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Well Margaret Wente is at it again. In a column last week titled Yellow duckies and other killers , she claims that "Mothers across Canada have been prostrated by the plastics scare." It's hard to be a good mother these days. Deadly perils lurk everywhere. Take that yellow bathtub ducky, contaminated with a dangerous substance known as BPA. But why stop there? Wente proceeds to list other putative hazards: toxic mould, pesticides, perfumes, "death-rays from the sun", walking barefoot in the grass. The message is clear: stop worrying already! We forget how negligent our own parents were. They gave us naked sunbaths and let us suck on plastic duckies and roll around on pesticide-drenched lawns. It's astonishing how ignorant they were, and how many of us managed to grow up. Now Margaret Wente is no scientist (what was your first clue?), so she needs an outside authority: Dr. Elizabeth Whelan is president of the American Council on Science and Health [ACSH], a...

In the April 19th edition of the Globe and Mail ("Canada's National Newspaper") columnist Maragaret Wente had a piece titled "The great plastics panic". Wente reports that at an elementary school near where she lives, plastic water bottles have been "banished": The kids know what's at stake. Plastic is death! At home, their anxious parents have stopped microwaving with plastic wrap. They've thrown out their plastic baby bottles and replaced them with ones made of glass. Leading retailers ... have banished plastic containers, baby bottles, sippy cups and pacifiers containing one offending chemical from the shelves. No wonder. A barrage of media reports have warned that the chemical in question - bisphenol A, or BPA - may be linked to breast and uterine cancer as well as lowered sperm count, early-onset puberty, obesity, hyperactivity, miscarriages, diabetes and other horrors. "So," she asks, "how worried should you be?" ...

As I noted the other day , a large part of the media has obediently lined up to proclaim the glories of Apple's "revolutionary" new iPhone. It seems that simply putting an i at the beginning of the name confers the blessing of the zeitgeist. With such an auspicious title, surely the iPhone couldn't flop. It's unsinkable unthinkable! Or is it? Check out Kirk Sato's 10 reasons IPhone is going to be a Flop . (He also links to a hilarious Stephen Colbert segment .) A purportedly potent rodent And another thing: the iPhone has no buttons . Reminds me of another Apple product: the Mighty Mouse , which came with my iMac. The advertising copy is seductive: Thanks to a smooth top shell with touch-sensitive technology beneath, Mighty Mouse allows you to right click without a right button. Capacitive sensors under Mighty Mouse’s seamless top shell detect where your fingers are and predict your clicking intentions, so you don’t need two buttons — just two fingers. A smo...

One of the gifts I received for my birthday was a 2nd-generation iPod shuffle . It's a triumph of minimalistic design, a near-perfect marriage of functionality and aesthetic. (I really like it.) But the media are currently in an almost religious frenzy over a different Apple product: the iPhone . A lot of the coverage has seemed like it was lifted straight out of Apple's propaganda press releases. Hmmm ... where have we seen this before? In reaction to this media love-in, I spent rather too much time today trying to convince anyone who would listen (including my long-suffering brother) that the iPhone will be a flop. I marshaled what I thought were some pretty good arguments. But a Google search of "iphone will flop" reveals that I was scooped! Back in December, CNET News.com editor-at-large Michael Kanellos published an opinion piece titled " The Apple phone flop ". He predicted that: As with any Apple product release, it will be ushered into the world on ...