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