[PHOTO] Founding Backstage Condominiums

Walking yesterday through the neighbourhood of St. Lawrence with my visiting father, just east of Yonge Street and wedged between Front Street to the north and the Gardiner Expressway, we came across this pit.

A recent satellite view shows the the corner of Yonge and The Esplanade to be hosting only a parking lot. This site now hosts the foundation of Backstage Condominiums, a 36-story glass tower that will overshadow the more classical 25 The Esplanade just to the east. (The "Backstage" likely comes from the projected tower's location just below the strip of theatres along Front Street.)

This close to Lake Ontario, seepage of water is a serious problem. Signs of water can be seen at the bottom of the retaining wall and on the floor of the pit.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Bag News Notes dissects that disturbing New York Post photo of a man seconds from being crushed by a subway train.


• Centauri Dreams notes Voyager 1's surprise discovery of distant magnetic currents more than a generation after its launch and research on the possibility of planets circling brown dwarfs.


• Daniel Drezner notes the continuing official anger of China with Norway over dissident Liu Xiaobo's 2010 Nobel Peace Prize. If Norway's a low-quality and badly-behaved country, Drezner asks, what is China?


• Eastern Approaches observes what may be the beginnings of a rapprochement between Serbia and its now-independent ex-province Kosovo.


• Geocurrents argues that Larry Summer's statement that American higher education students don't need to learn foreign languages is ill-thought; The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer agrees with the argument but disagrees with Geocurrents' points.


• GNXP's Razib Khan observes that DNA testing is likely to uncover new elements of African history of migration, suggesting that there may be ancestral links between speakers of Cushitic languages in East Africa and speakers of Khoisan languages elsewhere.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money is properly critical (1, 2) of Ross Douthat's argument that the lakc of high fertility rates indicates decadence; Marginal Revolution, sadly, is not.


• Language Log critically examines the recent argument made that English is more closely related to the North Germanic languages of Scandinavia, rather than the West Germanic languages of continental Europe.


• Norman Geras opines on the question of whether Ahmedinejad's statements about destroying Israel amount to genocide, criticizing Philip Roth who disagrees.


• Diane Duane, at Out of Ambit, takes a look at a delightful 17th century tract on the benefits of chocolate.


• The Transit Toronto weblog takes a look at a TTC-themed play.

[LINK] "Dawn probe spies possible water-cut gullies on Vesta"

Paul Drye's reaction on Facebook to the news--reported by the BBC's Jonathan Amos--that the surface of asteroid/dwarf planet Vesta might be marked by running water was "!!!". I share the sentiment: the idea that a dwarf planet 525 kilometres in diameter, with gravity 2.5% that of Earth and no atmosphere whatsoever, could have supported running water is counterintuitive.

[P]ictures of Vesta taken by Nasa's Dawn probe show complex gullies running down the walls of some craters.

The possibility of liquid erosion needs to be considered, say the researchers.

"We want to hear what other people's opinions are," Jennifer Scully, from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), told BBC News.

"We're just putting it out there to the community; we're not suggesting anything hard and fast at this stage."

[. . .]

Ms Scully examined all of the craters on Vesta that measured about 10km and wider, cataloguing the shapes of the gullies that etched their walls.

In the majority of cases (about 50 examples), the troughs trace simple descent lines and are presumably the consequence of loose rock or soil falling down the slope. But in a second, smaller group (11 examples), the pattern the gullies cut in the surface is quite different. They are complex; they are interlaced.

"The first group we call Type A. They're very typical of dry-mass wasting; the sort of thing you would get on Earth's Moon and on other, smaller asteroids. But the Type B gullies are the ones we think may have this liquid water origin; they have quite distinct morphologies. They are longer and narrower. They also interconnect, branching off one another."

If it was liquid water that carved these features, the question then arises as to its source.

Vesta is recognised generally to be a very dry body. Geological processes in its early history are thought to have driven off the vast majority of its volatile materials.

And in any case, with no pressure from an atmosphere, the asteroid cannot sustain liquid water at its surface for very long. Any such fluid would be lost to space in short order.

This means any reserve of water must be retained beneath the surface.

[LINK] "The Case for Drinking as Much Coffee as You Like"

Share the good news! Coffee really is the perfect drug.

The Atlantic's Lindsay Abrams describes.

"What I tell patients is, if you like coffee, go ahead and drink as much as you want and can," says Dr. Peter Martin, director of the Institute for Coffee Studies at Vanderbilt University. He's even developed a metric for monitoring your dosage: If you are having trouble sleeping, cut back on your last cup of the day. From there, he says, "If you drink that much, it's not going to do you any harm, and it might actually help you. A lot."

Officially, the American Medical Association recommends conservatively that "moderate tea or coffee drinking likely has no negative effect on health, as long as you live an otherwise healthy lifestyle." That is a lackluster endorsement in light of so much recent glowing research. Not only have most of coffee's purported ill effects been disproven -- the most recent review fails to link it the development of hypertension -- but we have so, so much information about its benefits. We believe they extend from preventing Alzheimer's disease to protecting the liver. What we know goes beyond small-scale studies or limited observations. The past couple of years have seen findings, that, taken together, suggest that we should embrace coffee for reasons beyond the benefits of caffeine, and that we might go so far as to consider it a nutrient.

[. . .]

The most recent findings that support coffee as a panacea will make their premiere this December in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Coffee, researchers found, appears to reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes.

"There have been many metabolic studies that have shown that caffeine, in the short term, increases your blood glucose levels and increases insulin resistance," Shilpa Bhupathiraju, a research fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health's Department of Nutrition and the study's lead author, told me. But "those findings really didn't translate into an increased risk for diabetes long-term." During the over 20 years of follow-up, and controlling for all major lifestyle and dietary risk factors, coffee consumption, regardless of caffeine content, was associated with an 8 percent decrease in the risk of type 2 diabetes in women. In men, the reduction was 4 percent for regular coffee and 7 percent for decaf.

The findings were arrived at rigorously, relying on data from the Nurses' Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study, two prospective studies that followed almost 80,000 women and over 40,000 men from the 1980s through 2008. Although self-reported, the data is believed to be extremely reliable because it comes from individuals who know more about health and disease than the average American (the downside, of course, is that results won't always apply to the general population -- but in this case, Bhupathuraju explained that there's no reason to believe that the biological effects seen in health professionals wouldn't be seen in everyone else).

That there were no major differences in risk reduction between regular and decaf coffee suggests there's something in it, aside from its caffeine content, that could be contributing to these observed benefits. It also demonstrates that caffeine was in no way mitigating coffee's therapeutic effects. Of course, what we choose to add to coffee can just as easily negate the benefits -- various sugar-sweetened beverages were all significantly associated with an increased risk of diabetes. A learned taste for cream and sugar (made all the more enticing when they're designed to smell like seasonal celebrations) is likely one of the reasons why we associate coffee more with decadence than prudence.

[LINK] "Ontario PC Leader Tim Hudak pledges easier access to booze but not lower prices"

The push to allow alcohol sales outside of provincial government-owned liquor stores that I mentioned in July recently got high-profile support from Progressive Conservative leader Tim Hudak. As the Toronto Star's Richard J. Brennan and Robert Benzie describes, the plan isn't getting support for other political parties in Ontario, many of which are concerned about the financial consequences for the province if it no longer has a monopoly on sales of alcoholic beverages.

The sale of beer, wine and spirits in corner stores and supermarkets would give Ontarians more freedom of choice, but not necessarily lower prices, says Tory Leader Tim Hudak.

Hudak told reporters Tuesday a Progressive Conservative government would “end the LCBO and Beer Store monopolies” without forgoing the revenue from hefty provincial taxes.

“Let’s let the private sector into the alcohol business, let’s have some more competition,” he told reporters outside an LCBO outlet in Toronto’s Liberty Village that refused to let him hold his news conference inside.

[. . .]

In 1985, then Liberal premier David Peterson promised beer and wine in corner stores but could not get the measure passed through the legislature. In 1995, then Tory premier Mike Harris pledged to sell the LCBO before backing off due to the billions in annual proceeds.

Last year, the LCBO contributed about $1.6-billion to provincial coffers.

Hudak addressed social concerns that some — like MADD Canada — might have with easier accessibility to booze, by noting there aren’t “riots in the streets” in other more liberal jurisdictions.

The Beer Store’s Jeff Newton said while consumers assume such changes would mean lower prices, Ontario’s high tax rates on alcohol prevent that.

“Their assumption is automatically that means prices are going down based on their experience from shopping in the corner store … in Florida or Buffalo,” he said.

[. . .]

MADD Canada, which crusades against drunk-driving, fears dire consequences if booze is easier to obtain.

“We have always been opposed to it simply because the more availability there is to alcohol, the more the consumption and the higher the risk of alcohol-related harm,” said MADD’s Carolyn Swinson.