A license to swat them away
In the closing moments of an excellent At Issues panel on CBC’s The National last night, National Post columnist Andrew Coyne explained why traditional Question Period theatrics are so feckless when a real scandal envelopes government.
[If the Opposition] would slow down and ask short simple questions, rather these kind of multiple-part grandstanding theatrics, but they don’t seem to be capable of that.
What sort of short questions, host Peter Mansbridge asked.
[S]imple questions of fact that put ministers on the record, where you can then compare what they say on the record with what they say later. It’s more in the nature of the way a lawyer asks questions in court.
It’s hard for them to resist, unfortunately, going for the big windup, you know, the big preamble beforehand, the big stream of accusations. And as we saw with John Baird, anybody who’s got any experience with those is very adept at just swatting them away. It gives him license, frankly, to give non-answers when you don’t ask real questions.
This is obvious to anyone who watches any question period in any Canadian legislature. Why don’t opposition MPs get it, and change their tactics? Perhaps because short, simple, lawyerly questions that build an embarrassing step-by-step case against a government policy or practice do not make onto the nightly television news.
Solved!
Highway 103 between Halifax and Bridgewater is surely the dullest drive in Nova Scotia. For the last three or four years, motorists forced to traverse its dreary confines have enjoyed momentary comic relief near the Tantallon exit, in the form of a car-sized, more-or-less cubical rock outcropping, painted as a Rubik’s Cube.
“A jumbled Rubik’s Cube fixed in stone, really heavy stone,” said West Dublin resident Peter Barss, who waxed philoshical about its deeper artistic significance:
A monumental monument to confusion and frustration? A puzzle that never changes… and can never be solved? An implied order, an order that can never be realized? A metaphysical statement about some absolute truth about the universe?
This week, the nerdish joke got better when someone — Glooscap? Giant MacAskill? — solved the cube.
Contrarian does not condone the defacement of Nova Scota granite, but we are prepared to make an exception in this case.
100 bottles of seeds on the wall
The late Harry Piers served as curator of the Nova Scotia Museum from 1900 and 1939. He was also Keeper of the Public Records, a position now known as Public Archivist. In these capacities, Piers received and cataloged hundreds of Nova Scotia animal, fossil, plant, and mineral specimens—along with a few crime scene photos.
Piers meticulously recorded each donation, listing its source, date, and location, together with significant details in a series of accession ledgers. Owing to their fragile condition, these records have been largely unavailable for the last half century, but the museum and the archives have recently collaborated on a project to digitize them, giving researchers ready access to the Piers Accession Ledgers.
The two institutions are celebrating the achievement with an online exhibit highlighting 60 of their favorite Harry Piers artifacts. They also produced a short YouTube video about Piers.
Those with a strong stomach may want to begin with images of the barquentine Herbert Fuller, scene of a triple murder described in this July 21, 1896 New York Times dispatch from Halifax.
The Public Archives of Nova Scotia has made great use of digital technology and social media to gain wider exposure for its collections [e.g.: here]. Unfortunately for those wanting to view online artifacts at higher resolutions, the archives employs an unwieldy Adobe Flash viewer that can only zoom into frustratingly small fragments. The effect is like viewing a large painting through a small-diameter tube. An upgrade to HTML-5 imagery is planned, and that should be a big improvement.
In the meantime, the two institutions have kindly granted Contrarian permission to reproduce a full-sized version of my favorite image from the 60 displays, a 1906 reference collection of 100 “economic seeds (useful and noxious plants) of Canada,” prepared by George H. Clark, Seed Commissioner of Canada, and made available to “seed merchants and agricultural institutions” for $2.
You’ll find everything from Hare’s Ear Mustard and Russian Pigweed to Prickly Lettuce and Cow Cockle, each in its own glass vial, capped with an aluminum screw-top, neatly labeled in English and Latin, and secured to the cardboard display by a brass spring clamp.
The image at right shows just one of the vials, containing the blue-grey seeds of common vetch. [Click here to view the whole imagine at this resolution.]
There is something about the variety of shapes, colors, and sizes of plant seeds that captures a naturalist’s fancy—the miniaturization of nature’s infinitely complex blueprint, perhaps, or the magical potential of spring growth.
Do check out the full Piers exhibit for yourself.
[Place-marker here for future discussion] The civil servants responsible for husbanding Nova Scotia’s voluminous documentary and photographic records responded promptly and courteously to my request for an extra large version of this image, and I am grateful to them.
However, antiquated traditions have saddled these officials with a command-and-control approach to record access, complete with application forms, contracts, fees, Crown copyright, etc. This is an artifact of a bygone era, when such resources were precious and scarce. The world has moved on to an economy of abundance in digital and print resources, and the provincial government needs to adjust.
A 6,000-mile long photograph
It’s 6,000 miles long and 120 miles wide (185 x 9,000 km.). It stretches from the ice-bound Kama River in Russia’s Tartaristan Province to Limpopo Province at the northern border of South Africa. It’s an unusually long stretch of unbroken land, given that water covers 70 percent of the Earth’s surface.
The Landsat Data Continuity Mission satellite, soon to be renamed Landsat 8, captured the image from an altitude of 438 miles (705 km.) by assembling 56 photographs taken over a 20-minute period on April 19 into a seamless unit. ThE 15-minute video below traverses its entire length. Be sure to view it in full screen mode by clicking the [ ] full screen icon at the lower right corner of the video, and at the highest resolution your monitor will accommodate by clicking the gear icon and selecting 1080p.
Others ways to view “The Long Swath” include:
- A four-minute compressed version, complete with labels and cheesy musical soundtrack. [Again, use full screen and hi-res.]
- An interactive display using the amazing Gigapan viewer.
More information here, here. and here. H/T: Digg.com.
Subverting logic, public health, & the environment
A handful of my neighbours, falsely purporting to repesent the residents of Boularderie Island, noisely oppose a plan to put up a couple of wind turbines at Hillside, Boularderie, near Bras d’Or.
Their arguments deserve scrutiny because of what they reveal about the logic underpinning the anti-wind movement.
In a CBC interview this morning, a spokesperson for the NIMBYists pointed to an elderly lifelong Hillside resident who has grown distraught about the project, and worries it will render her unable to live out her years in the beautiful place she has always called home.
Back in March, an Australian researcher cataloged every illness complaint related to wind turbines in that country and concluded that “wind turbine syndrome” was a disease spread by word of mouth. Its prevalence bears no relationship to the number and proximity of wind turbines, but correlates closely with the intensity of nearby protests against wind farms.
The Boularderie NIMBYists have spent months promoting fear of wind farms, with little success. Now they cite the fear they themselves aroused in a single elderly woman as a reason not to allow the project. This is akin to electroseining every fish in a disputed pond, and then citing the lack of fish as a reason to ban fishing.
In their magnanimity, however, the Boularderie NIMBYists would allow the turbines to go ahead as long as they are erected at least two kilometres from the nearest dwelling (a condition that would preclude their location on Boularderie, and virtually everywhere else in Nova Scotia), and as long as the proponents can prove they will do no harm — in other words, unless they prove, not just a negative, but every conceivable negative.
While it is sometimes possible to prove a specific negative proposition, it is impossible to prove an ill-defined an all-encompassing set of imaginary negatives. We’d have a better chance of disproving the existence of Bertrand Russell’s celestial teapot.
The really sad thing is to see environmentalism—probably the most important -ism of our time—distorted and corrupted to fight trivial or imaginary problems, at the expense of fighting real and pressing environmental threats, like emissions from burning coal.
And where do we burn coal? Why at the Point Aconi Generating Station, barely 10 kilometres upwind from Hillside.
Please whatever your name is – feedback, updated
Jon Stone writes:
Thanks for sharing that wonderful video. It is inspiring to see what creative minds can do when faced with a challenge.
There have been some astonishinglynegativecomments posted on various web sites with respect to the recent generosity of the Fountain family in creating the endowment for Dalhousie’s performing arts program. The gist of much of the derogatory discussion was that there is no value in training people in performance skills.
Well, here is one excellent example of the value of performers to society. I won’t be surprised if this goes viral and breaks all records for fundraising for the Janeway.
[Update] Greg Lukeman points out a New Zealand children’s hospital fundraising video posted August 27, 2012, that may have provided inspiration for the creators of “Please Whatever Your Name Is” (posted May 15,. 2013).
Please, whatever your name is…
Newfoundland has always had way better tourism ads than Nova Scotia (or pretty much anywhere else on the planet for that matter). Now it turns out they have way better children’s hospital ads, too. (Stay with this at least until the music starts, about five minutes in. Hilarious.)
[Video link]. H/T Calvert’s own Jenn Power.
This is Ground Control to Mister Chris
Brilliant!
Credits for the first music video ever produced in space include guitar and tenor vocals by Chris Hadfield (recorded on the International Space Station), plus terrestrial video production by Hadfield’s son Evan and TV producer Andrew Tidby, music production and mixing by music producer Joe Corcoran, with piano arrangements by Canadian singer-songwriter Emm Gryner. ”Space Oddity” was written by David Bowie and first performed by him in 1969, when Hadfield was 10 years old.
Who knows what this may inspire in the next generation of space enthusiasts.
Cmdr. Hadfield photographs my house one last time
This may be Astronaut Chris Hadfield’s last snapshot of Cape Breton Island from 370 km up, as he returns to Earth Monday evening via the steppes of Kazakhstan.
Hadfield’s tweeted comment: “The highlands of Cape Breton still wear the winter’s snow, sun highlighting the connecting waters.”
The May 5 image above is a rotated segment of a larger photograph you can download at its original resolution here. Previous snaps of Contrarian’s Primary Residences here and here. A world map with links to all Hadfield’s tweeted photos here.
