The John F. Kennedy Library in Boston has released a huge trove of digitized images and recordings of the late president. Alexis Madrigal, The Atlantic's tech blogger, has published a selection. Here's what struck me: As a young naval officer, Kennedy was certainly slim, but no one would have thought him gaunt or emaciated. Yet Kennedy's Navy ID card reveals that he was six feet tall and weighed just 150 pounds. Six feet, 150 pounds! How our standards of girth have changed (as previously noted)....

15 January, 2011

The frequency with which certain terms appear in Google search queries foreshadows reports of actual 'flu activity from agencies like the Centres for Disease Control by about two weeks. Google tracks the frequency of 'flu-linked search terms and maps the results by region. The current map for Canada shows low frequency in the west and east, moderate in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, and high in Ontario and Quebec. This is a screenshot. The actual map is interactive, so you can click on a province and see the search trends there over time. Check out the explanatory video. H/T: Steve Manley, 'flu sufferer....

13 January, 2011

Mary Cecilia "Bomber" LeBlanc, shown above with L'Arche assistant Mavis at the 2007 Cape Breton Island Film Series party for l'Arche Cape Breton, died peacefully Thursday morning in her home at The Vineyard, a L'Arche residence in Orangedale, surrounded by friends and caregivers. Death came six days before her 60th birthday, and, incredibly, hours before a provincial health bureaucrats were to meet to begin planning her involuntary removal from l'Arche, over protests of family, friends, and caregivers. Mary was a small woman with a steely will and an outsized capacity for getting her own way—and then leading a chorus of laughter about...

07 November, 2010

The dating site OK Cupid dips into its database of 3.2 million users to compare gays and straights, debunking a few myths along the way. A few highlights: Gays and straights have the same number of sex partners: six, on average; the same for men, women, gays, and straights.* Gays do not pursue sex with straights. (Only 0.6% of OKC's gay male users have ever searched for straight matches; only 0.1% of its lesbians users have ever done so; only 0.13% of straight users's profile visitors are gay.) Straight people sometimes have gay sex, straight women for more so than straight men. (One in four...

28 October, 2010

Felix Solomon, a blogger for Reuters, proposes a Unified Theory of New York Biking that Halifax cyclists would do well to heed: Bikes can and should behave much more like cars than pedestrians. They should ride on the road, not the sidewalk. They should stop at lights, and pedestrians should be able to trust them to do so. They should use lights at night. And — of course, duh — they should ride in the right direction on one-way streets. None of this is a question of being polite; it’s the law. But in stark contrast to motorists, nearly all of whom...

12 September, 2010

Last year, James Fallows illustrated the growing girth of North American's by digging up photos from the 1950s of Jackie Gleason, Alfred Hitchcock, and Ramond Burr. Gleason was a notorious fatso. Hitchcock and Burr were celebrated symbols of portliness. None would draw a second look today. Now comes evidence that the shift in our perception of what constitutes fat has been getting a quiet nudge from pants manufacturers in the form of "vanity sizing." Abram Sauer, of Esquire's Style Blog, snuck a measuring tape into the change rooms of a series of men's retail chains and came back with this heartbreaking news...

10 September, 2010

One of more than 300 self-service Bixi bike rental stations in Montreal. From April to November 30, the city will rent you a sturdy, well maintained, three-speed bike for $5 a day (or $28 for 30 days; $79 for a full year). A swipe of your credit card produces a five digit code to unlock one of the 5,000 available bikes; Return your bike within 30 minutes to one of the ubiquitous rental stands and there is no charge. It is a fast, easy, practical way to get around this bustling city, and the Bixi bikes are everywhere. The city-owed system recently...

14 June, 2010

Advocates of the Genuine Progress Index argue that traditional measures of our economic health, mainly the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), mislead us by mixing up good spending (on the likes of lobster, turnips, and bicycles) with bad (on oil spills, crime, and car crashes), and because it fails to account for depletion of natural resources. Those critiques, while valid and important, don't completely obviate the relevance of GDP. A new chart from Gapminder (previously mentioned in one of my all-time favorite Contrarian posts), shows that higher GDP per person equals longer life: The trend is unmistakable, and at first glance, the...

04 June, 2010

Men's Health offers graphic equivalencies for the 20 sugariest drinks in America. A 20-oz Starbuck's Peppermint White Chocolate Mocha with Whipped Cream has as much sugar as as 8½ scoops Edy’s Slow Churned Rich and Creamy Coffee Ice Cream. A 20 oz bottle of SoBe Green Tea has as much sugar as four slices of Sara Lee Cherry Pie. Tim Horton's medium black coffee, no sugar: [Update] But Jocelyne Marchand of Grand Pré points out: A teaspoon of sugar has 16 calories – the issue is not a teaspoon of sugar in a cup of coffee. How many coffee drinkers limit themselves to a level teaspoon, no...

29 May, 2010

A source I trust tells me the consultant's report on gambling Labour Minister Marilyn More won't release truly is substandard. Let's assume that's the case, and More was right to reject it after many attempts to get the contractor to fulfill the his obligations. Barring public access to the report is still the wrong thing to do. In effect, Minister More is saying interested Nova Scotians aren't sophisticated enough to understand or evaluate the report. It might cause them "anxiety" and "confusion." Such matters should presumably be left to their betters—people like More, and the Gambling Corp. honchos who talked her...

25 April, 2010
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