Category: That’s life
Feedback: bikes, books, and automobiles
Contrarian reader George Gore liked the video if Guillaume Blanchet, The Man Who Lived On His Bike, because:
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.
Boston’s finest one-up Anonymous hackers
Last week, a branch of the Anonymous hackers’ collective known as Antisec took took over the Boston Police Department’s website, replacing the home page with a screed protesting against the eviction of Occupy protesters, and a video of American rapper KRS-One performing his song “Sound of Da Police.”
Regaining control of the website took almost a week, enough time for police to devise a deft antidote to hacking: droll, deadpan humor.
This is one cop shop that doesn’t look flatfooted.
Dollar Store chic
From the moment I first stepped inside one, I have regarded dollar stores as miraculous institutions, unappreciated by the cognoscenti. In this morning’s New York Times, reporter Jesse McKinley describes how he outfitted his new apartment in Albany, NY, entirely from items purchased at the various dollar stores that abound in the area (with a slide show). The daring Mr. McKinley does not observe my only rule of dollar store consumption: Avoid items intended to be ingested.
Seen over Halifax
What’s that ghostly visage cruising over Halifax on an overcast Fourth of July, 1936. Hint: take a closer look at the logo emblazoned on the airship’s tail.
It’s Luftschiff Zeppelin #129, better known as the Hindenburg, on a transatlantic flight just 10 months before its catastrophic docking at Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey.
The photo is one of many fascinating images on a Nova Scotia Archives web display called An East Coast Port: Halifax in Wartime, 1939-1945.
The Hindenburg overflew the city at about 1000 feet, causing the Halifax Herald to fret two days later over the possibility “those aboard the Hindenburg were taking pictures of Halifax and other places, for the files of the German air ministry.”
The same Nova Scotia Archives web feature includes film clips from the period, including this riveting footage of a German U-Boat crew surrending to US and Canadian vessels off Shelburne in 1945. Note especially the crewmen being patted down at the 0:50 second mark, and the sullen faces of the hapless submariners assembled on an unidentified wharf at the 1:30 mark. This is not how they expected their war to turn out.
UPDATE: Reader Derek Andrews points out that a dirigible—one of ours, presumably—appears in this video as well.
The Nova Scotia Archives also makes its videos available in a more user-friendly format on YouTube.
H/T: Iain Grant and Richard Stephenson, and thanks to the Archives’ social marketing whirlwind Lauren Oostveen.
First contract legislation — rebuttal
Doing a little catch-up here after a week of long-distance travel on short notice. Scott Gillard, constituency assistant to MLA Howard Epstein, objected to the inference I drew from a brief first-contract strike at Summer Street Industries in New Glasgow, where professional union negotiators pursued rigid workplace rules with wilful indifference to the rights and sensibilities of the developmentally challenged men and women that organization serves.
The CUPE functionaries failed, thanks in part to pushback from their own members. Had the NDP government’s first-contract arbitration had been in place, I suggested, an arbitrator ignorant of disabilities issues could have effectively wrecked a wonderful non-profit organization. Gillard calls this the “my cousin Louise” argument:
No matter how valid the legislation, in this case, may be there will always be someone (my cousin Louise) who can share an exception to its effectiveness. I think it is a red herring. To oppose Bill 102 on the basis that, in a specific situation, it would not have served its intended purpose is a bit much.
Darrell Dexter - Throwing a bone (Tim Krochak phot/Chronicle-Herald)
You may have been able to provide and example of an exception to the benefit of the legislation but whether you are right or wrong on the implications of the legislation in this situation is irrelevant. Finding a specific situation where something may not work falls short of making a convincing case in opposition.
Good legislation is hopefully the goal of government. No government assumes their legislation is perfect. Frankly, it’s just this type of argument that reminds us of the complexity of a government’s legislative agenda. There’s always going to be a “my cousin Louise” type exception.
Gillard has a point. I was arguing from a very specific, though not unique, set of facts. and they have limited application to disputes involving conventional businesses. To be completely honest, I saw the first contract arbitration issue as an opportunity to lay out the disgraceful behaviour of a union that thinks of itself as progressive.
But what’s the case for Bill 102? What bad situation will it remedy?. Union people say over and over that collective bargaining works in Nova Scotia. For the most part, I think they are right. Why not let it play out? Why impose settlements on unwilling parties? After the jump, Gillard responds: Read more »
OWS as API
Even as Occupy protests comes under increasing pressure from local governments, the movement’s ability to gain traction remains both remarkable and largely unexplained. In a tweet last weekend, author James Glick, a pioneer of literate tech reporting, suggested an off-the-wall metaphor:
I think #OWS was working better as an API than a destination site anyway.
The Atlantic’s tech editor Alexis Madrigal expands on this idea in a fascinating way, including a lucid explanation of how APIs — Application Programming Interfaces — work (for the 97 percent of us who have no idea).
The most fascinating thing about Occupy Wall Street is the way that the protests have spread from Zuccotti Park to real and virtual spaces across the globe. Metastatic, the protests have an organizational coherence that’s surprising for a movement with few actual leaders and almost no official institutions. Much of that can be traced to how Occupy Wall Street has functioned in catalyzing other protests. Local organizers can choose from the menu of options modeled in Zuccotti, and adapt them for local use. Occupy Wall Street was designed to be mined and recombined, not simply copied.
This idea crystallized for me yesterday when Jonathan Glick, a long-time digital journalist, tweeted, “I think #OWS was working better as an API than a destination site anyway.” If you get the idea, go ahead and skip ahead to the documentation below. If you don’t get, let me explain why it might be the most useful way of thinking about #Occupy.
Here’s the Halifax I love
While puffed up pols and media toffs worked overtime this week to present Halifax at its snotty, hidebound worst, one local business demonstrated the city’s best spirit. During tonight’s Occupy Nova Scotia rally on the Parade Grounds, a carload of free pizza arrived from Freeman’s Little New York, together with a note:
And how did the Occupy Nova Scotia kids respond? They voted to donate one of the pizzas to the HRM cops. Now that is classy.
Photo: Bethany Horne; H/T: Chris Lambie
This is your brain on… ahem
Last year, we published a snapshot of Contrarian’s brain as he listened to Costas Halavrasos on Maritime Noon. Psychobiologist Barry R. Komisaruk of Rutger’s University in New Jersey has done me one better, by releasing a stop motion animation showing sequential MRI brain scans of 54-year-old PhD student and sex therapist Nan Wise as she manually stimulated herself to orgasm.
It is not known whether Wise was listening to Halavrasos at the time.
The first portion of the video shows a sequence of 20 snapshot fMRI images, taken over a 12 minute period, during which Wise approached orgasm, achieved orgasm, and entered a refractory period.
The scan detects oxygen levels in the blood that reflect the varying activity in 80 different regions of the brain. The animation uses a “hot metal” colour scale, beginning with dark red (low activity) and progressing through orange and yellow to white (highest activity).
H/T: Vicky Salazar
A murmuration of smoke — who cares about starlings?
Contrarian friend Dave Atkinson one-ups that video of a starling flock’s undulations.
Walking home the other day from my work at the University of Prince Edward Island, I saw two men ahead of me on the Confederation Trail. They were mesmerized by something in the sky. One of them was taking photographs with his phone.
At first, I thought they were watching an eagle, as they’re not uncommon in Charlottetown. When I caught up to them, they asked if I could see the magic smoke.
“Magic smoke?” I asked, wondering if they’d inhaled some.
“Yeah, look!”
Low on the horizon, a few hundred metres away, whisps of grey and black danced back and forth above the trees. “See how it breaks into groups, moves up and down and sideways and backwards? Sometimes it splits into two different clouds, then joins back together. Crazy!”
It was an amazing feat. But it wasn’t smoke.
“Starlings,” I said. “They start to move in big flocks at this time of year. They move like a school of fish. It’s amazing.”
I stood watching with them for a few moments. One of them men got on his bike and started peddling away.
“I’m not wasting my time watching a bunch of birds.”
