its (scanty, rare) deuterium?

I am not reproaching the professionals with not knowing. My hunch is that they do know. But - ask I, in a student's puzzlement - how (through, that is, what perhaps subtle combination of observations and deductions) do they know it?

[This is the end of the current blog posting.]