I have two questions:

1. Pedestrians: How do you view widening the pedestrian crossing by three metres, especially if it is combined with stopping the right turn on red? (My own view is that the right turn on red should be prohibited regardless; we should do away with right turn on red everywhere in the urban area.)

2. Now we know why the Bridge Commission trucks sit on the ramp — so that staff can make sure ships are clearing the bridge — but what are they supposed to do if the ships don’t clear the bridge? Swim out and pull the ships backward? Search for bodies thrown off the collapsed bridge?

In any event, even if the committee and then the full council agree to the recommended change, detailed designing and implementation wouldn’t happen until after the Cogswell Interchange is torn down and rebuilt as surface streets.

“If,” writes Blay, “upon the completion of the Cogswell Interchange redevelopment project, it’s found that travelling to Dartmouth via the Macdonald Bridge Ramp offers significant time savings, then the design work required to implement this modification could be planned for and included in a future budget year.” That’d be in the year 2020 at the earliest.

3. Shrubsall

“A convicted killer and sexual predator who could have spent his life in Canadian prison was instead back in the United States on Tuesday for a court hearing, as an American prosecutor questioned the Parole Board of Canada’s logic in sending him her way,” reports Michael Tutton for the Canadian Press:

“They made him our problem,” Niagara County District Attorney Caroline Wojtaszek said of 47-year-old William Shrubsall, who fractured one of his victims’ skull with a baseball bat during his spree of violence in Nova Scotia during the late 1990s. … The board’s six-page ruling was based in part on the authors’ belief the offender would “face many more years” of incarceration in Niagara County — where he jumped bail during his trial for sexually abusing a 17-year-old girl in 1996. Wojtaszek questioned that logic, saying there are limits on her ability to incarcerate Shrubsall, who has adopted the name Ethan Simon Templar MacLeod. “There is nothing in that (parole board) decision that would leave society to be any safer than it was when he was first designated a dangerous offender,” she said.

Stephen Kimber discussed Shrubsall here.

4. Pourbaix Diagram

Defence Research and Development Canada (DRDC) is looking for someone to draw a “Pourbaix diagram of Nickel Aluminum Bronze (NAB) alloy in seawater, to aid in the prediction of the integrity of NAB under conditions of crevice corrosion.”

Yeah, I don’t know what a Pourbaix diagram is either. Presumably, however, somebody wearing a pocket protector at one of the universities does know what a Pourbaix diagram is, and can probably do the assigned task:

The Contractor must construct a Pourbaix diagram (Electrochemical Potential versus pH) of the NAB (UNS C95800) in natural seawater (as defined in Section 5.2) at a temperature within the range 10 – 14 °C, showing the thermodynamically stable species at varying pH levels (-2 to 16) and Electrochemical Potential (-2 to 2 Volts) (versus Standard Hydrogen Electrodes (SHE)). The diagram must have pH on the x-axis and Electrochemical Potential on the y-axis, and include all 4 kappa phases, as well as the alpha phase. Note that the alloy composition (as outlined in Section 5.3) and temperature must be held constant.

Through the miracle that is Google dot com, I’ve learned that Nickel Aluminum Bronze “offers superior salt water corrosion resistance. It also is resistant to cavitation and erosion. Along with the advantage of pressure tightness, this high strength alloy is excellent for welding and is available in many forms at a lower cost to you.”

I’ll just assume they’re going to be building missiles with that NAB.

5. Hall of fame

After reading yesterday’s discussion of black face, a reader sent me this photo of Paul O’Regan wearing “brown face.” “And we named a Hall after this dude?” comments the reader, referring to the auditorium at the new Central Library that bears O’Regan’s name . Stephen Plummer. Update: a reader tells me the photo on the Mental Health Foundation of Nova Scotia is captioned incorrectly, and it is Plummer in brown face.

The photo comes from the Mental Health Foundation of Nova Scotia’s “Hall of Fame” webpage that evidently collects photos from various costume parties through the years. The above is from 2005.

I particularly like the 2006 photo, where Rob Steele, Sarah Dennis, Mickey MacDonald, and Danny Chedrawe dress as the pirates they are:

Rich people are weird.

Government

City

Wednesday

Budget Committee (Wednesday, 9:30am, City Hall) — here’s the agenda

Western Common Advisory Committee (Wednesday, 6:30pm, Prospect Road Community Centre) — here’s the agenda

Public Information Meeting -Case 21295 (Wednesday, 7pm, Cafeteria, Auburn Drive High School) — currently, there’s a convenience store at 272 Auburn Drive in Westphal, which is across the street from the parking lot for Auburn High School. In documents submitted to the city, lawyer Lloyd Robbins accuses the store of selling cigarettes to kids, but that’s neither here not there, as the store owner doesn’t own the property. Rather, Robbins wants the property rezoned for his unnamed client, the property owner, so that allowable uses on the site are expanded to include “food take out/variety store, office use including professional business, retail use, day care, medical clinic or personal service shops, and apartments within the existing building.” There’s no actual development application, but in drawings submitted, “bike storage” will be provided, so we know it’s going to be hip and sustainable and such so just approve it already.

Thursday

Transportation Standing Committee (Thursday, 2pm, City Hall) — see #2 above.

Province

Wednesday

No public meetings today.

Thursday

Natural Resources and Economic Development (Thursday, 9am, One Government Place) — a per diem meeting.

On campus

Dalhousie

Wednesday

Thesis Defence, Earth Sciences (Wednesday, 1pm, Room 3107, Mona Campbell Building) — PhD candidate Harold Kuehn will defend his thesis, “Along-trench segmentation and downdip limit of the seismogenic zone at the eastern Alaska-Aleutian subduction zone.”

Official Launch of the new Imhotep’s Legacy Academy Learning Centre and Makerspace(Wednesday, 1pm, Room J134, Sexton Gymnasium Building) — from the listing:

Imhotep’s Legacy Academy (ILA) is dedicated to increasing the representation of traditionally-marginalized students in science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM) studies and careers. ILA, established in 2003, began as a university-community collaboration to build STEM capacity in the African Nova Scotian community, using volunteer professors to train university students who act as mentors to students in junior high and high school.

RSVP here.

Elina Vähälä, Strings Masterclass (Wednesday, 5pm, Room 406, Dalhousie Arts Centre) — catch her Symphony Nova Scotia performance Thursday at 7:30. Her website.

Ethical Considerations for International Volunteers and Interns (Wednesday, 5:30pm, Room 1014, Rowe Building) — Rebecca Tiessen from the University of Ottawa will speak.

Dying with Dignity in Canada (Wednesday, 7pm, Room 105, Weldon Law Building) — Jocelyn Downie will speak.

Thursday

Atlantic Conference on Public Administration (Thursday, 9am, Four Points by Sheraton Hotel, Halifax) — for 200 bucks you could hear Scott Brison speak. Info here.

Six Primrose (Thursday, 7pm, Ondaatje Theatre, Marion McCain Building) — screening and discussion of Halifax director John Hillis’s film.

Saint Mary’s

Thursday

Fateful Decisions: Reckoning with the Climate and the Future (Thursday, 7pm, in the theatre named after a bank in the building named after a grocery store) — Lydia Patton of Virginia Tech will speak. From the listing:

Your friend asks you to accompany her on an expedition to climb Everest. A close friend proposes marriage, and you decide to have a child. After a recruiter visits your high school, you join the military. William James calls these ‘momentous choices,’ and we can call them ‘fateful decisions’. A fateful decision affects all or most of your subsequent decisions. A fateful decision may constrain or open up your future options, make a new life possible or impossible, or enable or rule out your life’s achievements. The current debate over what to do about the changing climate, about nuclear power, and about developing novel technologies, involve fateful decisions. How should citizens, governments, local political entities, and practical reasoners in general handle fateful decisions? Does Earth’s changing climate present a special case even among fateful decisions? How might public discussions of the ethical dimensions of fateful decisions help in making progress on questions of urgent public concern? How might an analysis in terms of ‘fateful decisions’ differ from one focused on ‘risk’?

In the harbour

05:30: Mignon, car carrier, arrives at Autoport from Southampton, England

14:00: Gotland Carolina, oil tanker, arrives at anchorage from Paulsboro, New Jersey

15:00: Nolhanava, ro-ro cargo, arrives at Pier 36 from Saint-Pierre

16:00: Mignon moves to Pier 31

16:00: Atlantic Sail, ro-ro container, arrives at Fairview Cove from Liverpool, England

18:00: Algoma Integrity, bulker, sails from National Gypsum for sea

21:00: Mignon sails for sea

Footnotes

I’m still busy with a project, but I’ll be on The Sheldon MacLeod Show, New 95.7, at 2pm.

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