Dick Van Dyke rescued by porpoises

The porpoises were not available for comment.

Balloon head dolphin

P. hoekmani (image from the Beeb article)

Archeologists have discovered the fossilized remains of a new type of dolphin on the bottom of the North Sea. The dolphin, christened Platalearostrum hoekmani after the Dutch fisherman Albert Hoekman, who trawled up a bone from the beastie's skull in 2008, seems to be most closely related to the modern-day pilot whale and probably lived between 2 and 3 million years ago. It had a bulbous forehead and a short, "spoon-shaped" rostrum (snout) and would have grown up to 6 meters long.

Pilot whale (G. melas)

New ones

New paintings!

For Kristine

Galaxy

Whale breaks record

A humpback whale has broken the mammalian record for longest migration. She swam at least 9,800 miles, traveling from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean in search of a mate. Cosmos Magazine has more:

The female humpback was first photographed among a group of whales at a breeding ground on Abrolhos Bank, off Brazil's southeastern coast, on 7 August 1999.

By sheer chance, it was photographed more than two years later, on 21 September 2001 by a commercial whale-watching tour at a breeding ground near the Ile Sainte Marie off the eastern coast of Madagascar.

Distinctive tail and spots

The whale was identified thanks to the distinctive shape of its tail and a pattern of spots on it.

"It is the longest documented movement by a mammal, about 400 km longer than the longest seasonal migration that has been reported," according to the research, headed by Peter Stevick of the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine.

The Internet Song

New demo! A song of longing, set on the internet.

Lights in the sky

Strange lights in the sky over DC, southwest of Bethesda from about 2:50 - 3am this morning. A steady, punctuated flickering, red and blue, for a while, not intermittent flashes. My Scully hypothesis is that it was a) police lights or b) distant lightning. Didn't really look like either of those. I'm still formulating my Mulder hypothesis.

Did anyone else see them?

Internet gleanings/current events

Some cool stuff in recent news:

First, this. Astronomers have discovered an Earth-like planet orbiting a red dwarf, Gliese 581, about 20 light-years away. It's in the habitable zone, meaning that water could exist in liquid form on the surface. Life, Unbounded explains:

With a 37 day orbit (putting it about 0.15 AU from the 1/3rd solar mass star) there's a good chance that GL 581 g is tidally locked - with a permanent day and night side, although it's by no means clear that tidal locking is inevitable. This poses significant questions about any climate on the planetary surface - something astronomers and planetary scientists have been worrying about for a while for this kind of scenario. A thick enough atmosphere and thermal transport could help even out the drastic day/night temperature difference and keep things stable.

 And then this: two dolphin species, the Guyana dolphin and the bottlenose dolphin, have been observed to alter the structure of their calls during interspecific interactions. This is cool for several reasons: first, it adds to our evidence that dolphins are skilled mimics. Secondly, it opens the possibility that these two different species could be capable of communicating with each other in some way. From the Beeb:

When bottlenose dolphins swim together, they emit longer, lower frequency calls, that are modulated.

In contrast, Guyana dolphins usually communicate using higher frequency whistles that have their own particular structure.

But often, the two species swim together in one group. These interactions are usually antagonistic, as the larger bottlenose dolphins harass the smaller Guyana dolphins.

When the two dolphins gather, they produce quite different calls, Dr May-Collado has discovered.

Crucially, calls emitted during these multi-species encounters are of an intermediate frequency and duration.

In other words, the dolphins start communicating in a style that is somewhere between those of the two separate species

In sadder news, Shiloh, one of the bottlenose dolphins at the National Aquarium in Baltimore, has died after a long illness. She was the mother of Chesapeake, the first calf born in captivity at the Aquarium, and the grandmother of Bayley, who is now about two years old. Shiloh was estimated to be about 31 years old, which isn't bad for a dolphin, but the news still came as a shock. I studied Shiloh's whistles for more than a year. Her contact call was a pretty, modulated upsweep with which I became very familiar. I'm going to miss her. So long, Shiloh, and thanks for all the fish.

And finally, I went to hear Richard Dawkins and Neil DeGrasse Tyson speak at Howard University the other day. The talk was an unscripted chat about the "poetry of science". Tyson spent a little too much time showboating - I would have like to hear more from Dawkins, devoted little fangirl that I am - but overall it was most enjoyable. I have to say, though...  Tyson was voted World's Sexiest Astrophysicist by People Magazine in 2000, but that Richard Dawkins is foxy. That hyperliterate Oxford-honed diction, that silver hair, that sultry voice... sigh.

Oh, and there are lots of new songs in the works: the Gargle Blasters are working on a cover of Pink Floyd's Young Lust... ooh, I need a dirty woman.



Coming attractions:

• The finished version of Homeopathy (in both censored and uncensored form... because this is a family blog)
• The finished version of Uncertainty (now with 100% more awesome due to sax solo by my dad)
•  More Young Lust
• Tabula Rasa (too full of angst for immediate release)
• The Night You Can't Remember (Magnetic Fields cover!)
• The Internet Song (work in progress)

Man, we almost have a setlist! Watch out, open mic night - the Gargle Blasters are coming.

Created things

Some recent ones:

Spray paint! I'm miffed the photo doesn't show off the eye-stabbingly fluorescent orange color it actually is. 

12x12 canvas, acrylic and ink

Piece of plywood, acrylic and ink

Huge piece of plywood, acrylic and ink

Homeopathy + MySpace

Another demo from the Gargle Blasters! This one's about homeopathy (from thoughtbunny to mp3 in under 24 hours, aw yeah)...



Our gallant triumvirate of sexy has only had a name for about a day, but wow it's all over the internet. Feed the collective ego here and here!

Uncertainty Strikes Back

Check out the latest version of Uncertainty, recorded with Alex in his most excellent basement!

Uncertainty

I wrote half a love song about physics. Have a listen!



I’m uncertain as to whether I should trust you
I’ve never been all that good at romance
You always seem to know just what I’m thinking
And that thought makes me happy in my pants

You’re photon-like in your acceleration
Stick with me baby, surely we’ll go far
I’ve calculated just how fast you’re moving
I just can’t be quite certain where you are

And curled up, cat-like, in my bed
The thought keeps turning in my head
It fills me with both joy and dread
I think I’m both alive and dead

*UPDATE*

New verses! Now with increased GarageBand sexiness!



I’ll pull you in past my event horizon
To terraform my lonely little moon
My heart is beating faster than a pulsar
And burning like the Lyrids do in June

Oh darling, won’t you tell me that you love me?
You light up the dark matter in my soul
I find my lust for you is supermassive
And growing like Andromeda’s black hole

Sperm whale... off Miami Beach

An injured sperm whale calf has been spotted off the coast of Miami Beach. Efforts are underway to find its mother, but if she is not found, the calf will probably be euthanized.

The opening was fantastic! Forgot to take pictures, as usual, but turnout was impressive and the company was grand. Thanks guys.

Breathe

The show opening is coming up! It's happening at Pure Wine Cafe on Monday, August 23, 6:30 - 10:30pm. There will be art and food and free bubbles!

There's an RSVPable facebook event here.

DC Animal News Examiner

I'm now the Animal News Examiner for the Washington, DC section of Examiner.com!

I'll be writing about everything animal in DC. Check out my page here, and tell all your friends. Tell your loved ones. Tell your pets.

Ring of fire

I'm in Hawaii right now, and it's been blowing my mind at every turn. Today's adventure: a hike around an active volcano, Kilauea. We came to the caldera's edge just after sunset and waited for the sky to get dark. As the light faded, the glow from the lake of lava inside the crater got brighter and brighter. Until it looked like this (click for monstrously large version) :

Then over to the Observatories at Mauna Kea, the world's largest astronomical observatory. The combined light-gathering power of the telescopes on the volcano summit is sixty times greater than that of the Hubble Space Telescope. The Keck Telescope and twelve others are at the top, but we went up halfway to the visitor center, where volunteers with telescopes let us use them to gawk at distant astronomical objects. I saw the Ring Nebula, 2,300 light years away. There were more stars in the sky than I had ever seen. The Milky Way was a carpet of tiny lights. "Beautiful" doesn't quite capture it.

Mind = blown.

Updates

I've got a few things going on, mostly exciting!

First, I'm framing a number of paintings for the show at the Pure Wine Cafe in Ellicott City. This entails many hours in the basement every day, playing with power tools and painting things and otherwise fooling around and getting covered in schmutz. Pictures to come...

There have been many adventures with Wowbagger, including swimming holes, night hikes followed by swimming holes, and a beautiful 18th century graveyard we stumbled upon after a relaxing tubing session down a river and an epic barefoot trek through knee-deep mud (whilst trying to get back to the parking lot).

I have a job! I will be tutoring nervous high school kidlings in the dark arts of the SAT. Had to retake the bloody test in its entirety to get the job - needless to say, I am not as smart as I was in high school - but it seems to have been worth it. I start in September. I never thought my first job out of college would require business casual and respectable conduct, but so it goes.

Finally, I've found another venue that might be interested in my art. I've been slacking recently, but I'm gonna have to start churning out new ones again. This is exciting!

A rough draft of my latest:

She's going to be a maenad. With prehensile hair.

Life is good!

Submitted my abstract for the LSA conference in January... months of coding and banging of my head against walls and other stationary objects come to fruition! There will be more coding, of course. Our n (low, approaching silly) is still a problem, so there's lots more data crunching to do before January, but I don't have to worry about that for a while.

Meanwhile, I'm working on framing a number of my paintings for this art show coming up. This entails hanging out in the basement for hours on end whilst high on spray paint fumes and playing with power tools.

I saw Iron Maiden in concert! Dream Theater opened during a sunshower, which was lovely. Then, just as Maiden came onstage, the sky cleared and a rainbow appeared opposite a pretty sunset. Rainbows are so metal.

Fig. 1) Eddie!

Fig. 2)   |m|

Life is pretty sweet.

Planet Word

Stephen Fry is going to host a BBC series on language! It's called Planet Word, and I am geekgiddy about it. He's a beautifully erudite writer and speaker, and one of my very favorite people-I-don't-actually-know-personally. I can't wait to see what the show will be like.

Here's a teaser, from a blog essay he wrote a while back:

But above all let there be pleasure. Let there be textural delight, let there be silken words and flinty words and sodden speeches and soaking speeches and crackling utterance and utterance that quivers and wobbles like rennet. Let there be rapid firecracker phrases and language that oozes like a lake of lava. Words are your birthright. Unlike music, painting, dance and raffia work, you don’t have to be taught any part of language or buy any equipment to use it, all the power of it was in you from the moment the head of daddy’s little wiggler fused with the wall of mummy’s little bubble. So if you’ve got it, use it. Don’t be afraid of it, don’t believe it belongs to anyone else, don’t let anyone bully you into believing that there are rules and secrets of grammar and verbal deployment that you are not privy to. Don’t be humiliated by dinosaurs into thinking yourself inferior because you can’t spell broccoli or moccasins. Just let the words fly from your lips and your pen. Give them rhythm and depth and height and silliness. Give them filth and form and noble stupidity. Words are free and all words, light and frothy, firm and sculpted as they may be, bear the history of their passage from lip to lip over thousands of years. How they feel to us now tells us whole stories of our ancestors.

Do read the whole thing. It made me all shivery.

Finally, this dates back to his Bit of Fry and Laurie days:

Ego boost

I write like
Chuck Palahniuk

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Apparently. Give it a shot!

Moko is dead

A sad story today: Moko, a dolphin living off the coast of New Zealand, became famous in 2008 when he was observed to guide two pygmy sperm whales to safety after they had become stranded between a sandbar and the beach. He played with swimmers and boaters, sometimes getting so enthusiastic that he prevented the swimmers from returning to shore (playing is serious business). A dolphin carcass washed ashore yesterday and, based on its markings and teeth, it's probably Moko.

The Beeb has more.

Just because I like it

Danny Elfman, the mastermind behind the soundtrack of every Tim Burton movie you can name, rocks out with his band Oingo Boingo. The song is Insanity, and it is delectably creepy.




I'd love to take you home with me and tuck you into bed
I'd love to see what makes you tick inside your pretty head
I wish that I could keep you in a precious Chinese box
On Sundays I would pray for you so it would never stop
I'd love to hear you laugh tonight, I'd love to hear you weep
I'd love to listen to you while you're screaming in your sleep
I'd love to soothe you with my voice and take your hand in mine
I'd love to take you past the stars and out of reach of time
I'd love to see inside your mind, to tear it all apart
To cut you open with a knife and find your sacred heart
I'd love to take your satin dolls and tear them all to shreds
I'd love to mess your pretty hair, I'd love to see you dead.

Art show!

One of my paintings got accepted to an art show at Pure Wine Cafe! It's a swanky little wine bar in Ellicott City, outside Baltimore.

The piece is a 3-panel painting of bubbles rising up the wall. 

I'm wildly excited about this - I've never had my work exhibited anywhere before! It will hang in the wine bar for three months, starting in August. Not sure about pricing yet, but I think it will go - if it goes - for much more than I'd been thinking of asking for it. 

The theme of the show is "Breath". I just started another breath-themed painting... with luck, this one could make it into the show as well.

This is a WIP - I'll post the finished version later.

This is exciting!

Leviathan

A sea monster has been unearthed! The fossilized remains of a giant whale-beast were found in 12 million year old sediment in Peru. It appears to be related to modern sperm whales: about the same size, but armed with 40 cm (16 inch) teeth on both the upper and lower jaws. From the BBC article:

A 3m-long fossilised skull of the creature was discovered by researchers in southern Peru in 2008. Dr de Muizon's student, Olivier Lambert was among them.


"It was the last day of our field trip when one of our colleagues came and told us that he thought he'd found something very interesting. So we joined him and he showed it to us," he said.


"We immediately saw that it was a very large whale and when we looked closer we saw it was a giant sperm whale with huge teeth."


The teeth were more than twice the length and diameter of those found in modern sperm whales and they were on the upper and lower jaws.

The researchers estimate that the creature probably measured more than 17 meters (56 feet!) long, and may have preyed on other whales. In a tribute to Moby Dick (one of my favorite books), they've named the whale Leviathan melvillei. 

Nature Video has a feature on Leviathan:





The paper is in Nature:

The Giant Bite of a New Raptorial Sperm Whale
Nature, Vol. 466, Issue 7302, 1 July 2010

Whaling news + new art

After a week-long circle jerk, the 62nd International Whaling Commission meeting in Morocco has ended. The 24-year old moratorium on commercial whaling remains in place, but no progress has been made. From the WWF:

But it could have been worse. The IWC was considering a worrying new proposal that could allow commercial whaling in the Southern Ocean for the first time in almost 25 years – and would also set commercial whaling quotas for whales listed as threatened by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).


WWF has always fully supported the maintenance of the IWC’s 1982 moratorium on commercial whaling. Unfortunately, whaling at a commercial scale continues by a small number of countries. We want to see all whaling come under stricter IWC control.

An interview with Iceland's "whaling king" reveals the jackassery that environmentalists face in some countries:

Kristjan Loftsson, Iceland's millionaire whaling king, doesn't really see the difference: "whales are just another fish," he said at a crunch meeting of the International Whaling Commission.


...


Loftsson is untouched by a wave of recent research showing that cetaceans -- the order grouping whales, dolphins and porpoises -- are closer to humans that once thought in their ability to communicate, recognizing themselves in a mirror, and create what anthropologists would call culture.


"I don't believe it. If they are so intelligent, why don't they stay outside of Iceland's territorial waters?" he shot back, attributing such ideas to "a bunch of crazies."

Yup. The stupid, it burns.

A few more recent articles on cetaceans:

• Chicago biologist fears Gulf oil threat to dolphins
• Russia's new oil exploration threatens gray whales
  

And a new painting!

Sick

Pediatric urologist Dix Poppas at Weill Medical College of Cornell University has been up to some pretty sick shit. Concerned parents bring their little girls to the good doctor and express their worries. Their worries, namely, that their developing child's clitoris is too large. The WTF factor only snowballs from here. Dix Poppas performs a "nerve-sparing" surgery on the little girls (most are around six years old) in which he removes the offending tissue from the shaft of the clitoris, then reattaches the glans to what little remains. 

Imagine growing up with the knowledge that your parents found the most private, sensitive part of your body so aesthetically disturbing, so very ugly that they arranged to have it chopped up by a creep who would later masturbate you as they watched. Ugh. 

I have few words to describe exactly how wildly unethical this is. Here's a Pharyngula post on the topic, and the original post from Psychology Today. The comment threads are worth reading and rather cathartic. Dan Savage has also caught wind of this, and has a long, passionately written post at the Stranger.

From Dan Savage's post:

There's lots to be outraged about here: there's nothing wrong with these girls and their healthy, functional-if-larger-than-average clitorises; there's no need to operate on these girls; and surgically altering a girl's clitoris because it's "too big" has been found to do lasting physical and psychological harm. But what's most outrageous is how Poppas is "proving" that his surgery "spares nerves." Dreger and Feder:


But we are not writing today to again bring attention to the surgeries themselves. Rather, we are writing to express our shock and concern over the follow-up examination techniques described in the 2007 article by Yang, Felsen, and Poppas. Indeed, when a colleague first alerted us to these follow-up exams—which involve Poppas stimulating the girls’ clitorises with vibrators while the girls, aged six and older, are conscious—we were so stunned that we did not believe it until we looked up his publications ourselves.


Here more specifically is, apparently, what is happening: At annual visits after the surgery, while a parent watches, Poppas touches the daughter’s surgically shortened clitoris with a cotton-tip applicator and/or with a “vibratory device,” and the girl is asked to report to Poppas how strongly she feels him touching her clitoris. Using the vibrator, he also touches her on her inner thigh, her labia minora, and the introitus of her vagina, asking her to report, on a scale of 0 (no sensation) to 5 (maximum), how strongly she feels the touch.... Poppas has indicated in this article and elsewhere that ideally he seeks to conduct annual exams with these girls....

I encourage you to vent your disapproval/outrage here (Weill Cornell Medical College contact form).


Now for something completely different: in the runup to next week's IWC meeting in Morocco,   celebrities are joining the "fight against whaling". If you're a Doctor Who fan, the wonderful Christopher Eccleston has gotten behind the cause. The BBC article also outlines the agenda for the meeting, which will probably result in the 24-year old moratorium on commercial whaling being overturned. Environmental groups are, of course, up in arms against this. More information is here, at the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society website. If you'd like to subscribe to their blog, the RSS feed is here.

4:30 in the morning

It's been a while since I've posted, mostly because it's been an eventful week or so. Adventures aplenty and little sleeping. But here's some whale poo, for your amusement.

Adventures + Tim Minchin

Fellow internet and IRL adventurer Wowbagger is now the official Baltimore Outdoor Adventure Examiner! Check out his column for reviews, ratings, and pictures of some of the hoopy outdoor adventures to be had in the DC/Baltimore area.

He is also responsible for my new obsession with Tim Minchin, singer/songwriter/comedian extraordinaire. Embedded for your viewing pleasure is one of his videos. This one's fun, and will tickle the skeptically inclined. Safe for work.





If you want more (you know you do), this one is hilarious and actually rather virtuosic. Decidedly NOT safe for work. Enjoy!

New Gulf horrors

The Big Picture has more terrible pictures from the Gulf oil spill today.

A seabird mired in oil in Louisiana

Moratorium harpooned

The Independent has an article today on the upcoming International Whaling Commission meeting, and what's likely to come out of it. At the same time that Australia is challenging Japan in court over its illegal whaling practices - one small step forward - it looks like the 24-year moratorium on commercial whaling is, in a giant leap backwards, about to be scrapped.

From the article:

The moratorium on commercial whaling, one of the world's major environmental achievements, is in danger of being abandoned after 24 years at a meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) which begins this week in Morocco.


A proposed new deal, which stands a realistic chance of being passed at the conference in Agadir, would allow the three countries which have continued killing the great whales in defiance of the ban – Japan, Norway and Iceland – to recommence whaling legally in return for bringing down their catches.


However, many conservationists do not believe that catches will actually fall under the proposed new agreement, and one of the world's leading whaling scientists recently described it in testimony to the US Congress as "a scam ... likely to fool many people".


...


Should the moratorium be dismantled, it would represent one of the most damaging setbacks ever for wildlife conservation. The ban, which was agreed in 1982 and became operational in 1986, was introduced after a long and intense campaign by environmental pressure groups such as Greenpeace.


They were protesting against the intense cruelty of whaling, where the killing is done by firing explosive harpoons into the large, intelligent animals, and also against the fact that many of the stocks of the great whales had been drastically reduced by over-hunting, with blue whales driven to the brink of extinction.


Although large-scale whaling came to an end with the ban, and populations began to recover, three countries carried on killing: Japan, by labelling its hunting "scientific research", and the Norwegians and Icelanders by lodging formal objections. Since 1986 the three nations have between them killed more than 30,000 whales, the Japanese leading with more than 1,000 whales a year – mainly minke whales, but also Bryde's, fin, sei and sperm whales.


But the global total of kills has nevertheless fallen to a tiny fraction of what it was, and the moratorium has been an unqualified success from a whale conservation point of view.


The deal which may do away with it, which has been on the table for three years, was first thought to be merely a diplomatic compromise to end the perpetual confrontation at IWC meetings between the whaling nations and the anti-whaling countries. But recently it has become clear that it had a different purpose, and was cooked up in the US – by leading figures in the Bush administration, among them being Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, who, until his conviction for taking unreported gifts in 2008, was the longest-serving Republican senator in American history.


One of the most powerful figures in US politics, Senator Stevens sought a deal with Japan after the Japanese caused problems for the US by objecting (as a bargaining counter in IWC negotiations) to the whale-hunting quota for Alaskan Inuit peoples, who have a traditional hunt for about 50 bowhead whales.


Senator Stevens is believed to have put pressure on the then-US Whaling Commissioner and IWC chairman, William Hogarth – whose budget, in the US National Marine Fisheries Service, Mr Stevens controlled as a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee – to open talks with Japan, which Mr Hogarth duly did at the 2007 IWC meeting in Anchorage, Alaska.

...


Justin Cooke, who is the representative of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature on the IWC Scientific Committee, took the deal apart in the US Congress, in evidence to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. Dr Cooke said: "The proposal is disingenuous and I suspect that it will fool many people." It was a scam, he said, in which the calculation of how many whales could be killed was being left to politicians rather than scientists.

I have always considered Ted Stevens a slimy bastard, but this latest revelation upgrades him to a walking, talking, waste of oxygen.

Click here to download Dr. Cooke's testimony in Congress. Short, sweet, and worth reading.

If your attention span is longer and your tolerance for bullshit higher than mine, you can download the full 43-page proposal here.

Friendship

If the last post got you down, you must watch this. Made my day.

Watch more National Geographic Channel videos on AOL Video

Good news, very bad news

First, the good news: Australia is set to pursue legal action against Japan for its illegal whaling program. From the Beeb:

The Australian government says it will lodge formal proceedings at the International Court of Justice in The Hague next week.


The move comes ahead of a meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) in Morocco next month, where agreement is being sought on a new approach to whaling, which would allow commercial hunting but with strict quotas.


Australian Environment Minister Peter Garrett and Attorney General Robert McClelland said in a joint statement that the move underlines their "commitment to bring to an end Japan's program of so-called scientific whaling".

And now the bad news. The first picture I've seen of a dolphin killed by the BP oil spill has hit the internet. A warning: this picture is graphic and may at the very least ruin your day. Click here.

Finally, Ann Weaver in Tampa wrote an article a few days ago about the effects of the spill on local dolphin populations. She reviews what little we know about the devastating damage the spill has done to the food chain, and speculates that dolphins will not be able (or willing) to leave the area.

From the article:

Couldn’t our adult dolphins just move, just head north or south where there was less oil or more food? Possibly. But even if the waters were unequally disturbed by the oil, and there were healthy waters to go to, dolphin psychology could keep the dolphins from fleeing the meltdown.


One, dolphins are pretty free-form but they do have habits. Changes during construction on the John's Pass Bridge further suggest that their habits die hard. They may stick to their habits despite diminishing food and water quality.


Two, dolphins live in home ranges, which are where they’re found most often. They may stick to their home ranges despite diminishing food and water quality. About sixty of the dolphins we’ve seen are residents who would stick around John’s Pass.


Finally, there’s the glaring psychological difference between humans and other animals: Humans move. Animals don’t. Granted, some animals migrate to another troop at maturity. But animals become endangered or extinct because, when humans destroy their habitat, the animals either have no place to go or don’t know to go.


Randy Wells of Mote Marine described our coastline as a mosaic of overlapping dolphin home ranges.


Let’s say, for the sake of argument, our local dolphins found John’s Pass untenable and decided to move. They would encounter dolphins already living in every area they went. There are no free waters where “our” dolphins could go.


Another major concern of mine is the expansion and potential connection of dead zones. A dead zone is an area of water that is so depleted of oxygen that no sea creatures can live in it.


The Gulf of Mexico already has a dead zone the size of the state of Massachusetts, created by the fertilizers that get into the mighty Mississippi from America’s breadbasket and end up in the Gulf. Lesser dead zones (if there is such a thing) pock the Western Florida shoreline. God forbid these all get together.

A bleak forecast.

Quite the weekend

The first part of this weekend was hikes and assorted adventures with Wowbagger: there was an 80's band, some trouble with the law, and a lovely beach. Atrocious sunburns aside (always reapply, kids), it was a great success. 

For Wowbagger

Today was something of a blow to the ego: sat at a farmer's market for 7 hours as people walked past my table of paintings. Almost none of them stopped. One or two came over and looked for a moment, and I even got some compliments, but I didn't sell a single painting. I think it was because I was just across from a table overflowing with pretty shiny beads. I can't compete with shiny things: people love shiny things.

It wasn't a total loss, though. I met a sweet, vague man called Angel. Angel chases storms and photographs clouds. He asked me what kind of weather I liked best. I told him I liked the unpredictable kind, when it's sunny one moment and pouring the next. He flipped through his photos and gave me a picture of just that: looming storm clouds against a blue sky. Then he explained very earnestly that the beams of sunlight coming through the clouds were actually angels coming down to Earth. I nodded. He smiled,  handed me a little figurine of a baby, and wished me luck.

Then I met Crazy Joe. Crazy Joe introduced himself with a dirty joke - the middle-aged ladies nearby giggled in horror - and took a picture of me with my paintings for posterity. He used to sell hand-blown bongs and pipes - "everything but the weed" - at this very farm market 20 years ago. He made quite a living for himself, but things went downhill after he discovered cocaine, and now he wanders around the place hitting on starving artists with pink hair.

It was actually significantly less creepy than it sounds now. The amusing crazy overwhelmed the alarming creepy, and talking to Crazy Joe was a lot more fun than reading patronizing GRE prep books or staring off into space.

Quite the weekend. Now it's time for more aloe and a nap.

Bethune on trial

Pete Bethune, a member of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (brilliantly parodied by South Park) goes on trial in Japan today.

Accused of boarding a Japanese whaling vessel, he pleaded guilty to four charges, including trespass and obstructing commercial activities, but denied a fifth charge of assault.

If convicted he could receive a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison.

From the Beeb:

The New Zealander was the captain of the Ady Gil, a futuristic kevlar boat which was sliced in two in a collision with a harpoon ship in January and sank.


The following month he boarded the ship, the Shonan Maru 2, from a jetski.


Sea Shepherd said his intention was to perform a citizen's arrest on her captain for the attempted murder of his crew, and present a bill for the lost boat.


But instead he was detained himself and the Shonan Maru 2 set sail for Tokyo where Mr Bethune was arrested by Japan's Coast Guard.


Commercial whaling has been banned worldwide since 1986.


Japan justifies its hunt as scientific research, while not hiding the fact that whale meat ends up in restaurants and shops.

If my ship had been sliced in half (dramatic video of the ramming here) by a whaler on an illegal commercial mission, I'd be pretty pissed off too. An arrest and a bill sound pretty reasonable. I have no idea why this incident couldn't have been brought to court under international law, or why the Kiwis aren't significantly angrier. 

Also, since when is throwing stink bombs considered assault?

Cell phone tourism

Picspam from a few places I've been recently.

• Park Avenue
• Ground Zero
  
• Great Falls, MD
  

Photos after the jump (click to embiggen). 

Gulf spill

Lazy though I may be, I think the unfolding environmental disaster in the Gulf deserves a mention.

First, NPR has a story on a group of scientist and engineers who have calculated the daily output of the broken pipe and come up with an estimate that is dramatically higher than the official numbers. 

Steven Wereley, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University, analyzed videotape of the seafloor gusher using a technique called particle image velocimetry.


A computer program simply tracks particles and calculates how fast they are moving. Wereley put the BP video of the gusher into his computer. He made a few simple calculations and came up with an astonishing value for the rate of the oil spill: 70,000 barrels a day — much higher than the official estimate of 5,000 barrels a day.


The method is accurate to a degree of plus or minus 20 percent.

Wereley's calculations were backed up by scientists and engineers at other institutions. Needless to say, BP disputes these figures. But even at BP's absurdly low estimate - 5,000 barrels a day - this is shaping up to be even worse than the Exxon Valdez spill.

Deborah Blum over at ScienceBlogs has a post on the relative toxicity of the oil in the Gulf and the chemical dispersant being used to break it down. The standard toxicity test for chemical compounds is called the LD50. LD stands for Lethal Dose and 50 indicates 50 percent. So, LD50 means the lowest dose at which a material kills half of the test subjects. Blum did some digging on the LD50s for crude oil and the dispersant being used (Corexit 9500) and came up with some distressing results: turns out that pouring Corexit 9500 on crude oil actually makes the resulting mixture even more toxic.

The results differ by species and by time as well as by amount of poison, The EPA numbers for Corexit 9500 (the formula used most heavily by BP) show that at 2.62 ppm, the dispersant kills half the silver fish in 96 hours/ four days. At a slightly higher concentration - 3.4 ppm - the compound kills half the little shrimp in two days.


As for crude oils, a very decent analysis by the American Petroleum Institute shows that all are toxic, but their effects vary with thickness and with the different chemistry seen in say, oil from the Gulf of Mexico and oil from Kuwait. The best estimate I've seen for South Louisiana Crude - after hours of exasperated research - comes from thesis work done at Louisiana State University several years ago. For instance, the study found that Louisiana crude had an LC50 of 4250 ppm for the warm-water loving killifish.


This suggests that crude oil is less acutely poisonous than chemical dispersants. But here's the really interesting finding in that terrific little study. Adding a dispersant - specifically Corexit 9500 - made the oil more poisonous. A lot more poisonous.


The "dispersed" oil had an LC50 of 317.7 ppm, making it more than 11 times more lethal in its effects. The study found a similar worsening for white shrimp, although not quite as dramatic. "Dispersed oils were more toxic than crude oils," noted the report.

Finally, The Big Picture has a feature on the spill. I highly recommend it. Beautiful pictures of awful stuff.

Bottlenose dolphins swim through oily water

Home again

I'm back on the ancestral homeworld. For a while, at least. I don't know what I'm doing next, but I hope there will be adventures.

Done and done

I handed in my thesis yesterday and I am done. Nothing left to turn in... all I owe Columbia now is a few library books.

Now we wait for graduation. And try to drink everything that's still in the fridge.

This is beyond weird.

Cetacean news

Here's a site that compiles news about dolphins and whales. Updated (almost) daily. Enjoy.

 Also, some of my favorite dolphin desktop wallpapers.

Cetacean picspam after the jump!

The birds and the B's

Jarbas Agnelli saw a picture of some birds sitting on some telephone wires. Another person might have just seen birds. He saw notes.

Reading a newspaper, I saw a picture of birds on the electric wires. I cut out the photo and decided to make a song, using the exact location of the birds as notes (no Photoshop edit). I knew it wasn't the most original idea in the universe. I was just curious to hear what melody the birds were creating.

Birds on the Wires from Jarbas Agnelli on Vimeo.

Gray whale in the Med

A gray whale has been spotted... in the Mediterranean Sea.

 Here he is, off the coast of Israel

From the article:

A gray whale has appeared off the coast of Israel, shocking conservationists.


Gray whales are thought to be extinct across the Atlantic Ocean, so the appearance of an individual within the Mediterranean Sea is a major surprise.


The whale may have inadvertently travelled a huge distance from its natural habitat thousands of kilometres away in the Pacific Ocean.


However, it raises the possibility that gray whales have returned to former haunts in the western hemisphere.


"This discovery is truly amazing. Today, gray whales only inhabit the Pacific Ocean, so to find one in the North Atlantic, let alone the Mediterranean Sea, is bizarre in the extreme," says Nicola Hodgins of the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society (WDCS), which has its headquarters in Wiltshire, UK.

Your average human next to your average gray whale (image from Wiki)

Another one bites the dust

Three papers (~25 pages last week) and one final down, one thesis to go, one week to finish it. It's going alright - 38 pages so far, and I'm shooting for 42 or so.

I'd be delighted if it ended up being exactly 42 pages long, because there's a distinct Douglas Adams theme running through it... I'm writing about dolphin intelligence and communication, so of course I had to cite him:

“Intelligence” is an ill-defined concept to begin with. Even among humans there is no universally agreed-upon definition, nor any meaningful measure of individual intelligence. As Darwin wrote in his discussion of intelligence, “no classification of the mental powers has been universally accepted.”And, as Douglas Adams wrote, “Man has always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much...the wheel, New York, wars and so on...while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man...for precisely the same reason.”

(Full disclosure: I have this on a t-shirt.)

Good intentions

Two new ones.

 

Peppermint Narwhal

Good intentions

Last days

I'm up to my neck in writing, but there are just  a few days left. By my calculations, I've got about 15 pages left to go before Thursday.


Some recent additions to the wall:

Shitty white paint cracks when you apply it too thick. I thought that was cool.

My grandma's cat

22

It's my birthday!

I was feeling nostalgic for the Netherlands, so I made a little landscape with clouds, acrylic and enamel again. I think it's Delft, but you can pick your own city if you like.

Productive

Crunching away on the thesis, filling my walls with the artistic thoughtbunnies of an increasingly scrambled mind.

Penny

Untitled (suggestions?)

The Boy in sunglasses

Hertzsprung-Russell

Flux/Peak

Boobquake!

In a follow-up to last week's post on sluts and earthquakes, today is Boobquake: a day for women around the world to show off their cleavage in an attempt to debunk a fundamentalist Iranian cleric who blames natural seismic events on women dressing immodestly.

The Bad Astronomer has more:

"...last week an Islamic cleric in Iran said that all the earthquakes occurring in that country are caused by women dressing "immodestly". Yes, this same screwed-up thinking that brought us the Taliban and the idea that burning, throwing acid upon, and beheading women is all their own fault for being, y’know, women, gives us this:

"Many women who do not dress modestly … lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which (consequently) increases earthquakes… What can we do to avoid being buried under the rubble?" Sedighi [the cleric] asked during a prayer sermon Friday. "There is no other solution but to take refuge in religion and to adapt our lives to Islam’s moral codes."

I got news for you, Sedighi: if I were God, I’d be throwing more earthquakes your way for the way you treat women. In fact, I’d send a few thousand mini ones that open the Earth and just swallow up the twinkie clerics who say such profoundly horrid things.

Serious note: I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: not all cultures are created equal. Any culture that sweepingly and maniacally oppresses half their population is what I would call evil. Moral relativism be damned: that kind of crap is wrong, plain and simple.

So I stand with my XX-oriented friends against the neolithic thinking of gender-oppressing religions. As Ben Franklin would say were he here today:


We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang lifted and separated.

Now go out and flash your favorite intolerant bastard! I leave you with my favorite relevant lj icon.

The Beeb does whales

Two articles in the BBC this week:

• How to rescue a stranded whale (with video)

Each year anywhere between five and 50 whales, dolphins and porpoises are washed up on Britain's beaches. British Divers Marine Life Rescue, a volunteer charity, was set up in 1998 to rescue them.

To find out how it's done Nick Higham, and volunteers including a chef, a plumber, a man who runs boat trips and a woman who works in IT, encountered a two-tonne inflatable whale for a training course on a Kent beach.

• Whaling plan draws anger 

The International Whaling Commission (IWC) has published draft proposals for regulating whaling for the next decade.

Japan's Antarctic whale hunt would fall in stages to less than a quarter of its current size. But hunting would continue on the endangered fin whale.


Key countries, including the US and Japan, have limited comments to saying they will consider the draft proposal carefully.


But some conservation and animal welfare groups have already indicated opposition.


"The fact that this proposal is even being discussed shows just how far out of touch the IWC is with modern values," said Claire Bass, manager of the Marine Mammal Programme at the World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA).


"It is entirely missing the point that blasting conscious animals with exploding harpoons is grossly inhumane."


However, others argue that the aim of completely banning whaling is unrealistic, and that a major down-scaling, combined with bringing it under international oversight, is a worthwhile compromise.


But the inclusion of fin whales and the continuation of hunting in the Southern Ocean - which has been declared a whale sanctuary - are points of concern.

With regards to "completely banning whaling is unrealistic, and ... a major down-scaling...is a worthwhile compromise", I am reminded of this article from the Onion:

VATICAN CITY—Calling the behavior shameful, sinful, and much more frequent than the Vatican was comfortable with, Pope Benedict XVI vowed this week to bring the widespread pedophilia within the Roman Catholic Church down to a more manageable level.


Addressing thousands gathered at St. Peter's Square on Easter Sunday, the pontiff offered his "most humble apologies" to abuse victims, and pledged to reduce the total number of molestations by 60 percent over the next five years.


"This is absolutely unacceptable," Pope Benedict said. "It seems a weakening of faith in God has prevented our priests from exercising moderation when sexually abusing helpless minors."


"And let me remind our clergy of the holy vows they all took when they entered the priesthood," he continued. "They should know that they're only allowed one small child every other month."

Library thoughts

It's mindblowing how much you have to read just to avoid writing something barfingly stupid.

Sluts and earthquakes

Hojjat ol-eslam Kazem Sediqi, the acting Friday prayer leader in Tehran, delivered a televised sermon at the Tehran University campus mosque last week. Given the wretched den of sin and iniquity in which he was speaking (all institutions of higher learning are like this), it is perhaps unsurprising that he chose to sermonize on the "prevalence of degeneracy" in modern society. Every generation of hypocrites laments the lapsed morals of the generation following theirs, nothing new there. When the degenerate youth asks why they need to behave exactly as their parents claimed they did, the elder generation rarely has anything convincing to say. But last Friday Sediqi put his finger on the real reason that strict Islamic morality is necessary, at least for women:

"Many women who do not dress modestly lead young men astray and spread adultery in society which increases earthquakes," he explained.

Tens of thousands of people have died in Iran earthquakes in the last decade.

More than 25,000 people died when a powerful earthquake hit the ancient city of Bam in 2003.

You heard it here first: 25,000 people died because some hussy pushed her veil an inch back to feel the sun on her forehead.

This is hilarious, but the "Unveiled women cause adultery" argument makes me crazy.  Male arguments for the necessity of the veil always puzzle me, because they are an admission of profound moral weakness. The veil is actually an insult to men: the statement it makes is that men are so very fallible that the very hint of a strand of hair will inevitably drive them into a lustful frenzy, after which point they cannot be held responsible for their own actions. It ascribes less agency to members of the male sex than most people ascribe to small children. For one of the most patriarchal religions in the universe, that's just... weird.

Artistic procrastination

Same story as last week. Thesis moving slowly, overwhelmed by a continuous flow of paint.

Amber

Bonsai

Self portrait as Che Guevara

New Jersey

for Pickle

The end is nigh

I'm counting hours until the end of undergraduate classes forever and ever and ever. This is beyond strange. It hasn't been four years. They're lying to me. My cap and gown are stashed away in my sock drawer, still in their plastic because I'm scared to open them up. I walk in a month and two days.

Locked myself in and stayed up for a few days this week staring at this screen and contemplating my thesis with a growing sense of existential horror. Sort of like this, but silently and in a library. I am cautiously optimistic, however. If I keep going long enough, it is statistically probable that I will produce a work of profound insight and great intellectual beauty:

Meat

Meat from Japan's "scientific research" whaling program is turning up in US and Korean stores. The Beeb reports:

Scientists say they have found clear proof that meat from whales captured under Japan's whaling programme is being sold in US and Korean eateries.


The researchers say they used genetic fingerprinting to identify meat taken from a Los Angeles restaurant as coming from a sei whale sold in Japan.


They say the discovery proves that an illegal trade in protected species still exists.


Whale meat was also allegedly found at an unnamed Seoul sushi restaurant.


Commercial whaling has been frozen by an international moratorium since 1986.


But a controversial exemption allows Japan to kill several hundred whales each year for what is termed scientific research.


The meat from these whales is then sold to the public in shops and restaurants in that country.

From the article, it seems the meat was advertised straight up as whale meat. While it boggles the mind that eateries selling endangered species escaped notice for so long, I suppose it's better than the alternative: dolphin and whale meat with toxic levels of mercury deliberately mislabeled and sold to unwitting customers as more expensive stuff.

Wonder how toxic this stuff was?

Arrest the Pope

Richard Dawkins wants to arrest the Pope:

RICHARD DAWKINS, the atheist campaigner, is planning a legal ambush to have the Pope arrested during his state visit to Britain “for crimes against humanity”.


Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, the atheist author, have asked human rights lawyers to produce a case for charging Pope Benedict XVI over his alleged cover-up of sexual abuse in the Catholic church.


The pair believe they can exploit the same legal principle used to arrest Augusto Pinochet, the late Chilean dictator, when he visited Britain in 1998.


The Pope was embroiled in new controversy this weekend over a letter he signed arguing that the “good of the universal church” should be considered against the defrocking of an American priest who committed sex offences against two boys. It was dated 1985, when he was in charge of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which deals with sex abuse cases.


Benedict will be in Britain between September 16 and 19, visiting London, Glasgow and Coventry, where he will beatify Cardinal John Henry Newman, the 19th-century theologian.


Dawkins and Hitchens believe the Pope would be unable to claim diplomatic immunity from arrest because, although his tour is categorised as a state visit, he is not the head of a state recognised by the United Nations.

That last part (emphasis mine) is interesting.

Wiki tells me that the Vatican is "a recognised national territory under international law, but it is the Holy See that conducts diplomatic relations on its behalf, in addition to the Holy See's own diplomacy, entering into international agreements in its regard." The Vatican itself is not recognized by the UN.  It is the Holy See (the ancient episcopal jurisdiction of the Catholic Church in Rome) that wears the pants in terms of foreign relations.

Wiki:

In addition to the member states [of the United Nations], there is currently one non-member permanent observer state: the Holy See (which holds sovereignty over the state of Vatican City and maintains diplomatic relations with other states). It has been an observer state since 6 April 1964,^[37] and gained all the rights of full membership except voting on 1 July 2004.^[38] 

Wiki again:

The Holy See has been recognized, both in state practice and in the writing of modern legal scholars, as a subject of public international law, with rights and duties analogous to those of States. Although the Holy See, as distinct from the Vatican City State, does not fulfil the long-established criteria in international law of statehood; having a permanent population, a defined territory, a stable government and the capacity to enter into relations with other states,^[4] its possession of full legal personality in international law is proved by the fact that it maintains diplomatic relations with 177 states, that it is a member-state in various intergovernmental international organizations, and that it is: "respected by the international community of sovereign States and treated as a subject of international law having the capacity to engage in diplomatic relations and to enter into binding agreements with one, several, or many states under international law that are largely geared to establish and preserving peace in the world."^[5]

In that light, calling the Pope's trip to England a "state visit" sounds a bit pretentious (if not out of character). The Pope is a "head of state", but as far as I can tell he's not actually the head of any full-fledged state. Vatican City is a toy country, and the Holy See is "analogous" to a State. I don't know that either of those grant him diplomatic immunity.

Of course, he has immunity of a different kind. He's the kindly daddy (from Latin: papa; from Greek: πάππας (pappas), an affectionate word for father) of the  most self-consciously grandiose institution on the planet. He's the shining, beatific face of the patriarchy. He's the ultimate earthly arbiter of right and wrong.

You can't just clap him in irons for systematically sheltering and relocating the holy men who raped the children entrusted to their care.

Can you?