Brood X periodic cicadas are due any day now

Brood X of the 17-year periodic cicadas are due to emerge in northeastern USA any day now. We won't see them around Toronto - just too far north - which is a shame because, alarming as the prospect of 1.5 trillion noisy cicadas emerging all at once is, it would nevertheless be pretty cool to experience.

It's such a bizarre idea. No-one really understands why there are populations of 13-year and 17-year cicadas only in eastern North America. No-one really understands how they manage to measure 13 years and 17 years so accurately, and why 13 years and 17 years anyway (prime numbers? really?) And no-one really know why these insects have a life so much longer than any other insect, the vast majority of it lived as immature nymphs deep underground in splendid isolation (there are theories about them outliving and avoiding predators, and the fact that the roots they live on are very low in nutrition so it take them a long time to mature, but these don't seem very convincing to me).

But, whatever the reasons behind it all (or lack thereof), the fact is that, when the soil reaches the magic 64°F temperature (about 18°C), emerge they most certainly will. And I for one am looking forward to seeing them, at least on video.

UPDATE

Some good pictures of Brood X. A bit late, but still great!

Why is anyone flying on planes at the moment?

I keep reading articles about the number of flights that are delivering passengers infected with COVID-19 into Canadian airports. The latest such article shows that, contrary to a few months, or even weeks, ago, most flights carrying infected passengers were domestic, not international, ones. 

So, really we're just spreading the disease more effectively around the country (particularly from hotspots like Alberta). Mind you, the ratio is only about 60:40, so there's plenty coming in from abroad too. In total, in the four months between January 1st and May 5th of this year, there were no less than 1,873 flights arriving or departing from airports in Canada that had at least one passenger who tested positive for the coronavirus. That's a lot.

It's all fascinating analysis. But my response is always: why is anyone flying anywhere anyway? Who are all these people? Pretty much the whole country is locked down - there's a pandemic on, don't you know? - so why is anyone jumping on a plane to anywhere?

I m missing travel, including international travel as much as the next guy. Possibly more so, because we had plans to ramp up our travel while my wife is still reasonably mobile. But all those plans were put on hold in March 2020, and since then we haven't even been out of our immediate area. That's what we're all supposed to be doing, right? So, why are some people going to cottages, visiting relative in other parts of the country, going abroad for sun holidays?

Why do those little flying insects swarm?

Those annoying little flying critters are back, especially around the waterfront where we live. They don't bite, but God are they annoying.

I've always called them "gnats", and that is a common name for them (although various species of gnats are really close cousins); others call them "lake flies". Technically, though, they are "non-biting midges" or chironomids, as opposed to biting midges (or "no-see-ums" in Canadian parlance). There are some thousand different species of them just in Canada alone, completely indistinguishable to us mere mortals.

But why do they have to swarm like that? Well, apparently,  the ones we see swarming are all males, and they hang out in clouds, often near water or around lights or other prominent objects, so that they are a more obvious target for females. Because pretty much all they do, and all they want to do, is mate. They literally are born, swarm, mate, and then die. They don't even eat. It all seems a bit pointless to me, quite frankly, although I'm sure they don't see it that way.

Why a vaccine patent waiver is a contentious idea

Since Joe Biden unexpectedly set the cat among the pigeons by backing a temporary waiver of COVID-19 vaccine patents, citing the old adage "extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures", there has been much discussion of the pros and cons of such an extraordinary move. India, South Africa and up to a hundred other medium- to low-income countries have been calling for a suspension of patents rules since last October, and the World Health Organization strongly supports the idea. But many higher income countries (including Canada) have been prevaricating and avoiding a definitive decision.

It sounds, at first blush, like a no-brainer. This is a global health crisis like no other. We are "all in it together" and "nobody is protected until we are all protected", and all that). So, in the interests of global equity and the common good, what could possibly be wrong with allowing poorer countries to produce their own vaccines if they can't afford the products being offered by Big Pharma, or can't get hold of them because of the prior claims of rich countries?

Well, a few things, apparently.

For one thing, coronavirus vaccines (particularly mRNA vaccines like Pfizer and Moderna's, but also the adenovirus products of AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson) are complex technical products. They are biological agents, rather than just chemical compounds that can be easily reverse-engineered. To replicate these kinds of vaccines requires access to the developer's "soft" intellectual property (the proprietary recipe, cell lines, manufacturing processes, etc). Developing, testing and quality-controlling such a product would take many months, if not years, for a country without (or even with) a high-level pharmaceutical and research base, and may not even be practical at all. For this reason, it is unlikely to be of much help in the short term.

In addition, potential manufacturers would need certain raw materials and other materials, like glass vials, bioreactor bags, and filtration equipment, which are already in short supply due to the overwhelming global demand, not to mention disruptive export restrictions.

Vaccine producers, and some countries that are against waiving patents, like Germany, argue that the price of the vaccines is not the main sticking point constraining vaccination in developing countries. It is true that the developers, while still making profits in some cases at least (AstraZeneca is being distributed on a not-for-profit basis), are not gouging as much as Big Pharma is often accused of, and have constrained their prices, especially given the billions of dollars in development fees they have swallowed, even after handsome government contributions.

Another issue is the potentially dangerous precedent that such a move creates. If patents can be waived at will, then much of the financial basis of the pharmaceutical industry starts to crumble. Will firms and individuals invest in vaccine projects in the future if there is no guarantee of profits? The reason patents were established in the first place was to provide incentives of short term monopolistic/oligopolistic profits as a recompense for research, innovation and technical progress. As Germany contends,"the protection of intellectual property is a source of innovation and must remain so". Now, I am not a big fan of Big Pharma, but it has to be admitted that the current system did yield several excellent vaccines in record time.

So, it's not as simple as it might appear at first sight. How do these arguments stack up against the bare fact that, as of April 9th, the 67 poorest countries in the world had received just 0.2% of the world's vaccines? Hard to say. Even if the moral argument supports a patent waiver, the fact remains that such a move would have little or no practical effect in the short term, and that's the term we need to focus on right now.

The debate rages on. Some countries like America, France and New Zealand, that were originally against patent waivers, have come around to the idea. The World Trade Organization's Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement requires a consensus, though, and many countries remain on the fence, and some - notably Germany - strongly against it.

Some people think that voluntary licensing would be a better solution than an outright waiver of patent rights. This would entail the developers entering into binding contractual agreements with generic producers, which would receive the necessary permission, know-how and assistance from the patent-holder to produce a vaccine for sale in a certain market. The patent-holder can ensure quality, and would receive royalties  in return, usually off less than 10% (as compared to the 25-30% profit margin companies like Pfizer are currently earning). AstraZeneca and Novavax have already entered into such agreements with India, Japan and South Korea. New agreements, it is argued, could be fostered, or even forced on the current patent-holders.

China's uncontrolled space debris

Speaking of China, there has been much speculation in recent days about exactly where bits of the the Chinese rocket Long March 5B would come down to earth. The Chinese rocket scientists had no idea, having lost complete control of it some time ago, but blithely opined that it would probably come down somewhere in one of the oceans, on the basis that 70% of the earth's surface is water. They say it is "very unlikely to cause any harm", which is a rather vague assurance.

If this seems to you like a bit of a cavalier and risky attitude, then you'd be quite right. About 80% of the empty core stage of the rocket was expected to burn up on re-entry into Earth's atmosphere, but this is a large and extrmely heavy object, estimated at between 18 and 22 tonnes, so that still leaves about 4 tonnes of metal debris to fall, God knows where.

Yesterday's Globe and Mail reported that, according to its expert sources, the rocket night be expected to hit the Pacific Ocean, somewhere near the equator. Other expert predictions have had it coming down somewhere in the Mediterranean basin, or possibly anywhere from Costa Rica to Australia. Clearly this is not a very exact science. Part of the problem is that the rocket fragment is orbiting the earth every 90 minutes or so, travelling at about 8 kilometres per second, so any slight difference in timing can make a huge difference in its geographical location.

In the end, Long March 5B landed safely in the Indian Ocean near the Maldives, nowhere near many of the earlier predictions.

This is the second time in a year that  Chinese rocket debris has fallen to Earth in a completely uncontrolled fashion. Long March 5B's predecessor fell on Ivory Coast in western Africa about this time last year, damaging several buildings, but thankfully leaving no human victims. Ten more such launches are planned by China in the coming years, as they assemble a new space station in Earth orbit. Their last space station also fell, uncontrolled, to Earth in 2018, landing safely in the Pacific Ocean, although again more by luck than judgement.

So far, then, they have been lucky. But it just seems irresponsible and wrong to take such risks. NASA is on record as saying, "It is clear that China is failing to meet responsible standards regarding their space debris", although the USA and Russia have also been guilty of losing control of their space garbage in the past. But China is definitely the worst repeat offender. One day, one of these re-entries is going to land on a city and kill thousands. 

We should not be allowing uncontrolled crashes, especially when we now have the technology to use re-usable rockets. Furthermore, the remains of these various space experiments are now littering our oceans, contaminated with hydrazine, a toxic rocket fuel.

Why is China called "China"?

I am still in the early pages of Bill Hayton's The Invention of China - one of the very few non-fiction books I have read in recent years that does not boast a long, wordy sub-title: the title itself is entirely self-explanatory - and I have already discovered several erroneous tenets of conventional wisdom, or at least personal assumptions and misapprehensions.

It should come as no surprise, I suppose, that China does not call itself "China", in much the same way as Germany does not call itself "Germany", or Greece "Greece". The label is a European one, although nevertheless one whose origins are surprisingly hard to pin down. Even the early Portuguese and Italian explorers of the 16th century did not encounter a place valled China. They were introduced to a state called Tamen or, in more contemporary spelling, Da Ming, literally the "Great Ming", i.e. the country of the Ming Dynasty. 

Very few years later, other European explorers reported the name of this fabled land as Ciumquo or Ciumhoa, which would be spelled today as Zhong guo or Zhong hua, literally meaning, respectively, "Central State" and "Central Efflorescence" (with the sense of "Civilization"). And this is what the country is usually referred to today by Chinese people, the two names having a similar official/unofficial duality as "United Kingdom" and "Britain", or "United States" and "America". These labels have been found applied to various parts of what we now consider China for some 2,500 to 3,000 years, although with various different connotations: as a geographical place, as a culture as a political system, etc, and never continuously. So, the common claims by China of a unified civilization and state extending back 3,000, even 5,000, years, are fanciful at best.

The Song Dynasty, for example, called their home Da Song Guo (the "Song Great-State"), and the Ming Dynasty referred to it as Da Ming Guo (the "Ming Great-State"), each with different borders, different cultures and philosophies. The terms Zhong guo and Zhong hua were only really revived in China in the late 19th century in an attempt to reinvent itself and to stoke nationalistic fervour. And various other phrases were also widely used over the centuries, including Shen zhou ("spiritual region"), Jiu zhoi ("nine regions"), Zhong ru ("central land") and Tian xia ("everything under heaven").

So, where then does the European name "China" come from? It is often thought to relate to the Qin Dynasty (pronounced "chin"), originally just a small fiefdom in the northwest of current China in about 1,000 BCE, which came to occupy most of the central Chinese plains over the succeeding centuries, arguably becoming the first dynasty to unify the core territory of modern China, before being overthrown by the Han Dynasty in the 3rd century BCE. But it should be noted that even under the Qin Dynasty, the region was never referred to as "Qin" or "China". 

Sanskrit documents from India in the 5th to 4th centuries BCE talked about a place to the east called "Cīna"; the Greco-Romans referred to the area as Sina or Sinae; a mountain people from the southeastern part of modern China were referring to themselves as the "Zhina" as long ago as the 5th century BCE; the Manchu-speaking Qing (pronounced "ching") Dynasty from northeastern China came to the fore in the 17th century and gradually formed the territorial base of modern China; 17th century Latin texts talked about the "Imperiii Sinici", referring to the Qing empire. There are many alternative theories for the European name (and the origin of the "Sino-" prefix), no one of which is definitive or wholly convincing. What is certain is that China never called itself "China".

Most of Chinese history consists of centuries of warring states, bloody internecine power struggles, and invasions and assimilations by "barbarians" of various ethnicities. Any notion of a unified, benevolent state bringing civilization to the barbarian masses, and ruling in peace and harmony for thousands of years, is, of course, a convenient fiction for the demagogues and political spin doctors of the modern Chinese state (and interestingly one that only arose, even in China, in the early 20th century).  There is just one "official" language throughout China's territory (Mandarin, or putonghua - another early 20th century development), but in reality an estimated 400 mutually-unintelligible languages, as opposed to dialects, are used. It is no more accurate than to say that the European Union has ruled over a united Europe for centuries. Indeed, unity was the exception and not the rule in the region's real history. 

And "China"? Well, it never really existed.

A census playlist is a bizarre but strangely endearing idea

I just completed the 2021 Canadian Census, but one thing I apparently didn't notice was a link to the 2021 Census Soundtrack, a series of playlists of Canadian talent for all tastes produced by the good people at StatsCan.

You can choose from Spark and Soul (some of Canada's chart-topping pop and R&B artists), Friday Night Kitchen Party (Canadian country and western hits), Studio Sessions (alternative and folk acts, which is actually not that bad, including the likes of Pottery, Weaves, Helena Deland, and many more even more obscure artists), True North Rap (self-explanatory), Voices from the North (Indigenous artists), and many more.

It's a bizarre idea. I guess the intention is that you nod along to your selected playlist to make the act of filling in the census seem less onerous. The Globe and Mail's ever-witty Cathal Kelly has contributed his own withering verbal demolition of it. But I just find the idea of StatsCan bean-counters getting together to come up with playlists rather endearing.

French language takes some halting steps towards inclusivity

French has always been a much more prescriptive and regulated language than English, and the Académie Française has had a strangle-hold over any innovations and foreign incursions for centuries (at least over "official" French - the language used in the street is a whole other matter). 

However, the winds of change are starting to be felt, albeit gently and haltingly, in the dusty halls of French academe. A recent edict from the French Education Minister (NOT the Académie Française, note) has taken steps to allow the increased feminization and inclusivity of some French words, particularly job titles, in schools, although it drew the line at a more radical practice that has become more popular recently in left-wing circles.

In French, adding an e to the end of a word has the effect of  giving it a feminine slant, and feminists have long complained that many words of power, like dirigeants (leaders) or élus (elected official) are nominally masculine, giving the false impression that those jobs are reserved exclusively for men. 

In recent years, some people have started using the more inclusive, although rather ugly and awkward, construction dirigeant•es and élu•es - that's a middle dot, like a decimal point - similar in some ways to the (equally ugly and awkward) English feminist construction s/he. The powers that be, though, have ruled that this is unacceptable, at least in schools.

As a compromise (or perhaps a sop), though, they are encouraging the use of feminized nouns like présidente, candidate and ambassatrice, in place of président, candidat and ambassadeur, where appropriate, or the use of both (e.g. "le candidat ou la candidate") where either is possible. This is probably the equivalent of the English switch from fireman to firefighter, or chairperson instead of chairman, although perhaps not quite as radical.

Commentators seem to think this is a major concession for the French government to make, even if the more radical feminist front see the banning of the • construction as a hindrance to their cause. And, given the glacial pace at which the French language progresses, they may well be right.