[PHOTO] The snow outside my window

[URBAN NOTE] "Toronto is a geologic force: the Lost Rivers guide to the PATH system"

Spacing Toronto's Daniel Rotsztain describes, with photos and maps, the aftermath of a recent walk in downtown Toronto's underground path system reveals the still-lasting geological influence of the area. Even after all the construction and channelling, remnants of lost streams like west-end Toronto's Garrison Creek still endure.

Thinking about the sheer volume of stone mined from the earth, shipped across the planet and reconstituted as Torontonian skyscrapers, it’s easy to appreciate that our modern city is a geologic force as strong as those that created the Scarborough Bluffs and carved the ravines.

Sometimes, the geologic forces of urbanization are more subtle. When the initial construction of the Bay-Adelaide centre was delayed indefinitely in the early 1990s, the city was left with a 6-storey stump and an unfulfilled order of 35,000 tons of Norwegian granite. Without the 44-storey tower to be clad, the city was awash in free flowing Scandinavian stone that has since settled into hundreds of tables and floors in downtown Toronto.

Beneath the city covered in layers of stone from elsewhere, there are indeed remnants of historical watercourses. Though most of the waterways in downtown Toronto have been eradicated due to extreme excavation for infrastructure and subterranean parking levels, a proxy for one of the Market Streams that used to flow south east through the city does exist.

In the corridor between the Royal Bank Building and Brookfield Place, the stone below our feet was showing signs of water absorption. This would have been where Newgate Creek emptied into Lake Ontario.

Though dry to the touch, the off-coloured stone might be a sign of the groundwater that would have replaced the creek. Standing underground, surrounded by concrete, it’s powerful to feel this rare assertion of the landscape beneath Toronto — a sign of the city before the glass, steel and international stone of today’s internationally constituted metropolis.

[URBAN NOTE] "City seeking "citizen-representatives" on the Toronto Transit Commission"

Transit Toronto's Robert Mackenzie reports that the TTC is looking for citizen volunteers.

If you’re a member of the public who’s interested in public transit and looking for opportunities to contribute to the your community, the City of Toronto is looking for you. It’s encouraging citizens to apply for membership on the Toronto Transit Commission — the TTC’s board of directors.

The board oversees matters of TTC policy, planning its services, building, maintaining and operating Toronto’s transit system and expanding its services and facilities.

It consists of 11 members — seven members of City Council and four public members. City Council appoints one of its member as the chair of the board. The board elects a vice chair from among its public members. Each commissioner serves for four years. Commission meetings usually take place just once a month, although occasional extra meetings may also occur.

The City says it’s looking for public members of the board who “have directorship and executive-level experience and collectively represent a range of skills, knowledge, and experience with one or more large organizations in a variety of areas”[.]

More, including a listing of those areas, at the link.

[LINK] "Black Wedding: The Re-emergence of Lenie Clarke."

Canadian science-fiction writer Peter Watts notes that two Polish fans of his latest, Maelstrom, have cosplayed a character. Cosplaying dark dystopic SF universes can be interesting. (Peter Watts fan, here.)

Today’s headline, though, hails from Poland, where Adam Rotter took a gorgeous-yet-macabre turn from his usual day job as a wedding photographer to cast his partner, Karolina Cisowska, as Lenie Clarke.

Together they’ve done a 16-shot spread[1] inspired by specific passages from Maelstrom. It’s over on facebook under the project heading “Syrena” (which I assume translates as “Siren” and not the more biological interpretation involving manatees). But I have, with Adam’s permission, posted the pics here at rifters.com, together with the associated inspirational snippets o’prose, over in the Rifters Gallery. View. Enjoy.

And my profound thanks to Adam and Karolina. From the in-your-face black rotting skull right down the telescoping shockprod in Lenie’s hand, these are just gorgeous.

Photos are available here

[LINK] "Germany Deserved Debt Relief, Greece Doesn't"

Bloomberg View's Leonid Bershidsky makes a controversial case.

It might still be argued that if Germany deserved a second chance after all it did to Europe, then surely Greece should also be granted one.

There's a technical answer to that. As [Yale's Timothy Guinnane] wrote, "The people of some countries today are working to repay international debts incurred by earlier governments that they did not elect or want. Often the debt was used either to provide luxurious lifestyles for a corrupt few, or to pay for the repression of the mass of the population. Yet under the rules of the international financial system, the people of the country are still responsible for the debt or risk loss of access to international credit markets."

[. . .]

The West German governments that benefited from the debt relief were resolutely anti-Communist and anti-Marxist. CDU, now the party of Chancellor Angela Merkel, ran West Germany for the first two decades of its existence. It was less economically liberal than it is now, and it built a sizable welfare state over the years, but it was still a center-right, capitalist force that believed that only private initiative could lead to more or less universal prosperity.

The far-left political forces were outside the London process in 1953; they were in the GDR. Now, far-left Syriza wants to be on the inside, with its plans to nationalize banks and utilities and its costly promises to voters. It will use the debt relief to provide free electricity to households, subsidize rents, restore Christmas bonuses to pensioners, raise minimum salaries -- that is, to return to the practices that led to the accumulation of Greece's debt. It is an extreme case of moral hazard, which the post-war German governments conscientiously avoided.

[LINK] "Inequality Fuels HIV Epidemic in the Caribbean"

The Inter Press Service's Desmond Brown describes the current state of HIV/AIDS in the Caribbean.

The Caribbean is one of the most heavily affected regions in the world, with adult HIV prevalence about one percent higher than in any other region outside sub-Saharan Africa.

The HIV pandemic in the Caribbean is fuelled by a range of social and economic inequalities and is sustained by high levels of stigma, discrimination against the most at-risk and marginalised populations and persistent gender inequality, violence and homophobia.

HIV in the Caribbean is mostly concentrated in and around networks of men who have sex with men. Social stigma, however, has kept the epidemic among men who have sex with men hidden and unacknowledged. There is also a notable burden of infection among injecting drug users, sex workers and the clients of sex workers.

The main mode of transmission in the Caribbean is unprotected heterosexual intercourse – paid or otherwise. Sex between men is also thought to be a significant factor in several countries, although due to social stigma, this is mainly denied.

[LINK] "Measles Still Kills Thousands of Children Each Year"

The Inter Press Service's Lyndal Williams notes that measles is still a killer.

Measles remains one of the leading causes of death for young children worldwide, even though a safe vaccine is available.

Most of the 145,700 people who died from measles in 2013 were children under the age of five, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

However, immunisation has also saved many children from death and serious illness. The WHO estimates that 15.6 million deaths were prevented between 2000 and 2013, because of increased access to the measles vaccination.

Jos Vandelaer, prinicipal advisor on immunisations for UNICEF, the United Nations children’s agency, told IPS that the children most at risk of missing out on vaccinations are among the world’s most vulnerable and disadvantaged, including children from minority backgrounds and displaced or refugee children in temporary accommodation.

“These are the very same kids who also don’t have access to health care, to clean water, to hygiene, to school, and so on,” he said.

“So these kids face a double whammy, in that if they don’t get immunised and they fall sick their chance of getting treatment is also lower than an average kid.”

[LINK] "There’s a Good and a Bad Way to ‘Geoengineer’ the Planet"

National Geographic's Craig Welch describes the latest scientific consensus on geoengineering. If it need be done, Welch suggests, relatively low-impact and low-risk methods would be quite preferable.

Developing the technology to suck planet-warming carbon dioxide back out of the atmosphere is an expensive but promising approach that may be necessary to help prevent the worst effects of climate change, according to the first of two reports released this morning by the research arm of the National Academy of Sciences.

But according to the second report, proposals to cool the planet on the cheap by reflecting sunlight are so risky that even serious study of them should be undertaken only in preparation for an emergency.

Together the two reports from the National Research Council (NRC) offer the most comprehensive U.S. examination yet of "geoengineering"—the intentional intervening in the climate system in an attempt to forestall some of the impact of global warming.

"The world is in a very tough situation, and there's no magic bullet here, unfortunately," said Paul Falkowski, a biochemistry professor at Rutgers University, who worked on the reports.

An NRC committee of experts from across disciplines was asked by several U.S. government science and intelligence agencies to evaluate geoengineering proposals. The ideas range from anodyne (planting trees to capture CO₂) to potentially alarming (injecting sulfate particles or other aerosols into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight and cool the planet).

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Centauri Dreams reports on a small satellite observatory, Twinkle, which will be studying exoplanet atmospheres.


• D-Brief notes the magnetism of the Earth's inner core.


• The Dragon's Gaze has links to two papers cataloguing ten thousand potential exoplanets found by Kepler.


• The Dragon's Tales links to a paper examining the age of some features on the surface of Mars.


• Joe. My. God. notes Madonna is going to promote her new album by chatting with fans on Grindr.


• Language Log notes that people have been complaining about the impact of foreigners on the English language since at least the 14th century (Danes and Normans, then).


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the bizarre suits against Obamacare.


• The New APPS Blog wonders if the tendency among philosophers to immediately classify new events as examples of an established trend is a way to silence discussion.


• Otto Pohl links to a paper of his describing how deported peoples lost and regained social capital in the former Soviet Union.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer wonders if China might support the Nicaragua Canal for security's sake in the case of war.


• The Russian Demographics Blog lists the dates on which the Russian Federation's national territories (Tatarstan, Chechnya, et cetera) were created in the early 20th century.


• Towleroad notes that a same-sex male couple was the first chosen to welcome the U.S.S. San Francisco to its home port, with a kiss.


• Window on Eurasia notes the spread of Ukraine-related violence into Russia and looks at regionalism in the Kuban area of Russia.

[DM] "Depopulation: An Investor's Guide to Value in the Twenty-First Century"

At Demograhpy Matters I positively review Depopulation: An Investor's Guide to Value in the Twenty-First Century by Philip Auerswald and Joon Yun.