Jennifer Watts has sent irate constituents a note explaining her position on HRM's violent eviction of peaceful protesters yesterday. After paying lip service to the principles espoused by those outraged at the mayor and council's behaviour, she reverses course and endorses Kelly's position that a petty bylaw should trump constitutional rights. I have received many emails from residents who are very concerned and angry with the enforcement of the municipal park bylaw in relation to the Occupy Nova Scotia protest. Many of these concerns include the decision to remove members of Occupy Nova Scotia on Remembrance Day, the right of peaceful...

12 November, 2011

A recent story by Andrew MacDonald in the online journal AllNovaScotia.com included the following sentence: NSP has begun slowly moving its 500 workers out of the Barrington Tower office to a new $54-million HQ on the Halifax waterfront, dubbed the Bennett Bunker for NSP ceo [sic] Rob Bennett [emphasis in the original]. The phrase, "dubbed the Bennett Bunker," is noteworthy for having been cast in passive voice, a grammatical form journalists often decry as a way for politicians and similar miscreants to evade responsibility for their actions. Who exactly "dubbed" NS Power's office building "the Bennett Bunker?" Why, AllNovaScotia, that's who. It invented...

12 November, 2011

Here are the events that led to today’s arrests in Halifax. A group of protesters exercised their right to assemble peacefully and petition their government for redress of grievances by camping out in the Halifax Parade ground. City burghers found the demonstration unruly, distasteful, and inconvenient. Seizing on the central role the Parade Grounds traditionally plays in Halifax's Remembrance Day observances, Mayor Peter Kelly demanded the protesters vacate the area before November 11. Showing more strategic accumen than one might have been inclined to expect, the OccupyNS protesters negotiated respectfully with veterans’ groups and HRM officials, and voluntarily withdrew to Victoria Park, a...

11 November, 2011

Contrarian readers just can't get enough of those starlings: H/T: Joshua...

10 November, 2011

Cape Bretoner Gordie Sampson now lives in Nashville, where he produces about 75 song demos a year, mostly in the country-pop vein. In a CBC Radio interview this morning, he reflected on what makes country music different: I write country song for the most part… The lyric is more important in this genre than really any genre I think. The lyric and the melody together really has to move the listener. In R&B or other types of modern music, the idea is to make people dance. In country music it’s, often times, its to hurt people’s feelings. To make them re-think that...

10 November, 2011

Contrarian friend Dave Atkinson one-ups that video of a starling flock's undulations. Walking home the other day from my work at the University of Prince Edward Island, I saw two men ahead of me on the Confederation Trail. They were mesmerized by something in the sky. One of them was taking photographs with his phone. At first, I thought they were watching an eagle, as they're not uncommon in Charlottetown. When I caught up to them, they asked if I could see the magic smoke. "Magic smoke?" I asked, wondering if they'd inhaled some. "Yeah, look!" Low on the horizon, a few hundred metres away, whisps of...

07 November, 2011

Two women in a canoe on Ireland's River Shannon stumble across one of nature’s greatest phenomena: a murmuration of starlings. Murmuration from Sophie Windsor Clive on Vimeo. H/T to The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal who writes: The starlings coordinated movements do not seem possible, but then there they are doing it. Scientists have been similarly fascinated by starling movement. Those synchronized dips and waves seem to hold secrets about perception and group dynamics. Last year, Italian theoretical physicist Giorgio Parisi took on the challenge of explaining the murmuration. What he found, as ably explained by my old Wired colleague Brandon Keim, is that the math equations that...

07 November, 2011

Earlier this week, various blogs and media outlets reported that Beijing was experiencing frightful levels of air pollution. To document the crisis, China hand James Fallows cited what he called "the indispensable (and highly controversial)" Twitter feed @Beijingair, which produces hourly readings of  fine particulate matter (PM2.5) in Beijing. On Monday, @Beijingair showed readings in excess of 300 µg/m3, contributing to conditions the US EPA characterizes as "hazardous," and warranting "health warnings of emergency conditions." What caught my attention was Fallows's assertion that the @BeijingAir feed is "the only known source of PM 2.5 readings in China." That is astounding: one PM2.5...

04 November, 2011

[See update below] Paul W. Bennett, the director of Schoolhouse Consulting, and Nova Scotia's best known educational policy critic, shares Bert Lewis's skepticism about Sir Ken Robinson's TED talk. With the advent of TED Talks, Sir Ken Robinson, the current, undisputed rock star of public education, has been, or will be, coming to a School Board near you, so it's wise to be forewarned and perhaps even forearmed. Sir Ken puts on quite a show, especially with that snazzy RSA animation. Very few can match him when it comes to the British accent, rhetorical flourish, and sardonic humour. Having listened to him many...

01 November, 2011
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