Even after Saskatchewan became a province, the majority of its traffic was horse-drawn: in 1906, there were just 22 motor vehicles registered in Saskatchewan. I’m writing about the building of the Saskatchewan road network, the most extensive of any province in Canada. (Something around 190,000 kilometres.)
The Canadian Arrow team, erstwhile X-Prize contenders, has been quietly working on a orbital transport.
I enjoyed this article on Forrest J. Ackerman, the “father of sci-fi” (so-called because he coined the word “sci-fi,” for which I have magnanimously forgiven him); I had the privilege of meeting Forry at the World Science Fiction Convention in Chicago in 2000.
Why, yes I did: my four-year-old daughter, Alice. Of course, I just might be biased… Naw.
I know this company just bought the name, but I’m feeing nostalgic all of a sudden, as I remember my first computer, a Commodore 64 (with a floppy drive, it set me back around $1,500 Canadian), my second computer, also a Commodore 64 (the first one died) and my third computer, a Commodore 128. Those …
“You can’t get there from here,” goes the punchline to an old joke, but in Saskatchewan, you usually can, thanks to the largest road system in Canada—more than 190,000 kilometres of roads. The topic, of course, is the building of Saskatchewan’s roads.
A British inventor has come up with a ramp that generates about 10 kilowatts of electricity every time a car passes over it. Think how much energy you could recover from a busy street! This is one of those “why didn’t I think of that?” devices. (Via Jalopnik.)
Saskatchewan is known as a windy place: there’s an old joke that “In Saskatchewan we don’t really call it windy unless we can see whitecaps on our bathwater.” The topic: SaskPower’s Centennial Windpower Project.
…you’ll want to keep an eye on Mars: The International Journal of Mars Science and Exploration, a brand-new peer-reviewed online open access scholarly journal. Known informally simply as The Mars Journal, this is the first scholarly journal devoted strictly to Mars-related science, technology and policy.
Dispatches from the Final Frontier has details of that Virgin Galactic/New Mexico spaceport deal. Anybody got a couple of hundred thousand dollars they’d like to give me?
A major engineering project is always a challenge, but that challenge is heightened when the project happens to be located deep in Saskatchewan’s northern wilderness. The topic: the Island Falls hydroelectric plant, Saskatchewan’s first hydroelectric facility, built in 1930.
Should you be one of those who receives a lump of coal in your stocking this Christmas, don’t despair and think you’ve been bad: Santa may just be urging you to give thanks for a remarkable resource which, among other things, may well be powering the lights on your Christmas tree. Coal is fossil plant …
