In 2000, the Jazzland amusement park opened on filled-in swampland at the eastern edge of New Orleans. Purchased and re-branded two years later by the giant Six Flags amusement park chain, the park closed in 2005 as Hurricane Katrina bore down on it, and never reopened. Various photographers have infiltrated the site and produced eerie photos of the defunct place of fun, 75 of which form a phantasmagorical display at the lovethesepics website. Wrote one photographer: I spotted the haunted lines of its empty roller coaster from the Ninth Ward off Interstate 510 while playing tourist in 2009 and begged a friend...

26 June, 2011

A tweet by Brent Gohde alerted me to a spectacular, and apparently unusual solar storm that took place early Tuesday morning. A medium sized flare, the kind that usually escapes from the surface and brings "solar weather" to Earth a few days later, erupted around 1:30 a.m. Atlantic time. But the solar filament that resulted didn't quite achieve escape velocity, so it plunged back to the surface with a splash that covered half the sun's diameter. [Direct video link here] Wired Magazine reported: “I’ve never seen anything like it before,” said NASA solar physicist Jack Ireland...

08 June, 2011

Friends of Contrarian know that in recent years I've had several occasions to visit the Faroe Islands, a quirky beautiful demi-country* located halfway between Iceland and Scotland. If you sliced Gros Morne National Park into 18 pieces and plunked them into the North Atlantic, you'd have a pretty good facsimile. With barely 49,000 people, the Faroes don't often hit the news, so my ears tend to perk up when they do. A piece by BBC travel writer Tim Ecott on the network's website offers a charming nugget. While sailing from the Faroese capital of Torshavn to the island of Nolsoy, Ecott...

30 May, 2011

The European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) on Cerro Paranal, a 2,635 m high mountain in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, combines the light from four fixed optical telescopes equipped with 8.2 meter (27 foot) lenses with that from four moveable auxiliary telescopes equipped with 1.8 meter (6 foot) lenses to produce images of the southern sky with a resolution of one milliarcsecond. This means it could distinguish the gap between the headlights of a Ford pickup parked on the Moon (if they had Fords on the Moon, and no winter parking ban). The observatory's José Francisco Salgado and...

30 May, 2011

A cedar waxwing feeds on red maple blossoms in Sydney Sunday morning. Photo: Teresa McNutt...

29 May, 2011

Ross Ferry resident Jeannie Ferguson puts April and May in perspective: If Nova Scotia had better weather, we couldn't afford to live here....

29 May, 2011

In the media landscape, there are climate change believers and climate change deniers, but rarely actual climate scientists. And never climate scientists this cool. [Not suitable for all workplaces.] Those with Flash-impaired devices, click here. H/T: Daily Dish...

18 May, 2011

A Nova Scotian who spent close to half his life in Quebec writes: Harper's undoing is Jean Charest. Quebecers know they are going to throw out the scandal-plagued Charest as soon as they can, but they can't do this with a strong BQ in Ottawa because it throws the federalist-nationalist balance out of whack. Quebecers like to balance a strong federalist parliament in Ottawa with a nationalist Assembly in QC, and vice versa. They can't vote Liberal on Monday because, well, Liberals are screwing up in QC. They also know that Harper can't be seen to kowtow to Quebec, so they'd rather...

30 April, 2011

Take a break from the election with this new video from NPR's Radiolab: H/T: Silas...

25 April, 2011

Contrarian reader DCM kindly corrects the party colors on my Google Trends Election Chart, and look who's taken over the lead: Produced from Google's trend tool, the chart shows Google searches in April from within Canada for the full names (firstname + lastname) of Canada's five party leaders. Previous (non-color corrected) instalment here....

24 April, 2011
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