Patrick Smith's Ask the Pilot blog adds an astounding data point to the accident, which killed at least two people and injured many more, some very seriously. [T]his was the first multiple-fatality crash involving a major airline in North America since November, 2001. The streak has ended, but it lasted nearly twelve years, with some 20,000 commercial jetliners taking off and landing safely in this country every single day — an astonishing run. Is it perverse to suggest that Saturday’s accident, awful as it was, serves to underscore just how safe commercial flying has become? [Emphasis added] 20,000 x 365 days x...

08 July, 2013

Facebook continually pesters me to entrer the "city" where I live, but rejects Kempt Head, Ross Ferry, Boularderie, and Cape Breton all of which are more-or-less accurate. It will allow me to enter Halifax, Sydney, or Baddeck, none of which is accurate. Contrast this with Google, which embraces locations with admirable granularity. Google effortlessly adopts islands, villages, hamlets—even micro-locations like Frankie's Pond and Parker's Beach—as long as it sees real people using them. This may seem a small thing, but it strikes me as a profound difference in the cultures of the two organizations. One constantly cajoles you into ill-fitting pigeonholes. The...

08 July, 2013

Hard rock, not coal: 160 feet under New York City, workers are building seven miles of tunnels to connect Grand Central Station with the Long Island Railway, on the other side of the East River. [Video link] Photos and a fuller account of the project from Wired here....

28 May, 2013

In his rivalry with Thomas Edison, Graham Bell made many attempts to record sound using media that ran the gamut from metal, glass, and foil to paper, plaster, and cardboard. Many of Bell's discs survive, but the technologies used to record them are long forgotten. Researchers and scientists from the National Museum of American History and the Library of Congress in Washington, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, and the University of Indiana have collaborated on a project to catalog and decipher the primative recordings, using high-resolution digital scans to convert them to audio files. One wax-and-cardboard disc, recorded...

19 May, 2013

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...

17 May, 2013

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....

13 May, 2013

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....

11 May, 2013

Having already photographed Kempt Head, Cmdr. Chris Hadfield turns his attention to less important parts of Nova Scotia: Hadfield has now photographed both of Contrarian's official residences. The universe is unfolding as it should. [UPDATE] Oops! A Twitter user with a Suessian pseudonym points out that Hadfield passed over, and photographed, Halifax on January 2: [Click these images for larger versions.]...

25 April, 2013

Many of you receive daily updates from Contrarian by email. These are sent out shortly after 3 am every day from Google's Feedburner service (to those who subscribed via the "once a day by email" link at right). This morning, for some reason, Feedburner sent out a trio of week-old posts for the second time. It's not clear why, but I wanted those who received it to know it was an error, not a deliberate reposting of these items. We are trying to sort out what happened, and why, if only to prevent it from happening again. Meanwhile, our apologies for adding to...

21 April, 2013

Snap quiz:  What do the following verses have in common? And that's how it went all afternoon, one lizard after another It made me wonder if snow leopards have a taste for joggers as well As is typical, the Pope stayed above the fray and did not comment. Whether such tactics will have a chilling effect remains to be seen. Answer: All four are inadvertent haikus, composed by humans but discovered by machines. The first two come from a Tumblr blog created by New York Times editor Jacob Harris, who adapted some open-source compter code to scan the homepage of the New York Times, looking for snippets of text that conform to the Haiku...

14 April, 2013
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