My Friend Sarah

This video is the winner of the 2009 Fraser Institute Video Contest. Please read below for a quick synopsis.


"My Friend Sarah" is about a young girl who was the president of her school's "Progressive" club, and then took an economics class...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olCmbcd4L0U

Ground Hog Day

Just six more weeks of winter folks, that’s what the keepers of the furry rodents of Eastern North American are saying. My horoscope told me otherwise, but I won't bore you with that.


In other silly news it seems that even respected scientific journals can learn to eat crow and peer-reviewed science can be discredited! Go figure! Of course this should be no surprise to anyone that knows science is a process of theories proposed and data collected. Even the most cherished theories tremble at the mercy of verifiable contradictory data. Such was the case this week when the Lancet, a highly respected British medical journal, completely discredited a peer-reviewed study it had published in 1998 claiming that the Measles, Mumps, Rubella vaccine (MMR) is somehow linked to autism. This resulted is a significant drop in the vaccination rate and a subsequent measles outbreak in Britain and other places.

The original article supported parents whose autistic children had been given MMR vaccine and a cause-effect relationship was presented in the Lancet. Science is self-correcting……eventually.

By the way, up here in the Great White North, six more weeks of winter would be miraculous.

Objective Reality Rules on cell-phones and H1N1!

Last October 31st I wrote a blog titled Arbitrariness, confusion, fear and panic about Ontario's new hand-held cell-phone ban and the H1N1 scare; and since both have been in the news lately I'd like to revisit them.


The cell-phone ban has been in effect for about three months, but police have been issuing warnings until now. Starting tomorrow (Feb.1, 2010) the grace period is over and each offence will cost $125 to anyone caught using a handheld cell-phone or texting in Ontario. My own very unscientific observation has been that people are still using these devices while driving but are being very discrete about it; which may be aggravating the problem. Of course the ban was put in place because our political leaders want to protect us, and based on “scientific data” that shows distractions like cell-phones impair driving ability, and banning them was politically opportune. Do the outcomes support this action?

A report last week from the American Insurance Institute for Highway Safety suggests that such laws are ineffective. The report titled: Laws banning cell-phone use while driving fail to reduce crashes, new insurance data indicate compares insurance claims in four US states before and after a cell-phone ban and compares these states to nearby jurisdictions where there is no ban. One would expect more insurance claims prior to a ban than after, that did not happen. One would expect more insurance claims where there are no bans compared to where the bans are enforced, that did not happen. All of this data was analyzed and controlled for a multitude of variables that insurance company bean-counters are famous for. The up-shot is that such bans have little or no effect in making driving safer. So will the laws be repealed? Democracy mob-rule dictates no.

As for H1N1, talk about a tempest in a teapot, even I was caught up in the hype about this thing. The last time Swine Flu caused such a caused such angst was 1976 and it looks like we were fooled again. Someday these recurrent “cry wolf” refrains will come back and bite us in the ass.

Last time virtually the entire Swine Flu kerfuffle took place in the US after a young soldier at Fort Dix New Jersey died and four of his comrades were hospitalized of what was reported as an H1N1 strain similar to the one that caused the 1918 Flu Pandemic. The resulting mass-vaccination program caused a paralyzing neuromuscular syndrome in at least 500 individuals with possibly 25 fatalities.

This time the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a Pandemic Alert and predicted 2 billion cases of H1N1 and hundreds of thousands of deaths. So far around 15 000 have died world wide, far less than any normal flu season.

The Council of Europe is investigating whether WHO officials faked the pandemic to boost drug revenues for CSL Limited, GlaxoSmithKline, and Roche. Conspiracy anyone?

The Power of the Sun

The picture left represents inertial confinement fusion which uses 192 laser beams focused through holes in a target container called a hohlraum. Inside the hohlraum is a tiny pellet containing an extremely cold, solid mixture of hydrogen isotopes. When lasers strike the hohlraum's walls X-rays are produced that strip material from the outer shell of the isotope fuel pellet, heating it up to millions of degrees. If the compression of the fuel pellet is high enough and uniform enough, nuclear fusion can result. That moment is called "ignition" - effectively a carefully controlled thermonuclear explosion - the energy produced in stars like our Sun. If this were to happen and the energy produced was greater than the energy put in, that would be a momentous event in human history, controlled nuclear fusion.
That's the goal at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory National Ignition Facility (Nif) in California and the most recent test results look promising. Scientists at the Nif think that ignition "might" just happen this year and that would make the over 50 year search for fusion power within reach. That would change everything!