Oceans2012, a coalition lobbying to ensure that the 2012 reform of the European Union Common Fisheries Policy "stops overfishing, ends destructive fishing practices and delivers fair and equitable use of healthy fish stocks," has produced a slick video to back up its campaign: [video link] Some factoids: Typically, shrimp trawlers throw 80 to 90 percent of the marine creatures caught back overboard. This means that for one kilo of shrimp, up to nine kilos of other marine wildlife is caught and wasted...

06 June, 2012

Brendan Chilcutt has created the Museum of Endangered Sounds, where you can revisit technological sounds of yesteryear: PacMan, a dot matrix printer, a dial telephone, and a 56K modem connecting over a phone line. It was that last example that caught the fancy of Atlantic Technology columnist Alexis Madrigal: Of all the noises that my children will not understand, the one that is nearest to my heart is not from a song or a television show or a jingle. It's the sound of a modem connecting with another modem across the repurposed telephone infrastructure. It was the noise of being part...

06 June, 2012

NYU grad student Josh Begley wrote a simple program (technically, a processing script) to capture a Google Earth arial image of every prison in the United States, then used the images as tiles to build a huge mosaic he calls Prison Map. The complete image is so vast, and takes so long to load as a website, Begley's main site defaults to a 700-prison subset of the best images. The United States is the prison capital of the world. This is not news to most people. When discussing the idea of mass incarceration, we often trot out numbers and dates and...

06 June, 2012

CBRM Mayor John Morgan, facing serious opposition* for the first time in 12 years, is scrambling to justify his cash-strapped municipality's snap decision to spend $6 million in tax money to block a private sector development that promised immediate jobs. On just two days' notice last month, CBRM outbid a private sector developer to buy the Greenfield Site, a 400-acre parcel on Sydney's freshly dredged harbour. At the time, Morgan said the so-called mystery developer planned to use the site for a bulk terminal that would permanently preclude its use as a container pier, the Great Big Project Morgan continually upholds as...

05 June, 2012

On Tuesday, members of the Nova Scotia Legislature's Community Services Committee will get a chance to question the bureaucrat who promoted what turned out to be false allegations of sexual misconduct against an innocent priest, and to ask her superiors why they still haven't withdrawn a report containing slanderous innuendo against him. The department's actions led to the closure of Talbot House, which had for 53 years provided safe lodging, meaningful work, and successful treatment for some of Nova Scotia's most troubled citizens. Marika Lathem, Director of Family and Youth Services and the principal author of the error-filled report, will testify. The Talbot...

05 June, 2012

Zhai Huasen, an experimental Chinese artist, used Photoshop to remove the bikes. Amazing how high the cyclists are.   H/T: Alexis Madrigal...

04 June, 2012

Moon over Auld's Cove: Moon over Beinn Bhreagh: ...

04 June, 2012

If Mabou can produce a great family band, why not Port Hood? Jean, Mitch, Gordie and Brennan MacDonald call themselves Company Road, and they recorded their alt-country debut tune Cry at the Rankin's Red Shoe Pub. [Video link] Sweet sound! You can buy it on iTunes. H/T: Heather Mosher via Melanie MacDonald...

04 June, 2012

On Saturday, I wrote that the majority members of the Nova Scotia Electoral Boundaries Commission only pretended to "interpret" their Terms of Reference, when in fact they had openly disregarded them.  Their only ethical choice, I wrote, was to "resign from the commission; or swallow hard and complete their assigned task." Important members of both opposition parties have responded. Liberal MLA Andrew Younger did so in a series of tweets: In fact, Canadian courts have ruled that +/- 25 percent should be the normal limit for variations in riding sizes, but that legislatures may go beyond that limit in special circumstances. It...

03 June, 2012
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