peanuts-csWriting in the New Scientist, David Nutt, recently fired as chair of Britain's scientific advisory council on the misuse of drugs, offers cogent thoughts on the nature of scientific advice to government. Moneyquote:
I can trace the beginning of the end of my role as chairman of the UK's official advisory body on drugs to the moment I quoted a New Scientist editorial (14 February, p 5). Entitled, fittingly enough, "Drugs drive politicians out of their minds", the editorial asked the reader to imagine being seated at a table with two bowls, one containing peanuts, the other the illegal drug MDMA (ecstasy). Which is safer to give to a stranger? Why, the ecstasy of course. I quoted these words in the Eve Saville lecture at King's College London in July. This example plus other comments I have made – such as horse riding is more harmful than ecstasy – prompted Alan Johnson, the home secretary, to say that I had crossed the line from science to policy. This, he said, is why I had to go. But simple, accurate and understandable statements of scientific fact are precisely what the advisory council is supposed to provide...
More after the jump.
08 November, 2009

Yoani Sánchez, the dissident Cuban blogger Contrarian featured last month, reports that she and three associates were briefly detained and roughed up by Cuban security agents while en route to an anti-violence demonstration Friday. In the face of Cuba's police state, Sánchez's behaviour is what you might call ballsy. I just managed to grab, through his trousers, one’s testicles, in an act of desperation. I dug my nails in, thinking he was going to crush my chest until the last breath. “Kill me now,” I screamed, with the last inhalation I had left in me, and the one in front warned...

08 November, 2009

The New York Times website offers a series of five interactive images today showing scenes along the Berlin Wall around 1989, and the same scenes today. The screen shot here, showing Ebertstrasse, a street that runs from the Brandenburg Gate to Potsdamer Platz, is static, but on the Times' site it shifts from before to after as you slide your cursor left and right. Contrarian reader Judy Haiven thinks it's time we turned out attention to another wall: The Berlin wall is down, but Israel's wall is up, and divides family from family, people from their work or school or from their...

07 November, 2009

In the window of J.W. Doull Bookseller, on Barrington Street in Halifax, today: Our Sincere Apologies To the owners of The Palace, Bubbles' Mansion, Peddlar's Pub, The Alehouse, The Dome, The Lower Deck, Maxwell's Pub, The Midtown, The Old Triangle, Cheers, The Split Crow, Durty Nellie's, &c* It is clear that one of our customers, upon leaving our shop after browsing in the mind-altering world of books, must have gone on to cause some sort of upset in one of your establishments. Whereupon some brave customer of yours in a fit of most laudable loyalty, then saw fit to smash...

07 November, 2009

A pair of Bonapart's gulls (top photo) feeding off the rocky shoreline at Auld's Cove today, part of a massive assembly of seabirds drawn by the annual migration of needlefish through the Strait of Canso. Birders counted more than 150 mature and juvenile Gannets (lower photo). ...

07 November, 2009

The American Civil Liberties Union has released a video in which five former detainees talk about their treatment at the American prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. All were eventually released without charge. As you watch this troubling video, consider the Harper Government's refusal to request the release of the last citizen of a western democracy still held in Guantanamo: Canadian Omar Khadr, who has been subjected to similar treatment for seven years, since he was 15. The Conservative Government is appealing a Federal Court decision ordering it to request Khadr's release, as every other western democracy did for its citizens...

03 November, 2009

Remember Barack Obama's "fired up, ready to go" campaign story? About a tiny Greenwood, South Carolina, city councilor named Edith Childs who saved a sparsely attended, early Obama rally with her rhythmic cheerleading? It became one of Obama's most effective set pieces, almost on a par with, "Yes we can!" Well, it turns out the story didn't trip lightly off the President-to-be's tongue the first few times he told it. In the clip below, an outtake from a documentary on the Obama campaign broadcast tonight on HBO, Obama aides coach him on how to tell the story more effectively. Hat tip: Politico....

03 November, 2009

In yet another sign of dire straits in the newspaper industry,  Toronto Star Publisher John Cruickshank today offered newsroom staff voluntary severance packages in advance of probable layoffs. In a memo to staff, Cruickshank said the paper is "seriously considering" contracting out core editorial and advertising functions. Moneyquote: [W]e are exploring the contracting out of some or all copy editing and pagination work, and the scope again may expand to include other editorial production and related activities.  The scope of these and related outsourcing initiatives may well extend to work groups in other divisions of the Star. Hat tip:  DMC...

03 November, 2009

As the final chord of "Paint it Black," opening number in the Rolling Stones' 2006 Halifax Commons concert, faded into the distance, Mick Jagger thanked the crowd for coming out despite foul weather. "We hear there's even a group that came all the way from Newfoundland," he said. The remarkable thing is that Jagger, the consummate professional, took the trouble to pronounce the name of Canada's 10th province correctly. So after 60 years as heir to the throne, is it too much to ask the presumed future King of Canada to show the same care and respect? [Update] Contrarian readers have leapt to...

03 November, 2009

Pop anthropologist Wade Davis, the first of whose CBC Radio Massey lectures¹ just ended in the Atlantic time zone, obviously has a lot of knowledge to impart about the Earth's diverse human cultures. So why did her  waste a good half of the opening talk shooting racist fish in a 19th Century barrel? Davis's point was that the errant 19th Century "science" of physical anthropology dripped with colonial arrogance, but the thinly disguised subtext seemed to be Davis's own moral superiority to these imperial prigs. The effect was both distasteful and boring, like listening a 21st Century astrophysicist satirize the Ptolemaic...

02 November, 2009
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