Plenty of Nothing

Palladian Bit

Sackville Under Water, 2055

A 2012 publication of the Atlantic Climate Adaptation Solutions Association, entitled Adapting to Climate Change: Infrastructure at Risk, Tantramar Marsh, New Brunswick (available as a PDF here) includes this map projecting the effect of a once-in-ten-year flood on the town of Sackville in the year 2055, when sea levels will be higher. The Tantramar Marsh, Trans-Canada Highway, CN tracks, and much of the downtown are beneath the waves. The inhabitants of Sackville are no different than other humans, which means they probably won't do much about it until too late, but now would be a good time to begin shifting the town uphill. Step One: rezone. Compare this projection.

Pedestrian Cage

Academic Corner

Montagnais Impact Crater

The Montagnais Impact Crater is 50 million years old, and at 45 km in diameter is the 19th-largest known impact crater on Earth, and it's only about 200 km SSW of Halifax. Map source.

Dalhousie College Then and Now

Keep to the Right

On this date in 1923 all traffic in Nova Scotia switched from the left side of the road to the right. Read about it here and here.

By coincidence, three of the last four posts use 'float image right', which is the most annoying and unwieldy option on Typepad and therefore not very common on Plenty of Nothing.

Crocuses of 2013

Amphibious

Barrington School

I've been trying without much success* to figure out the history of this building where I went for Grade Six in 1970-71. I'm pretty sure it had the name Barrington School while I was there. To a kid whose previous school had been younger than himself, this place seemed like a time machine -- a very very dilapidated time machine with a severe case of dry rot. It didn't help his sense of displacement any when on the first day the teacher showed up dressed like a Gibson Girl, with puffed sleeves, a floor-length skirt, and piled-up hair, as was the fashion briefly in 1970. This postcard is dated 1913, but the schoolyard life was just the same in my day, though the ground was less green and more the colour of furnace clinkers and broken bottles. The view was about the same too. The red building on the left is Carmen United Church, which still stands. The square yellow building on the right is the town hall, which I think existed in 1970 but is gone now. There is another picture of the school here showing that it predates the 1906 construction of the church. When was the school demolished? I'd like to know. The site, in the triangle formed by Main and King Streets and Clyde Avenue, now contains the more modern D W Archibald School. D

*The History of Sydney Mines published in 1990 is no help at all.