DancingSamurai.ca

This MacLean’s article, “A know-nothing strain of conservatism”, highlights one of my many reasons for unease with the reigning Conservatives of this otherwise fine country:

I think my colleague John Geddes came closest in his piece last week. It isn’t just that the Tories habitually ignore the expert consensus on a wide range of issues—crime, taxes, climate change—it’s that they want to be seen to be ignoring it. It’s the overt antagonism to experts, and by extension the educated classes, that marks the Tory style. In its own way, it’s a form of class war.

You can see it in the sneering references to Michael Ignatieff’s Harvard tenure, in the repeated denunciations of “elites” and “intellectuals.” In the partial dismantling of the census, we reach the final stage: not just hostile to experts, but to knowledge.

[...]

To whip up popular hostility to intellectuals is to invite the public to jump on its own funeral pyre.

How long do you think it will be before they start burning books? (via Dawg’s Blog)

So I’ve been noticing that windows is really slow on my netbook (even on my Toshiba A300), and so has my wife. It is quite frustrating that I could probably check my e-mail faster 20 years ago (boot time to open the application, etc). Sure, it was text based, but the functionality was there!
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The brilliant xkcd lampoons homeopathy:

I haven’t had much time to write about the new proposed copyright bill (C-32). In short, it has some good things, but unfortunately, like the last proposed bill, everything it offers, it takes away (and then some) by elevating digital locks (DRM) to trump status.

Calgary Herald:

Do you see what I see in the new copyright Bill C-32? Amid all the noise about new rights for users, upon closer scrutiny, this bill, rather than granting new rights, can effectively block users from making use of any and all of their rights, even existing ones. It is true that this bill now recognizes rights that we all thought we already had, like viewing our legally purchased Irish video in Canada, or playing our Leonard Cohen song on our CD and copying it to our iPod, or watching Desperate Housewives on Monday instead of Sunday evening. But even the new rights granted to teachers to use excerpts from Catcher in the Rye or clips from the Anne of Green Gables television show are meaningless if vendors choose to use a digital lock.

Globe and Mail:

The problem here is twofold. Practically, it puts all the power in the hands of digital content creators. They can wave a wand and – more or less arbitrarily – declare their content locked and beyond the reach of the hoi polloi and their “fair use.”

But more important, I think, is the fact that giving locks special legal status doesn’t make intuitive sense. If you want people to follow a law in their day-to-day lives, and you don’t want to create a police state to enforce it, you have to meet them halfway on the grounds of moral reasoning. And turning digital locks into unbreakable magic seals – as opposed to judging what the user does after they break a lock – is counterintuitive.

Unsurprising, but still rather disappointing:

She states “the Prime Minister’s Office’s position was, move quickly, satisfy the United States.” When Bernier and then-Canadian Heritage Minister Bev Oda protested, the PMO replied “we don’t care what you do, as long as the U.S. is satisfied.”

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[I]t would appear that the PMO’s decision to side with Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore in requiring strict anti-circumvention rules reflects a long-term decision to prioritize U.S. interests on copyright ahead of the national interest.

With a new copyright bill to be unveiled shortly, all the more reason to keep an eye out and make your voices heard.

Don’t have much more to add to Orac’s post:

I’ve written a few times before about the controversy over whether cell phones (a.k.a. mobile phones in most of the rest of the world) cause brain cancer, concluding on more than one occasion that the evidence does not support a link. For example, there has not been a large increase in brain cancer or other cancers claimed to be due to cell phone radiation in the 15 to 20 years since the use of cell phones took off back in the 1990s, nor has any study shown a convincing correlation between cell phone use and brain cancer.

Of course, one would not expect a priori, based on what is known about basic science, that cell phone radiation would cause cancer. After all, the development of cancer in general ultimately requires mutations in critical genes regulating cell growth and development. For an outside treatment to cause such mutations, as far as we know, requires the ability to cause DNA damage through the breaking of chemical bonds. Ionizing radiation can do this, as can certain cehmicals and chemotherapeutic agents. Indeed, that’s how these agents work against cancer because cancer cells tend to be more sensitive to DNA damaging agents than normal cells due to defective DNA repair mechanisms. Thus, it is highly implausible based on basic science that cell phone radiation could cause cancer. It’s not homeopathy level-implausible, but it’s pretty implausible.

Now this is creative – a sex ed quiz game aimed at teens put out by the London Health unit. Can you defeat the evil Sperminator?

(via BoingBoing)