[PHOTO] Andy Poolhall, 489 College Street

Andy Poolhall, 489 College Street
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

Andy Poolhall's riff on Andy Warhol amuses me.

[LINK] Some Friday links

• 'Aqoul suggests that Maghrebin immigrants in western Europe, especially in Spain, are going to shrink as the economic contraction hits.


• Centauri Dreams suggests that the astronomical state of the art is advancing to the point where telescopes might detect massive moons orbiting some of the extrasolar planets discovered over the past decade and a half.


• Crooked Timber's Henry Farrell notes that Ireland is set to experience a crushing recession, worse even than the one experienced by Finland in the early 1990s.


• Daniel Drezner critiques New York Times columnist David Brooks about one man's thoughts on global governance, while being skeptical about the chances of a Republican Party revival.


• A Fistful of Euros' Alex Harrowell lets us know that Russia's radar system--you know, the one used to detect incoming missiles?--is holey and needs to be helped, immediately.


• Language Hat points readers towards a Silk Road-centric view of Eurasian history and looks at the dynamics of Indo-European language evolution.


• Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowen wonders whether Arlen Specter's defection to the Democratic Party might actually weaken his hand and that of the party.


• pauldrye examines the origins of the phrase "Yellow Peril" in the late 19th/early 20th unseemly competition for territory and power by various imperialists in China.


• The Pagan Prattle lets us know that some anti-Semites believe that the Starbucks logo is an iconic representative of Jewish world domination, or something.


• Slap Upside the Head points out that a British Columbia politician who wrote an E-mail a dozen years ago comparing homosexuality to pedophilia wrote it to a fellow teacher in opposition to an anti-bullying initiative.


• Spacing Toronto examines the travails of poor neglected beat-down Jarvis Street and its improvement plans, tours the Shops at Don Mills, Toronto's latest anti-mall, and examines the zonards, people in the mid-19th century who lived on the fringes of Paris.


• Torontoist reports on the threatened gentrification of the famously eclectic Kensington Market neighbourhood and links to a panorama of Toronto as seen from the top of the CN Tower.


• Window on Eurasia reports that Russians tend to prefer the term "post-Soviet space" as opposed to "near abroad" to define the other fourteen Soviet successor states.


• Finally, the Yorkshire Ranter points out that Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi exile who engineered the 2003 invasion, has come out and admitted the lies. Surprise.

[LINK] "The ‘Face Book Fad’ Is More Than a Century Old"

Over at The New York Times Bits blog, Jenna Wortham points out that social networking technology didn't develop out of the void.

Remember that dispute about whether it was Mark Zuckerberg or some other Harvard students who really dreamed up Facebook a few years ago?

Well, it turns out that the notion of putting notes and images on a host’s “face book” was around long, long before Mr. Zuckerberg posted anything on his Wall.

Bryan Benilous, a historical newspaper specialist at the digital-archive company Proquest, said he and his colleagues came across a Boston Daily Globe article from August 24, 1902, titled, “Face Book The New Fad,” describing a party game where revelers sketch out cartoony caricatures for fun.

“I think it is interesting to note the similarities with this first iteration of Face Book as a shared social experience,” said Mr. Benilous. “It’s almost like having friends write on your wall in a much less tech-savvy way.”

Back in February I blogged about the tantalizing continuities between past and present in our informational environment. It's nice to see that it goes further back and more intensely than I'd thought.

[BRIEF NOTE] The Ceres Polar Lander

Will Baird's The Dragon's Tales is a wonderful blog, full of space news and biological studies and many other things, like, say, his impending second child. Thanks are also due him, in a very different way, for linking to the news that some researchers are making plans for a Ceres Polar Lander. Space.com has a good overview of this project.

As the exploration of the solar system progresses, some scientists are considering missions to often overlooked worlds. One of these is Ceres, the smallest known dwarf planet which lies within the asteroid belt.

Investigations have shown that Ceres is an excellent target for exploration and may even have astrobiological significance.

Joël Poncy is in charge of interplanetary advanced projects within the Observation and Science Directorate of Thales Alenia Space, a European company that works on satellite systems and other orbital infrastructures. This organization has been involved in many scientific missions, including the Huygens probe, CoRoT, ExoMars, Mars Express and Venus Express. Poncy and his team, in association with Olivier Grasset and Gabriel Tobie from LPG-Nantes, now have turned their eyes to Ceres.

Preliminary plans for a Ceres Polar Lander are currently being drawn up. The idea is to build a low-cost mission using reliable existing technology to complement other larger missions, while benefiting from NASA's Dawn mission results. Assuming launch by a Soyuz rocket, the spacecraft would take around four years to reach Ceres. It would then enter orbit before attempting a landing.

Poncy adds that "the lander would separate from the carrier, brake, land close to the target site while automatically avoiding boulders and permanent shadows. We would then perform an analysis similar that that of NASA's Mars Phoenix Lander of the surrounding soil and release a mini-rover to explore further. Astrobiological experiments similar to ExoMars can be envisaged."

Landing an automatic vehicle on Ceres will require some impressive technology, but this is already in development as part of other projects. Poncy said "techniques are being developed for robotic missions to the South Pole of the Moon, such as ESA's MoonNext, for which Thales Alenia Space has been awarded one of the study contracts."

A Ceres Polar Lander would provide a golden opportunity to transfer at low cost these lunar and Martian technologies for lander, rover and instruments to icy moon-like conditions, thanks to comparable orders of magnitude for gravity and temperatures at Ceres' poles.

I heartily approve of this. Quite apart from the general principle that there's never such a thing as too few space probes, long-time readers might remember my long-standing interest in Ceres, the largest dwarf planet in the inner Solar System and easily the most Earth-like of the various dwarf planets, nearly all of these being icy worlds far out in the Kuiper Belt.

[BRIEF NOTE] On the latest HIV/AIDS news

I meant to comment on André Picard's article in The Globe and Mail last week, "Taming a deadly disease", before now. Briefly put, Picard presents the common knowledge that remarkable advances in the medical state of the art have made 21st century HIV/AIDS a survivable long-term medical condition, that AIDS in 2009 is no longer the near-automatic death sentence that it was in 1979.

Twenty-five years after the discovery of the AIDS virus, the deadly disease has been halted in its tracks – so much so that sufferers are now dying at a ripe old age.

Nearly 85 per cent of patients being treated for HIV-AIDS with drug cocktails have undetectable levels of virus in their bloodstream, according to new data from the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV-AIDS in Vancouver.

“People with HIV are not exempt from destiny,” Dr. Julio Montaner, the centre's director, said in an interview, “but they are no longer dying from AIDS.” That fact, he said, “really tells the story of how far we've come with treatment.”

[. . .]

[S]cientists have learned to subdue the wily human immunodeficiency virus: Powerful drug combos are used to shut down HIV replication and limit the damage it inflicts on the immune system.

The impact of this treatment regime, known formally as highly active antiretroviral treatment (HAART), is undeniable – adding, on average, 13 years to the life expectancy of HIV-positive people, according to a study by Robert Hogg of the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV-AIDS.

Virtually anyone with money – or access to a public-health system like Canada's – can neutralize the virus's effects on the immune system and have a normal life expectancy.

“There's no reason people can't live 50 years with HIV,” said Anita Rachlis, an infectious-diseases consultant at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto. “But people with HIV often have a lot of co-morbidities.”

Indeed, while survivors are living longer, they are also dealing with a combination of related health challenges: the ravages inflicted on the immune system by the virus over many years; the damage done by long-term use of powerful drugs; and the effect of other infections that came along for the ride with HIV (such as hepatitis, herpes and HPV), not to mention the normal process of aging.

Picard goes on to interview four different people who are long-term survivors of HIV/AIDS, one man infected in 1980 and others infected in the rest of the following decade, whose lives have been saved by medications with side-effects that they have been able to tolerate, some to a greater extent than others. With effective treatment at an early enough age, people infected with HIV can have near-normal life expectancies. This happy story is of course limited; springheel_jack's recent observation that an epidemic disease like swine flu is going to have a disproportionately severe effect on populations unfortunate enough to live outside of economically developed countries, the ones with capable medical systems, certainly applies to HIV/AIDS.

This wonderful news takes me aback in a weird way. Growing up, I absorbed as much as anyone the news of an entirely unexpected and spectacularly horrible pandemic, the advent of effective new drugs was more background noise than anything else, the African HIV/AIDS has been covered extensively in Canada (Stephanie Nolen's 28: Stories of AIDS in Africa is a comprehensive and moving book on that epidemic from a Canadian perspective, if anyone's interested), and the disease certainly influenced my approach to my sex life. Mortal fear colours a lot of things. Now, I learn that given the right conditions it needn't be mortal at all, "just" another long-term medical conditions manageable with a sufficiently advanced technology in the right kind of society. I can't define this abackness very well other than to say that "Is that all there is?" comes close enough to what I'm thinking, or, perhaps, feeling.