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🔗 Canada 🔗 Minnesota 🔗 Canada/Geography of Canada 🔗 National Register of Historic Places

The northwesternmost point of the Lake of the Woods was a critical landmark for the boundary between U.S. territory and the British possessions to the north. This point was referred to in the Treaty of Paris in 1783 and in later treaties including the Treaty of 1818. This point lies at the corner of the Northwest Angle of Minnesota and is thus the northernmost point in the lower 48 United States. After Canadian Confederation, the point became the basis for the border between Manitoba and Ontario.

The "northwesternmost point" of the lake had not yet been identified when it was referenced in treaties defining the border between the US and Britain; it was simply an easily described abstraction based on a large landmark. The best maps at the time of the original negotiation depicted the lake as a simple oval. However, although the southern portion of the lake is easily mapped, to the north it becomes a complex tangle of bays, peninsulas, and islands, with many adjacent bodies of water separated or connected by narrow isthmuses or straits. An 1822 survey crew declared the referenced point impossible to determine. In 1824, British explorer David Thompson was hired to identify it. Thompson mapped the lake and found four possibilities, but did not conclusively declare one location.

In 1825, German astronomer in British service Dr. Johann Ludwig Tiarks surveyed the lake. Tiarks identified two possibilities for the northwesternmost point on the lake, based on Thompson's maps: the Angle Inlet and Rat Portage. To determine which point was the most northwestern, he drew a line from each point in the southwest-northeast direction. If the line intersected the lake at any point, it was not the most northwestern point, as shown in the example diagram here. Tiarks determined that the only such line that did not intersect the lake was at the edge of a pond on the Angle Inlet. (A 1940 academic study documents this point as being in the immediate vicinity of 49°23′51.324″N 95°9′12.20783″W (NAD83).)

Under the 1783 treaty, the international border would have run due west from this point to the Mississippi River. As this was determined to be geographically impossible (the Mississippi begins further south), under the 1818 treaty the international border instead ran from the point determined by Tiarks, to the 49th parallel. (It was not known at the time whether that was to the north or – in fact – the south.) From there it ran due west to the Rocky Mountains (and later, the Pacific coast).

Tiarks' point, however, created problems, because the 1818 treaty called for the border to run directly north–south from it. South of that point, the channel of the Northwest Angle Inlet meandered east and west, crossing the border five times, thereby creating two small enclaves of water areas totaling two and a half acres that belonged to the United States but were surrounded by Canadian waters. A 1925 treaty addressed this by adopting the southernmost of the points where the channel and the border intersected – approximately 5,000 ft (1,500 m) south of Tiarks' point – as the new "northwesternmost point". The new northwesternmost point thus became 49°23′4.14″N 95°9′11.34″W, based on the NAD27 datum, which is equivalent to 49°23′4.12373″N 95°9′12.20783″W under the modern NAD83 datum.

🔗 Technology 🔗 Canada 🔗 Guild of Copy Editors 🔗 Engineering

A screw drive is a system used to turn a screw. At a minimum, it is a set of shaped cavities and protrusions on the screw head that allows torque to be applied to it. Usually, it also involves a mating tool, such as a screwdriver, that is used to turn it. The following heads are categorized based on commonality, with some of the less-common drives being classified as "tamper-resistant".

Most heads come in a range of sizes, typically distinguished by a number, such as "Phillips #00". These sizes do not necessarily describe a particular dimension of the drive shape, but rather are arbitrary designations.

🔗 United States 🔗 International relations 🔗 Disaster management 🔗 Medicine 🔗 Viruses 🔗 Canada 🔗 Death 🔗 Agriculture 🔗 Mexico

The 2009 flu pandemic or swine flu was an influenza pandemic that lasted from January 2009 to August 2010, and the second of the two pandemics involving H1N1 influenza virus (the first being the 1918–1920 Spanish flu pandemic), albeit a new strain. First described in April 2009, the virus appeared to be a new strain of H1N1, which resulted from a previous triple reassortment of bird, swine, and human flu viruses further combined with a Eurasian pig flu virus, leading to the term "swine flu". According to WHO, the laboratory confirmed death toll is more than 18,036. Meanwhile, some studies estimated that 11 to 21 percent of the global population at the time – or around 700 million to 1.4 billion people (out of a total of 6.8 billion) – contracted the illness. This was more than the number of people infected by the Spanish flu pandemic, but only resulted in about 150,000 to 575,000 fatalities for the 2009 pandemic. A follow-up study done in September 2010 showed that the risk of serious illness resulting from the 2009 H1N1 flu was no higher than that of the yearly seasonal flu. For comparison, the WHO estimates that 250,000 to 500,000 people die of seasonal flu annually.

Unlike most strains of influenza, the Pandemic H1N1/09 virus does not disproportionately infect adults older than 60 years; this was an unusual and characteristic feature of the H1N1 pandemic. Even in the case of previously very healthy people, a small percentage develop pneumonia or acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). This manifests itself as increased breathing difficulty and typically occurs three to six days after initial onset of flu symptoms. The pneumonia caused by flu can be either direct viral pneumonia or a secondary bacterial pneumonia. A November 2009 New England Journal of Medicine article recommended that flu patients whose chest X-ray indicates pneumonia receive both antivirals and antibiotics. In particular, it is a warning sign if a child (and presumably an adult) seems to be getting better and then relapses with high fever, as this relapse may be bacterial pneumonia.

🔗 Aviation 🔗 Canada 🔗 Aviation/aircraft project 🔗 Amateur radio 🔗 Canada/Alberta

Balloon Experiments with Amateur Radio (BEAR) is a series of Canadian-based amateur radio high-altitude balloon experiments by a group of amateur radio operators and experimenters from Sherwood Park and Edmonton, Alberta. The experiments started in the year 2000 and continued with BEAR-9 in 2012 reaching 36,010 metres (118,140 ft).

The balloons are made of latex filled with either helium or hydrogen. All of the BEAR payloads carry a tracking system comprising a GPS receiver, an APRS encoder, and a radio transmitter module. Other experimental payload modules include an Amateur Radio crossband repeater, and a digital camera all of which is contained within an insulated foam box suspended below the balloon. A parachute recovery system is automatically deployed when the balloon bursts at altitude.

🔗 United States 🔗 Oregon 🔗 Canada 🔗 Canada/British Columbia 🔗 Indigenous peoples of North America 🔗 Mythology 🔗 United States/Washington

"Thunderbird and Whale" is an indigenous myth belonging to the mythological traditions of a number of tribes from the Pacific Northwest.

🔗 United States 🔗 Technology 🔗 Aviation 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military aviation 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Canada 🔗 Aviation/aircraft project 🔗 Engineering 🔗 Cold War 🔗 Military history/Military land vehicles 🔗 Military history/Canadian military history

The Avro Canada VZ-9 Avrocar was a VTOL aircraft developed by Avro Canada as part of a secret U.S. military project carried out in the early years of the Cold War. The Avrocar intended to exploit the Coandă effect to provide lift and thrust from a single "turborotor" blowing exhaust out the rim of the disk-shaped aircraft. In the air, it would have resembled a flying saucer.

Originally designed as a fighter-like aircraft capable of very high speeds and altitudes, the project was repeatedly scaled back over time and the U.S. Air Force eventually abandoned it. Development was then taken up by the U.S. Army for a tactical combat aircraft requirement, a sort of high-performance helicopter. In flight testing, the Avrocar proved to have unresolved thrust and stability problems that limited it to a degraded, low-performance flight envelope; subsequently, the project was cancelled in September 1961.

Through the history of the program, the project was referred to by a number of different names. Avro referred to the efforts as Project Y, with individual vehicles known as Spade and Omega. Project Y-2 was later funded by the U.S. Air Force, who referred to it as WS-606A, Project 1794 and Project Silver Bug. When the U.S. Army joined the efforts it took on its final name "Avrocar", and the designation "VZ-9", part of the U.S. Army's VTOL projects in the VZ series.

🔗 Human rights 🔗 Canada 🔗 LGBT studies 🔗 Law Enforcement 🔗 Discrimination

"Fruit machine" is a term for a device developed in Canada by Frank Robert Wake that was supposed to be able to identify gay men (derogatorily referred to as "fruits"). The subjects were made to view pornography; the device then measured the diameter of the pupils of the eyes (pupillary response test), perspiration, and pulse for a supposed erotic response.

The "fruit machine" was employed in Canada in the 1950s and 1960s during a campaign to eliminate all gay men from the civil service, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), and the military. A substantial number of workers did lose their jobs. Although funding for the "fruit machine" project was cut off in the late 1960s, the investigations continued, and the RCMP collected files on over 9,000 "suspected" gay people.

The chair employed resembled that used by dentists. It had a pulley with a camera going towards the pupils, with a black box located in front of it that displayed pictures. The pictures ranged from the mundane to sexually explicit photos of men and women. It had previously been determined that the pupils would dilate in relation to the amount of interest in the picture per the technique termed 'the pupillary response test'.

People were first led to believe that the machine's purpose was to rate stress. After knowledge of its real purpose became widespread, few people volunteered for it.

🔗 Canada 🔗 Canada/History of Canada 🔗 Canada/Geography of Canada 🔗 Canada/Canadian Territories

The High Arctic relocation (French: La délocalisation du Haut-Arctique, Inuktitut syllabics: ᖁᑦᑎᒃᑐᒥᐅᑦᑕ ᓅᑕᐅᓂᖏᑦ Inuktitut: Quttiktumut nuutauningit) took place during the Cold War in the 1950s, when 92 Inuit were moved by the Government of Canada to the High Arctic.

The relocation has been a source of controversy: on one hand being described as a humanitarian gesture to save the lives of starving indigenous people and enable them to continue a subsistence lifestyle; and on the other hand, said to be a forced migration instigated by the federal government to assert its sovereignty in the Far North by the use of "human flagpoles", in light of both the Cold War and the disputed territorial claims to the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. Both sides acknowledge that the relocated Inuit were not given sufficient support to prevent extreme privation during their first years after the move. The story was the subject of a book called The Long Exile, published by Melanie McGrath in 2006.

🔗 Canada 🔗 Geology 🔗 Canada/Ontario 🔗 Canada/Manitoba 🔗 Canada/Geography of Canada 🔗 Lakes 🔗 Canada/Saskatchewan

Lake Agassiz was a very large glacial lake in central North America. Fed by glacial meltwater at the end of the last glacial period, its area was larger than all of the modern Great Lakes combined though its mean depth was not as great as that of many major lakes today.

First postulated in 1823 by William H. Keating, it was named by Warren Upham in 1879 after Louis Agassiz, when Upham recognized that the lake was formed by glacial action.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Canada 🔗 Greece 🔗 Canada/British Columbia 🔗 Canada/History of Canada

Ioannis Phokas (Greek: Ἰωάννης Φωκᾶς), better known by the Spanish translation of his name, Juan de Fuca (born 1536 on the Ionian island of Cefalonia; died there 1602), was a Greek maritime pilot in the service of the King of Spain, Philip II. He is best known for his claim to have explored the Strait of Anián, now known as the Strait of Juan de Fuca, between Vancouver Island (now part of British Columbia, Canada) and the Olympic Peninsula (northwestern Washington state, United States).