There was a time when people had memory and machines didn’t. That’s now pretty well reversed. There was a time when making changes in documents, or photographs, was laborious and not for the faint of heart. Today, changing history is trivial– just a couple of buttons. And just wait until AI really gets going. What…
On December 12, 1901 at Signal Hill, Newfoundland, Guglielmo Marconi reported that he had received the world’s first transatlantic radio signal, a series of clicks transmitted from his antenna in England. There was (and remains) some scepticism, so in 1902 he repeated the signaling from Glace Bay, Nova Scotia to England. Either way, Marconi was…
A recent article set me off, not because of its content (it was rather vapid) but because the preppy little princess who authored the thing kept chirping on about “the septuagenarian”, apparently her new favourite word. Septuagenarian? What the heck are “septuagenarians”? Are they custodians of septuagens? Maybe officers in the Roman Senate? Perhaps septuagenarians…
Marshal Ferdinand Jean Marie Foch was, by all accounts, a brilliant and insightful military leader, the Supreme Allied Commander during the last years of World War One. His opinion of airplanes? “They are interesting toys, but of no military value.” Not long before that war, the motorcar had come into vogue, and in many jurisdictions…
Two things caught my attention this week past. First, Mondrian’s “painting” New York City I has been hanging upside down for over seventy-five years, and nobody noticed until now. And the second, not unrelated, is the CUPE strike in Ontario. To be fair to Mondrian and the critics, the “painting” is actually just a whole…
What’s up? Well, waiting times in Canadian emergency rooms are up, for one thing. In fact, waiting times for everything medical in Canada. What else is up? Violence and abuse toward medical personnel is up. Overcrowding is up (Canada ranks 31st of 34 OECD countries in hospital crowding). The number of Canadians without a family…
We’ve always had tyrants, and we always will. Tyrants, after all, are simply extremely successful entrepreneurs who have co-opted their systems to obtain control over most or all of the available human and economic resources. And having done that, “much wants more”, so before long they will wage war, at someone else’s expense, to get…
Saskatchewan’s Ukrainian diaspora has blessed our country richly. Walter Terentiuk was of that stock. Walter never left home without his spiral-bound pocket notebook and a stubby pencil. He’d listen carefully to everything you said, asking insightful questions, and from time to time stop you and take notes. Later, the notes went into his meticulous records,…
There are probably no weasel words quite as slick as “up to”. And they clearly are very effective. Think about it– this language is plastered all over the place: “Get up to 75% off!”. “Kills up to 99.9% of bacteria and viruses!”. “Up to 53% of Americans think Biden should step down.” In order to…
Not that long ago in our history, capital punishment was a popular tourist attraction. The hanging of felons behind the “county gaol” was sure to draw a crowd, and if it could be arranged on a summer evening or weekend, entire families with picnic baskets would show up to watch the bad guy twitch on…