A sense of wonder at 200X
Rosa Donham, age 4, got a USB microscope for Christmas. This week, she began photographing some of her favorite objects around the house, including this one: It's the mouth of a sand dollar....
13 January, 2011
Good morning, Valerie
A visitor finds its way to the mayor's house in Ross Ferry: ...
17 November, 2010
A climate change believer praises clean coal
China hand James Fallows expends a lot of time and words reassuring Americans that China is not the unstoppable, omnipotent superpower they fear it to be. Reality is more complicated, he argues, especially when viewed up close, from within China, where he has spent years. However, a Fallows cover story in the current Atlantic warns of one technology in which China is leaving the west in its dust: the quest for ways to burn coal without emitting carbon. In exhorting the west to greater effort in pursuit of clean coal, Fallows takes aim at one of the environmental movement's most sacred bovines: the...
13 November, 2010
Shark bait
[Updated below.] An adventure-vacationer has drawn Internet notice with his first-person account of surviving a shark attack while spear fishing in the Exuma Cays, a district of the Bahamas. Surviving to tell the story obliges me to do so José Mollá's New Age musings about the greater meaning of the episode conclude with this: Seeing a fin in the water is not nearly as alarming as not seeing that we spend our lives worrying about what’s irrelevant. I’m convinced that the shark didn’t come to take a piece of me but instead to leave me with something. A kind of wisdom that I...
07 November, 2010
Actress, restaurateur oppose environmental science
Another media outlet has presented admiring coverage of the campaign by Halifax restaurateur Lil MacPherson and Halifax actress Ellen Page to oppose something one might expect environmentally conscious citizens to campaign for: the productive recycling of composted human waste as a worthy alternative to dumping it, semi-treated, in the ocean. A Contrarian reader describes today's Herald story as: One-sided journalism at its worst. Lil MacPherson is not an environmental scientist. Ellen Page is not an environmental scientist. Nowhere in the entire story is there any effort to present the case in favour of biosolids. Even the headline “Rising in defence of province’s...
28 October, 2010
Those clever nuthatches
When I posted Peter Barss's photos of tool-using nuthatches, it struck me as remarkable that two different species were using the same tool in the same location on the same day. I wondered if there could be some teaching and learning at work here, but figured I was getting getting over my head, animal behaviour-wise. Contrarian reader Bill Matheson had the same thought: You may also have evidence here, even if anecdotal, to suggest cross-species cultural transmission of tool use. The red-breasted nuthatch seems to be gifted at learning from other species, according to the Nuthatch article on Wikipedia: "The Red-breasted Nuthatch,...
05 October, 2010
Avian tool use in West Dublin
For a long time, we humans flattered ourselves with the belief that tool use was among our defining and exclusive traits. In the last decades of the 20th Century, we grudgingly conceded the franchise — first to primates, then elephants, cetaceans, and birds. But who knew we had tool-using songbirds right here in Nova Scotia? Sunday afternoon, two nuthatches, one red-breasted, one white-breasted, transformed a stump in West Dublin, Nova Scotia, into a vice. The birds wedged sunflower seeds into a crack in the stump, thus freeing their beaks to peck open the firmly secured meals. Few things annoy the Contrarian more...
04 October, 2010
The biosolidity of Ellen Page
If the admirable Ellen Page* wants to contribute to the environment of her home province, she might consider pressuring the Dexter government to rethink its politically expedient decision to delay regulations to control mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants. Mercury is a dangerous element with well-known impacts on human health, especially the health of young children. The province and Nova Scotia Power have known about their obligation to clean up mercury emissions for years, if not decades. [Disclosure: both NSP and the NS Govt. have been my clients.] The government's decision to back away from that legislated commitment in the...
17 August, 2010
Visual data: seismic forerunners of Eyjafjallajökull
Datamarket.com has animated the earthquakes that prefigured Iceland's unpronounceable volcano. [Embedded below or vis this link.] Earthquakes and Eruptions in Iceland 2010 from hjalli on Vimeo....
17 August, 2010
Visual data: 2053 nuclear blasts
Isao Hashimoto, a Japanese foreign exchange dealer turned multimedia artist, has produced this bird's eye history of the nuclear era in the form of an animated timeline map showing the 2053 nuclear explosions set off by seven nations between 1945 and 1998. Each second represents one month. Hashimoto used no letters in the film, so speakers of any language can follow it. In the last two minutes of the video, each nation's explosions are highlighted in turn, by location. Hashimoto drew on data assembled by Nils Olaf Bergkvist and Ragnhild Ferm, and co-published by the Swedish Defence Research Establishment and te Stockholm International...
15 August, 2010