By now, anyone who is not living under a rock, knows that the decision to eliminate the long-census form has lobotomized the government and made public policy a mystical, maudlin, and moralistic guessing game rather than an objective evidence-based undertaking. Many compelling arguments regarding this sad outcome have been made and are firmly grasped by most.
To the few dissenters—who coincidentally already align themselves with the political right— I say this: if you are not going to oppose the census decision for statistical reasons, than do it to save conservatism! How is that possible? Well, it seems to me that the data debacle hurts Canadian conservatism in two very basic ways. First, the elimination of the form is an assault on the principle of individual responsibility. The government has effectively admitted that it is willing to capitulate to a group of citizens that find the census form burdensome. In so doing, the Conservatives have confessed to their belief that the public is too apathetic and too indolent to complete one of its very few and easy civic duties. At a time when voter turnout is pathetically low and civic intelligence is woefully inadequate, we are telling our citizens that they should not be bothered by the simple chance that they be required to answer a few questions once every five years. Does this not show a lack of faith in human industriousness? Does anyone else find it strange that a Conservative government, in a period of severe indebtedness, is spending an additional $30 million to make Canadians do less work?
Secondly, with the elimination of the long census, Conservatives have made it more difficult for actors outside of the meddlesome state to supplement good public policy. Groups outside the government, at very little cost to the government, add an enormous amount of value to efforts to improve economic development, health care, education, equity, and other policy areas. Generally, they do this using their own resources, and on their own merits. Simple logistics, however, prevent private policy actors from accumulating the kind of helpful data provided by the census. Therefore, these groups rely on the census data and have had it gladly given to them by government.
Past governments realized that it is much easier for them to collect data, and that by collecting and distributing that data, they ultimately did less work, intervened less, and harnessed the creativity of private sector policy groups. Conversely, the Conservatives are practicing the very arrogance, elitism, and central planning mentality that they often accuse their opponents of. Through the reduction of citizen provided information, the Conservatives have said that they trust themselves with decision-making, not the experiences of the public.
Conservatives seem unaware of these facts and have started the strange exercise of using an ideological decision to erode their own ideology. Who would have thought Canada would have a Conservative Nanny State!
– Dylan Marando
PP+G REVIEW 
What equals what what?Early in the neeetinnth century, , while working as a clerk in a patent office, was inspired to propose a relationship between mass (the m), and energy (the E).a0His equation just states, in basic mathematical terms, that there is a simple, constant correlationa0between mass and energy.If you were to see an equation that represented the relationship between, say, feet and inches, one would see something like this:The number of inches = 12 times the number of feetMathematically, you would express this relationship as I = 12 F. In this case, the number of inches equals 12 times the number of feet (F). (Mathematicians leave off the multiplication sign it is understood to be there.)Another identical equation for the same relationship is feet = inches/12; or that the number of feet equals the number of inches divided by 12.So if you are looking at 24 inches, you would determine the number of feet, simply dividing by 12.a0Alternatively, the number of inches can be found by multiplying the number of feet by 12. We all have done this many times in our daily life. For instance: Let’s say that you need to make sure there’s enough room on your desk for a printer and your computer monitor. So how many inches across is your three-foot wide desk? Multiply 3 times 12, and you get 36.It’s all about a relationshipEinstein’s equation, similarly, represents the constant mathematical relationship between energy (the E in the equation), and mass (the m in the equation).In our feet/inches example, the constant multiplier was 12. In Einstein’s equation, the constant multiplier is also a number, represented as c2 (called c squared ). It is not a common number, and not one that most people are familiar with. It’s extremely large, and much easier to write it down and work with it if it’s simply represented by two characters.The number we’re talking about is determined by multiplying the speed of light (which is approximately 186,000 miles per second meaning it could go around the world 7-1/2 times per second) by itself. This means that the number is 186,000 times 186,000. (The number actually used in Einstein’s equation was in kilometers per second. That’s approximately 300,000 kilometers per second times 300,000 kilometers per second which equals 90,000,000,000 [90 billion], or, simply, c2.)So Einstein’s equation says that to determine the amount of concentrated energy (E) in a unit of mass (m), we multiply by 90 billion.Same type of equation as feet/inches but the multiplier, instead of 12, is 90 billion. (There are some additional dimensional figures from the squared numbers which enter in, but the basic relationship is the 1 to 90 billion.)And the point?So what does this all mean? It means that the amount of concentrated energy in any mass is enormous! This relationship has been verified many times in experimental physics laboratories.For instance, in an atomic bomb explosion, if you compare the amount of uranium mass that is used to create the fission ( the process that creates the enormous energy release in an atom bomb), with the amount of mass left over after the explosion, physicists find that some of the mass (m) has disappeared!Where did it go? It got converted to energy:a0E.When physicists measured the loss of mass (m), they multiplied the loss of mass by Einstein’s c squared number and, lo and behold, got an answer for the amount of energy (E) released which was exactly what Einstein’s equation predicted.The power of thoughtThe amazing thing about Einstein’s equation is that it was not the result of fitting the results of an experiment to a mathematical formula, but instead was the result of a thought experiment an inspired bit of brain work! Einstein never did an experiment or worked in a scientific laboratory his breakthroughs were the result of an inspired thought.Additional resources and referencesHere is the E=mc2 equation in Einstein’s own words (): It followed from the special theory of relativity that mass and energy are both but different manifestations of the same thing a somewhat unfamiliar conception for the average mind. Furthermore, the equation E is equal to m c-squared, in which energy is put equal to mass, multiplied by the square of the velocity of light, showed that very small amounts of mass may be converted into a very large amount of energy and vice versa. The mass and energy were in fact equivalent, according to the formula mentioned above. This was demonstrated by Cockcroft and Walton in 1932, experimentally. -a0From the soundtrack of the film,a0Atomic Physicsa0/a0Copyright a9 J Arthur Rank Organization, Ltd, 1948For more insight, , or , a Physicist with the US Department of Energy’sa0Office of Scientific and Technical Information. Finally, you can also read lots more in the .GD Star Ratingloading…