The Canadian Beaver Band offers a jaundiced musical view of Halifax's spankin' new ship contract [possibly NSW]. H/T: Charlie Phillips...

Sunni Brown thinks the stigma against absent minded jottings is misplaced: The bottom line: People who doodle when they are exposed to verbal information retain more of that information than their non-doodling counterparts. We think doodling is something you do when you lose focus, but in reality, it is a preemptive measure to stop you from losing focus...

Jeff Jarvis speaking to Leo LaPorte on this week’s edition of This Week in Google: I listen to Radio Canada -- CBC -- on Sirius all the time, because they have good programs, and they’re covering RIM like it’s really a story, ‘cause they have to, ‘cause it’s like a national requirement. It’s so sad. Peter Rojas chimed in: That company...

The Cape Breton Post's Chris Shannon has a thorough and detailed account of Environment Canada's failure to monitor or control rampant siltation from the Sydney Harbor dredging boondoggle project (first reported here). In among the buck-passing and not-my-department quotes lies this gem: The federal environmental screening assessment report is supposed to be posted online. But a check of each of the departments’ websites didn’t turn up the report. A spokesperson for the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency said the screening report couldn’t be found on its agency’s website either since it doesn’t conduct that type of environmental assessment. “It’s really the responsible authorities that are responsible...

Reporters attending Parks Canada’s Sable Island announcement this morning at the Halifax Citadel were apparently in stenography mode. Or perhaps they had been instructed to fish for soundbites on more urgent stories, like the confusion around environmental and salvage measures for the grounded bulk carrier MV Miner. Whatever the cause, they came ill-prepared to probe the most contentious issue surrounding plans to make Sable Island a national park: the Harper Government’s impulse to promote private sector tourism development on the island. Environment Minister Jim Prentice touched off a furore in January, 2010, when he first announced plans to make Sable a...

The internet has some peculiar websites. This one comes from Wilsonville, Oregon-based SSI Shredding Systems, Inc., a company that claims to be "motivated by  one recurring question: What Needs Shredding?" You can sign up to receive the company's Shred of the Month video. I particularly enjoyed the impromptu bowling tournament. H/T: Silas...

A 100-hectare sediment plume kicked up by the Sydney Harbor dredging project, and presumably laden with industrial contaminants, has some officials annoyed over Environment Canada's failure to regulate the project. Gerry Langille, a Sydney-based industrial photographer often used by government agencies, snapped the photos Wednesday in calm conditions at slack tide. They have since circulated widely among federal and provincial bureaucrats. The Google Earth screenshot at left shows the approximate location of the upper photograph. The photo below shows the shoreline at Pt. Edward where the dredged material makes landfall, and where most of the sedimentation appears to originate. The infilled material...

In a call to CBC-Cape Breton last week, North Shore resident David Papazian spoke a widely held but rarely voiced opinion about the $38 million project to dredge Sydney Harbor in hopes that someone will build container terminal here: The money could be much better spent fostering small business here in Cape Breton which is a much better engine of growth than these sort of mega-projects that require huge amounts of capital at the taxpayers' expense, with a whole lot of expectations and dreams and hopes that — maybe not, but very likely — will become another chapter in the probably fairly...

Salon's Glenn Greenwald points out that last week's flood of Steve Jobs hagiographies mostly tiptoed around one inconvenient facet of the Great Man: he took LSD. He not only took it, he regarded having taken it as one of the two or three most important things he had done in his life. Greenwald: Unlike many people who have enjoyed success, Jobs is not saying that he was able to succeed despite his illegal drug use; he’s saying his success is in part — in substantial part — because of those illegal drugs (he added that Bill Gates would “be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once”). An excellent...

When people learn that my son Silas and his wife Jenn Power adopted a pair of identical twins with Down Syndrome, they often say one of two things: "I could never do that," or "You must be saints." I love Silas and Jenn beyond measure, and admire them hugely, but I can attest they are not saints. The explanation for their decision to adopt Josh and Jacob lies elsewhere. As members of the L'Arche Community in Iron Mines, Orangedale, and Mabou, Cape Breton, Silas and Jenn have lots of experience working and living with developmentally disabled people. It's what they like doing,...