This big: [Correction appended.] Google Engineer Paul Rademacher has produced a tool that will put a shadow the size of the Gulf oil spill anyplace on earth. (You may need to install the Google Earth Browser Plugin, which Rademacher developed, in your browser.) If the spill occurred off Sambro Island near Halifax, the slick would extend from Rose Bay, Lunenburg Co., in the west, to Port Bickerton, Guysborough Co, in the east: Here's how it would look on Sable Island, where Shell Oil's Uniacke G-72 gas well blew out for 13 days in 1984: Here it is on George's (!) Bank, where Canada...

09 May, 2010

Matt McKeon turned the Electronic Freedom Foundation's chronology of eroding Facebook privacy settings into an interactive graphic showing how much of your FB data is visible, by default, to various categories of Internet users, by year. You can get a sense of the problem from these screenshots, but the details emerge best in McKeon's website. Still plotting my escape. Hat tip: Flowing data....

08 May, 2010

Two weeks ago, Contrarian featured a exceptionally funny and creative YouTube video by two dorky techno musicians from Leeds, comprising two-thirds of the Brett Domino Trio. I didn't say so at the time, but these guys strike me as worthy 2010 inheritors of the 1960s folk revival. They make their own music, using an assortment of real and pseudo instruments. They exemplify the indie knack for using the Internet to bypass industry middlemen en route to fans (and, potentially, a living). Here, thanks to James Fallows, is a similar but even more successful YouTube group, Pomplamoose, covering the sublime Chordettes hit, Mr....

08 May, 2010

On CBC Radio last week, Contrarian’s old friend Ralph Surette said Nova Scotia Liberals had dumped their last nine leaders — every one since Gerald Regan — before they could fight a second election. That’s not quite true. The Liberals have had only seven leaders since Regan, and two of those took the party through two elections. Still, the record is fratricidal: The operative question is whether the Liberals will repeat this pattern when they review leader Stephen McNeil's leadership Friday. A covert campaign to unseat McNeil has featured an inept website and a mass mail-out using a purloined copy of the...

08 May, 2010

As we noted last month, Wendy Southgate was captured 43 times on Google Street View while walking her dog near in Elmsdale, Suffolk, UK. Today, it's a hapless Google Street View driver who captured himself while indisposed on lonely High Rock Road outside Reno, Nevada: Scroll around at the same location and see the disembodied Google Street View Car door flung open by the desperate driver as he sought the pause that refreshes: Hat tip: TWIG 41...

07 May, 2010

One hates to discourage any American foray in Canadian political analysis, but Fivethirtyeight.com [bad link fixed], the normally reliable US political blog that draws on the statistical tools of Sabermetrics, badly bollixed one such attempt yesterday. The website, which is predicting a near Conservative majority in today's British election, carries an article by research assistant Thomas Dollar, urging Tory Leader David Cameron to follow Stephen Harper's example and "Go Big or Go Home." Moneyquote: Harper's 2008 budget would have cut Federal funding of parliamentary elections--to the benefit of the Conservatives. All opposition parties formed an ABC coalition--Anyone but Conservative--to defeat...

06 May, 2010

Using data from Flightradar24.com, a site that tracks most European flights, the British firm ItoWorld produced this animation of European airspace between between April 16 and 21, as traffic resumed after the ash cloud shutdown: Hat tip: Silas...

03 May, 2010

At a web app developers' conference on April 21, Facebook unveiled a breathtakingly ambitious program to reorganize the way personal information is shared on the Internet. The changes, known as Open Graph, are hard to summarize simply, but they include the use of cookies, login codes, and Facebook "like" buttons on other companies' websites, to automatically share user information and preferences with other websites, which then use that information to personalize a user's browsing experience. More detailed explanations here and here. With 415 million users, Facebook offers web developers a powerful incentive to play ball, and they have flocked to embrace the...

02 May, 2010