[URBAN NOTE] Two Kensington Market gateway statues

Above is one of the cute little chair-based sculptures by--I believe--Vince Graham--on the perimeter of Kensington Market (here, off College) welcoming people to the neighbourhood. Compare this similar cat statue, taken in 2009, on the southern perimeter of Kensington Market.



This, likely one of Vince Graham's several late 1990s cat statues marking the southern perimeter of Kensington Market--compare his "Home again, home again" statue of a cat poised on a chair--is one of my favourite pieces of public art. Doesn't the majestic cat's pose look so . . . justified?

[BRIEF NOTE] On Canada's Tea Party

I've blogged in the past about my concerns that the populist conservatism of the United States' Tea Party might make it up into Canada, but those parts were somewhat--well--misguided. Iin truth Canada had a very popular Tea Party in the 1990s. The Canadian band of that name, fairly described as a CanCon equivalent to The Doors right down to the brooding handsome dark-haired singer, had a fair number of hits in that decade (like "Temptation", below) before attenuating and disbanding six years ago.

The band still has the domain name teaparty.com, however, and this name could make the band quite, quite rich.

For the last two years, the Tea Party has been the most talked about movement in American conservative politics, and a nearly forgotten band from Windsor, Ontario have been the accidental benefactors. Every time anybody searches for "tea party", one of the top results has nothing to do with pork barrel spending, the federal reserve, or, er, "Obamacare". Instead, teaparty.com is the website for the Tea Party, a Middle Eastern-tinged band whose last charting single was in 2001. In anticipation of traffic from supporters of the political movement, the band's website proclaims: "No Politics … Just Rock and Roll."

"So much damage has been done to our name by the political movement that we're considering selling [the website]," Tea Party bassist Stuart Chatwood recently told BusinessWeek. The band do not support Tea Party politics: "As Canadians, we're sensitive to all the criticism of socialised medicine," he said. Although the Tea Party would rather sell their domain name to a liberal satirist such as Jon Stewart or a Democratic fundraiser such as George Soros, Chatwood said the URL will probably go to the highest bidder. "We've got families," he said.

In this political climate, a website at teaparty.com could be a valuable portal for either fundraising or satire. As BusinessWeek pointed out, it could also be a canny business opportunity for Lipton tea. But high demand for the web address means it won't come cheap – domain names such as vodka.com and sex.com sold for millions.

Meanwhile, the Canadian Tea Party plan tokeep making music. They released seven albums between 1991 and 2004, selling 1.6m copies – mostly in Canada. After breaking up in 2005, they reunited for several dates this year.

Hee.

[BRIEF NOTE] Another pathway to an HIV vaccine?

All I can say about this discovery is that, though it would have been much nicer for it to have come closer to the official recognition of HIV/AIDS thirty years ago, I'm very glad that this new pathway towards a possible HIV vaccine has appeared.

Researchers from the United States and Europe, working in laboratories on the human immunodeficiency virus, found that HIV is unable to damage the immune system if cholesterol is removed from the virus’s membrane.

“It’s like an army that has lost its weapons but still has flags, so another army can recognize it and attack it,” said Adriano Boasso of Imperial College London, who led the study.

[. . .]

Usually, when a person becomes infected with HIV, the body’s innate immune response puts up an immediate defence. But some researchers believe HIV causes the innate immune system to overreact. This weakens the immune system’s next line of defence, known as the adaptive immune response.

For this study – published on Monday in the journal Blood – Dr. Boasso’s team removed cholesterol from the membrane around the virus and found that this stopped HIV from triggering the innate immune response. This in turn led to a stronger adaptive response, orchestrated by a type of immune cells called T cells.

[. . .]

“HIV is very sneaky,” Dr. Boasso said in a statement. “It evades the host’s defences by triggering overblown responses that damage the immune system. It’s like revving your car in first gear for too long – eventually the engine blows out.”

He said this may be why developing a vaccine has proven so tricky. “Most vaccines prime the adaptive response to recognize the invader, but it’s hard for this to work if the virus triggers other mechanisms that weaken the adaptive response.”

HIV takes its membrane from the cell that it infects, the researchers explained in their study. This membrane contains cholesterol, which helps keep it fluid and enables it to interact with particular types of cell.

Normally, a subset of immune cells called plasmacytoid dendritic cells (pDCs) recognize HIV quickly and react by producing signalling molecules called interferons. These signals activate various processes which are initially helpful, but which damage the immune system if switched on for too long.

Working with scientists at Johns Hopkins University, the University of Milan and Innsbruck University, Dr. Boasso’s team found that if cholesterol is removed from HIV’s envelope, it can no longer activate pDCs. As a result, T cells, which orchestrate the adaptive response, can fight the virus more effectively.

[BRIEF NOTE] On the decided joys and deserved successes of the emoticon

Wired produced an article today commemorating the 29th anniversary of the creation of the modern emoticon, :-) and then :-( being the two foundation characters of this symbolic system.

At precisely 11:44 a.m., Scott Fahlman posts the following electronic message to a computer-science department bulletin board at Carnegie Mellon University:

19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman :-)

From: Scott E Fahlman

I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:

:-)

Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark
things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use

:-(

With that post, Fahlman became the acknowledged originator of the ASCII-based emoticon. From those two simple emoticons (a portmanteau combining the words emotion and icon) have sprung dozens of others that are the joy, or bane, of e-mail, text-message and instant-message correspondence the world over.

Fahlman was not, however, the first person to use typographical symbols to convey emotions. The practice goes back at least to the mid-19th century, when Morse code symbols were occasionally used for the same purpose. Other examples exist as well.

In 1881, the American satirical magazine Puck published what we would now call emoticons, using hand-set type. No less a wordsmith than Ambrose Bierce suggested using what he called a “snigger point” — \__/ — to convey jocularity or irony. Baltimore’s Sunday Sun suggested a tongue-in-cheek sideways character in 1967.

But none of those caught on. The internet emoticon truly traces its lineage directly to Fahlman, who says he came up with the idea after reading “lengthy diatribes” from people on the message board who failed to get the joke or the sarcasm in a particular post — which is probably what “given current trends” refers to in his own, now-famous missive.

Fahlman has the entire reconstructed discussion thread archived at his website, here.

What appeals to me most about emoticons is that they're arguably the only new punctuation marks to have recently made it into the languages of the world.

Before Fahlman's particular (and very successful) innovation, there had been proposals for non-standard punctuation marks, marks that would have served a purpose. Take the interrobang, ‽, a character that--Wikipedia notes--would "combine the functions of the question mark (also called the “interrogative point”) and the exclamation mark or exclamation point (known in printers’ jargon as the “bang”). [. . .] A sentence ending with an interrobang asks a question in an excited manner, expresses excitement or disbelief in the form of a question, or asks a rhetorical question. For example: Are you nuts‽" The interrobang could fill a particular niche in written language, but for whatever reason--that niche's relative triviality versus the adoption costs of a new puncutation mark, say--the interrobang didn't take off. Neither did its various other peers.

Emoticons, notably, did take off. Emoticons are punctuation marks, broadening the bandwidth of written language just enough to give the reader an insight into the emotional state of the writer. That's a hugely important niche, especially in contexts where emotional context means all. ":-)" might not be suitable for casual use in more formal written document styles like that of the scholarly essay, sure--"The costs of separating from the Eurozone would be exceptionally high :-(", for instance--and I certainly don't use them in my own blog posts, but emotional context is very rarely relevant to the interpretation of those sorts of written documents regardless. In the context of casual communication, emoticons rule.

The emoticon, as a class of punctuation marks, because of the class' decidedly strong merits. Fahlman was one of many people aware of the concept, yes, but his particular proposals for filling that niche in written language were the hugely successful ones. I'd say that he deserves his fame. :-)