Ten minutes well spent
Ever sprinkle a little table salt onto a nicely grilled steak and then spit all over your friends as the intense taste hits your mouth? Ever go through a box of chip wagon french fries, adding salt continually because it won't stick to the fries, only to find the last few fries completely coated in the stuff? Have you ever sat staring at the beautiful shape of a salt crystal formed over hours and days of slow evaporation? Sadly, I have.
If any of this rings true to you, surf over to
Slate, where they have the
results of a taste test comparing 9 different salts on a number of dimensions. Now excuse me while I head over to the gourmet grocer to find some Morton Coarse Kosher Salt and some
Maldon Sea Salt - for those special occasions.
The dangers of excess weight
A new study shows a link between a high body mass index (usually associated with being overweight) and the risk of having a meniscal tear in your knee, requiring surgery. Read
more on
MedPage.
Geez, maybe my torn lateral meniscus isn't from squash, after all.
What is wrong with people?
When people look into the sky and discern shapes out of the cloud formations, most of them know that any shape they see is just a coincidence - a result of their brains trying to find familiar shapes in a random pattern. So what's with people getting so excited about a pattern on a grilled cheese sandwich that looks like Jesus? Or, the most recent one, rust and water stains in an underpass that
look like Mary? It's just a stain, people, and any resemblance to any symbol, religious or otherwise, is merely a trick of our minds. Get over it.
Air India Inquiry
As I've written
before, the trial against the people accused of masterminding and carrying out the Air India bombing in 1985 resulted in acquitals of both accused. Twenty years later, there are no more answers than there were in the days immediately following the tragedy, and yet the federal government
refuses to give a clear answer on whether they will hold an inquiry into why the investigation encountered so many problems. The people of Canada and India deserve to know why CSIS and the RCMP failed to act on the evidence they had on hand that there was a plan being developed to carry out just such an attack.
If you agree that this inquiry is vital, I urge you to visit the
inquiry web site and sign the petition, and ask your friends and colleagues to do the same. The inquiry won't change what happened and won't bring back any of the victims, but it will help the country understand why our investigative services failed us, and will help ensure that a tragedy of this type doesn't happen again.
Politics and principles
How do people choose what party they belong to? I'm thinking here not of the general public making a decision come election time, rather about people who decide they want to devote a good chunk of their lives to helping govern the people by becoming a candidate and hopefully an MP representing a party in parliament. How much of that decision is based on a real belief in that party's platform and principles, and how much is sheer opportunism, or "which party will help get me into power?"
I find myself thinking about this as I read about Liberal members of parliament such as David Kilgour and Pat O'Brien "considering their political options". They, along with possibly three other Liberal MPs, are considering crossing the floor to join the Conservatives because of their disgust over AdScam. And this makes me wonder - are they doing this because they've suddenly decided that they are Conservatives after all? Or because they just want to hold on to their seats in Parliament after the coming election? I know it can't be because some members of their party decided to steal $100M from the Canadian public; if they were really just outraged about that, then they would stick with the party and help to change it from within. The way I see it, they're just cowards, afraid of going back to the real world.
I don't have time to expand on it right now, but the more I think about it, the more it disgusts me that these so-called Liberals are doing this.
Lawyers and the last word
So I'm working on a license agreement to acquire the rights to a drug compound, and the agreement has been going back and forth with the other party and their lawyers. The most recent version I sent them seemed to be the penultimate version - they called me back to say that all of our changes had been accepted, and their lawyers were in the process of dotting the i's and crossing the t's. When I asked what sorts of changes I could expect to see, the response was "oh, you know lawyers, they just always have to have the last word". Expecting the worst, I opened up the agreement that was sent to me by their lawyer this afternoon and started scanning for changes.
In one section, we had the phrase "subject to the confidentiality provisions herein". Typical lawyer-speak, we figured, that would make the legal counsel on both sides happy. Apparently, it wasn't quite lawyer-speak enough; it came back altered to read "subject to the provisions of the confidentiality provisions herein".
Thank god our lawyer isn't that nitpicky. Even she had a good laugh over that one.
Drinking your way to slimness
The Globe and Mail
reports on a StatsCan report that examines the growing obesity among Canadians and the likelihood of people who are merely overweight becoming obese. In one finding:
The risk of becoming obese was almost 50 per cent lower among overweight women who reported occasional drinking, compared with those who never drank
I'll drink to that.
What's in a name?
This is somewhat amusing. Enter your first name, and you'll receive a brief description of your personality. At first I thought "wow, that's bang on", until I tried entering a few friends' name and realized that they're all quite similar, and not always correct.
Still, somewhat entertaining.
Cell phones and sperm cell mobility
A preliminary study at the University of Newcastle has identified that radio waves of a similar frequency to those associated with mobile phones can damage sperm DNA in mice.
Read the full story. I'm thinking I should stop carrying my cell phone in my pants pocket.
Pragmatic, indeed
In scouring the blogosphere for commentary on the AdScam testimony publication, I came across a blog called
Brock on the Attack. The writer is based in Toronto and has some very thoughtful posts on the scandal and numerous other political topics. Unfortunately, some of them haven't been thought through quite carefully enough.
In
one of his posts, titled "Let's be pragmatic", Brock examines Canadians' voting patterns and interest in politics. According to him, too many people in Canada vote based on a single issue such as same-sex marriage, which to him implies a lack of principles-based voting. The way he sees it, people should be more concerned about the pending economic consequences of soaring oil prices and the resulting inflation that is surely just over the horizon. Brock says:
Moreover, anybody who is willing to crown these Liberals the guardians of this nation’s economy, with their track record of corruption, and their lack of planning for the future is far more willing to roll the dice than I. Those willing to leave this nation to chance on the single issue of same-sex marriage are even more frightening.
a) what does their track record of corruption have to do with how they've managed the economy?
b) simply saying they don't have a plan for the future doesn't mean they don't have one (they've done more for scientific R&D than any goverment in over 25 years, and you could easily argue that R&D is the basis of the future economy)
c) if voting based on your view on same-sex marriage is "single issue" voting, then so is voting based on your views on the Liberals' economic performance, or the corruption scandal. Why is should one issue be more important to every person in this country than any other?
While I have no beef with Brock's economic analysis, I question his definition of what constitutes voting based on principles. Economic cycles come and go, economic policies are changed and revised all the time by successive governments. Voting your belief on an issue such as same-sex marriage is exactly what principled voting is all about - choosing one or more issues that are simply so important that they trump the day-to-day management of the country. These issues define who we are as a country and a people for years, decades, and generations to come.
For the record, I have voted Liberal in the past, and I likely will in the future. That does not mean, however, that I agree with everything they're doing or have done, just that I agree
more with their overall vision for the country than any other party's.
More on the futility
According to John Gomery, the ban was initially put in place because of the pending criminal trials against Jean Brault and other mucky-mucks at various ad agencies in and around Montreal. The rationale was that if the inquiry's testimony was made public, it would be nearly impossible to find jurors in Montreal who hadn't been tainted by it.
Sounds plausible, doesn't it? Except that the ban is completely ineffective, thanks to the way it's been implemented. The inquiry is open to the public, which means anyone can walk in and listen to what's being said. As a result, every political party, news agency, and busy-body interested in politics and with free time on his hands, has a representative listening to the inquiry live, in person. In Montreal, no less. How can you possibly ensure that the jury pool hasn't been tainted if you allow people in the same city to come in to your room and hear the testimony?
As an aside, the Canadian public is going nuts over this whole saga. Apparently, the US blog at the centre of the firestorm has been overwhelmed with hits from Canadian sites. I'm even seeing increased traffic on here; fully half the hits yesterday were redirected from search engines with something related to AdScam in the search string. More evidence that the ban is useless and unfair to the public.
More ban-breaking
The Globe and Mail has a
story on their web site today about the American who reported on the Brault testimony on his blog over the weekend. I haven't seen anything about the ban being lifted, so I'm guessing the Globe is breaking the law by publishing this story; let's see how long the story stays up.
The futility of the AdScam publication ban
As many of you are aware, Justice John Gomery has banned the publication of any of the contents of Jean Brault's trial at the
AdScam hearings due to his pending criminal trial. On Saturday, an American blog published an outline of Brault's testimony in defiance of the publication ban, which does not apply to media sources outside Canada, anyway. Over the weekend, a Canadian news site published a report that mentioned the blog by name, and apparently Canadians flocked to the site to get the scandalous information.
By the time I read about it this morning, all Canadian news reports and web sites I could find had their links to the blog deleted, and the news site's original report was removed from their site altogether. And yet it took me all of 60 seconds to find the blog (which I won't name because I don't want the Feds
coming after me - which they apparently might do even just for naming the news site involved).
If I can find it that quickly, then surely many other Canadians can still do the same thing. This creates a situation where some Canadians have access to vital information about the inquiry and the actions of the former government and their officials, while other Canadians remain in the dark through lack of internet access, inability to perform simple google searches, or the like. This situation is unacceptable, especially if a snap election is called to avoid the information becoming widespread public knowledge beforehand (although this is less likely thanks to the blogosphere).
It's time for Gomery to lift the publication ban. It made no sense to begin with, and now it's just inherently unfair to some Canadians. You can't run a country and you can't hold an election with access to critical information limited to a portion of your citizens.
How stupid can you get?
A (now former) Eli Lilly sales rep wrote a book called
Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman in which he bragged about how little he worked and how much he was paid for it. Surprise, surprise, Eli Lilly
just fired him for violating company policies. It may just be me, but I think if you've got it so good that you're hardly working and are making a few hundred grand for it, you just keep your mouth shut and continue to ride the gravy train. The last thing you should do is draw attention to it by writing a book. What an idiot.
Monkey Business: Swinging Through the Wall Street Jungle