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voltagegate | May 3, 2007E. Jean Carroll, the infamous advice columnist for ELLE magazine, picked 40 sex columnists from student newspapers across the country, and our own Amanda Baldwin was one of them. Carroll set all 40 columnists up on her website, giving them space to post their columns for the nation to read.
To see Amanda's contributions, select her name from the drop down list (one of the first on the list; the site is javascripted, so there's no direct link).
I feel like a proud parent. Amanda has gotten so much crap over the past couple years as our sex columnist, from English professors giving her a hard…
cmcclain | May 2, 2007
Benthobatis marcida (Chordata: Elasmobranchii: Torpediniformes: Narcinidae)
"It is a clumsy fish about a yard long, and very ugly. Being too slow to catch its swift prey in fair chase, it stuns them with an electric shock, and then eats them. The electric power comes from the body of the Ray; if it wishes it can send a deadly shock through any fish which ventures near. Without chance of escape, it is at once stunned, and falls helpless." - R. Cadwallader Smith Within the Deep
Description Described in 1909 in collections from the Albatross Steamer off of the coast of the…
pharyngula | May 2, 2007I pored over this map of online communities, and couldn't find scienceblogs! I was so disappointed.
There's an obvious place for us, though: somewhere down in the bottom left corner, around Sulawesi.
cmcclain | May 2, 2007
I try to keep all posts here strictly on topic, after all this is Deep-Sea News. So if you are not interested in my personal life and only in the deep sea then stop reading now.
Last year on July 4, I faced the decision that no one with a dog should ever face. The vet looked at me and said, "We can take Moses into surgery and try to find and correct the problem or..." It is the next words that scared me the most, "or put him to sleep." I never hurt so much except for the day I left him behind at an interstate exit when I asked for directions, not realizing he was missing until 10 miles…
mixingmemory | May 2, 2007Even though study after study has shown that implicit race bias is pretty much ubiquitous in American society, I'm still occasionally surprised when a study comes out demonstrating it in an area I hadn't previously thought about. That was the case when a friend emailed me a New York Times article on a study of racial bias in NBA referees (the working paper on the study is here. Why did the study authors, Joseph Price and Justin Wolfers, choose NBA referees? Here's their explanation, from the paper:
Our setting provides intriguing insights into own-race bias; relative to social, judicial, or…
cmcclain | May 2, 2007In case your are unfamiliar with this group, Wespac is the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council in charge of policy for the management of fisheries in the EEZ around American Samoa, Guam, Hawaii, the Northern Mariana Islands and US Pacific island possessions. Funny things are going on at Wespac. According the Honolulu weekly...
Under Kitty M. Simonds, executive director of Wespac, the council's budget has grown to the point where it receives nearly 25 percent ($5 million) of all federal funds dedicated to federal fishery management councils ($20 million), even though the value…
cmcclain | May 1, 2007
and live in underwater cities made of lollipops and children's dreams. And we will tour the ocean depths with Undersea Tourist Boats! O what a glorious future we will have when the year 2000 comes!
PZ turned me on to the Paleo-Future blog, a wonderful site where the future of yesteryear is relived. The above image is the only one to come true from a series of postcards produced by Hildebrands (a leading German chocolate company of the time). Paleo-Future also has a some more posts on future human inhabitation of the world's oceans.
cmcclain | May 1, 2007
So when I am down in a submersible, I worry about protection. What happens if I accidentally drop my USB flash drive out the window at 600 feet down? What if I am scuba diving and I need 8GB of memory? What if an evil deep-sea biologist snatches my USB wand and uses my data for his evil deeds? What if..?
I worry a lot about data storage but luckily Corsair has just released its Flash Survivor GT with a 8GB or 4GB option. The Survivor's case is CNC-milled, anodized aircraft-grade aluminum, water resistant to 200M, and impervious to shock through its dampening collar. It also has…
tqa | May 1, 2007
Jon Stewart's right. The Bush Administration is really making him obsolete. There's no need to wait for him to spin something the President says to make him look stupid and give you a good laugh. All you need to do is read the raw material.
Today's comedy routine - which I'm going to bet will be featured on the Daily Show tonight - was delivered at a CENTCOM conference at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida earlier today. The President, while trying yet again to make the case for his "surge" strategy, said:
The other option was to pull back from the capital, before the Iraqis could…
tqa | May 1, 2007
New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine has been released from the hospital 18 days after suffering a large number of fractures in a high-speed car crash. Most, if not all, of the injuries were unnecessary. Had the Governor been wearing his seatbelt, as the other two passengers in the car were, he would almost certainly not have sustained such extensive injuries.
Before heading home to the Governor's Mansion, Corzine made a brief statement to the press. In it, he expressed remorse for his actions:
"I understand that I set a very poor example for a lot of young people, a lot of people in general…
cmcclain | May 1, 2007An oddly incomplete article is over at the Tenerife News Online. Despite its revealing title of An Interview with Professor Searle - MICHAEL - IN NEED AN INTRODUCTORY PARAGRAPH - WHO DID THE INTERVIEW ETC , Searle provides some interesting commentary on the first expedition of the RSS James Cook..
The drill could produce some good samples of mantle rock, but as I said the sediment cover in many places was thicker than we expected. We are therefore thinking about writing a proposal for funding to bring a larger drill here to penetrate deeper. But don't worry, the mantle substance at the…
voltagegate | May 1, 2007For the kids, of course. I got this comment on my basics post about tropical dry forests last night around midnight:
Hey, I just wanted to say Thanks for being a GREAT resource for my school project on the Tropical Dry Forest Biome. This has helped greatly and I hope in the near future I do some more research of my own to see how I personally can help save these biomes around the world. Once again Thanks for your help.
~*hugs*~
I'll throw down for the sake of any late night school project; I've certainly had enough of those myself.
megrand | April 30, 2007"Objects of Beauty"
Why do we often consider "ugliness" (and decay) to be beautiful? Is it romantic, profound, avant-garde, elitist, morally problematic?
-Aric Chen
The image accompanied The British Metrological Record for September, Bermuda, by Lieut. Colonel Alexander, Royal Engineer
I see beauty in its simplicity and clarity, but especially in its use of very entirely different visual attributes to help distinguish and bring character to the different categories of information displayed; *much* more engaging than color-coding.
-Bradford Paley
This map was created by compiling the GPS…
pharyngula | April 29, 2007Anyone want to help Joolya with her unpleasant personal fungus problem? I should warn you that there are photographs at that link, and she is naked under her lab coat.
cmcclain | April 29, 2007
The oil freighter Esso Languedoc outside the coast of Durban (1980). The man who took it, Philippe Lijour, estimated the mean wave height when this occurred to be about 5-10 m. The mast on the starboard side is 25 m above the mean sea level. The wave approached from behind and broke over deck, but caused only minor damage. Picture from here.
When I started this deep-sea biologist gig, my wife asked me if going to sea be would dangerous. I lied and said no but not that she believed me anyway. A short list includes:
Falling overboard and being lost at sea
A…
revere | April 29, 2007Let's see. If I were making a pile of money by doing something illegal and I got caught, do you think I'd be able to get off just by agreeing not to do it again? I guess if what I was doing was making illegal prescription drugs, I could. I'll make a mental note:
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced the entry of a Consent Decree of Permanent Injunction against PharmaFab Inc., its subsidiary, PFab LP, and two company officials, Mark Tengler, PharmaFab's president, and Russ McMahen, PFab's vice president of scientific affairs, to stop the illegal manufacture and distribution of…
cmcclain | April 29, 2007
Exterior view of Phoenix 1000. Photo from U.S. Submarines
Regular readers of DSN know that Peter and I try to provide all the latest information on all the newest vessels. Regular readers will also know Peter and I have had little success raising the necessary funds from you are readers to purchase any of them. Well here is the next plea and rest assured it will not be the last. Peter and I need $78,000,000 to purchase the Phoenix 1000.
The Phoenix 1000 is a 65-meter (213') personal luxury submarine...As proposed, the submarine would constitute the single largest private undersea…