More than a million people have used Stephen Wolfram's Personal Analytics for Facebook, a web app that generates a fascinating visual report of your Facebook profile: age, gender, relationship status, and location of your FB friends; the number of your friends' friends and the number of their friends in common with you; your friends' most common first and last names; your most 'liked' post; your FB use by day of the week and time of day; and a word cloud of your posts (like mine, at right). Wolfram, best known as inventor of the computer program Mathematica and the search engine...

27 April, 2013

As I said yesterday, I find the spectre of the hectoring free-marketeers at Sun News demanding government regulation to coerce consumers into buying their product hilarious. Contrarian reader Ritchie Simpson thinks I'm out to lunch: I mean really, Parker, what a scurrilous attack on Sun News, complete with quotation marks in the title to suggest that someone, supposedly [Sun News VP Kory] Teneycke, actually said that. I’m forced, in Eastlink’s basic package, to pay for all 3 major American networks, all other Canadian news channels, including the Ontario centric, slightly pinkish, tax gobbling, bureaucracy-bound CBC in several guises, two CTV channels,...

25 April, 2013

Having already photographed Kempt Head, Cmdr. Chris Hadfield turns his attention to less important parts of Nova Scotia: Hadfield has now photographed both of Contrarian's official residences. The universe is unfolding as it should. [UPDATE] Oops! A Twitter user with a Suessian pseudonym points out that Hadfield passed over, and photographed, Halifax on January 2: [Click these images for larger versions.]...

25 April, 2013

There is something deliciously ironic about free-market ideologues asking a government commission to force consumers to buy their product. [caption id="attachment_11799" align="alignright" width="250"] Kory Teneycke, former Harper flak and SunNews VP turned government handout seeker[/caption] That's what SunNews, the right-wing Canadian cable news channel, is asking the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission. SunNews has been a dud in the market. Canadians have chosen not to watch what's often called Fox News North. So the tax-and-spend hypocrits at Sun want to force-feed us by getting the CRTC to require cable companies to put them in the basic cable package, a notion called mandatory carriage. If...

24 April, 2013

To illustrate Adam Gopnik's piece on National Geographic* in last week's New Yorker, photo editor James Pomerantz riffled through hundreds of images from NatGeo's online archive of more than 11 million photos. This week, the New Yorker website reproduced "a handful of particularly intriguing images" from "the photo booty" Pomerantz uncovered. National Geographic being the source, one of the images naturally featured Cape Breton. Can you guess what's being pictured here? The caption: "Men wear the waistcoat of Cape Breton’s famous giant named Mcaskill (sic)."**  Gilbert H. Grosvenor took the photograph. * A subscription is required to read the entire piece. ** I assume the...

23 April, 2013

[Headline-related punchline at the end.] One reason behind my campaign [here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and most amusingly, here] to restore sanity to weather warnings and school cancellations is the tremendous cost these bureaucratic panic attacks impose on society. Every school cancellation begets a cascade of expensive waste: students missing school; taxpayers paying school employees not to work; parents losing work time to make last minute child-care arrangements; employers with missing or distracted workers; etc. Blogger Clark [NLN] at Popehat argues that Friday's unprecedented lockdown of commerce, transportation, and public events in Boston imposed a vastly greater cost with no...

21 April, 2013

Earlier this month, the London Cyclist website published a photoessay of 10 Bike Stands I'd Like to Leave my Bike In. My favorite: This comb-style rack is a close second: There are lots of bike enthusiasts and lots of artists in both Halifax and Sydney. Why don't we take on the task of world leadership in groovy bike racks? (I'm looking at you, Victor Syperek.) H/T: Bruce Schneier  ...

21 April, 2013

Many of you receive daily updates from Contrarian by email. These are sent out shortly after 3 am every day from Google's Feedburner service (to those who subscribed via the "once a day by email" link at right). This morning, for some reason, Feedburner sent out a trio of week-old posts for the second time. It's not clear why, but I wanted those who received it to know it was an error, not a deliberate reposting of these items. We are trying to sort out what happened, and why, if only to prevent it from happening again. Meanwhile, our apologies for adding to...

21 April, 2013

Our curmudgeonly friend is back (previous instalments here, here, and here) with some observations on the language of politics: Folks will pound tavern tables for hours as they expound on the reasons our political system is failing us, but they rarely mention our sloppy use of words. Because we pay so little attention to their meaning, we are, as we are intended to be, oblivious the effect they have on us. Some examples. “Change” All politicians support change. But change what? And change it how? “Hope” See above. Hope for what? “A better tomorrow” See above. What will that look like, exactly? “Family values” See above. Many of the worst...

18 April, 2013
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