The Brain Repair Centre at the QEII Health Sciences Centre took a magnetic resonance image of Contrarian's brain today, as part of a study on memory loss in people with Alzheimer's disease. The researchers assured me I was there solely as a control! While the machine buzzed, clicked, and roared, the kindly technicians played CBC radio through my headphones. This is what Contrarian's brain looks like while listening to Costas Halavrezos....

12 April, 2010

Over the last two days, Contrarian readers in Halifax, Sydney, and England have reported that the website is loading slowly or not at all. HostPapa, my normally reliable hosting service, confirmed tonight that the server is responding slowly. The customer service rep has escalated the problem to the technicians who work on Hostpapa's servers. I hope they fix it soon. Apologies for the inconvenience. In most cases, apparently, if you are patient, the page will eventually load. The strange thing is, it works perfectly here at Kempt Head. (And yes, I appreciate the fecklessness of using a website people can't load...

05 April, 2010

Our old friend Ivan Smith's ears perked up at our mention of an independent advisory panel to offer suggestions on how to improve a government website. He wonders if anything similar is planned in Canada. Smith points to copyright activist Michael Geist's interesting testimony March 25 before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage (available, sigh, not on the committee's website, but on Geist's.) Moneyquote: In recent years, many countries have embraced open data initiatives, including both the U.S. and U.K.  Others, such as Australia, have adopted open licenses to make government content more readily usable and...

04 April, 2010

Gary Lauder calculates the wasted fuel and time caused by one intersection's stop signs at $100,000 per year. Roundabouts work better, but how about a "Take Turns" sign? Hat tip: Crest Halifax....

04 April, 2010

Contrarian will be at the Inverary Inn's Thistledown Pub in Baddeck this evening to lead a discussion about blogging sponsored by the Cabot Trail Writers' Festival, the group that organized this event last fall. In addition to an annual fall festival, the group plans a series of satellite events, of which tonight's discussion is the first. I'll be talking about the writerly (journalistic, aesthetic, ethical) aspects of blogging; Mike Targett will be on hand to backstop me on those issues, and to add his technical smarts to the discussion. The pub serves supper from 5:30 to 8; The fireside blogging discussion,...

06 March, 2010

In the 1920s, the German writer and artist Fritz Kahn produced a series of illustrations depicting the human body as a machine, most famously in the 1926 poster, Der Mensch als Industriepalast (Man as Industrial Palace): Now, another German artist, 20-year-old Henning Lederer has created an animated version of the poster: Hat tip: Flowingdata.com....

25 February, 2010

David Beck of Clarkson University and Jennifer Jacquet of the University of British Columbia won an honorable mention in the illustration category of the [U.S.] National Science Foundation's 2009 Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge for Jellyfish Burger. Other winners include a comic strip about brain development, an animation showing why identical twins become less similar as they grow older, and a two minute video about airline routes. Fuller account here. Slideshow of other winners here. Podcast interview with some of the winners here. (The last two sites may require free registration.)...

19 February, 2010

In response to our post about pay phones, Contrarian reader AN points out that people concerned about the vanishing phone booth can adopt one of the gorgeous British Telecom kiosks at left. Well, you can if you are a British municipal authority. The cost? Free, without a phone; £300 per year with pay phone service. Not sure who would want to adopt the booth at right....

15 February, 2010

Still on the subject of aircraft, remember US Airways Flight 1549, the Airbus 320 that set down safely in New York's Hudson River after losing both its engines to a collision with Canada geese? Exosphere3D, a Denver company that "specializes in technical animation and scientific visualization of complex data sets," has combined the wealth of publicly available radar data, cockpit and air traffic control recordings, and flight recorder information to create a series of startling 3D animations the tell the story in a way that would have been inconceivable a decade ago. I've embedded the best of the bunch...

10 February, 2010
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