Wireless telegraphy isn’t difficult to understand, Albert Einstein once said. The regular telegraph is like a very long cat; you pull its tail in New York and it meows in Los Angeles. Wireless telegraphy is just the same, only without the cat. That being the case, the world is filling with more and more non-existent …
Category: Blog
Volunteers: vital to Canadian arts
When most people attend a performance of some kind, their attention is naturally focused on the performers–the people on stage singing or dancing or acting or reading from their novel or poetry collection. And that’s all well and good–those people worked hard to get there–but there’s another group of people that work just as hard …
Canadians vie for the X-Prize
Human beings have been going into space for 40 years, riding vast amounts of U.S. or Russian government money, poured into massive rockets that are mostly thrown away after one use. But many people think this is a terrible way to go into space. If we want to make space truly accessible (at a cost …
Paleoclimatology
This week an international expedition set out for Mt. Logan, Canada’s highest mountain (and yes, it’s still Mt. Logan, not Mt. Trudeau) to attempt to travel through time: to look back 10,000 years to see how climate has changed over the millennia–and how human activities are affecting climate now. Two Canadian scientists will climb to …
Hypersonic flight
Less than a hundred years ago, the Wright Brothers made the first powered airplane flight. Next month, NASA will fly a whole new type of airplane, faster than anything that has flown to date: not just supersonic (faster than the speed of sound) but hypersonic (MUCH faster than the speed of sound). Of course, NASA …
Food coatings
Most people prefer shiny apples to dull ones, crisp French fries to soggy ones, and fresh nuts to stale ones. Enter food coatings. Some are visible and some are invisible, but they’re on much of the food you buy, keeping it fresh-tasting and -looking longer. It’s not easy. After all, the coating has to be …
The Saskatchewan Film Pool: bringing filmmakers together
It’s not easy being an independent filmmaker. Of all the art forms, film is one of the most expensive, requiring specialized equipment and facilities. But filmmaking is like any other complicated endeavor: it gets easier when you pool resources with other individuals involved in the same pursuit. That’s the philosophy behind the Saskatchewan Filmpool Cooperative. …
Lucid dreaming
I enjoy my dreams, which are typically full of James-Bond/science-fictional elements. Sometimes they’re so exciting I regret waking up and not finding out how they end. Maybe I don’t have to. Apparently it’s possible to learn to direct your dream while you’re in it. It’s called lucid dreaming, and researchers at Stanford University have developed …
Purring
I’m a cat person. Don’t get me wrong; I like dogs. But I like cats more. (It’s an odd thing: although many dog people absolutely hate cats, I’ve seldom met a cat person who hates dogs. But that’s probably a topic for another column.) One of the nicest features of a cat is its purr. …
Perfect pitch
The Harding University A Cappella Chorus, when I sang with it, seldom relied on pitch pipe or tuning fork to pitch songs. Instead, we relied on Eve, who hummed pitches as needed–ask her for an A or a C-sharp, and she could produce it, accurately, out of thin air. Eve was one of the estimated …
Neutral Ground: art from the edge
“Edgy” is an adjective frequently used–maybe overused–these days to describe everything from movies to fashion. The avant-garde, it seems, has become just another marketing niche. But the concept of the avant-garde has a long and honorable history in the art world, where artists are always seeking to be on the edge, to provoke and disturb, …
Plant communication
“I talk to the trees, but they don’t listen to me…” sings one of the characters in the musical Paint Your Wagon. Maybe he’s just not speaking the right language. Far from being inert lumps, plants can and do communicate–both with other plants, and, interestingly, with insects. Of course, we’re not talking Shakespearean sonnets or …
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