Probabilities are tricky things to wrap your head around, and they are often not entirely intuitive. When a media report says that a COVID-19 test is 80% accurate or a vaccine is 95% effective, how do we know if that is good news? How reliable are those numbers, and how do we put them in context? Because our intuition can fail us, we need to rely on mathematics. Face your fear (of math), and...
Sir Richard Branson, aka “Astronaut 001 (License to Thrill)” became a spaceman today with a crew of five others aboard his own spaceship, the VSS Unity.
Unlike other space launches, from teeth-rattling explosive vertical rocket-boosted liftoffs, this one began as an ordinary flight. Takeoff was the same as in the cabin (luxury first class, mind you) of a normal aircraft from a normal runway. This is where the similarity ends, however. Branson and his crew...
Some sciences capture the public imagination, others don’t. Sadly, geology seems to fall into the latter category. The monotonous cycles of erosion and deposition are quite boring, and the interminable timeframes involved in geological processes are quite difficult for people to truly comprehend.
What people don’t realize, however, is that many of the events they find most interesting and exciting – volcanic eruptions, landslides, floods, and other natural disasters – are actually geological processes, altering...
(With files from Laurie Weston)
Let’s suppose that your medical doctor finds something of concern and suspects that you may have cancer. Your doctor’s first step is to send you for some type of non-invasive test, such as an X-ray or MRI. A few days later, you receive a phone call from your doctor, and you get the news you have been dreading. Your test is positive.
So, how concerned should you be? Although you should...
On June 23, Bill C-36 was given first reading in Canada’s House of Commons. Concerning hate crime, speech, and propaganda, this bill proposes amendments to the Criminal Code and the Canadian Human Rights Act (CHRA). The federal government claims that the bill is being proposed to help reduce the rise in hate crimes and make online spaces “safe.”Concerned citizens may reasonably ask if this bill will effectively reduce and redress hate crime, or if it...
In previous BIG Media articles (Assessing the relative lethality of COVID-19: a Canadian case study, COVID clarification – a tale of two tales), we compared COVID-attributed deaths to other causes of death of all types to provide context for the impact of COVID-19 in its first year. This was enlightening in many ways, but diseases such as cancer and heart disease are not contagious, and deaths from these causes are therefore unlikely to spread...
Oliver Stone thought he was quoting someone else when he wrote, “Hell is the impossibility of reason.” Other writers may have spoken similarly, for the ability to reason is arguably humanity’s greatest gift and hope for co-operation.
The words “Intelligence” and “Logic” appear in BIG Media’s logo because they align with the organization’s commitment to deliver articles that are objective and factual. It is the belief of BIG Media ownership that elements of the news...
An article recently published on BIG Media (Assessing the relative lethality of COVID-19: a Canadian case study), presented an analysis of all causes of death in Alberta from 2001 through 2019, and compared the COVID-attributed deaths of 2020 to the overall “deathscape”. At the time I was researching and writing that piece, I noticed an article on the CTV News website addressing a similar theme. This article was based on the same source of...
A constant theme in this three-part series on renewable energy is that wind and solar electricity generation have a different operating structure compared to the incumbent generation technologies that produce the majority of the world’s electricity. This is particularly the case when compared with hydrocarbon sources oil, natural gas, and coal.
The first two stories in the series are linked here: Renewable energy – renewing hope or struggling to cope?; Renewables Part 2: cost and...
“Everyone dies.”
– Elon Musk
Although most of us try to delay the inevitable as long as possible, death is a fact of life. Most people do not even like to mention it. In the midst of a pandemic, however, death is a hot topic. Yes, everyone dies, but what is killing us and how has COVID-19 changed the “deathscape”?
Causes of death are many and sometimes difficult to pinpoint in individual cases. Data available from the...
