Every once in a while, between pleas from search engine optimizers, deposed African Generals, and cut-rate Viagra pushers, spam coughs up a gem. Like the 5,711-word message I just received from Father Yahweh, yea Jehovah, Most High God, aka Linda Newkirk of Little Rock, Arkansas. It began like this: It can now be reported that many of the wildfires in the western United States have been started by highly trained and well equipped foreign terrorists. It can also be reported that these terrorists are also responsible for the numerous explosions that occured in Michigan on the 6th and 7th of June...

26 June, 2012

NYU grad student Josh Begley wrote a simple program (technically, a processing script) to capture a Google Earth arial image of every prison in the United States, then used the images as tiles to build a huge mosaic he calls Prison Map. The complete image is so vast, and takes so long to load as a website, Begley's main site defaults to a 700-prison subset of the best images. The United States is the prison capital of the world. This is not news to most people. When discussing the idea of mass incarceration, we often trot out numbers and dates and...

06 June, 2012

The ultra-conservative US Tea Party movement is taking a page from Stephen Harper's playbook: gutting the census. Last week, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed an appropriations bill that would shutter several Census Bureau projects and programs. Robert Groves is the Bureau's director: [Video link] My mother, a school board member in her tiny Maine town, had a bumper sticker that read, "If you think education is expensive, try ignorance." You might equally, if less pithily, say, "If you think the census is expensive, try not knowing what's happening to your country's population." Gathering statistical information about a country's demographics has been a hallmark...

13 May, 2012

A Chinese engineer, on his first trip to the United States, a work assignment for his company, snapped this photo, reproduced today on James Fallows's blog. Fallows asks his readers: Why did he take the photo? What happened next? For the answers, go here....

07 May, 2012

I am one of what I think must be a small number of people who met both of these guys, which may be why I was struck by the resemblance when I saw the photo on the left in the Ottawa Citizen. They weren't separated at birth, because the man on the left was born 26 years after the man on the right. I wonder if they ever met. Mr. Manning?...

12 March, 2012

At a news conference marking the 10th anniversary of Portugal's bold experiment in drug policy — the decriminalization of all drugs — Joao Goulao, President of the Institute of Drugs and Drugs Addiction, said, “There is no doubt that the phenomenon of addiction is in decline in Portugal." The number of addicts who repeatedly use hard and intravenous drugs has fallen by half since the early 1990s, when the figure was estimated at around 100,000 people. Goulao, a medical doctor, stressed that treatment decriminalization was not solely responsible for the drop, but that treatment programs and risk reduction policies also played a role. As E.D. Cain...

15 February, 2012

Federal government benefits in the US —chiefly Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid,  veterans' benefits, income security, unemployment insurance, and veterans' benefits—accounted for 17.6 percent of personal income in 2009. The New York Times today published another of its fantastic interactive charts, this one showing where federal assistance has gone over the last 40 years: what counties got what percentage of their personal income from which programs in each of those years. This screenshot doesn't do the actual chart justice, so click through to the original. An accompanying story concludes that, while social support programs once went mostly to the poorest Americans, the middle...

12 February, 2012

Earlier this week, various blogs and media outlets reported that Beijing was experiencing frightful levels of air pollution. To document the crisis, China hand James Fallows cited what he called "the indispensable (and highly controversial)" Twitter feed @Beijingair, which produces hourly readings of  fine particulate matter (PM2.5) in Beijing. On Monday, @Beijingair showed readings in excess of 300 µg/m3, contributing to conditions the US EPA characterizes as "hazardous," and warranting "health warnings of emergency conditions." What caught my attention was Fallows's assertion that the @BeijingAir feed is "the only known source of PM 2.5 readings in China." That is astounding: one PM2.5...

04 November, 2011

During a brief stopover in Ottawa yesterday, a gracious member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery took me for a sail on the Ottawa River, where I snapped this photo: In case you don’t recognize the building, it’s the posterior of 24 Sussex Drive, home of Canada’s Prime Minister. Even without Bruce Cockburn on board, I was struck by the wondrous want of any obvious standing on guard for Stephen Harper. Our small party boarded my friend’s sailboat at the Hull marina, just across the street from the Museum of Civilization. No one checked our ID, demanded we sign a register, or x-rayed...

26 September, 2011
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