Today’s Morning File led off with a victory lap in which Editor Tim Bousquet proclaimed that, “as I predicted, [the Tuft's Cove spill] was much larger than originally reported.” I call B.S....

15 August, 2018

When documents released by Edward Snowden revealed that the US National Security Agency (NSA) routinely hovers hoovers up metadata on telephone calls made and received in that country, officials first lied about the practice, then defended it on grounds the information obtained was trivial. President Obama insisted the gathering of metadata amounted only to "modest encroachments on privacy" and "a circumscribed, narrow system directed at us being able to protect our people." He emphasized that NSA was "not looking at content." A new, crowdsourced study shows that telephone metadata—information that includes the date, time, and length of phone calls, and the numbers called, but not the...

18 March, 2014

In March, 2013, the non-profit, open-source research organization, OCEARCH, caught a four-metre, 900 kg, female great white shark off the Atlantic coast of Florida near Jacksonville, then released it after attaching monitoring and tracking devices. In the year since, the shark has travelled 31,000 kilometres, visiting Cape Hatteras, Bermuda, George's Bank, Placentia Bay, and the Grand Banks, before crossing the mid-Atlantic ridge to a point 1200 kilometres off the coast of Ireland. In late October, Lydia, as the researchers nicknamed her. spent three days exploring Newfoundland's Placentia Bay and Merasheen Island: You can follow Lydia's travels on OCEARCH's interactive, live-tracking map. You can follow...

11 March, 2014

To make sport of bad English translations by non-English speakers is to flirt with, nay dive headfirst into, unbecoming condescension. But sometimes, it's irresistible. "Please use it referring to as equipped," has been an all-purpose mantra in my house ever since those words arrived on the wrapper of a Honda Civic air filter sometime in the 1980s. Last weekend, my son Silas received a set of Chinese-made Edifier speakers he had ordered on line. Among the packaging, he found this poetic brand testimonial: I believe this can only be fully appreciated as blank verse: Big surprise, astonishment, and enjoyment. Ever from the sparkles of ideas...

22 January, 2014

A friend called tonight, en route from Halifax to Cape Breton, wondering if I could recommend a restaurant in Truro where he and his partner could eat supper. A quick Google search turned up TripAdvisor.ca's listing of 79 Truro eateries. That's right: 79 restaurants in Truro, one for every 159 residents. Moreover, 60 of the 79 had user reviews. Those that did not were mostly predictable chain outlets like McDonald's, Tim Horton's, and Subway. In seconds, I was able to call up the dozen or so with the highest user rankings, eliminate those whose cuisine did not interest my friends, click through...

02 January, 2014

This is a must-have for anyone living along the Strait of Canso superport, and for 14 residents of Goldboro, soon to be the site of an LNG terminal. Denizens of HRM may also want to bone up in anticipation of warships soon to be flying off the assembly line at the Irving Shipyard. Be sure to read the reviews, especially the third one down. H/T: Sue, via Jane Kansas...

30 December, 2013

Every Christmas since 1993, British Television's Channel 4 asks a noteworthy figure to record an "alternative" to starchy pieties of Her Majesty's annual Christmas message to her subjects. This year, Channel 4 tapped whistleblower Edward Snowden. From his temporary asylum in Russia, Snowden sounded a pithy, 1 minute, 43 second, warning about the dangers of government spying: A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all. They’ll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves — an unrecorded, unanalysed thought...

28 December, 2013
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