Explore, Canada's outdoor magazine, has added a feature on Pollett's Cove in northern Cape Breton to its website. Moneyquote: When you research and read about Pollett's Cove on Cape Breton Island, NS, you realize it's one of those special places that consistently puts it at the top of favourite lists among the hikers and backpackers who have conquered it, regardless of where they've been in the world...
Several real life events and issues, most notably including the need to program our fall film series, have kept the cranky fellow from posting in recent days. Apologies to several readers who have inquired. Over the next week, we'll do our best to work our way through a backlog of topics including: Reflections on the life and death of Donald Marshall, Jr.; what the sorry state of provincial finances and its analog, the sorry state of our political leadership; a simple way HRM could save money while curbing greenhouse gasses; and a few nuggets about mapping....
Atlantic Magazine writer James Fallows, drawing on this New York Times op-ed piece, bemoaned the lack of headway in replacing the GDP (gross domestic product) with a GPI (genuine progress indicator) in the years since the Atlantic published this seminal 1995 cover story on the concept. In fact, that Atlantic cover story helped inspire Nova Scotia's Ron Colman to found GPI Atlantic, which has done important work developing measures of real progress in this region. Colman wrote Fallows to point this out, and today Fallows blogs about GPI Atlantic. [Disclosure: contrarian once worked for GPI Atlantic.]...
When then-prosecutor Bob Lutes realized he would be speaking at the same small conference as Donald Marshall, Jr., he braced himself for the rage he thought Marshall must feel toward any prosecutor. Instead, he found a "calm, quiet, respectful" man, who "had a presence about him." Lutes's must-read letter in today's Halifax Chronicle-Herald recalls the encounter: He was everything that you would want your children to be when meeting someone for the first time. I watched him, listened to him, and spoke with him. He amazed me...
A US polling website tries to explain the difference between the Canadian medical care system and the British health care system. And does a surprisingly good job. .. .. .. .. .. .. UPDATE: Spoilsport contrarian reader JP points out: Fivethirtyeight.com isn't quite right, is he? Or he's at least misleading: Everything BUT doctor services in Canada are owned and run by the state. Point taken, but after all, this is an American writing about Canadian health care. How much accuracy can one expect?...
CBC-Nova Scotia ran a long commentary this morning by Halifax resident Dave Hayden about financial rip-off artists like Earl Jones, then used its website to link to Hayden's online petition urging stiffer penalties for white-collar crimes. A grey zone between information and promotion perhaps, but in contrarian's view, the public broadcaster steps over the line when it links to a petition lobbying government on a current issue....
Stephen Taylor, a Conservative blogger who organized a series of rallies to protest last fall's proposed coalition government, has created an extraordinary mashup of poll-by-poll results from the 2008 federal election and Google Earth. The high definition (HD) video may take a few moments to load completely. Elections Canada provides the data that drives this extraordinary tool, but not in a format that Google Earth or Google Maps can read or import. Taylor crashed his computer several times coming up with a program to translate the data into a format Google could use. Taylor's creation will shade each federal poll result according...
On trial in 1971: [caption id="attachment_1797" align="alignnone" width="600" caption="(Canadian Press Photo)"][/caption] Upon his release in 1982 : [caption id="attachment_1798" align="alignwrap" width="600" caption="(Canadian Press Photo by Halifax photographer Albert Lee.)"][/caption] With his mother, Caroline Marshall, following double-lung transplant in 2003: [caption id="attachment_1799" align="alignwrap" width="600" caption="(Canadian Press photo)"][/caption]...
One of the great things about running a blog is that when you write about something interesting that you know little about, readers rush in with a wealth of further information. Contrarian friend Andrew Weissman directed us to an extraordinary TED talk by Hans Rosling illustrating the phenomenal potential of the digital graphs we touched on this morning. Rosling is a professor of international medicine at Sweden's Karolinska Institutet (the organization that hands out the Nobel Prize for Medicine). He discovered Konzo, a previously unknown paralytic disease associated with hunger in Africa. He also co-founded the Gapminder Foundation, which developed the...