Tag: Fishing

Daily Links

On 14th July 2018

The Innovation Station – A miscellany of videos on a wide variety of innovative topics, ranging from 3D printing to virtual reality.

Gender Shifts in American Baby Names – An interesting study of the gender flips some names undergo over the generations. Would be interesting to see if patterns can be found in the shifts, maybe tendencies for certain underlying phonetic elements to shift in gender?

Deep Sea Fish – The stuff of nightmares? Photos of some catches from the depths of the Arctic circle. [Deu/Rus]

Ultimate P2P Backup Software – If I knew my arse from my elbow, this’d be one of those projects I’d love to tackle in my spare time. I used CrashPlan until recently, and finding a replacement backup solution has been something of a nightmare. Anyone volunteering to please write this?

Gank, To Steal – Interesting chat about the verb ‘to gank’ on A Way with Words. Only ever previously heard it in a MOBA context, it seems it has a much earlier meaning (as seen in hip-hop).

[Photo by David Clode on Unsplash]

Fishing the planet dry, by saving the dolphins

By Fips

On 1st August 2007

In Environment, Rants, Television

Feeding the dolphins

There are some pretty banal programmes on television at times, such is the role it plays, but Animal Park – Wild on the West Coast really caught my eye today. It served up the job of a nature programme from California, but it was a real eye opener to some of the ludicrous crap that gets spewed out, and of course funded, in the name of environmentalism. One segment showed how they looked after a sealion with some neurological disease, to the extent of giving the animal an MRI scan, ascertaining it wasn’t going to survive, and then putting it down. If anyone could explain the point of all that to me, I’d be impressed.

Yet the clip which really boiled my noodle was the one which showed how they were exercising bottlenosed dolphins in captivity, in order to measure their heart rates, and ultimately determine how many calories they needed whilst at rest and whilst active. They were then going to use this information to work out how many fish the animals required, and then pass this important information on to the fisheries in the region, essentially intimating that fisheries would be restricted or closed based on the feeding requirements of the dolphins. It really is amazing at times how random ‘research’ can become. It would seem that as long as those cute little dolphins get enough to eat, no one particularly gives a rat’s arse about whether the ecosystem at large is suffering as a result of fishing policies. Plus, you can bet a pretty penny that with all the statistical horse shit they would have to utilise to make any sense out of those pretty useless collections of figures, there will be little correlation between what they would have to tell the fisheries and reality!