TheAtlantic.com's tech columnist Alexis Madrigal marked the 135th anniversary of Alexander Graham Bell's US patent for the telephone by reproducing a doodle-like drawing of the device Bell submitted with his patent application: That's a fragment; see the whole diagram here. Madrigal found the image among Alexander Graham Bell Family Papers, which are stored at the Library of Congress and available online in a searchable database. Naturally, that set Contrarian searching for terms like "Telegraph House" (9 hits), "Beinn Bhreagh" (100), "Ross Ferry" and "Kempt Head" (zip and zip). A search for "Sydney" produced 47 hits, including this remarkable letter to...

09 March, 2011

I wrote yesterday that only one Canadian news source had taken note of a Robert Kennedy Jr. column on HuffingtonPost slamming Stephen Harper. In fact, the CBC's Kady O'Malley took note in a tweeet (which is what @kady does): So did Jane Tabor in the Globe and Mail. Neither piece turned up in a Google search at the time of my post. O'Malley took umbrage at my post, arguing that RFK's "entire piece was pure crap" and "a kennedy being staggeringly wrong on facts isn't news." This is a strange standard for news selection, especially coming from Canada's Parliamentary press gallery, where...

03 March, 2011

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., son of a famous man, former congressman, president of the Waterkeeper Alliance, and professor at Pace University, used a column in the Huffington Post to laud the CRTC for resisting efforts by the PMO to lift Canada's ban on false news. Kennedy links the PM's efforts to Sun Media's plans for a Canadian version of Fox News. Moneyquote: Harper, often referred to as "George W. Bush's Mini Me," is known for having mounted a Bush like war on government scientists, data collectors, transparency, and enlightenment in general. He is a wizard of all the familiar tools of...

02 March, 2011

In response to my post on the Dexter government's obsessive management of routine government communications, Bruce Wark writes: When I arrived in Nova Scotia in October, 1986 as CBC Radio's National Reporter for the Maritimes, I found that the Nova Scotia government's public relations system was generally third rate. I had just come from six years covering the Ontario legislature and was used to dealing every day with a professional civil service and public relations officers who provided accurate information quickly and efficiently. In fact, I realized  during my years at Queen's Park that the Conservatives' decision to create a professional (and...

27 February, 2011

Faced with the conspicuous failure of the war on drugs, the Harper Government proposes to escalate it, as if doing more of something that failed is likely to succeed. Portugal took a different approach. On July 1(!), 2001, that country decriminalized the use and possession of all illicit drugs, a move many feared would accelerate social decay. The British Journal of Criminology has published a study of what actually happened: This paper examines the case of Portugal, a nation that decriminalized the use and possession of all illicit drugs on 1 July 2001. Drawing upon independent evaluations and interviews conducted with 13 key stakeholders in...

28 January, 2011

This is a tired tune, but indulge me for a few bars. A few weeks ago, a Halifax physician went on Air Canada's website to book two round-trip flights: one to Sydney, Nova Scotia, 306 kilometers away; another to San Diego, 4,724 away (via Toronto). Air Canada charged $827 for the Sydney flight; $548 for SanDiego. That works out to $2.63/km for the Sydney flights vs. 11¢/km. for SanDiego. Years ago, some Sydney friends attended a wedding in St. John's, NF. Another wedding guest came from Cairo, Egypt. Guess who paid the lower fare? Try doing business with that handicap. Or as my...

26 January, 2011

Contrarian reader Ritchie Simpson upbraids me for whining about prime ministerial ivory tickling to the tune of John Lennon's Imagine. If you don't our political system to be reduced to an unending morass of partisan sniping and snide asides where nothing is accomplished because it may benefit the other side, then please refrain from making small minded comments. The shadow of pettiness covers more than just our politicians. if you want our politics raised out of the morass of point scoring then you must judge yourself as you judge others. I hate to sound like some overly pious prig or worse your...

22 December, 2010

Another leader with image problems takes a page from PM Harper's fakebook: Remarkable parallels here — similar image problem, similar soft-soap remedy. At least Putin didn't sully John Lennon's memory....

18 December, 2010

That's what Atlantic tech blogger Alexis Madrigal calls Google's Books Ngram Viewer. Google has scanned about 10 percent of all the books ever published. Enter any word or phrase into the search box, and the viewer returns a graph of its frequency of appearance in books published over the last two centuries. Note that the searches are case sensitive, and you can compare the relative frequencies of up to four five different words or phrases, separating them by commas in the search box. Say, "Nova Scotia" and "Ontario," for example: Try it yourself, and please send me any interesting pairings you come up with. Madrigal's...

16 December, 2010

Perhaps this post deserves elaboration. By any measure, dredging Sydney Harbour is a dubious use of public funds. It may yield modest increases in commercial shipping, but dreams of a container terminal here are but a fantasy. Despite the massive boom in world shipping that characterized the 2000s, the two container piers in Halifax continue to limp along at half capacity. Plans for a third pier at Melford are years ahead of those for Sydney, where a putative terminal proponent seems to have vanished. Yet the Cape Breton public has been massively oversold on the concept as the only possible salvation of...

10 December, 2010
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