[PHOTO] Vesta Lunch, June 2012

I took this photo of Vesta Diner, looking northeast across the intersection of Bathurst and Dupont Streets towards the restaurant's location at 474 Dupont Street.

The place has an iconic look that constantly disappoints. I gave it a poor review when I first visited the establishment, hopeful, in 2005 and later gave it two stars at Yelp. (Even the coffee wasn't very good.) I might have been overly generous--recent comments in a 2007 blogTO review suggest that the restaurant has been cited on multiple occasions by city authorities for sanitary issues.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Beyond the Beyond's Bruce Sterling links to a review of a book highlighting the prominent role played by the nearly one million Chinese migrants in Africa.


• James Bow examines the Southridge Mall, a mall in Iowa's Des Moines that engaged in a suicidally bad redesign.


• Centauri Dreams' Paul Gilster summarizes a recent study by astronomers of the different layers of the atmosphere of brown dwarf 2MASSJ22282889-431026.


• Daniel Drezner is skeptical of the idea that American military deployments abroad give the United States an economic edge, pointing to the example of South Korea.


• Eastern Approaches examines the political mood in Serbia, finding an odd optimism that--if unsatisfied--could turn badly on the incumbents.


• The Global Sociology Blog shares a chart showing the relationships, ideological and even dynastic, between the most powerful factions in China.


• Razib Khan at GNXP deconstructs the myth of "Mitochondrial Eve" as the only woman who left descendants.


• The Planetary Society Blog's Emily Lakdawalla sums up the ongoing American Astronomical Society conference. Plenty of news about exoplanets!


• The Signal describes the efforts of oral historian Doug Boyd to come up with a suitable file format for oral histories.


• Torontoist highlights the Sherlock Holmes collection of the Toronto Reference Library.

[LINK] The Fomalhaut system

I found the above map of the known bodies in the Fomalhaut system at The Dragon's Tales. Almost twice the mass and seventeen times the brightness of our sun, Fomalhaut now seems to support at least one planet, b, in a very eccentric orbit, as well as two substantial debris disks.

The question of Fomalhaut b's existence or non-existence has been ongoing for some time, last year producing a preliminary confirmation of the body's existence at the same time that other astronomers discovered an ongoing "comet massacre" in the system's dusty belts. Fomalhaut b's very eccentric orbit makes it outstanding among exoplanets discovered.

[REVIEW] William Barton and Michael Capobianco, Alpha Centauri

I own two books which are named, in whole or in part, after a nearby star now known to host at least one exoplanet. The first one I'll revieww here tonight is the 1998 novel Alpha Centauri, one of several co-authored in the 1990s by William Barton and Michael Barton.

It was almost inevitable that Alpha Centauri, one of the brightest visible objects in the night sky and home to the nearest stars to our own world outside of the Sun, has featured in numerous works of fiction. Of the three stars of Alpha Centauri, two are reasonably like our own Sun, while for the past month one of these has been definitively known to host a planet. Alpha Centauri has been commonly imagined not only as a destination for explorers but as a potential second home for humanity, a planetary system that--if we're lucky--could support a new Earth to supplement, or replace, the old.



It's the hope of finding a potential second home for humanity that starts off Alpha Centauri. Forty years ago, at the beginning of the 23rd century, the sublight starship Mother Night was launched to explore Alpha Centauri, its crew of ten charged with scouting the trinary system of the title to determine its suitability for colonization. The Solar System, densely colonized by immortals, is now home to three hundred billion people and nearing potentially catastrophic resource shortages, leaving the oligarchy that runs the lot with no option to ensure their survival but to look for homes outside the solar system. As soon as the Mother Night arrives, however, its crew discovers that for hundreds of millions of years, the Alpha Centauri system was populated by a technologically advanced civilization. What happened to them? Is it too late for humanity to learn lessons? Unbeknownst to the investigating crew, however, one of their number belongs to a secret organization devoted to preventing the human cancer from spreading to the stars. Complications ensue.

( Spoilers, and squick. )

Alpha Centauri could have been a great book had its authors not tried to explore everything and not done so in ways that made me indifferent to the survival of the characters and their civilization. It speaks to the strength of these ideas that I'll rate it "good", with the note that readers should be prepared.

[REVIEW] Michael McCollum, The Sails of Tau Ceti

There have been many mentions of past appearances of worlds of Tau Ceti in science fiction, but so far as I know, few have have brought up Arizona-based science fiction writer Michael McCollum's 1992 The Sails of Tau Ceti.



I read the book again wanting to really like it. McCollum was a very active hard SF writer in the 1980s and 1990s, at least from my young perspective as I bought interesting-looking new titles in used book stores on Prince Edward Island. His bibliography in his German Wikipedia article is extensive. (Curiously, the article has no English-language counterpart.)

The ideas behind The Sails of Tau Ceti is certainly audacious. Centuries after the mysterious nova destroyed Tau Ceti that 25th of August, 2001, the inhabitants of our industrialized solar system detect a light sail craft apparently pushed into interstellar flight by the light of the nova. Starhopper, the first prototype starship, is repurposed to intercept the craft before it enters our solar system. Carrying, among others, the software engineer Tory Bronson, they rendezvous with the craft only to discover that it is a crewed vehicle, an O'Neill-type habitat housing tens of thousands of hexapodal Phelans fleeing the ruin of their home system and seeking succor in ours. Bronson is convinced to represent the refugees and their case to humanity.

( What's the secret? )

A minor kibbitz. The Phelans are noted as sending ships not only to our solar system but to Epsilon Eridani, Epsilon Indi, and Alpha Centauri, in other words the three closest Sun-like stars to our own planetary system other than lost Tau Ceti. Looking at the Internet Stellar Database, the Phelans had other options: Omicron 2 Eridani, or 40 Eridani, is closer to Tau Ceti than Epsilon Indi (10.2 light years versus 11.5), while 82 Eridani is just two thousand astronomical units further from Tau Ceti than Sol (both roughly 11.9 light years from the Phelans' home system). Especially if the pre-nova Phelans were aware of humanity through our radio pollution and uncertain about our attitudes towards alien refugees, in-universe wouldn't the Phelans have explored other, potentially safer, options. (I'm guessing that the data on the location of Sun-like stars in the neighbourhood of Tau Ceti that's a simple Google search in 2013 was more problematic 21 years ago.)

( Good ideas, but nothing compelling. )

[URBAN NOTE] "The real Rob Ford"

Edward Keenan's essay in The Grid says pretty much what I think about Toronto's mayor: Ford isn't disingenuous in his incoherence, he's just demonstrating his incapacity.

Here’s the thing about Rob Ford, and it strikes me as almost too-obvious to say it (yet again) at this point: He is a simple man. People have a hard time believing that he could rise to the position in government he occupies without being some kind of genius, and indeed I think he has savant-like qualities in connecting with the alienation a lot of people feel from the bureaucracy that’s meant to serve them. But he is not sophisticated, and he is every bit as bumbling and unguarded and unprepared as he appears every time he opens his mouth and talks. For a long time—especially when he was busy winning the election and, in its aftermath, crushing his opposition and ramming his agenda down his opponent’s throats—observers thought he had some kind of carefully hidden mastery of political strategy. That his Homer Simpson persona was a mask concealing a devious tactician.

But, of course, in retrospect, as I was discussing with Ivor Tossell yesterday and as John McGrath and David Hains discussed on Twitter today, those months of rolling over opponents were a crazy, apparently aimless joyride. At that point right after the election when his strength was greatest, when regular politicians lived in fear of the wrath of Ford Nation and grudgingly respected the expressed will of the electorate, he chose not to do anything that would require such great political capital: He didn’t get council to cancel Transit City, or repeal the Land Transfer Tax, for instance. Instead, he pissed away his greatest moment of strength doing things that were already really popular with the electorate. He repealed the Vehicle Registration Tax (which even Joe Pantalone had promised to do), declared TTC workers an essential service (a fiscally reckless move that had the TTC workers’ union crying “don’t throw us in the Briar Patch”!), and contracted out some garbage collection.

[. . . T]he real Rob Ford is every bit as simple and well-meaning, I think, as his lawyer claims. He is open about his ideas and opinions and behaviour, mostly. He tells it like he sees it. He stands up in defiance of the integrity commissioner and council on some questions on principle. And the principle he stands for often is, “Folks, I’m a good guy.” I think he believes it. As the activist Desmond Cole said recently, his attitudes are not mean-spirited; he has a certain “innocence.”

But there’s a point at which this particular type of innocence—a destructiveness that lacks malice because it comes from complete ignorance—becomes inexcusable. If I built a bridge and it collapsed because I am not an engineer and have no idea how bridges work, my steadfast conviction that I had built the best bridge that I could and that I was certain it would be strong (and, in fact, I am certain it was strong and it was a good bridge) would be of little solace to anyone on it when it caved in; I would have had no business building the bridge in the first place, given that I have no understanding of how to build bridges.