Salon's Glenn Greenwald notes the lead paragraph in a New York Times story Saturday: WASHINGTON — The 48 Guantánamo Bay detainees whom the Obama administration has decided to keep holding without trial include several for whom there is no evidence of involvement in any specific terrorist plot, according to a report disclosed Friday. The report itself concludes that "for many detainees at Guantanamo, prosecution is not feasible in either federal court or a military commission."  Greenwald comments: They can't even be prosecuted in the due-process-abridging military commissions we invented out of whole cloth for those who can't be convicted in a real court.  In...

30 May, 2010

The stupidest thing the late, lamented Halifax Daily News ever did was to fire weekly columnist Jane Kansas over sloppy attribution of an Internet joke. Busybodies elevated the offense to plagiarism, requiring capital expiation — the irony of firing Nova Scotia's most original writer for unoriginality lost on all concerned. Currently on Sabbatical from Halifax, Kansas is travelling on foot from Helena, Montana, to Medicine Hat, Alberta (a 543 kilometer side-trek to visit a friend), thence from Western North Dakota to Toronto (which Google maps calculates at 2082.5 km.). Kansas likes a challenge. Along the way, she files occasional dispatches to...

29 May, 2010

In 1230, French Cardinal Hugues de Saint-Cher (and 500 of his colleagues) completed the first search engine. The Washington Post's Brian Palmer has a neat piece on the evolution of search tools since. Money quote: Brin and Page's billion-dollar realization was that users would rather see a reputable page that matched their query reasonably well than an obscure page that matched perfectly. These innovations remain the backbone of today's search engines, from Google and Yahoo to Bing and others. But the Web is changing at a staggering pace. The 1994 index for Lycos, one of the Web's first search engines, had only...

29 May, 2010

Men's Health offers graphic equivalencies for the 20 sugariest drinks in America. A 20-oz Starbuck's Peppermint White Chocolate Mocha with Whipped Cream has as much sugar as as 8½ scoops Edy’s Slow Churned Rich and Creamy Coffee Ice Cream. A 20 oz bottle of SoBe Green Tea has as much sugar as four slices of Sara Lee Cherry Pie. Tim Horton's medium black coffee, no sugar: [Update] But Jocelyne Marchand of Grand Pré points out: A teaspoon of sugar has 16 calories – the issue is not a teaspoon of sugar in a cup of coffee. How many coffee drinkers limit themselves to a level teaspoon, no...

29 May, 2010

[Update below] Peter Spurway, who was director of communications for Premier John Hamm, writes: I have no knowledge of what Dan may or may not have done around the Herald story. That said, if he had simply declared who he was in the comment he posted in response to the story, all of this would have been avoided. (And whether his online comment qualified as an email to the newspaper is hair-splitting.) By not posting his real name and interest in the story, Dan failed to be sufficiently transparent, in my view. [Update] Defeated Liberal byelection candidate Miles Tompkins writes: Amazing what one can miss...

26 May, 2010

Sharon Fraser is a Halifax journalist, women's rights advocate, and the wife of Dan O'Connor, the chief of staff to Premier Dexter embroiled in a controversy over inaccurate reporting by the Chronicle-Herald over the weekend. She describes the events at the heart of the Herald's misreporting: I have no desire to keep this going eternally but I wrote this summary this morning and thought you might be interested. Here's what happened: On Friday, the Herald published a front-page story reducing an important government initiative and its announcement to the amount of money that was spent over several months in its preparation.  The headline...

25 May, 2010

Contrarian reader and consulting engineer Jeffrey Pinhey considers the pros and cons of using consultants, and the media's treatment of the Dexter government: So you are just getting around to the realization that the media are not going to be pro-NDP anything unless they are in opposition? I am no member of any of these "parties" (my parties are a lot more fun) but it sure seems obvious that the Herald is holding Darrell Dexter to a higher set of expectations that any other Premier has been in some time, even to the point of somehow twisting things to...

24 May, 2010

Estonian travel buff Ahti Heinla used the distribution of photos on Panaramio to create a world heat map of touristiness. Yellow indicates high touristiness, red medium touristiness, and blue low touristiness. Areas having no Panoramio photos at all are grey. The analysis takes account of both the number photos and the number of authors in a given area. Here is a lo-res blowup of the Nova Scotia section. Note that despite the Nova Scotia Government's decades-old policy of promoting boring and exciting parts of Nova Scotia equally to tourists, visitors still flock to Cape Breton. ...

24 May, 2010

A stiff sou'west breeze pounds the stratified shoreline of Green Point, in Gros Morne National Park, on Newfoundland's west coast Sunday afternoon. ...

24 May, 2010

Art Ortenburger is a home-schooled teenager who can't get high-speed Internet at his home in Bonshaw, PEI, 24 km. west of Charlottetown. Ortenburger wondered how many other Islanders were beyond reach of broadband, so he crafted a set of automated computer programs to find out. His tools submit each address from the freely-available PEI Civic Address Database to Aliant’s web page. Aliant, the only provider of DSL (or telephone-based) high speed Internet on the Island, responds with one of two messages: Congratulations! You can choose from the following list of services currently available to you…” or: Your address … does not currently qualify for...

24 May, 2010
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