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...

Early in 1229, Johannes Myronas, a monk working in Jerusalem, wrote a prayer book. He constructed the book on parchment he recycled from several documents, including a manuscript by the Greek mathematician Archimedes of Syracuse (287–212 BC). Myronas erased Archimedes' words, separated the pages of his manuscript, cut the pages in half, turned them sideways, shuffled them, and transcribed his own prayers onto them. In the years since, the prayer book was drizzled with wax and repaired with various types of glue. Some its pages were covered again with forged paintings. In this way, a unique work by one of humankind's seminal...

  The management of Simeon's Family Restaurant in Sydney attached a makeshift sign to the venerable but non-functioning Bell-Aliant pay phone in the restaurant's vestibule. With the explosion in cell phone ownership and use, timely maintenance of the ancient pay-per-use devices just isn't a priority any more. "Trying to find a working pay phone," wrote one friend when I posted this photo on Facebook, "is like trying to find a four-leaf clover." "I love pay phones," wrote another. "They hint at a world of possibilities."...

The bow section of the Titanic resting on the Atlantic Ocean bottom. A pair of self-propelled, undersea robots scoured the 3-by-5-mile debris field, snapping more than 100,000 hi-resolution side-scan sonar images that a computer lated stitched together to create the most comprehensive map yet of the disaster's remains. The bow section roughly corresponds to the highlighted portion of the photo below. The stern section, which suffered far more damage during the two-and-a-half-mile plunge to the ocean bottom, lies in pieces scattered half a mile away from the bow. Researchers from RMS Titanic Inc., the wreck's legal custodian, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in...

Gary Gallivan will present the history of Cape Breton Island through postcards: A native of Whitney Pier, Gallivan is a life-long collector of postcards. His illustrated talk before the Old Sydney Society will highlight four postcard periods, including "The Golden Era" (1900 to 1914), which featured cards of a high technical quality depicting industrial, disaster, and sports scenes, as well as visits by dignitaries and patriotic events. Gallivan's collection includes rare cards featuring the Broughton mine and Dominion Number 2 colliery, the Gisborne Bridge on the Mira River, a fishing camp at Jersey Cove, Robert Perry’s visit to Sydney, the 1913 fire in North Sydney,...

Previewing a forthcoming movie about Nova Scotia's most interesting neighbourhood: Directed by Peter Giffen of Moncton's PostMan post production studio. Giffen describes the trailer as a sneak preview to an hour-long documentary still in production, that follow from Heart Of Steel, a doc Giffen directed for Video Tech Ltd. of Halifax under contract to the Sydney Tar Ponds cleanup project. H/T: Alicia Penney...

Lauren Oostveen, Nova Scotia's tweeting archivist, today unearthed a clipping from The 4th Estate, Halifax's one-time alternative weekly, about a vampire conflab that took place at Dalhouse 39 years ago this month. The 4th Estate story is good, but the yarn Oostveen dug up to go with it is even better. Organized by English Professor Devendra P. Varma, a renowned Dracula-lit buff, the goth-before-its-time conference boasted "the largest gathering of vampire experts ever presented in Canada," and featured a screening of the classic 1931 movie Dracula, starring Bela Lugosi. The Himalayan-born Varma, who died in 1994, was apparently quite a character. According to Oostveen,...

As the 2011 flood season ramped up across the US and Canada, TheAtlantic.com's tech blogger, Alexis Madrigal. found himself wondering how the Mississippi River system works. So he produced an explainer that lays out the complex combination of natural and human forces that create, and attempt to control, the inevitable natural process of river flooding. What is the Mississippi River? It's not actually a silly question. The Mississippi no longer fits the definition a river as "a natural watercourse flowing towards an ocean, a lake, a sea, or another river." Rather, the waterway has been shaped in many ways, big and...

Los Angeles filmmaker and photographer Ransom Riggs made this short film about his favorite post-apocalyptic landscape, the Salton Sea. It's quite a story. H/T: Silas...

In the last few years, I've made several business trips to the Faroe Islands, a rocky archipelago that rises spectacularly from the North Atlantic, about halfway between Iceland and Scotland. The population of 48,917 is about one-third of Cape Breton's; the land area of 1,399 square km barely tops that of Richmond County, NS. Search Google Images for "Faroe Islands," and you'll turn up dozens of photos far more beautiful than the snapshot below, of a rocky point known as Tinganes that sticks into the harbour at Torshavn, the country's* largest town. Tinganes sits two blocks from the hotel where I...