All ten images here. Maybe some Contrarian readers have similar photos they’d like to share from this side of the Atlantic.

H/T: Alison Nastasi

I bought a lot of books on line in the run-up to Christmas, and I was struck by how much quicker Amazon was able to get them to me than Chapters. When I tweeted this observation, a fellow tweep chided me — of all people — for not patronizing local bookstores.

I like a nice bookstore as much as the next fellow. Who doesn’t enjoy wandering through the stacks at J. W. Doull’s, feeling the stairs creak underfoot, talking books with the marvellous staff he employs. But it’s no accident that John Doull can no longer afford the rent in downtown Halifax. Book buyers have voted with their feet, and Amazon is winning by a landslide.

Just as iTunes represents a much better way of buying music than the old customer-contemptuous, $20-album-in-a-record-store model, so Amazon beats the pants off the bookstore model.

That impression came early and easily to me, because I live in a bookstore desert. The nearest bookstore, a bedroom sized Coles, is an hour away, and rarely stocks the books I seek. So my normal bookstore experience is to drive an hour, go to an ill-stocked store where an ill-informed clerk will tell me they don’t have what I want, place an order, drive an hour home, and repeat the round trip a week or two later when the desired volume comes in, or fails to.

Or I can sit in my living room, tap a few keys on my laptop, and have the book delivered to my house a few days later, for less than I would pay in the bookstore. Sure, I’ll miss the creaky stores, and I’ll seriously miss the wonderful people who staffed these institutions. But I’m fine with the new method, and I get more books, quicker and cheaper, as a result.

On the Tuesday before Christmas, I heard an NPR podcast about a new biography of Leonardo of Pisa, aka Fibonacci, who revolutionized modern commerce by introducing Arabic numerals to Western Europe, thereby enhancing the computing power of ordinary citizens more than anyone before Steve Jobs invented the personal computer. This would make a great present for my math-inspired son, but I’d never be able to get it by Christmas,

I checked on line. Both Amazon and Chapters had the book, but only Amazon claimed the ability to delivery it by Friday, the last delivery day before Christmas, and only if I paid an exorbitant amount for special shipping. I bit, and at about 4:30, hit Amazon’s buy button.

The package was delivered in Halifax at 10:30 the next morning, This was a miracle on a par with the Dollar Store. I’ve been puzzling ever since about how Amazon (or LL Bean, or Zappos, or Staples) can manage these feats of order processing. Today, a new TED talk appeared that explains part of the mystery.

The TED talker, Mick Mountz, founded Kiva Systems, a material handling company that is revolutionizing warehouse management by replacing conveyors with little orange robots shown at the top of the page. In action, they look like suitcase-sized Zambonis. Instead of stock pickers wandering around the warehouse, looking for products to assemble into orders, the bots bring the products to the pickers, who pack them into boxes for shipment.

They do this by moving whole shelves around the warehouse, their patterns controlled by algorithms that learn as they go, so the process continually improves. In effect, it turns a warehouse into a massively parallel processing machine, not unlike a computer. Watch the video for the fascinating details.

My father is 64 years old. He’s been riding his bike more than 120,000 km. And he keeps going. I dedicate this film to him.

More on Guillaume here and here.

Here’s the TK Bremen shortly after it grounded on Kerminihy Beach, near Erdeven, Brittany, France, on December 11. 2011.

And here’s the M/V Miner after it grounded on Scatarie Island, Cape Breton, after a towing cable parted on September 14, 2011.

The much larger Miner was under tow, bound for a scrapyard in Aliaga, Turkey. Here are the two ships’ specifications:

The Bremen was much more accessible than the Miner, having grounded on a mainland beach, while the Miner fetched up on remote, unpopulated, forbidding Scatarie Island. Though very different, the two areas share one thing in common besides shipwrecks: The dunes adjacent to Kerminihy Beach are a nature preserve, and Scatarie is a provincially protected wilderness area.

There the similarities end. As detailed in a photo spread on TheAtlantic.com website, 40 men worked day and night for two weeks to dismantle the Bremen and clean up the beach, at a cost of nearly €10 million euros (CDN$13.2 million).

“One month after the wreck,” reports The Atlantic, “the cleanup process is nearly complete.”

The French cleanup began:

The work continued:

Here’s all that remained of the TK Bremen as of Monday:

I won’t attempt to draw any lessons. I’m no expert, and the Miner is a much larger vessel in a much dicier location. But it may be worth noting that three weeks after the Miner went aground, NS Premier Darrell Dexter hadn’t been able to get any federal agency to take charge of the disaster. And I can’t recall any Canadian shipwreck being cleaned up the way France cleaned up the Bremen, let alone in two weeks flat.

Makes you wonder.

The website Boatnerd.com details numerous collisions, groundings, and accidents experienced by the Miner its previous incarnations as the Canadian Miner, the LeMoyne, and the Maplecliffe Hall. More information about the Miner here and here, and about the Bremen here, here, and here.

* According to Boatnerd, the Miner’s Canadian registry was cancelled last June. I was unable to determine its registry for the aborted trip to Turkey.

How a tightly paywalled, social-media-ignoring, anti-copy-paste, gossipy news site became a dominant force in Nova Scotia

Every morning, the business and political elite in the biggest province on Canada’s East Coast turns to an unlikely source of information about their own world.

Among all the online news organizations trying to find a way to profitability, consider AllNovaScotia.com, which has just celebrated 10 years online and now challenges its historic print rival for the attention of the province’s leaders.

It’s done that by not following the rules: It has a nearly impenetrable paywall, no social media presence, no multimedia, and only rare use of links. It doesn’t cover crime and barely covers sports and entertainment.

It is astounding that AllNS has succeeded so throughly while flouting so many Internet conventions—astounding, and often irritating. I wish it were less paywalled and more open to the sociable aspects of the web that seem to me enlivening and enriching. But this is a position publisher David Bentley and his editor-daughter Caroline Woods view with ill-disguised contempt.

it’s hard to argue with the results. AllNovaScotia doesn’t prove that other models can’t work on the internet, but it affirms something at least as ennobling: that there can be a profitable market for dogged, meaty reporting.

Commenter Gavin Anderegg shares my irritation at the deliberate impediments to sharing, but adds:

I was missing the point while focusing the platform. This site wasn’t for me. Sure they could fix these issues (and probably should), but all everyone else cared about was the content. And for such an aged looking site that doesn’t care about social media, AllNovaScotia beats Twitter to the punch when delivering certain types of local news.

After a while I started to understand: people are willing to pay read well written, properly investigated, and timely content. This is especially true when you can identify a niche group and write specifically for them.

Content comes first at AllNovaScotia. That’s the key.

The 1,700-word piece is written by King’s journalism professor Tim Currie and [disclosure] briefly quotes Contrarian.

The critical issue is: Which part of the board should players of varying skills aim for?

Should they aim for the triple 20, with a big payout on a success, but a low score from a miss? Or, should they aim for the bullseye?

Alternatively, is there some other optimal location on the board they can aim for that, whilst not the highest scoring region, has a large expanse of middle-of-the-road point values. Would aiming for this region, even with an inaccurate shot, get a reasonable number of points such that, on average, the expected score is the highest that can be achieved?

The true answer to this riddle, as we will see, is that “it depends…”

The optimal strategy for aiming depends on your skill as darts player. A very skillful player should aim for the middle of the triple 20; Much of the time he will hit his target, and the times he misses will be few enough that his average score will still be high.

A very poor player should aim close to the bullseye, as just hitting the board will be an achievement (and a scoring one at that!). Aiming for the center maximizes the chances of hitting something.

But what happens between these two extreme?

Serious darts buffs should check up the whole fascinating post.

Non-dart-chucker Derek Andrews detects a flaw in Barry’s analysis:

It seems to assume that standard deviation would be the same in both vertical and horizontal directions.

It has been many years since I threw a dart, but I seem to think that my horizontal aim is much better than my vertical aim, the latter relying heavily on a good sense for the weight and balance of the projectile.

H/T: Nathan Yao

Videography by James O’Garra. H/T John Hugh Edwards.

From the moment I first stepped inside one, I have regarded dollar stores as miraculous institutions, unappreciated by the cognoscenti. In this morning’s New York Times, reporter Jesse McKinley describes how he outfitted his new apartment in Albany, NY, entirely from items purchased at  the various dollar stores that abound in the area (with a slide show). The daring Mr. McKinley does not observe my only rule of dollar store consumption: Avoid items intended to be ingested.

Organized by English Professor Devendra P. Varma, a renowned Dracula-lit buff, the goth-before-its-time conference boasted “the largest gathering of vampire experts ever presented in Canada,” and featured a screening of the classic 1931 movie Dracula, starring Bela Lugosi.

The Himalayan-born Varma, who died in 1994, was apparently quite a character. According to Oostveen, he “had a ten­dency to believe in con­spir­a­cies, secret police, and other forces” who, he believed, harboured an unsavoury interest in his collection of vampire books and memorabilia. At his insistence, “the really important stuff” was kept in a locked cabinet at the departmental library.

Time passes, [and] the library peri­od­i­cally asks about his use of their space, does he really need this secure storage, and so on. He says yes, and the cab­inet gets moved a few times as the library moves divi­sions and departments.

The Berlin wall falls, the world is more open, evil forces are in retreat, and Varma decides he can take home his trove of vam­pire doc­u­ments and literature.

He comes to the library with the one and only key, and of course, it’s an empty cabinet.”

Oostveen professes not to know who to blame for the pilferage: Abraham van Helsing or Dracula. I suspect Cletus Hollohan had a hand in it.

H/T: Silas