The shape of this trussed torus, and the way it hung in the air, reminded me of something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Then it hit me:

Alexander Graham Bell’s circular kite, two fabric-covered disks, conjoined by tetrahedral trusses, flying over Beinn Bhreagh. No larger point here — the structures aren’t even all that similar in detail — just a striking confluence of shape, style, and scale across the span of a century.

Dear Aliant,

It’s not me, it’s you.

We’ve been through a lot together. Land lines and cell phones. Dial-up, high-speed, wireless Internet sticks and now, fibre-op. I’ve treated you well. Sent you hundreds of dollars every single month. Tried to keep the lines of communication open. We’ve talked and talked – never more than during my recent move to New Brunswick. In fact, we just got off the phone with one another, marking our tenth call related to my move from Nova Scotia.

I called you just now because I was alarmed to receive a bill for nearly $800. This happened for a few reasons: I lost track of my last bill during the move, so there was an outstanding balance (sorry about that). But there was also more than $100 in long distance accrued over just a couple of days. The phone at my old house wasn’t disconnected on the date I had requested, so I continued to make calls. What I didn’t know was that my long distance plan had been disconnected, on schedule… without my knowledge.

Over the past couple of months I’ve talked to lots of your employees. I’ve helped them understand that when you move from Nova Scotia to New Brunswick you end up with two separate accounts listed in different places in their computer system. I’ve been calm and understanding when things have not gone as planned – technicians not showing up on the scheduled day, information already provided not being recorded in my file. Your business is a complicated one with lots of moving parts, and I get that.

And you’re right – when we were in Baddeck, you were really the only game in town for cell service with reliable signal. You offered the most attractive options for bundled high-speed and land lines. I feel like I really tried. I mean, I have three accounts with you alone.

But the thing is, Aliant, now I live somewhere with more choice. It’s been some time since I’ve felt like things were really right between us, and I owe it to myself to see who else is out there. It’s a big world, and I need to explore it.

So, Aliant, I just want to say good luck, and I’m sorry it didn’t work out between us. It’s been fun, sometimes. Keep in touch, okay?

Love always,

The video was taken somewhere on the InterCoastal Waterway around 2007. See a longer version here, and another vantage point here.

The original poster explains that the balls, each containing a tonne of water, are swung out with an initial turn of the boat to port or starboard. At that point, the boat tends to continue heeling on its own, but the degree of list can be controlled by extending the line holding each bag, using a winch in the cockpit.

H/T: Eliot Frosst

The management of Simeon’s Family Restaurant in Sydney attached a makeshift sign to the venerable but non-functioning Bell-Aliant pay phone in the restaurant’s vestibule.

With the explosion in cell phone ownership and use, timely maintenance of the ancient pay-per-use devices just isn’t a priority any more.

“Trying to find a working pay phone,” wrote one friend when I posted this photo on Facebook, “is like trying to find a four-leaf clover.”

“I love pay phones,” wrote another. “They hint at a world of possibilities.”

The bow section of the Titanic resting on the Atlantic Ocean bottom. A pair of self-propelled, undersea robots scoured the 3-by-5-mile debris field, snapping more than 100,000 hi-resolution side-scan sonar images that a computer lated stitched together to create the most comprehensive map yet of the disaster’s remains.

The bow section roughly corresponds to the highlighted portion of the photo below.

The stern section, which suffered far more damage during the two-and-a-half-mile plunge to the ocean bottom, lies in pieces scattered half a mile away from the bow.

Researchers from RMS Titanic Inc., the wreck’s legal custodian, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Falmouth, Massachusetts, and the Waitt Institute of La Jolla, California carried out the survey, the results of which will be featured in a two-hour History Channel documentary April 15, 100 years after the Titanic sinking. More photos here.

H/T: Roland McCaffrey.

The estimable Bethany Horne of Halifax Open File pointed us to this Reddit post, and thence to this collection of NASA astronaut videography, where we tracked down the amazing sequence from which our image — a screenshot, as it turns out — was clipped. Check out this gorgeous time-lapse video from the space station’s January 29 pass up the East Coast of North America, starting at the southern edge of the Gulf of Mexico and ending off the northeast coast of Newfoundland. For full effect, view it in full screen mode.

From NASA’s annotation:

These sequences of frames were taken at the rate of one frame per second, therefore the slower speed of the video more closely represents the true speed of the International Space Station than previous videos.

This video was taken by the crew of Expedition 30 on board the International Space Station. The sequence of shots was taken January 29, 2012 from 05:33:11 to 05:48:10 GMT, on a pass from just southwest of Mexico to the North Atlantic Ocean, northeast of Newfoundland.

This pass begins looking over Central America towards the Gulf of Mexico and the southeastern United States. As the ISS travels northeast over the gulf, some southeastern United States cities can be distinguished, like New Orleans, Mobile, Jacksonville, and Atlanta. Note the numerous bright spots of what are likely oil drilling platforms in the Gulf off the Mississippi Delta.

Continuing up the east coast, some northeastern states, like Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City stand out brightly along the coastline.

The Aurora Borealis shines in the background as the pass finishes near Newfoundland.

Video courtesy of the Image Science & Analysis Laboratory, NASA Johnson Space Center. View more here.

A view of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and parts of Maine and Quebec, taken from the International Space Station. Click the image for a larger version.

The bright spot at the left side is Montreal Quebec City;* that on the middle right is Halifax. Other bright spots include (left to right) Bangor, Saint John, Moncton, and Charlottetown. Close inspection reveals Truro, New Glasgow, Antigonish, Port Hawkesbury, and Sydney. The St. Lawrence River appears as a string of lights heading northeast from Montreal, and the Gaspe Peninsula is outlined in light. I believe the aurora borealis accounts for the greenish hue on the horizon.

A Contrarian reader supplied the image without identifying information, and I’ve been unable to pin down its source precisely. Based on a similar image taken a few hundred miles to the southwest however, I believe it was taken on January 29 by Expedition 30, the current crew of the International Space Station.

H/T: Shine boy.

*[Correction] Contrarian reader Bill Swan thinks the light blob on the left is Quebec City, not Montreal. He’s probably right.

I lived for four months on a bicycle in the fall of 2006 and spring of 2007, riding from Chester to Ciudad Victoria, in Mexico, and then up the Rio Grande valley from Matamoros to Alpine.

Gore also shares my non-hostility toward Amazon:

In 1961 I was a twenty-one year old college freshman partially supporting myself by working in a bookstore. The store manager was Bobby Berg, who was the best bookseller I have ever encountered, and I shared that opinion with a lot of people, including Robert Oppenheimer and Erwin Schrodinger. The store had the most complete paperback inventory west of Chicago. I felt privileged to work there at minimum wage. I have a deep and abiding love for bookstores.

Now I am an old man who still has an insatiable hunger for reading. The nearest bookstores are an hour away, and I am frustrated in them because I can’t read titles on the bottom shelves without kneeling down, which gets more and more difficult. So Amazon.ca has rescued me. But I miss my youth and bookstores.

Finally, Alicia Rius’s photos from the back seats of abandoned automobiles reminded Salem, SD, Contrarian reader Gregg Drube of The Future of Automobiles, a even more dystopic collection by autophobe Douglas Coulter on the crazyguyonabike website.

Thanks to all. Readers can write Contrarian at this address.

I bought a lot of books on line in the run-up to Christmas, and I was struck by how much quicker Amazon was able to get them to me than Chapters. When I tweeted this observation, a fellow tweep chided me — of all people — for not patronizing local bookstores.

I like a nice bookstore as much as the next fellow. Who doesn’t enjoy wandering through the stacks at J. W. Doull’s, feeling the stairs creak underfoot, talking books with the marvellous staff he employs. But it’s no accident that John Doull can no longer afford the rent in downtown Halifax. Book buyers have voted with their feet, and Amazon is winning by a landslide.

Just as iTunes represents a much better way of buying music than the old customer-contemptuous, $20-album-in-a-record-store model, so Amazon beats the pants off the bookstore model.

That impression came early and easily to me, because I live in a bookstore desert. The nearest bookstore, a bedroom sized Coles, is an hour away, and rarely stocks the books I seek. So my normal bookstore experience is to drive an hour, go to an ill-stocked store where an ill-informed clerk will tell me they don’t have what I want, place an order, drive an hour home, and repeat the round trip a week or two later when the desired volume comes in, or fails to.

Or I can sit in my living room, tap a few keys on my laptop, and have the book delivered to my house a few days later, for less than I would pay in the bookstore. Sure, I’ll miss the creaky stores, and I’ll seriously miss the wonderful people who staffed these institutions. But I’m fine with the new method, and I get more books, quicker and cheaper, as a result.

On the Tuesday before Christmas, I heard an NPR podcast about a new biography of Leonardo of Pisa, aka Fibonacci, who revolutionized modern commerce by introducing Arabic numerals to Western Europe, thereby enhancing the computing power of ordinary citizens more than anyone before Steve Jobs invented the personal computer. This would make a great present for my math-inspired son, but I’d never be able to get it by Christmas,

I checked on line. Both Amazon and Chapters had the book, but only Amazon claimed the ability to delivery it by Friday, the last delivery day before Christmas, and only if I paid an exorbitant amount for special shipping. I bit, and at about 4:30, hit Amazon’s buy button.

The package was delivered in Halifax at 10:30 the next morning, This was a miracle on a par with the Dollar Store. I’ve been puzzling ever since about how Amazon (or LL Bean, or Zappos, or Staples) can manage these feats of order processing. Today, a new TED talk appeared that explains part of the mystery.

The TED talker, Mick Mountz, founded Kiva Systems, a material handling company that is revolutionizing warehouse management by replacing conveyors with little orange robots shown at the top of the page. In action, they look like suitcase-sized Zambonis. Instead of stock pickers wandering around the warehouse, looking for products to assemble into orders, the bots bring the products to the pickers, who pack them into boxes for shipment.

They do this by moving whole shelves around the warehouse, their patterns controlled by algorithms that learn as they go, so the process continually improves. In effect, it turns a warehouse into a massively parallel processing machine, not unlike a computer. Watch the video for the fascinating details.

Here’s the TK Bremen shortly after it grounded on Kerminihy Beach, near Erdeven, Brittany, France, on December 11. 2011.

And here’s the M/V Miner after it grounded on Scatarie Island, Cape Breton, after a towing cable parted on September 14, 2011.

The much larger Miner was under tow, bound for a scrapyard in Aliaga, Turkey. Here are the two ships’ specifications:

The Bremen was much more accessible than the Miner, having grounded on a mainland beach, while the Miner fetched up on remote, unpopulated, forbidding Scatarie Island. Though very different, the two areas share one thing in common besides shipwrecks: The dunes adjacent to Kerminihy Beach are a nature preserve, and Scatarie is a provincially protected wilderness area.

There the similarities end. As detailed in a photo spread on TheAtlantic.com website, 40 men worked day and night for two weeks to dismantle the Bremen and clean up the beach, at a cost of nearly €10 million euros (CDN$13.2 million).

“One month after the wreck,” reports The Atlantic, “the cleanup process is nearly complete.”

The French cleanup began:

The work continued:

Here’s all that remained of the TK Bremen as of Monday:

I won’t attempt to draw any lessons. I’m no expert, and the Miner is a much larger vessel in a much dicier location. But it may be worth noting that three weeks after the Miner went aground, NS Premier Darrell Dexter hadn’t been able to get any federal agency to take charge of the disaster. And I can’t recall any Canadian shipwreck being cleaned up the way France cleaned up the Bremen, let alone in two weeks flat.

Makes you wonder.

The website Boatnerd.com details numerous collisions, groundings, and accidents experienced by the Miner its previous incarnations as the Canadian Miner, the LeMoyne, and the Maplecliffe Hall. More information about the Miner here and here, and about the Bremen here, here, and here.

* According to Boatnerd, the Miner’s Canadian registry was cancelled last June. I was unable to determine its registry for the aborted trip to Turkey.