"Oil," a major exhibition by Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, is currently on display at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. in Washington, DC. The exhibit includes horrific photos of the Alberta Tar Sands: Burtynsky-06-s [Click images for larger view - links fixed.] Burtynsky specializes in sweeping, often eerily beautiful views of landscapes altered by industry: mine tailings, quarries, scrap piles. James Fallows, of the Atlantic, which features another of Burtynsky's images this month, writes:
The impact of the exhibit as a whole is, well, hard to convey in words.... [V]ery few people have seen the range of oil-industry artifacts that he has captured in his wall-sized and incredibly-detailed photos. Extraction and refinery operations around the world; the industries oil has made possible; the indications of the end of the oil era. Hard to forget.
The exhibit moves next to The Rooms Art Gallery in St. John's, Newfoundland, where it will be on display from May 7–August 15, 2010. It will continue to travel through 2012. More photos and a video after the jump.
28 November, 2009

A funny thing happened to Jeff White of the Halifax design group Brightwhite during a well-received traveling seminar sponsored by Economic and Rural Development Nova Scotia last month. In Guysborough Town, the seminar took place in the local school. All was going well until White began his presentation on social marketing for small business. [B]ecause we were in a school, all the main social media sites were blocked by the school board firewall! The principal summoned a Grade 7 nerd, who showed me how to bypass the blockage, and off we went. I'll seriously never understand why schools do their best to make...

08 November, 2009

Contrarian reader Cliff White writes: I'm in Quebec at the moment and, as you can imagine, the deal with New Brunswick is playing very well here.  I can't see how this won't turn out to be a very bad deal for New Brunswick in the long term, similar to, but eventually worse then, the one Newfoundland agreed to under Smallwood. At the time Smallwood signed the Churchill Falls deal, it looked pretty good, given the cost of energy at the time.  The problem arose when energy prices went up dramatically and Quebec refused to renegotiate. The length of the agreement meant that...

30 October, 2009

[caption id="attachment_2855" align="alignleft" width="320" caption="Kempt Head, Nova Scotia"][/caption]...

30 October, 2009

Marcos Weskamp, a design engineer and "self-taught technologist" who likes to play with data visualization, has created a treemap display of Google News. Newsmap shows stories as blocks on a grid. The size of the block reflects a story's rating in Google's search algorithm. The color of a block reflects its broad subject matter (world, national,business, technology, sports, entertainment, health), selectable with tabs along the bottom. The country of origin can be selected from tabs along the top (like the "Can" tab highlighted in the example above). Rolling your cursor over a block produces pop-up text like the white box...

27 October, 2009

Going to Mars isn't easy, although the mission success rate has improved since the 1960s. In chronological order (counter-clockwise from top-left), missions to the red planet are color-coded by country, with the longest lines representing the most sophisticated missions. (Even old-fashioned bar graphs can be compelling in the hands of a sharp designer.) Hat tip: FlowingData.com via FastCompany.com via WeLoveDatavis. Original source unknown....

26 October, 2009

Contrarian reader Andrew Bourke flags the droll consumer reviews of the Playmobil Security Checkpoint on the Amazon website (scroll way down). Moneyquote: I was a little disappointed when I first bought this item, because the functionality is limited. My 5 year old son pointed out that the passenger's shoes cannot be removed. Then, we placed a deadly fingernail file underneath the passenger's scarf, and neither the detector doorway nor the security wand picked it up. My son said "that's the worst security ever!". But it turned out to be okay, because when the passenger got on the Playmobil B757 and tried...

20 October, 2009

Five talented office workers with questionable taste in music: ...

17 October, 2009
The Offshore/Onshore Technologies Association of Nova Scotia (OTANS) invited Contrarian to chair the Regional Energy Strategy panel at its annual CORE (Canadian Offshore Resources Exhibition) Conference this week, and that give him an excuse to make a speech.
To anyone who has looked at the challenges climate change poses for our region, it’s obvious that one key is to improve our regional energy infrastructure. It’s also obvious that doing so will be an expensive venture, and it’s far from clear how much of the expense will be shouldered by government and its taxpayers, and how much by private corporations, their shareholders, and their customers. Decisions about these matters will be made in an atmosphere of mild public concern about climate, great public resistance to increased costs, and little to no public or political understanding of risk assessment.
Full text after the jump.
09 October, 2009

Contrarian reader Bill Long writes: Thanks for jogging my memory about the amazing Mr. Smith. Back in my introductory days to the interwebs, his site, Nova Scotia's Electronic Attic, was one of the first to boggle my mind at the possibilities for citizen participation in information gathering and dissemination. Good to know he's still kicking. It amazes Contrarian how often Ivan's simple, low-tech, but voluminous site pops up near the top of Google searches on important topics. For example, it edges out Wikipedia for first place in a search for "Nova Scotia history." ...

09 October, 2009
Show more
Loading...