Highway 103 between Halifax and Bridgewater is surely the dullest drive in Nova Scotia. For the last three or four years, motorists forced to traverse its dreary confines have enjoyed momentary comic relief near the Tantallon exit, in the form of a car-sized, more-or-less cubical rock outcropping, painted as a Rubik's Cube. "A jumbled Rubik's Cube fixed in stone, really heavy stone," said West Dublin resident Peter Barss, who waxed philoshical about its deeper artistic significance: A monumental monument to confusion and frustration? A puzzle that never changes… and can never be solved? An implied order, an order that can never be realized?...

21 May, 2013

The late Harry Piers served as curator of the Nova Scotia Museum from 1900 and 1939. He was also Keeper of the Public Records, a position now known as Public Archivist. In these capacities, Piers received and cataloged hundreds of Nova Scotia animal, fossil, plant, and mineral specimens—along with a few crime scene photos. Piers meticulously recorded each donation, listing its source, date, and location, together with significant details in a series of accession ledgers. Owing to their fragile condition, these records have been largely unavailable for the last half century, but the museum and the archives have recently collaborated on a project...

21 May, 2013

It's 6,000 miles long and 120 miles wide (185 x 9,000 km.). It stretches from the ice-bound Kama River in Russia's Tartaristan Province to Limpopo Province at the northern border of South Africa. It's an unusually long stretch of unbroken land, given that water covers 70 percent of the Earth's surface. The Landsat Data Continuity Mission satellite, soon to be renamed Landsat 8, captured the image from an altitude of 438 miles (705 km.) by assembling 56 photographs taken over a 20-minute period on April 19 into a seamless unit. ThE 15-minute video below traverses its entire length. Be sure to view it...

20 May, 2013

In his rivalry with Thomas Edison, Graham Bell made many attempts to record sound using media that ran the gamut from metal, glass, and foil to paper, plaster, and cardboard. Many of Bell's discs survive, but the technologies used to record them are long forgotten. Researchers and scientists from the National Museum of American History and the Library of Congress in Washington, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, and the University of Indiana have collaborated on a project to catalog and decipher the primative recordings, using high-resolution digital scans to convert them to audio files. One wax-and-cardboard disc, recorded...

19 May, 2013

A handful of my neighbours, falsely purporting to repesent the residents of Boularderie Island, noisely oppose a plan to put up a couple of wind turbines at Hillside, Boularderie, near Bras d'Or. Their arguments deserve scrutiny because of what they reveal about the logic underpinning the anti-wind movement. In a CBC interview this morning, a spokesperson for the NIMBYists pointed to an elderly lifelong Hillside resident who has grown distraught about the project, and worries it will render her unable to live out her years in the beautiful place she has always called home. Back in March, an Australian researcher cataloged every illness...

17 May, 2013

Jon Stone writes: Thanks for sharing that wonderful video. It is inspiring to see what creative minds can do when faced with a challenge. There have been some astonishinglynegativecomments posted on various web sites with respect to the recent generosity of the Fountain family in creating the endowment for Dalhousie's performing arts program. The gist of much of the derogatory discussion was that there is no value in training people in performance skills. Well, here is one excellent example of the value of performers to society. I won't be surprised if this goes viral and breaks all records for fundraising for the Janeway. [Update]...

16 May, 2013

Newfoundland has always had way better tourism ads than Nova Scotia (or pretty much anywhere else on the planet for that matter). Now it turns out they have way better children's hospital ads, too. (Stay with this at least until the music starts, about five minutes in. Hilarious.) [Video link]. H/T Calvert's own Jenn Power....

15 May, 2013

Brilliant! Credits for the first music video ever produced in space include guitar and tenor vocals by Chris Hadfield (recorded on the International Space Station), plus terrestrial video production by Hadfield's son Evan and TV producer Andrew Tidby, music production and mixing by music producer Joe Corcoran, with piano arrangements by Canadian singer-songwriter Emm Gryner. "Space Oddity" was written by David Bowie and first performed by him in 1969, when Hadfield was 10 years old. Who knows what this may inspire in the next generation of space enthusiasts....

13 May, 2013

This may be Astronaut Chris Hadfield's last snapshot of Cape Breton Island from 370 km up, as he returns to Earth Monday evening via  the steppes of Kazakhstan. Hadfield's tweeted comment: "The highlands of Cape Breton still wear the winter's snow, sun highlighting the connecting waters." The May 5 image above is a rotated segment of a larger photograph you can download at its original resolution here. Previous snaps of Contrarian's Primary Residences here and here. A world map with links to all Hadfield's tweeted photos here....

11 May, 2013

The 226-metre, 24,535-tonne, self-unloading Canadian bulk carrier Algoma Mariner, presumably laden with Little Narrows gypsum, passed Ross Ferry at 7 p.m., Saturday, working its way out the Great Bras d'Or Channel against an incoming tide. Built on the Yangtze River, near Jiangyin, China, in 2011, at a cost of more than $50 million, it is powered by an unusual low-speed, two-stroke, six-cylinder engine. The Mariner is owned by the Algoma Central Corp. of Ste. Catherine's, Ontario, and registered in Port Colbourne....

11 May, 2013
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