The following death notice appeared in Cape Breton yesterday. Joseph Peter MacLean Hello, if you are reading this I am gone from the earth. I am here with my parents Charlie and Katie (Campbell) MacLean, also my baby sister Mary Margaret is here too. I never had a chance to know her on earth as she died when she was one and a half years old. I lived for 67 years, it was a good life. I enjoyed playing music and speaking my beloved Gaelic — my native tongue. I played with the Boisdale Trio, the Cape Breton Fiddlers Association, made a CD,...

14 January, 2013

Yesterday, White House press spokesman Jay Carney kiboshed the idea of minting a platinum trillion dollar coin to get around the Congressionally imposed debt ceiling that Republicans are using to ransom deep cuts in medicare and social security. Some economists have urged President Barack Obama to exploit a legal loophole that would allow the government to print a single $1,000,000,000,000 coin, and deposit it with the Federal Reserve Bank, thereby enabling the US Government to pay bills Congress has already authorized. MSNBC Host Chris Hays summed up the case for the coin this way: If this seems surreal or ridiculous or magical to...

13 January, 2013

Chasing Ice, a new film from director Jeff Orlowski, follows photographer James Balog's attempt to catalog the climate change-induced melting of the north polar icecap, using time lapse photography. This scene, the film's climax, shows the spectacular breakup of a Manhattan-sized chunk of ice from Greenland's Ilulissat Glacier. To appreciate the images, click the gear at the lower right edge of the film, and pick the highest resolution your monitor will support. Then view the clip full screen. The trailer for Chasing Ice is here. H/T: Melanie McGrath...

05 January, 2013

A few weeks ago, Contrarian ran a BBC video on Uruguayan President Jose Mujica, who lives in a modest bungalow on the outskirts of Montevideo, gives away 90% of his $12,000/month salary, and drives his own '87 VW Beetle. Often called "the poorest president in the world," Mujica brushes off the label with a quotation from the Roman philosopher Seneca: “It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, who is poor.” Today, the New York Times devotes its Saturday Profile to President Mujica: Under Mr. Mujica, who took office in 2010, Uruguay has drawn attention for seeking to legalize...

05 January, 2013

Contrarian's friend Gus writes: In my younger days I used to live in Concord, where the Contrarian spirit runs deep (and perhaps was born). Bronson Alcott, who would not wear wool because it was stolen from sheep, would have recruited Louisa May to the cause. I remain interested in the bruising local politics of these places - it would have been fun to listen to the arguments about P.E.T. bottles at town meeting. Since half the town are M.I.T professors, the lines would have been sharply drawn. The other half, Harvard professors, would have spoken at length and contributed nothing to...

04 January, 2013

Just after Christmas, I noted an angry denunciation of Chief Theresa Spence and the Idle No More movement by a Harper-friendly journalist. I took it as an early sign that Spence holds "outsized potential to cause trouble for Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government." Toronto Star columnist Chantal Hébert seems to agree, albeit somewhat convolutedly: On the societal role of government, the gap between the various non-Conservative constituencies in this country has always been smaller than the gap between those who support the current government and those who don’t. The ranks of those who sympathize with the activist goals of the Idle No More movement stretch...

03 January, 2013

With so many real and pressing environmental crises threatening to harm Planet Earth, why are so many well-meaning environmentalists so easily diverted into foolhardy projects like the campaign to ban plastic water bottles? On January 1, the Town of Concord, Massachusetts, prohibited the sale of "non-sparkling, unflavored drinking water in single-serving polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles of 1 liter (34 ounces) or less." To be clear, it's still OK to sell small, plastic bottles of Coke, Red Bull, colored sugar-water, and carbonated water, and it's OK to sell Just Plain Water in 40-oz plastic bottles or gallon jugs. In an approving report on the ban, the Globe and Mail...

03 January, 2013

If you're anything like me, your conception of the human heart comes from text book line drawings and plastic models in doctors' offices. To create a more useful, virtual model, the Barcelona Supercomputing Center used 10,000 parallel processors. The beating heart turns out to be a phenomenally complex electromechanical apparatus—wondrous, and almost spooky, to behold. The center recently released a video simulation, although based on a rabbit's heart rather than a human's. From Emily Underwood via Alexis Madrigal. Journal articles: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cnm.1494/full http://www.bsc.es/computer-applications/alya-red-cc  ...

03 January, 2013
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