Left: Holiday beach-goers at Coney Island, NY, on July 4, 1935, near the height of the resorts popularity. Right, the same  beach, photographed this July 4 7 from the top of of the amusement park's ferris wheel, by Sydney native Angela Honan....

11 July, 2012

When Paul Watson, the Canadian who heads the Sea Shepherd Society, attempted to disrupt a traditional pilot whale harvest on the Faroe Islands last year, canny local fishermen postponed the event until no whales appeared until after the HMS Brigit Bardot weighed anchor and departed the tiny country's waters. (See further update here.) This deprived Watson of gory footage for a TV series celebrating his latest charismatic crusade. Still, when the four-part series aired on US cable channels this spring, Faroese government officials braced for a backlash. What they got was something quite different: a flood of tourism inquiries. The documentary's B-roll footage of the...

08 July, 2012

PHD Comics talks to particle physicist Daniel Whiteson for an exceptionally lucid explanation of the quest for the Higgs boson: what it is, and how the Large Hadron Collider of the  European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) was able to observe it, albeit indirectly. If the predicted effect  [of the Higgs boson's existence] were huge, it would be very easy to tell the difference between "with Higgs boson" and "not with Higgs boson." The prediced effect is tiny, so it's really hard to see. What you need is a huge amount of data. You need to take a gillion collisions before you can...

07 July, 2012

Our pal Colin May will argue with anyone — even an astrophysicist. He writes: You can push on a string. Freeze it...

02 July, 2012

The much anticipated fireworks display over Halifax proved an austere celebration. They were fun while they lasted, about 12 minutes, and the cheerful, appreciative, harbourside crowd was a delight. This cheerfulness, a certain joie de vivre, has a leavening effect on patriotism, an emotion that, left unchecked, can be unpleasant and dangerous. In that spirit, I point out that, over the last 24 hours, we've had the Canadian Women's Soccer Team don Tory blue jerseys for their pre-Canada Day bout with the Yanks, and the managing editor of the National Post tweeted his outrage that the Globe and Mail occasionally publishes op-ed pieces by...

01 July, 2012