If the earth were only 100 pixels wide (instead of 12,756 kms.), what would the distance to Mars look like? Two British designers, Jesse Williams and David Paliwoda, have devised a neat interactive animation to show you the answer, along with how far it is to a GPS satellite and the moon. . Don't stop here. Click on the image (or here) to see the animation for yourself. Hint:  Even at an impossible 3x the speed of light, it's a long way off. ("And we put a piece of equipment on it," my friend Jeff P. observed in wonderment.) H/T:  Flowing Data  ...

08 April, 2013

Last week, I posted a photo of Contrarian's home turf that Chris Hadfield, 35th Commander of the International Space Station, had taken from 370 kilometres overhead. An avid photographer, Hadfield has produced scores of images depicting locations all over the earth, including at least 10 of Nova Scotia sites.* You may already know what I managed to miss: that geographer David MacLean and his students at the College of Geographic Sciences in Lawrencetown, NS, have created a database of Hadfield's images (and some by fellow astronaut Thomas H. Marshburn) that you can access through a wonderful, interactive map. MacLean has been kind enough to let...

07 April, 2013

In a prescient book published a quarter century ago, when few people had heard of the internet, Carolyn Marvin, a professor of communications at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication, catalogued the fear and loathing with which newspapers greeted the advent of the telegraph and the telephone. High on the list of perceived horrors was the inevitable moral degradation of women. Old media are still at it, constantly warning us to be very afraid of the perils lurking in the internet, computers, smart phones, cell phones, etc. The magazine Pacific Standard gamely took note of this handwringing today with an article...

04 April, 2013

Less than an hour ago, from his perch aboard the International Space Station, Cmdr. Chris Hadfield posted this photo of Contrarian's Kempt Head, Boularderie Island, home. (Just incidentally, the photo also shows the ice of Baddeck Bay, from which Alexander Graham Bell's research team flew Canada's first powered aircraft, the Silver Dart, in 1909, a factoid Hadfield happened to mention.) For the geographically challenged, Boularderie Island is the slender finger of land extending in from the right edge of the photo. Kempt Head forms the island's southwestern tip, and is the name applied to the community that occupies the portion of the island...

04 April, 2013

National Geographic has been publishing gorgeous photographs for 125 years, so starting a Tumblr feed seems a natural step for the dowdy journal. One of the first entries features Mabel Gardiner Hubbard Bell [See update below] inside a tetrahedral kite frame, while her husband, Alexander Graham Bell, leans in for a kiss. Doesn't it just make you wish you had known these two? Dated October 10 16, 1903, this photo surely must have been taken at Beinn Bhreagh. Click on the image to see the full-sized version. *UPDATE: It appears there is controversy about whether the woman in this photo is Mabel...

29 March, 2013

Do wind farms make some people sick? Or do false claims of a connection between wind farms and illness make people sick? The question arises because opponents of wind farms often contend they cause illness, but scientific studies have consistently found little or no evidence to support such a connection. [This report by Ontario's Chief Medical Officer of Health is typical.*] Now a team of public health researchers at the University of Sydney in Australia has collected every known public complaint of wind farm-induced illness in that country (those filed with the wind companies themselves, those filed with three government commissions, and those...

17 March, 2013

I thought I'd witnessed an impressive milestone in the annals of retail marketing Sunday when I came upon a BestBuy vending machine in Halifax's Stanfield Airport that dispenses iPads. Two hours later, in the Icelandair departure lounge at Boston's Logan Airport, Brookstone trumped BestBuy with its display of personal helicopter drones. For US$299, you can have your own Parrot AR Drone Quadricopter, equipped with two HD video cameras (one facing front and the other pointing earthward), all controlled by an app on your iPhone or iPad. Steve from the Brookstone store gave Balgovind Pande and me a demo: [Video link] Parrot claims battery life sufficient for...

28 January, 2013

A Contrarian reader recently added Pope Benedict XVI's new Twitter account to his Twitter feed. Whenever a user follows someone new, Twitter responds by suggesting a similar person they might also like to follow. Who is similar to His Holiness? Why Charlie Sheen, of course.   Ah the wonders of social technology. Twitter doesn't say exactly which qualities the pontiff and the thespian share. Surely not substance abuse or cohabitation with porn stars. Problems with anger management could be a possibility, but our money is on having children removed from your care for their own protection. H/T: SBD...

25 January, 2013

If you're anything like me, your conception of the human heart comes from text book line drawings and plastic models in doctors' offices. To create a more useful, virtual model, the Barcelona Supercomputing Center used 10,000 parallel processors. The beating heart turns out to be a phenomenally complex electromechanical apparatus—wondrous, and almost spooky, to behold. The center recently released a video simulation, although based on a rabbit's heart rather than a human's. From Emily Underwood via Alexis Madrigal. Journal articles: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cnm.1494/full http://www.bsc.es/computer-applications/alya-red-cc  ...

03 January, 2013
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