Last Tuesday, BBC Radio 4's Making History series broadcast Sable Island – A Dune Adrift, reporter Sean Street's documentary about "Nova Scotia's Galapagos." At the Natural History Museum, in Halifax, [Sean] witnesses the unpacking of the latest consignment of bones and specimens – extraordinary ancient walrus skulls – collected by Zoe Lucas, who has been on the island for decades. He meets artist Roger Savage who had to tie his easel down, clamp his paper and battle with the scouring sand as he captured the landscape of the place in his paintings. And he meets a man who dedicated years to...

Attentive Contrarian readers will have noticed the new "Report a Tpyo" link at the top of each post: Copy editing has never been Contrarian's long suit. Countless fine editors — Doug MacKay, Alexander Farrell, Jo-Anne MacDonald, Jack Thomas, Bill Turpin, Stacey Pineau, Penny Body, Doug McGee, and other too numerous — have saved my sorry bacon from embarrassment again and again. Now it's your turn. Often written in haste, Contrarian relies on crowd-sourcing for error correction. Mike Targett, Contrarian's techno-fixer and geopolitics scout, added the Report a Tpyo link to ease this process. Clicking the link brings up a pre-addressed email you...

Speaking of bad science, here's an early, poetic screed on  homeopathy attributed* to Rev. George Washington Doane (1799-1859), professor of belles-lettres at Washington (now Trinity) College, Hartford, Connecticut; rector of Christ church, Boston; and, later, Episcopal bishop of New Jersey: Take a little rum The less you take the better Pour it in the lakes Of Wener or of Wetter. Dip a spoonful out And mind you don't get groggy, Pour it in the lake Of Winnipissiogie. Stir the mixture well Lest it prove inferior, Then put half a drop Into Lake Superior. Every other day Take a drop in water, You'll be better soon Or at least you oughter. * A few sources sources attribute Lines...

Ben Goldacre, a physician who hosts the Bad Science website and writes the UK Guardian's Bad Science has produced a witty compendium of the year in dodgy scientific research in the UK and elsewhere. Moneyquote: A £6m Home Office drugs education study was published with no results, because it was so flawed it couldn’t produce any, we saw MPs being foolish about cervical screening and moon magic, and then when they didn’t like the scientific evidence they got from Professor David Nutt, they sacked him. If politicians want us to take them seriously on the evidence for global warming, they have...

Each year, the Province of Nova Scotia provides equalization grants to municipalities with less-than-average fiscal capacity. The unconditional transfer is based on a formula that compares a municipality's needs and ability to pay. In the current fiscal year, the Cape Breton Regional Municipality received $16.7 million, which amounted to 52 percent of all the equalization money given out in the entire province. The next largest recipients were Amherst at $1.2 million, and New Glasgow at $1.0 million. Put another way, CBRM got 14 times as much money as the next largest recipient. The numbers for 2009-2010 are expected to be similar....

The UK Guardian, a trailblazer in the quest for newspaper survival in a digital era, has an Advent calendar of its best datablog entries for 2009: Hat tip: Cheryl Cook....

The Supreme Court of Canada refusal to hear the Cape Breton Regional Municipality's equalization lawsuit was not as predictable as the rising of the sun this morning. But it was close. The lawsuit was cynical ploy by a mayor who likes to posture as a scrapper for the little guy, but refuses to do the hard work needed to reach political solutions to the little guy's problems.
  • Contrary to popular belief, even a total victory for CBRM would not have brought the municipality a single dime. It didn't even ask for money.
  • In any case, the lawsuit had no chance of success. Aside from Mayor John Morgan and his pricey Toronto constitutional lawyer, Contrarian has been unable to find a single lawyer who thought it had any chance of success.
  • Although the case suffered a mercifully early death—it was thrown out before trial—the mayor's insistence on appealing to the highest court in the land frittered away at least $500,000 in legal bills, and wasted three five years that could better have been spent seeking a political solution. During that time, CBRM ran up another $60 million $100 million in debt its citizens cannot afford.
  • The mayor now says he will seek a political solution, but he is playing a weaker hand, having demonstrated that his constitutional claims lack legal validity.
I believe the municipality has a case for greater provincial assistance in meeting basic service needs. I hope the Dexter Government, financially strapped as it is, gives the problem a fair hearing. But the mayor's legal adventure not only delayed a solution, it encouraged the worst impulses of Cape Breton's culture of dependency, and it reinforced the rest of the world's weary stereotype of Cape Bretoners as people with their hands out. In all these respects, it did a disservice to the very citizens Morgan claims to champion. Elaboration after the jump.

The clarity and detail of the rebuttal Richard Colvin filed with the House of Commons this morning stand in stark contrast to the government's flimsy response. With devastating thoroughness, Colvin documented factual errors and faulty logic underlying the testimony of government witnesses who tried to explain away Ottawa's studied indifference to the likely torture of prisoners our soldiers handed over to Afghan authorities. Download his statement—it's well worth the read—or check out Kady O'Malley's summary and the Toronto Star's account. In response, the best Dan Dugas, spokesman for Defense Minister Peter MacKay, could offer was another jingoistic attempt to portray criticism of government...

"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know," said Google CEO Eric Smith, "maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." Smith's cavalier assessment of browser privacy issues in an MSNBC interview so incensed the main developer of the Mozilla Firefox browser that he urged Firefox users to abandon Google for a search engine with a better privacy policy, namely Bing, by Google arch-rival Microsoft: Asa Dotzler's outburst raised eyebrows on the net, because the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, maker of Firefox and the Thunderbird email program, depends on Google for about 97 percent of its revenue. Various bloggers...

One of Contrarian's favorite websites, FlowingData, has produced a year-end list of the five best data visualization projects of 2009. Topping the chart is Britain From Above, a UK-based visual effects and animation company. FlowingData's Nathan Yau describes the result: GPS traces from taxi cabs and airline flights scurried to locations; telephone communications glowed in the sky; ground lights twinkled as if the roles of sky and earth were switched; and internet traffic burst from computer to computer. With all that data on display, patterns emerged - zero air traffic in no-fly zones and taxis taking alternate routes to avoid heavy...