Visa has released a new iPhone app that uses survey data to help parents calculate the going rate for tooth fairy emoluments, based on a parents' gender, age, income, location, and educational attainment. The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal played with the app for a while and came up with in interesting discovery that doesn't really surprise me much: The smaller the amount I put in for household income, the greater the size of the average tooth fairy's gift. In fact, I was only able to get calculator to output $5 by setting my household income to $20k per year and selecting that my...

04 September, 2012

A Grey Seal surveys the shoreline at Whale Cove, Inverness Co., Saturday. (Click photo for larger image.) Photo: Joshua Barss Donham....

28 August, 2012

Contractors belatedly install a wheelchair ramp at the Chickenburger outlet on Queen St. in Halifax Monday afternoon. Background here. Congratulations to Gus Reed for making HRM a little more inclusive than it was yesterday. The city insists that installing the ramp was a condition of Mickey MacDonald's "temporary" occupancy permit all along, but the chronology of events tells a different story. July 4 — Reed, who uses a wheelchair, meets with MacDonald to protest against the newly opened restaurant's inaccessibility. The owner is adamant that a ramp is not feasible. July 6 — Reed writes to Brad Anguish, HRM's Director, Community & Recreation Services, to complain...

27 August, 2012

"One of this government's least admirable traits," said a friend who admires much the Dexter Government has done, "is its refusal to ever admit it made a mistake." The impulse to stay an obviously incorrect course is common enough in government, and it commonly leads to even greater error. This month, the Dexter Government's refusal to admit mistakes in its reprehensible treatment of a Cape Breton addiction recovery centre led to further error in the form of a dishonest procurement process. On Friday, the Board of Directors of Talbot House announced it would not submit a tender to supply the addiction recovery services...

27 August, 2012

Most Contrarian readers don't know Fr. Paul Abbass. This moving video will give you a sense of the man whose life and reputation has been so damaged by the reckless behavior of the Department of Community Services and the Dexter Government. He talks about what happened to men during their stays at Talbot House Board members and former residents of Talbot have made their own videos here. The Dexter Government assumes cynically that it can tough this situation out and it will go away. We'll see about that....

24 August, 2012

Contrarian reader Denis Falvey, a physician and retired Armed Forces Major, responds to our curmudgeonly friend's tale of abuse at the hands of the province's doctor and patient monitoring program prescription monitoring program: Your curmudgeonly friend is correct, on pretty much all points. The so-called war on drugs, like any war, is having serious consequences for innocent bystanders. And, like most wars, it has devolved into destructive nonsense. Drugs are illegal as a result of a misguided attempt to impose morality, back in the early 20th century. After a generation of murder and mayhem, alcohol prohibition was seen by virtually everyone to be...

23 August, 2012

After just 17 days on Mars, NASA's Curiosity Rover has detected strong indications of life—and confirmed a familiar adage at the same time. Photo credit: Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Photo-enhancement credit: Peter Barss...

23 August, 2012

A curmudgeonly friend writes: Last winter, the Nova Scotia Prescription Monitoring Program ruined my wife’s first vacation in eight years. The Program exists to restrain the abuse of prescription drugs, something I thought prescriptions themselves were for. To this end, among other things, the Program provides the police with information about legal (that is to say legal) drugs you are taking (you may have thought that information was confidential). But the hammer in the Program’s toolbox is its ability to intimidate doctors out of doing what they believe is right for their patients. To wit, from the Program’s FAQ: “If the Program has reason to believe...

22 August, 2012

Now that we have freed the 2011 election donations data from the deadening grasp of Elections Nova Scotia, there's no end to the interesting things one can do with it. For example: In 2011, 4130 Nova Scotians...

16 August, 2012

When Philip Humber of the Chicago White Sox pitched a perfect game against the Seattle Mariners back in April, I wrote that the frequency of these exceedingly rare feats had ramped up dramatically over the last three decades. Mathematicians argued that speedup was more apparent than real, a classic example of a Poisson distribution. This is the natural tendency for exceptionally rare but random events to bunch up in ways that appear non-random. Humber's flawless game was the 19th in modern baseball's 112-year* history. Since April, there have been two more, including the 1-0 gem Félix Hernández of the Seattle Mariners pitched against the Tampa Bay Rays...

16 August, 2012
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