Quotulatiousness

October 28, 2012

Toronto accused of being deadly waypoint for migratory birds

Filed under: Cancon, Environment — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:11

In the New York Times, Ian Austen examines claims that Toronto’s downtown core is taking a huge toll of migratory birds every year:

There is no precise ranking of the world’s most deadly cities for migratory birds, but Toronto is considered a top contender for the title. When a British nature documentary crew wanted to film birds killed by crashes into glass, Daniel Klem Jr., an ornithologist at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pa., who has been studying the issue for about 40 years, directed them here, where huge numbers of birds streaking through the skies one moment can be plummeting toward the concrete the next.

“They’re getting killed everywhere and anywhere where there’s even the smallest garage window,” Professor Klem said. “In the case of Toronto, perhaps because of the number of buildings and the number of birds, it’s more dramatic.”

So many birds hit the glass towers of Canada’s most populous city that volunteers scour the ground of the financial district for them in the predawn darkness each morning. They carry paper bags and butterfly nets to rescue injured birds from the impending stampede of pedestrian feet or, all too often, to pick up the bodies of dead ones.

The group behind the bird patrol, the Fatal Light Awareness Program, known as FLAP, estimates that one million to nine million birds die every year from impact with buildings in the Toronto area. The group’s founder once single-handedly recovered about 500 dead birds in one morning.

Rob Silver finds the claim to be a bit unlikely:

Malaysian group calls for “Films that carry confusing messages” to be banned

Filed under: Asia, Media, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:52

A Bollywood film is at the centre of controversy in Malaysia:

An influential Muslim youth group said today that Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan’s “My Name Is Khan” movie confuses Muslims as it promotes liberal Islam and religious pluralism, and warned Malaysian broadcasters not to air the hit film.

The Muslim youth group’s statement comes after the Malay right-wing group Perkasa’s call last week for Muslims nationwide to boycott award-winning singer Jaclyn Victor for singing the Malay-language Christian song “Harapan Bangsa”, which she has said is meant for Christians.

“Angkatan Belia Islam Malaysia (ABIM) strongly protests the screening of ‘My Name Is Khan’ on TV3 on the second Hari Raya Aidil Adha.

“Films that carry confusing messages clearly shouldn’t (tidak wajar) be screened by a main Malaysian television station,” the group’s vice-president Ahmad Saparudin Yusup said in a statement today.

He questioned the timing of the film screening, saying that it raises the question of where the “media’s care and responsibility in their broadcasting materials” went.

H/T to Blazing Cat Fur for the link.

The Two Scotts pick this week’s NFL matchups

Filed under: Football, Humour, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:55

Scott Reid and Scott Feschuk get serious about something … but not football, of course:

New York Giants (plus 2) at Dallas

Scott Reid: I have no way of knowing but I like to imagine that deep down, Tony Romo and Eli Manning loathe one another.

Romo’s hatred would be all bound up in his feelings of insecurity and gross inadequacy (not unlike your own feelings toward me, Mr. Feschuk). Manning probably just hates the dimples. My fondest hope is that deep in the fourth quarter of this week’s matchup – after the Giants gain a 10-point lead – Romo breaks down on television and begins to sob uncontrollably, confronted with the awful truth that he’ll never best his rival. Manning, meanwhile, will make Jessica Simpson jokes and snicker about the hands-off approach of John Mara. Eventually Romo cracks completely and beats Manning savagely with a Gatorade bottle – leaving Eli dead and himself condemned to a life behind bars. In no way would this scenario make Mike Vick the best starting quarterback in the NFC East. Pick: New York.

Scott Feschuk: That’s all very interesting but I have a more important question: What man would ever agree to date Taylor Swift? You’d have to know right from the get-go that everything that happens is basically fodder for her next three albums, right? Wouldn’t it get awkward pretty quick?

You and Taylor Swift are in bed.

You: That was amazing. Let’s do it again.

[Swift opens her journal and starts writing.]

You: What are you doing?

Taylor: Oh, nothing. What rhymes with horndog?

You: Are you writing a song about me and our relationship?

Taylor: What? No. No, of course not!

You: Then who are these guys? [Points to drummer, guitarist and fiddler in bed with them.]

Taylor: Take five, fellas. I need to work on the bridge anyways.

Pick: New York.

On foreign policy, Romney and Obama sing from the same hymnbook

Filed under: Government, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:42

At Reason, Sheldon Richman explains why there seemed to be so little difference between President Obama’s foreign policies and those of Mitt Romney:

If we needed evidence of the impoverishment of American politics, the so-called debate between President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney gave us all we could ask for.

We normally expect a debate to highlight some disagreement, but in American politics disagreement is reserved for minor matters. The two parties — actually the two divisions of the uniparty that represents the permanent regime — agree on all fundamentals. If you need proof, observe how the establishment media treated Ron Paul, who challenged the permanent regime’s basic premises on foreign policy, civil liberties, and monetary control. He dug too deep.

It’s been noted, mostly by humorists, that Romney continuously expressed his agreement with Obama across a range of issues: drone warfare, Iran, Afghanistan, even Iraq. He tried to manufacture differences by suggesting that he would have done more sooner. But this all sounded flaccid; Romney seemed desperate to draw some contrast with a foreign policy that he embraces.

What does Romney really believe? Who can say? What we do know is that he’s taking his foreign-policy advice from a team of neoconservatives, formerly of the George W. Bush administration, who helped dig the hole the country is in.

October 27, 2012

Chemophobia, “a fear so rampant that it has infected an entire generation of women”

Filed under: Environment, Health, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:13

Margaret Wente in the Globe and Mail:

Ms. Williams is right that our bodies contain trace amounts of pretty much everything that’s in our environment. But toxicity is a matter of degree. And technology is so advanced that we can measure trace amounts in parts per trillion. As yet, research has found no trace of harm. For example, after a comprehensive review of environmental causes and risk factors for breast cancer, the U.S. Institute of Medicine found no conclusive link between any of these chemicals and an increased risk of breast cancer. According to Scientific American, “some research shows the toxic load in breast milk to be smaller than that in the air most city dwellers breathe inside their homes.”

[. . .]

This is not to say there’s no impact from environmental factors. But these effects are small and uncertain. To eliminate them all, we’d have to eliminate modernity and return to being hunter-gatherers again.

But I’m afraid chemophobia is here to stay. Fear sells. Fear of chemicals manufactured by rapacious, greedy, money-sucking capitalist enterprises sells even better. Fear is is the main product peddled by interest groups such as the Environmental Defence Fund, which has been quite successful at marketing the notion that invisible dangers lurk all around us. The media love this stuff because it makes for easy headlines: If your shampoo doesn’t kill you, your lipstick will! Fear is a staple of celebrity experts like Dr. Oz, who has advised readers to avoid toxic sales receipts from fast-food restaurants and gas stations.

In praise of (invisible) editors

Filed under: Books, Media, Technology — Tags: — Nicholas @ 11:32

I don’t have a huge library of ebooks: partly because I’m still years behind in reading my actual printed book backlog, and partly because I’m not over-fond of reading books off a screen. However, I’ve often heard from those who do read some of their books in ebook format that typos are much more common there than in the printed versions:

… the reason for so many typos here is that almost no self-publishers are passing their work under the nose of an editor. Perhaps this distinction is easier if I use the English English words, editor and subeditor (or “sub”). An editor decides on what is going to be published, how stories are going to be tackled. A sub does the work that is lacking here. Correcting typos, making sure sentences are whole, perhaps rewriting the occasional line to make it flow.

What almost everyone who hasn’t worked for a newspaper doesn’t understand is that all of the copy in anything has been passed under such a nose. The subs rescue many of us from the its/it’s problems, dangling participles (not that I even know what that is) and so on. One of the things that everyone writing online has had to learn (or relearn!) is all of these rules. For we don’t have subs online.

We’ve all also had to learn (or relearn) that subbing your own writing is near impossible. The eye just skips over some of the things that a writer is prone to. Sure, spellcheckers help but they’re not perfect. And they won’t help with grammar or the its/it’s thing, or “arc” and “are”.

So this is the first reason that many ebooks are filled with mistakes and typos. Many are being written by those who don’t know about the vital function of the sub and wouldn’t afford one even if they did. And given that it is incredibly difficult to sub your own work this might well be a problem that doesn’t have a solution.

Do you use a stupidly easy-to-guess password?

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:15

SplashData has released an updated list of the top 25 passwords gleaned by hackers from stolen password files:

# Password Change from 2011
1 password Unchanged
2 123456 Unchanged
3 12345678 Unchanged
4 abc123 Up 1
5 qwerty Down 1
6 monkey Unchanged
7 letmein Up 1
8 dragon Up 2
9 111111 Up 3
10 baseball Up 1
11 iloveyou Up 2
12 trustno1 Down 3
13 1234567 Down 6
14 sunshine Up 1
15 master Down 1
16 123123 Up 4
17 welcome New
18 shadow Up 1
19 ashley Down 3
20 football Up 5
21 jesus New
22 michael Up 2
23 ninja New
24 mustang New
25 password1 New

If you recognize any password on this list … do yourself a favour and change it to something not on the list, preferably using more characters (including upper and lower case letters, numbers, and symbols). And don’t use the same password on multiple sites! SplashData sells a password keeper application that is quite useful (I’ve been using it for years now), and is available for multiple platforms.

Picking the scab: analyzing the Vikings-Buccaneers game

Filed under: Football — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:43

Having watched the Thursday night game from opening kickoff to final interception, all I can do is find comfort in ridicule and abusing our coaching staff and (some) players until next time they start a game. Ted Glover at the Daily Norseman seems to feel the same way:

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An argument against further publicizing the Jimmy Savile victims

Filed under: Britain, Law, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:59

At the Huffington Post, Brendan O’Neill points out that with Savile dead, the hue-and-cry to round up all the alleged victims and have them pour out their stories will not actually benefit anyone except the “theraputic industry”:

The victims themselves don’t get much out of it, since they are cajoled into reliving unpleasant things that happened decades ago. Worse, they’re publicly branded as damaged, as permanently scarred, despite the fact that many of them will have led full, interesting lives since that one time a dirty old man did something bad to them.

They are immortalised as one of Jimmy’s Victims, and in the process they are dehumanised, turned from rounded, complex individuals into simply sufferers.

Justice doesn’t benefit from these revelations, either, since Savile is dead and cannot be found guilty of anything. It is virtually impossible to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the allegations against him are true, because, in a civilised society at least, the dead cannot be put on trial. Which raises the question of why so many of the police’s resources are being pumped into gathering more and more Savile abuse stories.

And society as a whole doesn’t benefit from the open invitation to every person who had a bad encounter with Savile to reveal all. In fact, society, the big communal space we all inhabit, looks set to be the biggest loser in all this.

The Savile scandal will further dent social solidarity. The promotion of the idea that paedophiles lurk everywhere, that, in the words of the deputy children’s commissioner Sue Berelowitz, “There isn’t a town, village or hamlet in which children are not being sexually exploited”, will exacerbate today’s climate of suspicion and mistrust. The now widely accepted idea that there were “paedophile networks” at the Beeb, in the NHS, even around Parliament, will ratchet up already high levels of public cynicism towards institutions and the political sphere.

October 26, 2012

This week in Guild Wars 2

Filed under: Gaming — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:48

The Halloween edition of my regular community round-up at GuildMag is now online. This week’s collection includes lots of Halloween items, plus all the usual blog posts, videos, podcasts, and fan fiction.

“Canada has effectively become the Digital Third World”

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:21

In Forbes, Reuven Cohen looks at the state of internet access in Canada:

Before I get into what was discussed, I need to provide some context to the current state of Internet connectivity in Canada. To understand the Internet landscape in Canada is to endeavour into the realm of duopolies, bandwidth caps and mediocre Internet connections. As it stands today, Canada has effectively become the Digital Third World.

A recent video interview with The Globe and Mail’s Omar El Akkad and Netflix CEO Reed Hastings summaries the problems with cloud computing in Canada. Hastings’ specifically calls out capped Internet plans as compared to the rest of the world saying “Canada has the misfortune of being the country with the lowest internet caps maybe in the world but certainly in the developed world and in all of the Netflix world. In Mexico, Internet is largely uncapped; in the US it’s largely uncapped; in the UK it’s completely uncapped; in Canada there’s a number of providers with very low caps…I don’t quite understand it.”

Herein lies the problem, the widespread use of bandwidth caps in Canada is partially the result of a market defined by vast geographies and a limited population base. This has resulted in a highly concentrated market controlled by a small group of ISPs. Making things worse is a highly government controlled telecom industry that prevents foreign investments, particularly for wireless and broadband services. This combination of factors has led to one of the most restrictive markets for cloud computing as well as other internet related services found in any of the major industrialized nations today.

Turnovers and poor tackling give Tampa Bay the win in Minnesota

Filed under: Football — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:51

The Minnesota Vikings dropped their season record to 5-3 with a home field loss to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Rookie running back Doug Martin put on a great show, getting his first career 100 yard game while Minnesota put on another clinic of poor tackling skills. During the game, the announcers pointed out that Martin by himself was out-gaining the entire Vikings offense. To be fair, the Vikings defence was the best of the three units on the field last night: the offense was putrid and the special teams players didn’t improve much from last week’s debacle.

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QotD: Supporting the “undeserving” poor

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:26

Two of the great and correct insights of libertarianism are that the state has very limited knowledge, and that its interventions often lead to people gaming the system. This is true of welfare spending as of anything else. The government doesn’t have the knowhow to distinguish well between the deserving and undeserving poor. And its efforts to do so are not only expensive — in terms of paying bureaucrats and corporate scroungers and fraudsters — but also bear heavily upon the honest and naive deserving poor whilst the undeserving, who know how to game the system, get off.

Chris Dillow, “Support the undeserving poor”, Stumbling and Mumbling, 2012-10-25

October 25, 2012

“[W]e are now fully entered into a post-democratic era here in KanuckiHarperStan”

Filed under: Cancon, Law — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:37

Paul “Inkless” Wells points out that the hyperventilation over the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in the Etobicoke Centre election case is just a tad overblown:

There was some chatter on Twitter this morning, after the Supreme Court ruled to uphold the election results in Etobicoke Centre, to the effect that Stephen Harper has finally succeeded in stacking the top court with corrupt thugs and we are now fully entered into a post-democratic era here in KanuckiHarperStan. My hunch is that this overstates things.

First, this was actually the Harper government’s first good day at the Court in a while. The Supremes have more often been in the habit of handing Harper trouble, as with the Insite supervised-injection site case and Jim Flaherty’s dead-parrot project for a national securities regulator. In those highest of high-profile cases, Harper appointees concurred with their colleagues in unanimous judgments.

Today there was division, and it didn’t follow partisan lines neatly. (I’ll cut to the chase: I think it’s simplistic to presume a justice appointed by a given PM will consistently rule in ways that please that PM. This has simply never been the case in Canada, to the dismay of a succession of prime ministers.)

A contrarian view of the proposed Detroit-Windsor bridge

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:02

Terence Corcoran points out that the proposed new bridge connecting Detroit and Windsor is not quite the simple story of Canadian generosity to cash-strapped Michigan:

In this view, Mr. Harper as Captain Canada had vanquished not only the state of Michigan and its governor, Rick Snyder. He had also declared war on the real battle target, the private corporation that controls the other Detroit-to-Windsor crossing, the Ambassador Bridge owned and controlled by the Moroun family, headed by 83-year-old billionaire Manuel Moroun.

Mr. Moroun, whose family has owned the bridge since the late 1970s — maintaining it and collecting all tolls — is portrayed as an influence-buying Tea Party capitalist who seeks tax breaks to prosper, a monopolist who wants to keep out competition, a symbol of all that is wrong with America’s special-interest dominated governments. Mr. Harper and Canada stand as principled, influence-free promoters of international trade, commerce and the public good.

It takes a lot of ideological twisting to reach that conclusion, especially for Conservatives who portray Mr. Harper as the economic good guy — despite all evidence to the contrary that Mr. Harper is the heavy-handed statist attempting to cripple a private entrepreneur. What Mr. Harper is really doing is using government power to do what Canadian governments have wanted to do for at least five decades: thwart the private ownership — and if possible take control — of the Ambassador Bridge.

[. . .]

So Mr. Harper, by moving in to fund a competing bridge using taxpayers’ dollars, is re-enacting the Trudeau policy, using more direct methods. Ottawa will pay to build a second bridge, potentially driving the Moroun family out of business.

Being a billionaire, Manuel Moroun isn’t a sympathetic figure. He is described, among other things, as being a fake capitalist, a rent-seeking monopolist who does not want to face competition. It’s a charge that belittles Mr. Moroun and elevates the dubious intentions of the government. When a foreign national government shows up on your door, with the support of the governor of your state and likely the president of the United States, to announce that “We’re from the government and were here to compete with you,” Mr. Moroun has good reason to run to the courts and the political process.

For doing so, Mr. Moroun has been described as litigious, a wealthy manipulator and a purchaser of political favours. When it comes to manipulation, however, it’s hard to beat Ottawa and the massed forces of special-interest industries, unions and government bureaucrats who have joined to promote and build a new bridge at government expense.

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