Nova Scotians could be forgiven for feeling confused about prospects for shale gas fracking in the province. Is shale gas a sensible short-term approach to reduced carbon emissions? Or an environmental calamity waiting to happen? Those who stand to profit from shale gas, and governments desperate for energy solutions that won't cripple the economy, are predictably bullish on our shale gas reserves. Many environmentalists oppose fracking with the unreassuring obduracy they bring to every issue (see: the nonsensical flap over biosolids). I have no idea who's right about shale gas, but today's New York Times offers a massive dump of insider documents purporting to...

26 June, 2011

The New York Times has posted eight interactive satellite images of tsunami-ravaged cities in Japan. By moving the blue slider in the center of the image left and right, you can transition back and forth between the before and after images. (You can't do that on the screenshot shown here, only by going to the NYT site.) H/T: Richard Stephenson...

14 March, 2011

A New York Times article explains something that has long puzzled me: why are institutions where security really matters so lax about passwords, while the corner store requires long, ever-changing, combinations of  upper and lower case, alphanumeric and non-alphanumeric characters? Why are my credit union and my bank satisfied with a four-digit numeric PIN, which they never make me change? The answer, according to a number of security experts interviewed by the Times, is that passwords don't need to be strong or constantly changed. Worse, "[O]nerous requirements for passwords have given us a false sense of protection against potential attacks. In fact,...

12 September, 2010

The blobfish, highlighted in a New York Times slide show on ugly animals, is "practically all face — a pale, gelatinous deep-sea creature whose large-lipped, sad-sack expression seems to be melting toward the floor." An accompanying article explores the underpinnings of our aesthetic recoil: [C]omparative consideration of what we find freakish or unsettling in other species offers a fresh perspective on how we extract large amounts of visual information from a millisecond’s glance, and then spin, atomize and anthropomorphize that assessment into a revealing saga of ourselves. Wildlife biologists are far from immune to prejudice against the unbeautiful. [R]researchers found 1,855 papers about...

10 August, 2010

Anand Girisharadas of the New York Times addresses a weighty issue that threatens to become a regular topic on Contrarian: use of conjunction "so" to begin a sentence. He notes a National Public Radio interview in which fully one quarter of the sentences began with "so." While Girisharadas dredges up a 14th century poem in which Chaucer begins a sentence with "so," he cites scholars who trace the recent boom in introductory so's to Silicon Valley, or perhaps to Microsoft employees. In the software world, it was a tic that made sense. In immigrant-filled technology firms, it democratized talk by replacing a world of...

01 June, 2010

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

Hannah Fairfield of the New York Times plots the number of miles driven by US drivers, both private and commercial, against the retail price of gasoline from 1956 to February, 2010. The horizontal axis represents miles driven, while the vertical axis shows the price per US gallon (3.79 litres) in current US dollars. The drawn path represents the passage of time. Note that sharp spikes in gas prices coincided with reductions in miles driven in 1973, 1978, and from 2005 to 2010. Click here for a larger image with interesting subgraphs and embedded commentary....

12 May, 2010

We've read a lot lately about the value of swift, full, and forthright apologies when public figures screw up. What about companies that screw up? Blippy is a website that lets users trade updates about their consumer purchases. Recently, an obscure programming error, compounded by mistakes at Google and one small midwestern bank, allowed Google to index the credit card numbers of four or five Blippy customers, potentially exposing these numbers to people browsing the web. Co-founder & CEO Ashvin Kumar's apology to users could serve as a model for companies that find themselves in a similar pickle. Moneyquote: It has been...

11 May, 2010

The appalling Wikileaks video showing a US helicopter gunship mowing down a group of Iraqis, including two Reuters journalists, two children, and a pair of Good Samaritans whose only offense was to come to the aid of a badly injured man, continues to provoke reaction. Reader Cliff White writes: You can't help wondering after watching that terrible video if killing has just become a game to those soldiers in the helicopter.  It's both terribly disturbing and dismaying to listen to their casual banter as they go about their "work".   Even when they learn that children have been injured it's no big...

08 April, 2010

Some reaction to yesterday's Wikileak disclosure of horrific footage from an American helicopter gunship mowing down unarmed* civilians, as crewmen gloated over the killings. James Fallows: I can't pretend to know the full truth or circumstances of this. But at face value it is the most damaging documentation of abuse since the Abu Ghraib prison-torture photos. As you watch, imagine the reaction in the US if the people on the ground had been Americans and the people on the machine guns had been Iraqi, Russian, Chinese, or any other nationality. As with Abu Ghraib, and again...

06 April, 2010
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