In Merriam-Webster's online vocabulary quiz, sixty-somethings blow the competition away: Take that, whippersnappers!...

Contrarian reader Peter Barss waxes philosophical about the primal draw of radio-storms and weather-porn: It 's exciting to sit in our warm, safe living rooms listening to dire warnings of impending weather doom. It's even more of a thrill to turn on our flat screen TVs and watch weather gals and guys get whipped by wind-driven snow as they stand outside yelling into their microphones so they can be heard over the howling "weather bomb." We live in a society that is soft and luxurious. One of the luxuries we indulge is the illusion that if we just do everything right we...

Most of the listeners who responded to my debate with CBC manager Andrew Cochran about the network's (in my view) inflated coverage of weather are just fine with the CBC's weather treatment. [caption id="attachment_11355" align="alignright" width="300"] Highway conditions at 3:30 pm, February 20, when Cape Breton schools closed early due to forecasts of possible freezing rain that evening: Pavement dry; precipitation nil.[/caption] This doesn't surprise me. Some people like being frightened about weather, just as others like being frightened about crime. Lurid coverage of crime by some media has led to a sharp increase in the public perception of personal risk from...

Almost exactly a year after precipitous--and as it turned out, groundless--complaints by the Nova Scotia Department of Community Services forced the closure of Cape Breton's only residential addiction recovery centre, Talbot House will get its funding back this week. Health and Wellness Minister David Wilson will deliver the news in Cape Breton Friday, a weekday traditionally chosen for announcements governments would prefer to inter quietly. Wilson became the minister responsible for recovery centres last September, when Premier Darrell Dexter, fed up with the continual barrage of negative stories about DCS mistreatment of Talbot, stripped that department of the file and handed...

With so many real and pressing environmental crises threatening to harm Planet Earth, why are so many well-meaning environmentalists so easily diverted into foolhardy projects like the campaign to ban plastic water bottles? On January 1, the Town of Concord, Massachusetts, prohibited the sale of "non-sparkling, unflavored drinking water in single-serving polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles of 1 liter (34 ounces) or less." To be clear, it's still OK to sell small, plastic bottles of Coke, Red Bull, colored sugar-water, and carbonated water, and it's OK to sell Just Plain Water in 40-oz plastic bottles or gallon jugs. In an approving report on the ban, the Globe and Mail...

If you're anything like me, your conception of the human heart comes from text book line drawings and plastic models in doctors' offices. To create a more useful, virtual model, the Barcelona Supercomputing Center used 10,000 parallel processors. The beating heart turns out to be a phenomenally complex electromechanical apparatus—wondrous, and almost spooky, to behold. The center recently released a video simulation, although based on a rabbit's heart rather than a human's. From Emily Underwood via Alexis Madrigal. Journal articles: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cnm.1494/full http://www.bsc.es/computer-applications/alya-red-cc  ...

What do Iceland, Finland, Cyprus, Netherlands, Norway, Slovenia, Denmark, Sweden, Austria, Czech Republic, Switzerland, Ireland, Germany, France, Malta, Belgium, Hungary, Australia, Slovakia, New Zealand, Estonia, United Kingdom, and Luxembourg have in common? They all have lower rates of "relative child poverty" than Canada, according to a UNICEF report card a "Measuring child poverty in the world’s rich countries." Some 13.3 percent of Canadian children live in relative poverty, defined as households whose disposable income, adjusted for family size and composition, is less than 50% of the national median income. We're in 24th place. Iceland is first, at 4.7 percent.  The US ranks 34th, at...

In a tacit acknowledgement that Community Services bolloxed the crisis it brought on at Cape Breton's Talbot House Recovery Centre, the province has stripped the department of responsibility for all five addiction recovery centres in Nova Scotia. From now on, provincial funding, service agreements, and oversight will fall under the Department of Health and Wellness. [caption id="attachment_11009" align="alignleft" width="200"] Peterson-Rafuse[/caption] The decision comes just in time for Health to assume responsibility for evaluating a proposal from Talbot House to restore provincial funding it received as Cape Breton's only addiction recovery centre. That avoids the sticky problem of having Community Services officials, with...

Most Contrarian readers don't know Fr. Paul Abbass. This moving video will give you a sense of the man whose life and reputation has been so damaged by the reckless behavior of the Department of Community Services and the Dexter Government. He talks about what happened to men during their stays at Talbot House Board members and former residents of Talbot have made their own videos here. The Dexter Government assumes cynically that it can tough this situation out and it will go away. We'll see about that....

A curmudgeonly friend writes: Last winter, the Nova Scotia Prescription Monitoring Program ruined my wife’s first vacation in eight years. The Program exists to restrain the abuse of prescription drugs, something I thought prescriptions themselves were for. To this end, among other things, the Program provides the police with information about legal (that is to say legal) drugs you are taking (you may have thought that information was confidential). But the hammer in the Program’s toolbox is its ability to intimidate doctors out of doing what they believe is right for their patients. To wit, from the Program’s FAQ: “If the Program has reason to believe...