March 31, 2006

• Add it to the list: low-oxygen dead zones, dropping fish and seagull populations, drifting ghost nets, oil spill, garbage, farmland runoff ... I'd put in links to stories I've read on those topics in the last year, but it's too depressing. I'm gonna go buy a Tahoe and crank up the sound system!
• ugh. now I am depressed AND hungover.
• You forgot to keep drinking.
• All my life I wanted to try scuba diving. About five years ago my wife and I decided to just do it. We got certified and began a series of the very best vacations I have ever had or could imagine. To be amid the coral and the sponges, and the fish and the turtles..it is just rapture. I believe the log book has 74 dives recorded to date. I can think of nothing that I'd rather do. If the coral goes, we humans should hang it up as a species.
• >If the coral goes, we humans should hang it up as a species. If we kill enough stuff in the oceans, we may not have a choice.
• un- lets get really drunk and drive around in your Tahoe and kill endangered animals and eat fast food and litter and hurl ignominious insults at illegal aliens, DOOOOOOOD!
• Make room for me Medusa! One of my friends put it to me best several years back, "I'm not worried about what's happening to the planet - it will bouce back, but we will not!"
• Spend more money on nanotech development. You can make ' coral ' reefs. Once we've got our nano going, we're back in the driver's seat.
• back in the driver's seat *shudder* nice joke and apropos with the SUV ads, but ugh!!!! things like this make me look forward to the earth kicking us to the evolutionary curb and getting on with its life!
• Whale Farts! Somehow, I felt that was appropriate.
• I am living in my grade-school nightmares.
• It's never really really a holocaust until a Jew dies. The bleach in my toilet bowl may have killed a lot of shit, but it didn't kill a human. Though sometimes coral looks a little like a brain, it don't make it matter.
• Look monkeys. I'm sorry. My explanation/excuse/whatever is that the word holocaust is important.
• Could have been ' the colonblast '. Think about that ! O the horror !
• c1250 Gen. & Ex. 1326 Ysaac was leid {edh}at auter on, So men sulden holocaust don. 1648 J. BEAUMONT Psyche XXIV. cxciv. (R.), The perfect holocaust of generous love. 1671 MILTON Samson 1702 Like that self-begotten bird In the Arabian woods embost, That no second knows nor third, And lay erewhile a Holocaust 1732 BERKELEY Alciphr. v. §3 Those Druids would have sacrificed many a holocaust of free-thinkers. 1833 L. RITCHIE Wand. by Loire 104 Louis VII..once made a holocaust of thirteen hundred persons in a church. 1987 Sunday Tel. 23 Nov. 15 (heading) Aids: the new holocaust.
• I had not an idea that Lionel Ritchie was born in 1833, and what a crazy last name! How old is Nicole tho? And does it taste of fish? Cryzy cool!
• Googling Mackerel's first line, I get this. The others seem to come from there as well. Mackerel - any chance you could expand on that a little, for the uniniated?
• It's not just in the Carribean.
• "Error -- invalid parameter" is what I get for your link, path. /bee wailing
• In other news, I can't spell today.
• A detailed desciption of coral bleaching can be found here.
• bees - it worked on preview, but I got the same error just now, and the same Google search got a 404 message. The site must have gone bye bye. It was incomprensible, though, and had nothing to do with expiring coral. Ah, well.
• It's a mesmerizing feeling, to weightlessy admire such beauty, usually amid an explosion of colorful fishes and whatnot. But one always feels as if by just being there, one is hurting, damaging that which one is admiring.
• Oh, don't be so ridiculous. My favorite thing to do scubaing is to stand upside down in a coral cave and totally weird out my inner balance mechanism. Up is down and down is up, etc. Then when you come back up you feel like you're on the wrong planet. Mind you, I feel like that anyway.
• That's because YOU ARE ON THE WRONG PLANET.
• I hate you sooooooooo much, the quidnunc kid.
• I love you, but :)
• I love you, but :)
• Twice!
• Yeah, I know, and is my ass sore.
• Oh sorry I wondered where I left that. If you could mail it back to me, I'd be real obliged.
• Quid: Sorry. We need that as the base structure for nano-teching a new coral reef. We didn't appreciate the old one enough, so this is what we get from here on in.
• I understand that the oceans are warming. The question I haven't had answered is isn't this a cyclical trend? Don't these reefs bleach out and harden to form more terra firma? Seems I heard something about it, but I can't find confirmation right now.
• "isn't this a cyclical trend?" Nobody knows. That's part of the endless argument about the issue. "Don't these reefs bleach out and harden to form more terra firma?" NO. If they bleach, they become dead chunks of calcium, which eventually erodes away into tiny infinitessimal pieces, lost forever. What you have to realise is that coral is only coral when it is *alive*. It is a huge living colony of animals, within a deposited structure of calcium carbonate, which takes fucking aeons to lay down. Once it's gone, it's gone forever and the coral structure itself is a doomed lump of concrete in the ocean. Billions of life forms will be destroyed.
• > My explanation/excuse/whatever is that the word holocaust is important. the greeks called. they want their word back. i don't think it's possible to fence off elements of language because they've become associated with a specific historical event.
• Holocaust is a great destruction, not specific to any historical event.
• Word.
• I believe the word choice applies perfectly to this event. Italicized parentheses just aren't cutting it anymore...
• Nifty post. Sucks that it's happening.
• > The bleach in my toilet bowl may have killed a lot of shit, but it didn't kill a human. The idea that only humans matter is going to kill a lot of humans.
• Besides, it may not have instantly, directly killed a human, but it may in the long run.
• Right on, yentruoc. To paraphrase sugarmilktea's thought above, this planet has plenty of ways to repair the damage man has caused, all of which include the elimination of mankind.
• yay for voluntary extinctionism! you first!
• Yentruoc is right.
• Welcome to the Great Barrier Reef in Australia - mind you the article doesn't mention 'Crown of Thorns' infestation. History in Oz shows regular die off followed by panic science surveys etc. Yes, diving or snorkelling in these natural marvels cannot be beaten, but: maybe there is a natural die off zone - most tourist attractions get tired..........(tongue firmly planted in cheek). Oh, Chyren. those life forms are far more adaptive than the apparently dominant Homo Sapiens - hell they've been here a million years - we scream if the aircon breaks down......
• Welcome to the Great Barrier Reef in Australia Thanks, it's great to be here.
• quidnunc u got a tardis or what?
• And in a sorta-non-sequitur, I was watching some news show on PBS on Sunday, all about cheap flights throughout Europe on Ryanair and EasyJet and shit, and how guys in England are flying off to Bratislava and Estonia for stag parties where they can drink and shoot guns and drink and drive tanks and stuff, and at the end of the report, they said that telescopes would be made useless by the year 2050, thanks to interferring con trails from increasing jet traffic. Yikes.
• That's something I'd never have thought of as atmospheric pollution. At least way down here in NZ we should be able to watch the stars for a while longer.
• i find this "telescopes useless by 2050" unnecessarily alarmist: 1. con trails dissipate. 2. air corridors are actually quite narrow. 3. air travel will not continue to grow at the rate it's grown in the past 20-25 years. 4. night flying is restricted for safety reasons.
• But -- but -- they said it on PBS, man! P. B. S.!
• sorry, i sit corrected. astronomers are shagged. the sky is clouding over!
• Spoken like a gentleman sir. Now - are you going to give me a fish license?
• yes, but you can only catch them with plastic bags.
• Coral reefs disappearing? Contrails clouding up your telescope? Small potatoes, my friend. We're about to lose a billion stars.
• Researchers fear more than half the world's coral reefs could die in less than 25 years... Last year's coral loss in the Caribbean waters supports predictions that 60 percent of the world's coral could die within a quarter century, said Tyler Smith of the University of the Virgin Islands. "Given current rates of degradation of reef habitats, this is a plausible prediction," Smith said. See also: NOAA Coral Reef Conservation Program