The New York Times this morning published a correction of a story it ran 161 years ago, on January 20, 1853: The Times does take its responsibility for factual accuracy seriously. This whimsical correction of two, 161-year-old spelling errors was one of nine corrections it published today. Five years ago, at the urging of Contrarian and Provincial Court Judge Anne Derrick, the Times corrected its obituary of Donald Marshall Jr. The original version of the Times obit had incorrectly described the circumstances surrounding the killing of Sandy Seale, the 16-year-old boy whom Marshall was falsely convicted of murdering. For all they criticize...

04 March, 2014

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

Contrarian reader Peter Barss waxes philosophical about the primal draw of radio-storms and weather-porn: It 's exciting to sit in our warm, safe living rooms listening to dire warnings of impending weather doom. It's even more of a thrill to turn on our flat screen TVs and watch weather gals and guys get whipped by wind-driven snow as they stand outside yelling into their microphones so they can be heard over the howling "weather bomb." We live in a society that is soft and luxurious. One of the luxuries we indulge is the illusion that if we just do everything right we...

01 March, 2013

After just 17 days on Mars, NASA's Curiosity Rover has detected strong indications of life—and confirmed a familiar adage at the same time. Photo credit: Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Photo-enhancement credit: Peter Barss...

23 August, 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

Yesterday, I posted a slo-mo  video of a Slinkeys, which, when dropped while their springs were completely distended, appeared to levitate momentarily, until their springs had time to re-compress, whereupon they began their expected downward trajectory. My pal Peter Barss (who is descended from a real pirate, kids) has a question "for anyone who remembers their physics better than I do." During most of the its fall, the bottom of the Slinky remains absolutely motionless, which, to my mind, means the gravitational force acting on the slinky pulling it down is exactly balanced by the force compressing the bottom of the...

26 June, 2012

Peter Barss thinks newscasters overuse puns. In a letter to CTV, he wrote: Like many news stations (radio and television) you seem inclined to use as many puns as you can fit into a story. The question I'd like to suggest that you ask yourselves is, "Why?" Does a pun help to elucidate a story? I don't think so. In fact, the use--overuse actually--of puns acts as a distraction from the news. Instead of helping to clarify a story, puns draw attention to the "cleverness" of the speaker. It's like "Hey, look at me. I just found another pun." Just because a...

10 February, 2012

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

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
Peter Barss, at yesterday's opening of his rescued Images of Lunenburg County at the Anderson Gallery:
As you look at these pictures and read the text panels from the book I imagine you’ll be asking yourselves the same question that has perplexed me for years: how did these men survive... without Wal-Mart? Images-Barss-040Right after Myra and I were married we spent a few nights in the West Ironbound lighthouse with our friends Ingram and Lynn Wolf, the light keepers on the island. One evening Ingram set out to rake up some grass but couldn’t find his rake. So he made one. Drilled some holes in a narrow board, whittled wooden pegs for the teeth, and walked into the woods to cut a sapling for a handle. Ingram had the grass raked up before the sun set. That memory has remained with me as emblematic of the self-sufficiency and resourcefulness of the people represented in this exhibit, If I had needed a rake it would never have occurred to me that I could make one. I would have headed directly to the hardware store. These men could fix anything that went wrong with the engines in their boats with nothing more than a screw driver and a pair of pliers, they navigated through fog as thick as pea soup, and they could tell you what the weather would be in coming days more accurately than the forecasters of today who seem to believe that staring at computer screens will give them more information than stepping outside and learning what nature has to tell them. These men lived at a time when communities were relatively isolated, families were closer and people had more time for each other. Neighbors depended on neighbors in good times and bad times. There were community dances and parties and when men were lost at sea --which happened all too frequently--the entire village grieved with the family. They were not rich men and they didn’t own a lot of stuff. But they were only poor in an economic sense. One man told me “I remember back... there was nice feelings in them times. We had nothin’... but you was a millionaire.” It’s easy to romanticize the era this exhibit portrays. No one wants to go back to those days... but maybe we should look back and think about what we have lost.
The show is up until August 4. After the jump, Peter describes the work a Halifax design shop put in restoring the images, the negatives for which had been lost in a house fire a quarter century ago:
04 July, 2010
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