• John opens the discussion about the Texas-sized ball of garbage.
• MySpace and Bebo joining the Google Alliance — the Open Social Networking Scheme.
• CNet thinks that the “Do not track” notion is a bad idea. Yeah, it’s a bad idea if you are CNet!
• 8 AM to Midnight tomorrow you can buy a $100 HD-DVD player at guess where?
• UC Berkeley invents a nanotube radio.
• Lenovo dropping the IBM brand now. Apparently no longer needed.
• Look at the Christian YouTube called GodTube. Already hitting 4 million unique users a month. Wow!
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You know, while the controversy of Global Warming waxes and wanes, the death of our oceans continues with little recognition==and its going to collapse before the Arctic ice pack!
Food stock fish species have dissappeared or exist at non-fishable 3-5% of original numbers ((with too many “fishermen” claiming a rise to 7% as a 50% increase in numbers so lets fish some more!!—“Bravo!”)). With so few fish in the ocean, the eggs and offspring of jellyfish have little competition and their numbers are rising exponentially.
Is the apocalypse coming? Most certainly so. Just cant tell how or from what quarter. Course, the ocean will not die. Just be sick for 100 years. I’m sure we will all adapt. Get those jellyfish hot cake recipes out.
The garbage area is real enough, but you can’t drive an SUV on it or anything.
Nano technology will / have to / save us from our waste.
In every landfill there’s a goldmine of reusable material, the ocean should be no different. We have to invent autonomous miniature harvesters, powered by microwaves of a certain frequency (for ground penetration properties).
#1, in Eastern Canada, it’s the Shrimp Factor, not enough fish to eat them, so there’s too many shrimp. However they are a small variety, so demand is less – yet they taste much better than the farmed giant shrimp.
Our famous Quebec Cod, or “Morue”, has moved away to colder waters, fisherman in Greenland are now fishing Cod, that just five years ago never had any.
How about a plug on the PRIUS story?
http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/10/29/hybrid.birth.ap/index.html
Trucks / SUV’s are the prime candidates for Diesel-Electric cars, the technology is mature, still in use for TRAINS for decades.
Would beat the pants off the Prius MPG.
2–B Dawg==great link. Been looking for that for a while.
I only recently found out that MADE MADE NON NATURAL PLASTIC is NOT bio-degradeable as I thought it was.
Used to think it might take 1000’s of years, but eventually it got eaten by a bug or solar degraded back to nature? Turns out, the “molecules” of the plastic never go away==or close enough to be true for its negative impact.
Yes, the plastic gets smaller and smaller==but never goes away.
Disgusting.
All things considered, Texas is very small compared to the Pacific Ocean.
And I’ll buy that there is enough pollution in the Pacific (perhaps more) to make up a mass the size of Texas IF it was all gathered together.
But I want the see that mass on Google Earth before I will put on my tin foil hat and call it a “crisis”
#1
The next thing you know, the nutricionists will eventually yap about the beneficial factors of eating jellyfishes.
#3
You can always create an added value to the tiny shrimps such as canning them, dehidrating them, or overall give the instant ramen industry a push to actually put shrimp in their shrimp flavoured instant cup noodles.
Seems with the cost of oil going up it would be worth somebody’s while to start bringing all the plastic in and recycling it. My Brother works for a dairy producer and people have been stealing their crates to cash in for scrap.
This article claims the ball of garbage is bigger than Australia.
The video is a pile of rubbish, the size of something really, really, impressively big, I mean, bigger than Texas and Australia. Maybe even bigger than Antarctica, which is getting smaller. By the way, why are all big places such crap? Another wide eyed green making money out of spooking the chumps. Everything, biodegrades, it just takes a little longer for long carbon chains, just long enough to cash those donations and head for Switzerland.
I came upon this item via a simple google search, concerning the garbage ball in the pacific.
http://www.sciencepunk.com/v5/index.php?s=spat
Essentially, it’s a fake! Greenpeace made it up. An exaggeration of the known facts, to help their cause to clean up the oceans. And it seems to me that they got the idea from that story about the infamous garbage barge of 1987. Here’s the Wikipedia item about it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobro_4000
Of course there is a certain amount of garbage in the oceans. Stuff has probably been floating in the pacific since Captain Cook’s time. And the more modern stuff is probably the results of all those Cruise Liners, dumping their garbage at sea. By not registering in the USA, they avoid any of our stricter environmental and safety regulations. Yet they depend almost entirely on US citizens for their customs. Even the famed Disney Cruise line isn’t registered in the US. So if Greenpeace wants to go after some big time polluters, I’d have no problem with them taking on the Cruise Lines. They’re not even registered american companies. So screw them!
Please correct me if I’m wrong, but (for 10#) I think it’s the Acrticthat’s getting smaller. I understand that the Antarctic is actually getting larger at the moment. Anyone?
• UC Berkeley invents a nanotube radio.
GREAT! I hope it comes with a microscope and toothpick to change the stations!
Wired Science (on PBS) did this story a few weeks back
http://www.pbs.org/kcet/wiredscience/video/index-102.html
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No agenda is an interesting listen if nothing else (I find politics humour rather than informational)
But you should syndicate it on the itunes podcast directory and then I’d just add it to my list 🙂 otherwise I’m liable to forget about it within a month or so …. good luck with that though
I always though it was retarded that Lenovo paid how many zillion dollars just to use the IBM name. They could have just put out a quality clone and dones just as well.
Don’t worry about the oceans dying…we have more than enough Soylent Green to go around.
The garbage patch is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Pacific_Gyre
But it’s nothing like an “island” – 5.1kg/km² of trash is obviously littered, but not covered in junk.
#20
The irony is that in an open ocean where you have nothing to cling on, these garbage patches give the sea life a place to hold on to.
#21- I agree with that idea. An artifical floating reef, of sorts. I maybe just crazy enough to work. Especially as it was unplanned. Now it’s those planned artifical reefs that are the real disgrace. They dumped tons of old car tires, off shore. With some lame excuse that they would create an artifical reef for sea life. But the tires were too bouyant in sea water, and get moved around by wave action. So they only manage to destroy any naturally occuring reef coral. No word about any plans to remove those tires from the sea bottom. Somebody should at least get fired for that blunder.
They ought to send the Glomar Explorer out to glom on to it and bring it back for recycling !
funny i hear you guys talking about tin foil hats. that is ludicris, you need a modified lead alloy hat. that s waht really works!
I’m not surprised at all. These kind of things are rather normal now for us. It is something that all companies do nowadays and that authorities sit and do nothing. This is the world we are living in.