Category: Health
Biking made easy in Montreal
One of more than 300 self-service Bixi bike rental stations in Montreal.
From April to November 30, the city will rent you a sturdy, well maintained, three-speed bike for $5 a day (or $28 for 30 days; $79 for a full year). A swipe of your credit card produces a five digit code to unlock one of the 5,000 available bikes; Return your bike within 30 minutes to one of the ubiquitous rental stands and there is no charge. It is a fast, easy, practical way to get around this bustling city, and the Bixi bikes are everywhere.
The city-owed system recently expanded to Washington, DC, and Arlington, VA. Could Halifax or Sydney get in on the action? We have a few drawbacks compared to Montreal:
Montreal has 502 km. of bike lanes and paths, and recently announced plans to spend $10 million installing another 50 km.
Food for thought.
Prosper and live long
Advocates of the Genuine Progress Index argue that traditional measures of our economic health, mainly the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), mislead us by mixing up good spending (on the likes of lobster, turnips, and bicycles) with bad (on oil spills, crime, and car crashes), and because it fails to account for depletion of natural resources. Those critiques, while valid and important, don’t completely obviate the relevance of GDP. A new chart from Gapminder (previously mentioned in one of my all-time favorite Contrarian posts), shows that higher GDP per person equals longer life:
The trend is unmistakable, and at first glance, the few outliers (South Africa, Russia, to a lesser extent, the USA) are countries with wide income disparity. Download larger versions here [pdf or ppt].
Hat tip: Cliff Kuang at Fast Company.
Why I drink black coffee – updated x 2
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.
Source: Tim Horton’s nutritional calculator.
And then there’s the Cold Stone offering: equivalent to 68 strips of bacon.
The same product family being tested at select Tim Hoton locations in Nova Scotia: Bedford (980 Bedford Way), Dartmouth (577 Main Street), Halifax (6455 Quinnpool Rd), Sydney (479 George St), and Wolfville (370 Main St).
Hat tip: Flowingdata.com
That suppressed gambling report – update
A source I trust tells me the consultant’s report on gambling Labour Minister Marilyn More won’t release truly is substandard. Let’s assume that’s the case, and More was right to reject it after many attempts to get the contractor to fulfill the his obligations. Barring public access to the report is still the wrong thing to do.
In effect, Minister More is saying interested Nova Scotians aren’t sophisticated enough to understand or evaluate the report. It might cause them “anxiety” and “confusion.” Such matters should presumably be left to their betters—people like More, and the Gambling Corp. honchos who talked her into this foolish course (and won’t even let her commission another study).
Is this really how Nova Scotia’s first NDP administration wants to govern?
Liberal critic Leo Glavine has the sensible answer to More’s patronizing stand: Release the report to anyone who requests it, together with a detailed account of its deficiencies.
Bureaucrats humiliate a weak minister
When you bring $145 million a year into the treasury of a province as deeply in hock as Nova Scotia, you swing a big bat.
So when a consultant hired by the banished Tory government delivered a cost-benefit analysis of gambling in Nova Scotia to the newly elected NDP government, it stands to reason that the big bat wielders at the Nova Scotia Gaming Corporation*, the agency that administers the provincial government’s addiction to gambling revenue, had first dibs on reviewing it.
Marilyn More
Whatever the report said about the human toll exacted by provincially sponsored gambling, we can surmise that Gaming Corp. honchos didn’t take kindly to its conclusions. If the Labor Department harbors any panty waists who fret over such trifles as suicides, bankruptcies, child neglect, and marriage breakups caused by the corporation’s activities, they were no match for the gaming execs.
On Tuesday, Labor Minister Marilyn More announced that the report had been scrapped, the consultants who wrote it fired, and the citizenry spared exposure to its malign conclusions.
“It just doesn’t seem to make any sense to create anxiety and apprehension around information that just isn’t accurate,” More told reporters, setting a new standard for patronizing voters.
Not to worry, said More, the corporation will get right on a cost-benefit analysis of its own, presumably one showing less cost and more benefit.
“You can be sure that the next study will have clear accountability and criteria, and that the information will be publicly released, and it will answer a lot of your questions.,” she said Tuesday
That ringing declaration apparently set Blackberries jangling, because the very next day saw More execute a humiliating about-face. There will be no such study because (in a revelation sure to surprise economists and social scientists) no one knows how to do a cost-benefit analysis of provincially promoted gambling addiction.
At least now we know who runs The Department of Labor, and it ain’t Minister More.
This is a classic illustration of how canny bureaucrats can manipulate an inexperienced minister in a newly elected government. Too bad so many gambling addicted Nova Scotians will have to pay the price for More’s weakness.
So much for social democracy.
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*Nova Scotia Gaming Corp. is the agency’s official name, but I use it reluctantly, because “gaming” is a euphemism designed to disguise the outfit as some benign Department of Parcheesi and Hopscotch.
My brain & Maritime Noon
The Brain Repair Centre at the QEII Health Sciences Centre took a magnetic resonance image of Contrarian’s brain today, as part of a study on memory loss in people with Alzheimer’s disease. The researchers assured me I was there solely as a control!
While the machine buzzed, clicked, and roared, the kindly technicians played CBC radio through my headphones. This is what Contrarian’s brain looks like while listening to Costas Halavrezos.
What’s up with this, Pete? – updated
A diesel-powered Pete’s Frootique truck idles unattended on Doyle Street in Halifax Saturday morning, needlessly spilling volatile organic compounds into the crisp spring air.
Update: Contrarian reader Colin May points out: Parked on the wrong side of the street, in a no parking zone, too close to a stop sign. Three strikes and you’re…
Big Mac v. salad – feedback (updated)
Contrarian reader Ken Clare thinks Contrarian’s standards slipped with our post of a chart comparing US food subsidies:
Edward Tufte, the “Galileo of Graphics” you introduced us to back in June, refers to images like these as “chartjunk.”
I haven’t taken the time to measure the images you copied (from a committee of physicians who may have had a passing relationship with math sometime in their pasts), but the subsidies pyramid eyeballs closer to a 100-to-1 ratio than the 75-to-25 ratio it is labeled.
Update: A Diligent Reader award goes to Contrarian’s insomniac friend Alistair Watt, who spent time with a ruler and a spreadsheet before concluding that the front faces of the pyramid graphs were a nearly perfect match for the data they purported to represent, but their transformation into three-dimensional pyramids distorted the data severely.
In other words, had this been presented as a column chart or a pie chart, it would have been reasonable. However, when I laboriously calculated the volumes implied by each subsection, the results were dramatically different.
Why a [U.S.] Big Mac costs less than a salad
This comparison, from the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, is, of course, based on U.S. farm subsidies and U.S. dietary guidelines. Any data geeks out there want to take a stab at Canadian pyramids?
Can Down syndrome cure cancer?
This winter, Contrarian hosted an interesting discussion about whether Down syndrome needs a cure. Now reader Denis Falvy offers an intriguing footnote. It seems that people with Down syndrome rarely get tumors.
Recent research at Children’s Hospital in Boston, reported in the journal Nature, suggests that a gene (gene 231) on the extra chromosome (chromosome 21) carried by people with DS may inhibit cancer by blocking the activity of a protein tumors need to grow. Money quote:
The gene suppresses the growth of new blood vessels that cancers need by blocking the activity of the protein calcineurin, suggesting a new target for future cancer drugs. The investigators… add that chromosome 21 might possess four or five anti-angiogenesis genes.
