[PHOTO] Woman on Harbord Street

Woman on Harbord Street
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

Harbord Street, in addition to being a pleasant avenue of residential and commercial units, is always photogenic.

[LINK] "'Earth-like' snow falls on Mars: study"

CBC carries this story.

On Mars, snow falls in the early morning from wispy, feathery clouds that many Earthlings would recognize as cirrus clouds, a Canadian-led research team has reported.

"We found ice clouds and precipitation that were surprisingly Earth-like – certainly more so than expected," said Jim Whiteway, the professor at Toronto's York University who headed the study published Friday in Science. It was the first time precipitation had been observed falling to the ground on Mars.

Whiteway told CBC News that the Martian clouds are similar to very thin clouds seen in Earth's Arctic in the winter.

"They're called diamond dust. And if you look up at the sky, you can still see the stars, but you see some sparkling ice crystals falling, sparkling in the moonlight."

Whiteway and 22 collaborators used data gathered by NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander using a Canadian-designed light-detection-and-ranging (LIDAR) instrument. The lander spent five months in the Martian Arctic during the Martian summer last year and completed its mission in November.

[. . .]

NASA first reported Phoenix's observations of falling snow in September, but at that time it wasn't clear whether the snow ever made it to the ground. Now that the data has been analyzed, researchers think they have a better understanding of the water cycle on Mars.

During the day, they suggest, the water vapour is lifted by turbulence and convection. At night, as the temperature drops below the frost point, it forms ice crystal clouds and falls back to the surface as snow.

[LINK] "A lucky strike"

Last week at The Globe and Mail, Peter Cheney came up with an interesting article examining how the people of the Toronto Islands are coping with being cut off from the mainland since the ferries aren't running. Quite well, apparently.

In your fantasies, paradise is, well, a paradise. The air is filled with the scent of herbs and the trill of songbirds as you sit in your garden, contemplating a far-off world of traffic jams and daily struggle. In other words, you are in Elizabeth Amer's yard on Ward's Island, a small green cosmos where the city of Toronto is in full view, yet somehow distant.

And this week, thanks to the city strike that has shut down the ferries, it really has been a paradise.

Normally, a million tourists a year flock to the Toronto Islands, drawn by attractions such as the southern beaches and the rides at Centreville. Untold thousands spill over into Ms. Amer's neighbourhood, walking or riding the car-free, tree-lined pathways, curious to see a way of life drawn straight from The Wind in the Willows .

But since the strike began, the islands are a world transformed, stripped of their tourist hordes by the forces of politics.

“People are enjoying the quiet,” says Ms. Amer. “We don't have anything against the tourists, but there's been a lot less hubbub.”

[. . .]

[T]he strike's upside has been a spectacular quiet. On Centre Island, normally a Disney-style throng of tourists and clanking rides, you could fire a cannon through the park without hurting anyone. Stand still, and the only sounds are the cry of gulls and wind rustling through the trees. The restaurants are shuttered, the rental bikes are locked up in a compound, and the paddle boats are in dry-dock. Ward's beach, normally wall-to-wall on a sunny day, is near-empty.

“It's been pretty peaceful,” says Bob Buck, a retired actuary whose grandmother built a cottage on Ward's Island in 1934. Mr. Buck has spent summers on the islands since 1959. This week, he worked at repainting his house, and contemplated the change produced by the ferry shutdown. “It's nice to have some quiet,” he said. “But we never had a problem with the tourists. This is a beautiful place, and people want to see it. Nothing wrong with that.”

The islanders' relationship with their mainland brethren is a complex one, fraught with politics and real-estate envy. The city spent decades trying to eliminate the community and turn the islands into a park, only to be confronted with determined resistance from residents, who waged a lengthy political battle to save their homes. The fight ended in 1993, when the Ontario government passed legislation that granted long-term leases to homeowners on the islands.

Living on the islands involves a unique set of compromises. You get to inhabit a piece of real-estate that makes Rosedale look like a wasteland by comparison – you live beneath soaring trees, and the towers of downtown Toronto glitter across the water. On the downside, everything you buy (including appliances and the materials to build a house) must be loaded onto a ferry and schlepped from the dock. And if you were hoping to get rich by selling your house, forget it: Properties are priced at replacement value, and returned to a land trust.

Then there's the annual tourist invasion, which begins in late spring and runs until Labour Day or so. Some islanders feel like animals in a zoo, subject to the scrutiny of a seemingly-endless parade of visitors. Most take it in stride: “There are people who come here three or four times a year,” says Barry Lipton, a retired construction worker who has lived on the islands since the late 1980s. “They love it, and they pay taxes to support the park. They're entitled to be here.”

Even so, the civic strike has provided a welcome respite.

[LINK] "A 'devastating' border shutdown, a chaotic commute"

Also in The Globe and Mail last week, Les Perreaux wrote about the impact that the tightened US-Canadian border is having on the eastern Ontario city of Cornwall and the adjacent Mohawk community.

The waters around Cornwall Island are buzzing with motorboats, but these aren't pleasure cruises or the area's notorious smugglers.

The boats plying this part of the St. Lawrence River these days are mostly makeshift ferries hauling commuters across the U.S.-Canada border to the islands and mainland communities of the Akwesasne Reserve.

Long-standing animosity between Mohawks and border guards boiled over May 30, when natives protested the arming of customs agents. The guards fled their Cornwall Island post, saying they feared violence, and the federal government shut down the crossing. Cross-border travellers now must take long detours or navigate the St. Lawrence.

A month into the shutdown, there is little sign of tension between Mohawks and Cornwallites. If anything, they seem united against Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan.

Mohawks filed an application last week asking the Federal Court to order the minister to reopen the border. They have allies among their neighbours.

[. . .]

A few kilometres south, in the middle of the St. Lawrence, Liz Sunday, a 62-year-old Mohawk grandmother, is making the complicated Akwesasne commute.

Instead of driving over the Seaway International Bridge, Ms. Sunday travels from her Quebec home into U.S. territory at the end of Ransom Road. Then she hops on a boat for a five-minute ride back into Canada. Without clearing customs, she hitches a ride to Cornwall General Hospital to visit her husband, Mitchell, who is recovering from a stroke.

Ms. Sunday embraces the voyage with grace. “I like this, you get to see people you haven't seen in a long time,” she said. “Maybe they should just leave [the border] closed.”

[LINK] "From Haiti, a surprise: good news about AIDS"

In the past, I have blogged a fair bit about Haiti, nominally the only Francophone nation-state in the Americas but actually Creolophone, with a geography dominated by environmental catastrophe and a people suffering from any number of horrors including HIV/AIDS. Happily, as Jonathan M. Katz writes for the Associated Press, Haiti seems to be getting a handle on that.

When Micheline Leon was diagnosed with HIV, her parents told her they would fit her for a coffin.

Fifteen years later, she walks around her two-room concrete house on Haiti's central plateau, watching her four children play under the plantain trees. She looks healthy, her belly amply filling a gray, secondhand T-shirt. Her three sons and one daughter were born after she was diagnosed. None has the virus.

"I'm not sick," she explained patiently on a recent afternoon. "People call me sick but I'm not. I'm infected."

In many ways the 35-year-old mother's story is Haiti's too. In the early 1980s, when the strange and terrifying disease showed up in the U.S. among migrants who had escaped Haiti's dictatorship, experts thought it could wipe out a third of the country's population.

Instead, Haiti's HIV infection rate stayed in the single digits, then plummeted.

In a wide range of interviews with doctors, patients, public health experts and others, The Associated Press found that Haiti's success in the face of chronic political and social turmoil came because organizations cooperated and tailored programs to the country's specific challenges.

Much of the credit went to two pioneering nonprofit groups, Boston-based Partners in Health and Port-au-Prince's GHESKIO, widely considered to be the world's oldest AIDS clinic.

"The Haitian AIDS community feels like they're out in front of everyone else on this, and pretty much they are," said Judith Timyan, senior HIV/AIDS adviser for the U.S. Agency for International Development in Haiti. "They really do some of the best work in the world."

Researchers say the number of suffers was initially lessened by closing private blood banks, and statistically by high mortality rates — an untreated AIDS sufferer in Haiti lives eight fewer years than an untreated American.

Well-coordinated use of AIDS drugs, education and behavioral changes such as increased condom use have kept the disease from surging back, at least for now.

Statistics are notoriously unreliable in this country of poverty and lack of infrastructure. The most telling data would be the number of new infections in a given year, but researchers say such a precise count is impossible.

Next best is to estimate the infected as a percentage of the population. From 1993 to 2003, only pregnant women were tested, and their rate of infection dropped from 6.2 percent to 3.1 percent, according to GHESKIO and national health surveys.

Researchers now test men and women aged 15 to 49, and the official rate is 2.2 percent, according to UNAIDS.

That's still far higher than in the developed world, but it's lower than the Bahamas, Guyana and Suriname, and much lower than sub-Saharan Africa, where the rate averages about 5 percent but spikes to 24 percent in Botswana and 33 percent in Swaziland.

[BRIEF NOTE] On the gay generation gap (?)

In the most recent issue of New York Magazine, Mark Harris has an interesting article, "The Gay Generation Gap", which talks about how even in the Pride season, queer men are divided sharply along generational lines.

This week, tens of thousands of gay people will converge on New York City for Pride Week, and tens of thousands of residents will come out to play as well. Some of us will indulge in clubbing and dancing, and some of us will bond over our ineptitude at both. Some of us will be in drag and some of us will roll our eyes at drag. We will rehash arguments so old that they’ve become a Pride Week staple; for instance, is the parade a joyous expression of liberation, or a counterproductive freak show dominated by needy exhibitionists and gawking news cameras? Other debates will be more freshly minted: Is President Obama’s procrastinatory approach to gay-rights issues an all-out betrayal, or just pragmatic incrementalism? We’ll have a good, long, energizing intra-family bull session about same-sex marriage and the New York State Senate, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, Project Runway and Adam Lambert.

And at some point, a group of gay men in their forties or fifties will find themselves occupying the same bar or park or restaurant or subway car or patch of pavement as a group of gay men in their twenties. We will look at them. They will look at us. We will realize that we have absolutely nothing to say to one another.

And the gay generation gap will widen.

The stereotypes, Harris goes on to write, are many and often wounding.

Public infighting is a big minority-group taboo—it’s called taking your business out in the street. And it may seem strange to note this phenomenon at a juncture that, largely because of the fight for gay marriage, has been marked by impressive solidarity. But let’s have a look. Here’s the awful stuff, the deeply unfair (but maybe a little true) things that many middle-aged gay men say about their younger counterparts: They’re shallow. They’re silly. They reek of entitlement. They haven’t had to work for anything and therefore aren’t interested in anything that takes work. They’re profoundly ungrateful for the political and social gains we spent our own youth striving to obtain for them. They’re so sexually careless that you’d think a deadly worldwide epidemic was just an abstraction. They think old-fashioned What do we want! When do we want it! activism is icky and noisy. They toss around terms like “post-gay” without caring how hard we fought just to get all the way to “gay.”

And here’s the awful stuff they throw back at us—at 45, I write the word “us” from the graying side of the divide—a completely vicious slander (except that some of us are a little like this): We’re terminally depressed. We’re horrible scolds. We gas on about AIDS the way our parents or grandparents couldn’t stop talking about World War II. We act like we invented political action, and think the only way to accomplish something is by expressions of fury. We say we want change, but really what we want is to get off on our own victimhood. We’re made uncomfortable, or even jealous, by their easygoing confidence. We’re grim, prim, strident, self-ghettoizing, doctrinaire bores who think that if you’re not gloomy, you’re not worth taking seriously. Also, we’re probably cruising them.

This hasn't been my personal experience. Of my queer friends, probably about as many are in their 40s or later as are in their 20s or early 30s. That might be an artifact of my social networking in Toronto, however, which concentrated on relatively older people already established. Or it might not. Or it might relate to my tastes. Or it might not. Or ...

Thoughts and experiences, everyone?

At any rate, Harris goes on to suggest that the generation gap is rooted in the substantially different experiences of the two generations. The older had to fight for the right to be, in the face of prejudice and psychic wounds and medical catastrophes, whereas the younger had to face a certain amount of prejudice and problems but not too many, and is interested in--relatively speaking--fine-tuning things.

Again, thoughts and experiences everyone?