Before I say anything, I want to point out that this news item is being discussed by the hospital boards and they will be consulting the community, and the final vote has not happened--yet. There are two hospitals in Midland not 5 minutes apart from each other, which have decided to join in to one large hospital and take advantage of the synergy of the union. The official proposal, however, surprised everyone when it appeared saying the new hospital would be a Catholic hospital. This is only a problem because the policy of Catholic hospitals are dictated by doctrine. The upshot is ...

Canada now has a federally regulated definition of organic. What this means is that in Canada the idea that you can slap the word Organic on your product just to increase sales are over. Organic foods have been increasing sales by 15-20% per year. Anyone would want to take advantage of that. But the new rules put strict regulations on how you grow your crop, and how you raise your animals, to qualify as organic. ...

Canada has a new Hindu temple. This is no house of cards, either. It's a $40 million dollar marble building, built without steel or brick, and held together with the force of gravity. It is an impressive hand-carved building, but one wonders what better use $40 million dollars could have gone to. Well, let's not go to extremes. The Hindus in Toronto likely should have a new temple, and I wouldn't deny them this. But $40 million seems excessive. I picked up on this angle because religions tend to go on about how much good they do the world. And I'm not sure that this counts so much. ...

I stumbled upon an interesting argument in the current video game console debate. In world wide sales, Nintendo's new product, the Wii (pronounced "we") is simply clobbering both the Microsoft XBox360 and the Sony PlayStation 3. Some anti-Nintendo gamers like to say that the Wii is just a fad, or that the Wii will lose it's appeal as HD TVs increase their market share. The thinking goes that since the Wii cannot do HD graphics (the number of pixels on the screen) that people won't like it when they get better TVs. The numbers are like this: 30 million American homes have HD TVs, 16 ...

Our greatest experiment—civilization itself—will succeed only if it can live on nature's terms, not man's. To do this we must adopt principles in which the short term is trumped by the long in which caution prevails over ingenuity; in which the absurd myth of endless growth is replaced by respect for natural limits; in which progress is steered by precautionary wisdom. —Ronald Wright (Quoted as appeared in the July/August 2007 issue of The Walrus magazine). ...

Last night my co-workers and I were talking about humans, nature, and our "place" in nature. One concept that came up was the often repeated "balance" in nature. After break I returned to work and thought this over in my head. It occurred to me that there isn't really any balance in nature. There have been 7 mass extinction events where large groups of animals have all died out. In fact, it turns out that over 90% of all species that have ever existed on Earth have gone extinct. It seems unbalanced to me. Now, I'd like to point out that extinction, even mass extinction like the ...