Benoît Mandelbrot, 85, the iconoclastic mathematician who coined the term fractal and helped inject the digital revolution with creative artistry, died last Thursday at his home in Cambridge, Madssachusetts. Here, in a TED talk, he talks about his work: ...

18 October, 2010

Growing discomfort with the military commission trial of Canadian child soldier Omar Khadr, the only western national still held in the US detention centre in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has apparently propelled the US government to seek a plea bargain in the case. The presiding military judge delayed the trial this week in anticipation of a possible deal. Why now? The Toronto Star's Michelle Sheppard reported Thursday that Omar Khadr's pending trial "has caused discomfort among some of Obama’s advisers, who are concerned about the fact that he was 15 at the time of the alleged offence." Friday's edition of the New York Times,...

14 October, 2010

Most of us know, intellectually, that standard Mercator projection maps grossly distort the relative sizes of countries. In particular, the world maps we most often use exaggerate the size of first world, northern-hemisphere countries like Canada, the USA, and the nations of Europe, while under-representing the size of third-world countries clustered around the equator. But do we grasp this distortion in any visceral sense? Quite the contrary: Each time we look at a distorting world map, we are subliminally reinforced in the prejudice that we're big, and they're small. GUI-designer Kai Krause strikes a blow against what he calls immappancy with this...

14 October, 2010

.. .. Chiquita Brands International, successor to the United Fruit Company, a cartel whose imperialist policies in Latin America gave life to the term banana republic (coined by O. Henry), has revealed the winners in its contest to replace the company's iconic fruit sticker. Here are Contrarian's favorites: . . . ...

10 October, 2010

When I posted Peter Barss's photos of tool-using nuthatches, it struck me as remarkable that two different species were using the same tool in the same location on the same day. I wondered if there could be some teaching and learning at work here, but figured I was getting getting over my head, animal behaviour-wise. Contrarian reader Bill Matheson had the same thought: You may also have evidence here, even if anecdotal, to suggest cross-species cultural transmission of tool use. The red-breasted nuthatch seems to be gifted at learning from other species, according to the Nuthatch article on Wikipedia: "The Red-breasted Nuthatch,...

05 October, 2010

Whenever business kept him overnight in Halifax, Irving Schwartz liked to stay at the Lord Nelson Hotel, as does his son-in-law and protégé, Adrian Noskwith. Late Monday night, Adrian checked into the Lord Nelson for the first time since Irving's death. On the desk in his suite he found a sympathy card signed by the hotel manager and 30 hotel staff. [W.R. MacAskill photo.]...

05 October, 2010

For a long time, we humans flattered ourselves with the belief that tool use was among our defining and exclusive traits. In the last decades of the 20th Century, we grudgingly conceded the  franchise — first to primates, then elephants, cetaceans, and birds. But who knew we had tool-using songbirds right here in Nova Scotia? Sunday afternoon, two nuthatches, one red-breasted, one white-breasted, transformed a stump in West Dublin, Nova Scotia, into a vice. The birds wedged sunflower seeds into a crack in the stump, thus freeing their beaks to peck open the firmly secured meals. Few things annoy the Contrarian more...

04 October, 2010

On the evening of September 12, a hit-and-run driver struck Neil Alan Smith on Fourth Street North, St. Petersburg, FL, throwing him off his mountain bike. Smith, 48, a dishwasher at the Crab Shack restaurant in St. Petersburg, died six days later at Bayfront Medical Center. When the Times announced Smith's death on its website, a reader commented: A man who is working as a dishwasher at the Crab Shack at the age of 48 is surely better off dead. Times editors swiftly removed the post, deeming it offensive and insensitive to the dead man’s friends and family. Then they took another, more...

02 October, 2010
Show more
Loading...