Temporarily Torontonian
Please listen to this podcast: Gabor Maté on The Human Face of Addictive Behavior Maté makes some excellent points about the psychological basis for addiction, as well as the serious problems with our current approach of treating addiction as a crime. Maté makes a powerful case that criminalization of drug use is ineffective and unethical, [...]
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With the commencement of hearings, the political fight over the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline is now beginning in earnest. The proposed pipeline would carry bitumen from the oil sands to the Pacific coast for export. It would encourage the development of the oil sands and contribute to the fastest-growing category of emissions of greenhouse gas [...]
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This is a good idea: Retraction Watch. They have been reporting on retracted scientific papers since 2010.
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One distinguishing feature of biology seems to be that it is always possible to examine a process in a greater level of detail, whether it is cellular respiration or blood clotting or evolution. You can say something simple like “DNA contains genes, which are instructions for making proteins using ribosomes” but there are masses of [...]
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Perhaps the best thing about the metric system (more formally, the International System of Units) is the way in which it allows for the easy estimation of many practical problems, and takes advantage of the intuitive connections people can make. For instance, one millilitre (mL) of volume occupies a space of 1 centimetre (cm) by [...]
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During a recent discussion with Tristan, the subject of the Turing Test arose. For those who are unfamiliar, the test is intended as a way to determine if a machine has intelligence. You set it up so that it can converse with a human being – for instance, through a text-based instant message type conversation [...]
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I decided to get vaccinated against human papillomavirus (HPV) with Gardasil. HPV causes genital warts, as well as cervical, anal, penile, and throat cancer. The vaccine covers four of the many strains of the virus – types 6, 11, 16 and 18 – including those that cause most genital warts and cancer cases. Gardasil is [...]
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The Supreme Court of Canada’s unanimous decision to support Vancouver’s safe injection site is very encouraging, particularly in the present political context. Overall, the direction of Canada’s policy toward illegal drugs is depressing and frustrating. We are choosing the emulate the country with the worst drug policy in the developed world – the United States. [...]
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I am glad someone actually went out and did this: Among other things, it shows how our intuitions are often based on the limited range of conditions experienced by our ancestors on Earth, and thus reflective of only a subset of what is true about the universe generally. We expect air resistance to exist everywhere, [...]
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All day tomorrow, September 14th 2011, Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project will be broadcasting a multinational, multilingual attempt to inform people about climate change and what ought to be done about it. Hopefully, this will help to recapture the attention of the public and policy-makers. It has drifted a lot in the last few years, [...]
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Keep carbon underground. Help stop the Northern Gateway oil sands pipeline.
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Content copyright Milan Ilnyckyj (2003-2011). May be used non-commercially with attribution. For more details see this page.