If your supercomputer is going on jeopardy, how do you give it an interesting voice and an appealing face? That's the problem that confronted the Automata Studio and technology artist Joshua Davis, hired by IMB to give Watson personality. If you can't see this video, try here. H/T: Nathan Yau....

15 February, 2011

Joel Plaskett performing in advance of a planned FlashMob on Halifax's Celebration Square: Mr. Plaskett was joined briefly on one chorus by Nova Scotia Premier Darrell Dexter. It occurs to me Mr. Plaskett's songs cry out for bluegrass covers. They are made for that high lonesome sound. ...

14 February, 2011

My netizen pal Angela Mombourquette makes a good case for the proposed seven story housing project that has stirred opposition in the otherwise low-rise, middle-income neighborhood where church elders want to build it. Venerable St. John's United Church, which currently occupies the lot at Windsor and North in a residential neighborhood of Halifax's West End, has reached its best-before date. The congregation proposes to replace it with a building, called "Spirit Place," that will house both a place of worship and an independent living facility for old people — all wrapped into a seven-storey structure. Furthermore, St. John's specifically promotes Spirit Place...

13 February, 2011

CBC Weekend Mornings' take on school snow days, rain days, bad Camry days, and damp snow pants days: [Those without a Flash-endowed machine, go here.] H/T: Doug Barron, director. Cast: unknown....

13 February, 2011

If someone asks you that on a first date, they could be asking a proxy question. OK Cupid, the dating site that uses its database to research the sociology of romance, has been considering the best questions to ask on a first date if your real goal is to find out something altogether different: Among all our casual topics, whether someone likes the taste of beer is the single best predictor of if he or she has sex on the first date. H/T: Nathan Yau...

10 February, 2011

Holland's Theo Jansen sculpts PVC pipe into incredible kinetic beasties. H/T: Tony Comstock....

10 February, 2011

An A.W. Leil crane capsizes while attempting to place a large wall panel during construction of the new Yarmouth High School January 28. The fun begins at about the 2:40 mark. No one was hurt in the incident. H/T: Richard Stephenson....

10 February, 2011

Overheard on the 'net: Zadie (Age 4):    Look in my nose Zadie's mother:    I don't see anything in your nose. Zadie:    Oh. I don't smell anything in your eye....

05 February, 2011

Engineers from Google, Twitter, and SayNow, a voice messaging startup Google bought last week, put their technical chops to work over the weekend devising a way around the Egyptian government's Internet shutdown. From Google's Official Blog: Like many people, we’ve been glued to the news unfolding in Egypt, and thinking of what we could do to help people on the ground. Over the weekend we came up with the idea of a speak-to-tweet service—the ability for anyone to tweet using just a voice connection...

01 February, 2011