It’s been 15 years since my one and only contribution to the Confluence Project, an achievement I savour to this day. The goal of the online repository is ambitious, but seemingly simple: to store photos—and perhaps a little travel story—from the intersection of every integer degree of longitude and latitude in the world. So far, […]
What parent hasn’t felt this grim determination at some point during the marathon that is modern, village-less childrearing? I instantly fell in love with this statue on a visit to Moscow (en route to the Kabardino-Balkarian Republic to visit a physics lab under a mountain). I can’t seem to find any information about the sculpture […]
This originally appeared in 2015. There’s a popular myth about Dutch last names that goes like this: When Napoleon occupied the Netherlands and instituted a family name registry, only the upper classes had such names already in use. A significant subset took the opportunity to protest foreign rule by registering under silly names like “Born […]
Artificial Intelligence historian Pamela McCorduck has died. Author of Machines Who Think: A Personal Inquiry into the History and Prospects of Artificial Intelligence and other seminal works, I had a request in to interview her for a number of projects but never heard back. Now I know why. In a pitch for a Netflix show, […]
This week I received an email from an R&D engineer at Canada’s National Research Council. Hossein Babaei and his team in the Ocean, Coastal and River Engineering division have been doing computational modelling of the ways in which the ice in an ice road deforms under the tyres of slow-moving versus speeding trucks. They then […]
I recently took an ultra-fun workshop run by the Queen of Shitty Robots, Simone Giertz. It’s the second of hers I’ve done, the first being a lightening round of Lego Mindstorm building to create robots that would then be raced against each other over the distance of one meter. This time, we were creating robot […]
This month I left Ottawa for the first time in years. It was marvelous to be somewhere else, doing something else, for once. It was not quite as marvelous to be in transit again. There’s nothing as boring as travel delay stories, but here’s a flavour of the experience: People were taking photos of the […]
Canada’s politics are stable enough that I can afford to be, more or less, a single-issue voter. Six years ago, I wrote to the incoming member of parliament for my riding – a candidate for whom I did not vote. “Dear Ms. McKenna: Congratulations on your new position as our Member of Parliament. My parents […]