[PHOTO] Flowers of Rollo Bay

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• blogTO shares ten interesting facts about Scarborough.


• The Dragon's Gaze looks at orbits where two or more objects can share a path.


• The Dragon's Tales reports on Lockheed's allegedly promising plan for near-term fusion reactors.


• Eastern Approaches notes concerns about media bias in Slovakian print media.


• Geocurrents notes how recent events show that Ukraine does not cleave neatly into pro- and anti-Russian halves.


• Joe. My. God. observes that the Micronesian state of Palau has decriminalized homosexuality.


• Language Hat looks at the history of how fonts get their names.


• Marginal Revolution notes the arguably stagnant and over-regulated labour market of France.


• James Nicoll has announced his ongoing effort, to commemorate the Cuban missile crisis, to review books on nuclear war.


• The Planetary Society Blog's Emily Lakdawalla notes that astronomers have found a second small Kuiper belt object for the New Horizons probe to survey.


• Spacing Toronto blogs about the demographic and economic challenges of millennials in Canadian cities.


• Towleroad looks at problems with gay intimacy visibility on American television.


• Window on Eurasia considers tensions over migration in post-Soviet Russia.


• The World notes the devastating impact on living standards of the Greek recession.

[LINK] Paul Farmer on Ebola in Africa

Doctor Paul Farmer, whose sensitive and insightful book AIDS and Accusation on the Haitian AIDS epidemic I reviewed in 2006, has a diary article up at the London Review of Books recounting his experiences of Ebola in Africa. As he notes, if Ebola is an epidemic, is it an epidemic defined--created, even--by extreme poverty.

Both nurses and doctors are scarce in the regions most heavily affected by Ebola. Even before the current crisis killed many of Liberia’s health professionals, there were fewer than fifty doctors working in the public health system in a country of more than four million people, most of whom live far from the capital. That’s one physician per 100,000 population, compared to 240 per 100,000 in the United States or 670 in Cuba. Properly equipped hospitals are even scarcer than staff, and this is true across the regions most affected by Ebola. Also scarce is personal protective equipment (PPE): gowns, gloves, masks, face shields etc. In Liberia there isn’t the staff, the stuff or the space to stop infections transmitted through bodily fluids, including blood, urine, breast milk, sweat, semen, vomit and diarrhoea. Ebola virus is shed during clinical illness and after death: it remains viable and infectious long after its hosts have breathed their last. Preparing the dead for burial has turned hundreds of mourners into Ebola victims.

Many of the region’s recent health gains, including a sharp decline in child mortality, have already been reversed, in large part because basic medical services have been shut down as a result of the crisis. Most of Ebola’s victims may well be dying from other causes: women in childbirth, children from diarrhoea, people in road accidents or from trauma of other sorts. There’s little doubt that the current epidemic can be stopped, but no one knows when or how it will be reined in. As Barack Obama said, speaking at a special session of the United Nations, ‘Do not stand by, thinking that somehow, because of what we’ve done, that it’s taken care of. It’s not.’ Preventing the next eruption is an even more distant goal.

As of 1 October, a third of all Ebola cases ever documented were registered in September 2014. More than seven thousand cases have been recorded since March, more than half of them fatal. In epidemiological terms, the doubling times of the current Ebola outbreak are 15.7 days in Guinea, 23.6 days in Liberia and 30.2 days in Sierra Leone. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggested at the end of September that unless urgent action is taken, more than a million people could be infected in the next few months.

The worst is yet to come, especially when we take into account the social and economic impact of the epidemic, which has so far hit only a small number of patients (by contrast, the combined death toll of Aids, tuberculosis and malaria, the ‘big three’ infectious pathogens, was six million a year as recently as 2000). Trade and commerce in West Africa have already been gravely affected. And Ebola has reached the heart of the Liberian government, which is led by the first woman to win a presidential election in an African democracy. There were rumours that President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was not attending the UN meeting because she was busy dealing with the crisis, or because she faced political instability at home. But we knew that one of her staff had fallen ill with Ebola. A few days ago, we heard that another of our Liberian hosts, a senior health official, had placed herself in 21-day quarantine. Although she is without symptoms, her chief aide died of Ebola on 25 September. Such developments, along with the rapid pace and often spectacular features of the illness, have led to a level of fear and stigma which seems even greater than that normally caused by pandemic disease.

[LINK] "With a parade for Putin, Serbia walks a tightrope"

Reuters' Matt Robinson describes how Serbia's flirtations with both the European Union and Russia is becoming increasingly untenable. Something will be giving.

On Thursday, guns, tanks and planes will be back in the city, now capital of Serbia, for a Liberation Day parade held four days early to accommodate the guest of honor -- Russian President Vladimir Putin, en route to a summit in Milan.

It is a gesture with huge symbolism in a Cold-War-style East-West split over Ukraine that has forced Serbia, politically indebted to Russia but seeing its economic future with the European Union, into a delicate balancing act.

The United States is uncomfortable about the idea of Putin and his military chief taking the salute at a parade of 4,500 Serbian soldiers while NATO says Russian soldiers are still making war in eastern Ukraine.

"You can have good relations with Russia and China, and with the United States. But our view of visits by Chinese and Russian officials differs; the Chinese haven't attacked anyone, but the Russians have," Michael Kirby, the U.S. ambassador to Serbia, was reported as telling the Serbian daily Vecernje Novosti in an interview last month.

[LINK] "Women named Isis face backlash over Islamic State acronym"

CBC's Meagan Fitzpatrick writes about the concern of women called Isis that their name is being tarnished, literally, by association with the violent Islamic State. While I generally agree with the argument that the association between the name and the pseudo-state's acronym is tenuous, I do have to wonder if this really needs to be an issue.

Women named Isis say they are experiencing a backlash because of the acronym ISIS that is widely used to refer to the jihadist group, and they are pleading with media outlets to stop using it.

They have launched a campaign to share what they are going through and to pressure media to switch from ISIS, which stands for Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, to ISIL, which stands for Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. The organization itself is using the name Islamic State, but that has not been adopted by most Western media organizations, including the CBC, which refers to the group as ISIS.

What to call the group and how to translate its Arabic name into English have been matters of debate.

What is not in doubt is that women named Isis now have a name associated with militants responsible for enslaving women and grotesque acts of violence, including the beheadings of American journalists and British aid workers.

At the forefront of the "Save Our Name" campaign is a Miami woman named Isis Martinez. In a YouTube video she says that the last few weeks have been "incredibly challenging."

"My name is Isis, I love my name. Or so, I loved it a lot more before," she says.

[LINK] "What It's like to Fly the $23,000 Singapore Airlines Suites Class"

Blogger Derek Lo recounts his experience of an incredibly luxurious airplane flight from Singapore to New York City, with abundant photos.

In 2008, Singapore Airlines introduced their Suites Class, the most luxurious class of flying that is commercially available.

The Suites were exclusive to their flagship Airbus A380, and they go beyond flat beds by offering enclosed private cabins with sliding doors that cocoon you in your own little lap of luxury. The interior was designed by French luxury yacht designer Jean-Jacques Coste and comes along with a plush soft leather armchair hand-stitched by the Italian master craftsmen Poltrona Frau. Perhaps most well-known of all, Singapore Airlines became the first and only commercial airline with a double bed in the sky.

However, the experience came with a hefty price tag. With round-trip tickets costing up to S$23,000 (or US$18,400), it was completely unattainable for most people.

Frequent flyer miles buy much.

[URBAN NOTE] "How the CN Tower killed Toronto’s rooftop lookouts"

Spacing Toronto's Chris Bateman describes how mid-century Toronto's observation decks were undermined by the CN Tower. Nice photos, too.

There was a time when observation decks were all the rage in Toronto. The designers and developers of tall buildings like TD Centre, Commerce Court, and City Hall, keen to show off their creations to the public, installed top floor public viewing galleries with panoramic views of the city. One had a restaurant, another doubled as an art gallery, a third had an aviary.

These early privately-owned public spaces (POPS) gave many people their first chance to look down on the city from above. They were popular, too. About a million people visited the observation floor at the top of TD Centre every year. That was until the CN Tower showed up and spoiled the party in 1976.

One of the oldest and best-known closed observation decks in Toronto sits atop the original Commerce Court tower at King and Bay. When the building was completed in 1931, it was the tallest building in the British Empire. Crowds of people gathered on the unfinished roof in 1930 to watch the R100 dirigible balloon―the pride of Great Britain’s budding Imperial Airship Scheme―glide silently over Toronto.

Today, the tower is easy to miss among the city’s taller skyscrapers, but the exquisite detail of the roof was always meant to be seen up close. Massive carved heads, representing courage, foresight, observation, and enterprise, still peer out from the thirty-second floor observation balcony, though the visitors are long gone. The deck, which doesn’t have a safety railing, is too dangerous, the building’s owners say.

The 1972 addition to Commerce Court was built with an observation level, too. The 57-floor International Style Bay Street building robbed the complex’s original tower of its downtown view and trumped it for height. When it opened the new tower was the tallest in Toronto, beating neighbouring TD Centre by about 17 metres.

[LINK] "How to mark the 20th anniversary of the Netscape Navigator?"

Colby Cash's article in MacLean's marking the 20th anniversary of Netscape Navigator is a delight.

The Netscape Navigator web browser celebrated its 20th anniversary this week. For many of you, Netscape will have been the first browser you used, and was therefore your first introduction to ubiquitous digital connectedness. This, in turn, means it was probably responsible for a permanent change in your neurology and in the essentials of your lifestyle. Which seems worth observing—or mourning, according to your view of it.

When I say “Netscape,” of course, your instinctive reaction is probably to recoil at the memory of crude, dead technology. You think of four-digit baud rates, image files loading with agonizing slowness, and the raspy scream of the old-fashioned modem. But Netscape, practically speaking, probably changed your life much more than changing religions or cities or even spouses would.

Even if you are a literal hermit who has never come within five metres of a computer, you have some relationship to the browser and its consequences: It has altered politics, decided elections, changed regimes, reshaped the economy, exploded and reassembled the media, transformed the news. The children raised with (within?) the browser will have consciousnesses we cannot comprehend. They will live according to axioms, and on the basis of expectations, that are foreign to us, and that would be foreign to every generation of humans that has hitherto lived.