Dávur í Dali, a social sciences student at the University of the Faroe Islands, offers this friendly correction to our post about how Paul Watson's TV attack on the Faroese pilot whale hunt backfired: I am writing to you to correct a small misunderstanding in one of your posts on the Faroe Islands pilot whale hunt. Your post implies that we actively hunt whales, as someone would hunt deer or similar game. This is not correct. The whale hunts are not prepared or planned events. They happen when we sight a pod of whales swimming through our fjords or in general vicinity...

14 July, 2012

Phishers aren't just Nigerian schoolboys any more. They're getting reasonably sophisticated: Three factors almost hooked me: I actually am a CIBC (credit card) customer. Always delete any "security message" from a financial institution where you don't have an account. The URL (in dark blue text) looks like a genuine CIBC website (www.cibconline.cibc.com/...

14 July, 2012

Left: Holiday beach-goers at Coney Island, NY, on July 4, 1935, near the height of the resorts popularity. Right, the same  beach, photographed this July 4 7 from the top of of the amusement park's ferris wheel, by Sydney native Angela Honan....

11 July, 2012

When Paul Watson, the Canadian who heads the Sea Shepherd Society, attempted to disrupt a traditional pilot whale harvest on the Faroe Islands last year, canny local fishermen postponed the event until no whales appeared until after the HMS Brigit Bardot weighed anchor and departed the tiny country's waters. (See further update here.) This deprived Watson of gory footage for a TV series celebrating his latest charismatic crusade. Still, when the four-part series aired on US cable channels this spring, Faroese government officials braced for a backlash. What they got was something quite different: a flood of tourism inquiries. The documentary's B-roll footage of the...

08 July, 2012

PHD Comics talks to particle physicist Daniel Whiteson for an exceptionally lucid explanation of the quest for the Higgs boson: what it is, and how the Large Hadron Collider of the  European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) was able to observe it, albeit indirectly. If the predicted effect  [of the Higgs boson's existence] were huge, it would be very easy to tell the difference between "with Higgs boson" and "not with Higgs boson." The prediced effect is tiny, so it's really hard to see. What you need is a huge amount of data. You need to take a gillion collisions before you can...

07 July, 2012

Our pal Colin May will argue with anyone — even an astrophysicist. He writes: You can push on a string. Freeze it...

02 July, 2012

The much anticipated fireworks display over Halifax proved an austere celebration. They were fun while they lasted, about 12 minutes, and the cheerful, appreciative, harbourside crowd was a delight. This cheerfulness, a certain joie de vivre, has a leavening effect on patriotism, an emotion that, left unchecked, can be unpleasant and dangerous. In that spirit, I point out that, over the last 24 hours, we've had the Canadian Women's Soccer Team don Tory blue jerseys for their pre-Canada Day bout with the Yanks, and the managing editor of the National Post tweeted his outrage that the Globe and Mail occasionally publishes op-ed pieces by...

01 July, 2012

In previous installments, we brought you video of the amazing levitating Slinky, and Peter Barss wondered how the Slinky had been calibrated to work exactly this way. I asked physicists to come forth, and they have—not just physicists, but an astrophysicist. (Who better to explain levitation?) Saint Mary's grad Jonathan Dursi, now a senior research associate with the Canadian Centre for Astrophysics, furnished this detailed by elegant explanation: Sometimes you hear that there's three things taught in first year Engineering (or Physics, or whatever); things fall down; F=Ma; and you can't push on a string.* It's exactly those three things at play...

29 June, 2012

One of my favorite photographers, Cory Katz, a 25-year-old autodidact, has a show on at the Cape Breton Centre for Craft and Design, from now until July 16. Katz springs from that unlikely hotbed of artistic talent that is New Waterford. Yes, New Waterford. ...

29 June, 2012

The Atlantic's Derek Thompson explains it in four terse sentences: Europe has Greece. We have Mississippi. Europe uses the term "permanent bailouts." We call it "Medicaid." And he illustrates the point with a map from the Economist: Thompson again: [T]he poorest states like Mississippi, New Mexico, and West Virginia rely on ginormous transfers of federal taxes in the form of unemployment benefits and Medicaid. Like the United States, the euro zone is all on one currency. Unlike the United States, the euro zone collects a teensy share of total taxes at the EU level and has no legacy of permanent fiscal transfers from the...

26 June, 2012
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