I described a 250-gigabyte laptop hard drive as "impossibly huge." Ivan Smith found one twice as big at Tiger Direct: a 500 gigabyte Hitachi Travelstar laptop drive for just $99. That's 1¢ for every 50 megabytes. Ivan has more on the incredible shrinking price of data storage here....
The new Halifax Seaport Farmer's Market doesn't impress Contrarian reader Michael Graham: I really hope there is a tremendous amount of work to be done, because it is an insanely cramped space with two sets of narrow doors. There weren't thousands of people at once — no mob, just a very small space with no room to move. Three people effectively block all movement along an aisle — no wider than at a grocery store. Relatively speaking, the brewery market is incredibly easy to move through. What makes this space attractive? Glass, concrete, and gridlock? It's just a small warehouse with natural...
Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to eat local: A huge throng of regulars, plus tire-kickers, overwhelmed the Halifax Seaport Farmers' Market's opening day this morning, forcing shoppers to wrestle with traffic tie-ups, inadequate parking, and impossibly long coffee lineups. It is a gorgeous space, however, and congestion will likely ease once construction is complete and the market starts opening throughout the week. Lead designer Keith Tufts, of the Halifax architectural firm Lydon Lynch, describes the building's advanced environmental features in this video. One sour note: US imposed, Homeland Security regulations prevent the market from opening the huge water-facing doors on...
Google CEO Eric Schmidt speaking at the Techonomy conference Wednesday: There was 5 exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilization through 2003, but that much information is now created every 2 days, and the pace is increasing...
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's stirring defence of the Muslim community's right to build a mosque not far from the destroyed World Trade Centre is widely available on the Internet. But it embodies such rare eloquence in a principled, conservative defence of human freedoms and tolerance, it bears repeating here.
First an excerpt:
We may not always agree with every one of our neighbors. That's life. And it's part of living in such a diverse and dense city. But we also recognize that part of being a New Yorker is living with your neighbors in mutual respect and tolerance. It was exactly that spirit of openness and acceptance that was attacked on 9/11, 2001. On that day, 3,000 people were killed because some murderous fanatics didn't want us to enjoy the freedoms to profess our own faiths, to speak our own minds, to follow our own dreams, and to live our own lives. Of all our precious freedoms, the most important may be the freedom to worship as we wish. And it is a freedom that even here -- in a city that is rooted in Dutch tolerance -- was hard-won over many years. In the mid-1650s, the small Jewish community living in lower Manhattan petitioned Dutch governor Peter Stuyvesant for the right to build a synagogue, and they were turned down. In 1657, when Stuyvesant also prohibited Quakers from holding meetings, a group of non-Quakers in Queens signed the Flushing Remonstrance, a petition in defense of the right of Quakers and others to freely practice their religion. It was perhaps the first formal political petition for religious freedom in the American colonies, and the organizer was thrown in jail and then banished from New Amsterdam.... This nation was founded on the principle that the government must never choose between religions or favor one over another. The World Trade Center site will forever hold a special place in our city, in our hearts. But we would be untrue to the best part of ourselves and who we are as New Yorkers and Americans if we said no to a mosque in lower Manhattan. Let us not forget that Muslims were among those murdered on 9/11, and that our Muslim neighbors grieved with us as New Yorkers and as Americans. We would betray our values and play into our enemies' hands if we were to treat Muslims differently than anyone else. In fact, to cave to popular sentiment would be to hand a victory to the terrorists, and we should not stand for that.Watch the video here. After the jump, the full text of Bloomberg's speech.
The following message greeted Scott Gillard, constituency assistant to Halifax Chebucto NDP MLA Howard Epstein, when he logged onto his Facebook account Tuesday: [Maybe you should "like"] Michael Ignatieff. Many who like Jack Layton like him. Well, Scott, for the sake of the country, maybe you should....
Contrarian reader Wallace McLean noticed something else about those maps: [T]he US Census Bureau seems to generate unemployment data for the 3,140 counties and "county-equivalent" units of geography below state level, with an average population of under 100,000. Statistics Canada only provides (roughly) comparable data for 73 "economic regions" within Canada, with no sub-provincial/territorial data for PEI or the territories. The 73 regions have an average population of over 450,000. Even if you could get free and up-to-date data out of Statscan, it's not nearly as fine-grained as what they seem to have in the States. There would seem to be some fundamental...
Before a reader draws me up short on Monday's link to an interactive map showing explosive growth of unemployment in the US, I should acknowledge the choropleth problem. James Fallows introduced the issue, and the word, in a blog post about the same map Tuesday. The problem is that geography does not equal population. A choropleth map depicting social trends (unemployment or election results) can mislead if its geographical units (states or provinces) vary widely in population. (The word derives from Greek terms for "area/region" + "multiply.") Fallows gives the example of the razor thin 2004 US presidential election, in which the...
How a video goes viral: Sometime on Wednesday, Halifax filmmaker Andrea Dorfman uploaded her lovely video, featuring Tanya Davis's poem about solitude, to YouTube. At 6:38 a.m., Friday, when Halifax artist Shelagh Duffett reposted the video to her website, it had been viewed 40 times. Kimberley Mosher, an account manager for a Halifax Advertising agency, saw it on Shelagh's site and put it on her Facebook page, where, in turn, fashion blogger Allison Garber saw it and reposted the link to her FB page. All this happened in less than three hours. Allison's and my mutual friend (and brilliant, Baddeck-based communications strategist) Stacey Pineau sent me the link...
A simple interactive graphic brings home the recession's impact on US jobs. Youtube version here. Who wants to make a Canadian version? Oh, right, you have to have a government that makes data readily available in machine readable formats. And if it's survey data, you need a random sample. Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan...