The Globe and Mail's André Picard continues to talk sense on H1N1 and the mass vaccination campaign. Moneyquote: In 21st century Canada, risk is a largely unfamiliar concept. In a country of 34 million people that has nearly 400,000 births annually, fewer than 800 children aged 1-14 die each year. (Another 1,200 or so under the age of 1 die, most of congenital abnormalities.) In Canada, the greatest danger to children is falls and motor vehicle collisions. Deaths from infectious disease are remarkably few, in large part due to vaccination. [...

28 October, 2009

A very sad update: The woman attacked by two coywolves succumbed to her injuries overnight. Deepest sympathy to her family and friends for their unimaginable loss. - - - The shocking news that a 19-year-old Toronto-area woman was attacked and "very, very seriously" injured by a pair of coyotes in the Cape Breton Highlands National Park this afternoon will undoubtedly focus attention on recent reports that Eastern Coyotes are in fact a hybrid of coyotes and wolves, or coywolves. We offer heartfelt hopes for a speedy and complete recovery for the unidentified woman, who was hiking on the popular and well used Skyline...

27 October, 2009

A Contrarian reader who is also a public health nutritionist responds to our post about Fralic's foolishness: This Globe and Mail article convinced me of the importance of getting the H1N1 vaccination.  There is so much misinfomation out there, and I hold health reporter Andre Picard's coverage in high regard. Nova Scotians can find the location and schedule of immunization clinics in their District Health Region here. [On the map, click on your DHA.] I plan to take [my children] to the Baddeck clinic and get us done before the rush. Contrarian expects tomorrow's Baddeck clinic, the first in Cape Breton, to be a...

27 October, 2009

This promises to be a continuing Contrarian topic, but I will flag it briefly: NB Power's apparently imminent sale to Hydro Quebec represents a tectonic shift in Nova Scotia's energy options. I mention this because, as is typical, the national news media seem to view the story as just another installment in Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams's (to them) clownish battles with central Canada. Such a view is as witless as it is patronizing. The sale poses huge problems for Nova Scotia and PEI, as well as Newfoundland. If Quebec can use its windfall profits from Joey Smallwood's disastrous 1969 deal on Upper...

27 October, 2009

Marcos Weskamp, a design engineer and "self-taught technologist" who likes to play with data visualization, has created a treemap display of Google News. Newsmap shows stories as blocks on a grid. The size of the block reflects a story's rating in Google's search algorithm. The color of a block reflects its broad subject matter (world, national,business, technology, sports, entertainment, health), selectable with tabs along the bottom. The country of origin can be selected from tabs along the top (like the "Can" tab highlighted in the example above). Rolling your cursor over a block produces pop-up text like the white box...

27 October, 2009

In the annals of irresponsible journalism, it would be hard to top Shelley Fralic's recent Vancouver Sun column pooh-poohing the need for 'flu shots. Consider this fair warning to all you germaphobes and nervous Nellies: I will not be getting the swine flu shot. And my hunch is that many other British Columbians of good health and sound mind will also not be heeding the inoculate-'em-all, big and small, entreaties issued this week from federal health authorities, who in an odd singsong of official well-meaning laced with hysteria are encouraging pretty much everyone to line up, in order of priority, for...

27 October, 2009

The Liberal back-room boys have convinced defeated candidate Ian McNeil to seek a recount of last week's vote. McNeil should have stuck with his own better instincts. Fifty votes is a slim margin, but he'll never overcome it in a recount. In the rare occasions when elections are controverted, voters usually punish the candidate who demanded a re-vote....

27 October, 2009

Chris Jordan photographed the decomposed corpses of  albatross chicks a few weeks ago on Midway Atoll, a tiny island of sand and coral in the middle of the North Pacific. Parent birds feed their nesting chicks what looks to them like food, but is actually plastic flotsam that collects in the nearby Pacific Gyre. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking. To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible, not a single piece of plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered...

26 October, 2009

Philip Lee responds to Contrarian's effort to get the New York Times to correct its obituary of Donald Marshall: While I appreciate your efforts to have the record corrected at the New York Times, I am disappointed by your wink-wink, nudge-nudge attack on journalist and author Michael Harris. First, you've misrepresented his position. Michael Harris recently spoke about the Marshall case in a lecture theatre filled with students and professors at St. Thomas University in Fredericton where he is a visiting chair this fall. Among other things, he outlined at length the significance of the robbery story and how this was used...

26 October, 2009

On July 22, 1941, an unnamed couple got married in Amsterdam. The bride lived in a second-floor apartment at Merwedeplein 39. The girl next door, in the second-floor apartment at No. 37, leaned out the window to get a good look as the happy couple left the apartment. Someone filmed the scene. It is the only time Anne Frank was ever captured on film. The Anne Frank House museum recently uploaded the film footage to YouTube, "thanks to the cooperation of the couple."...

26 October, 2009
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