20 September 2015
Island Life 20 September 2015
20/09/15 15:48
When I was in college I had a professor, Prof. McBurney I think, who was known to drop things into the middle of his lectures to see if people were awake. One time he was talking about the deep ocean bottom environment. He mentioned that far from continents there was little food and no light. Really the only thing that happens in these remote sites would be the occasional dead whale dropping to the bottom, at which time there would be an explosion of sea creatures converging on the carcass. They’d feast until in just a few days even the bones had been eaten. At this point Prof. McBurney paused and then said “I wonder what the life down there thinks about this. I mean for years nothing but dark and cold, then suddenly tons of whale land on their doorstep. I mean what would their religion be? Nothing and then out of the dark this mana from heaven. …” He went on like this until he could see that most of the class was utterly confused, then with a “Well, anyway…” he’d get back to discussing what subduction zones did to the chemistry of these sediments. He did this kind of a thing regularly.
This came to mind this week when a report came out about a surprising number of whale carcasses that had washed up on the coast of British Columbia and Alaska. Normally there would be a couple of dead whales found in a summer. This year there have been a couple dozen, and the question was why. After looking at the carcasses and ruling out common things like getting hit by ships and entanglement with fishing gear they concluded that it was algae. You see it’s been a very hot year. A big blob of unusually warm water has formed a few hundred miles off the west coast. The theory is that, as is well known, toxic algae blooms happen in warm water. This toxic algae would be eaten by zooplankton, which would be eaten by krill, which would be eaten by fish. Eventually it gets eaten by top predators like whales where the toxins accumulate and cause brain damage and eventually death. Apparently it doesn’t do this to fish, because, well, fish don’t have a lot of brain to start with. This seems to be related to an unusually high number of deaths also seen this year among seals and sea lions in California. It’s interesting how little things snowball and have unexpected impacts.
There are lots of live whales around here. Here is a story from a couple of weeks ago where a pod of killer whales swam around and under a kayak.
http://www.cheknews.ca/watch-several-pods-of-orcas-swim-incredibly-close-to-kayakers-113930/
And more recently someone was paddle boarding, a crazy activity at the best of times if you ask me, when a pod of killer whales passed. They weren’t travelling either. They were hunting and it looked rather dicy for a bit.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/killer-whale-feeding-frenzy-surprises-b-c-paddle-boarder-1.3223368
And just south of here some people got a little closer to a humpback whale than they planned. Nobody was hurt but it was a scary moment when the whale breeched and landed on their kayak.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-34272635
Farther afield there was a seal that photographed surfing on a whale off of Australia.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-34276032
But you know those crazy Australians. Always have to outdo the rest of us in The Commonwealth.
Meanwhile, Marsha and I have yet to see a whale in the wild.
At work, this week was mostly about software testing. Now there are two methodologies to testing software. First there’s following the protocol that tests every feature in every situation so that any and all bugs will be rooted out and fixed. Then there's the "pretend you never read the manual and mess with it until you break something". Guess which finds the most bugs? The trouble is that the formal, systematic, testing protocol was written by the same people that wrote the software and the manual. Me on the other hand never had an opportunity to think "why would anyone in their right mind ever do that?" It also helps that I may not be in my right mind, but that’s another story. Whatever the reason I found a lot of bugs, which have been fixed. This lead to the following bug report. All I did was try to delete something off the screen, and the software crashed. The report entered in the tracking log read: #11331 Bug. Important. Can't destroy a zvol in GUI when iSCSI is enabled and system is possessed by evil spirits." I'm rather proud of that one.
And finally, I want to tell you a story about these two old guys that lived in Eugene when I was growing up. They were close friends but as it happened they both died at the same time. It turned out they had each left all there possessions to the other one. It was a huge mess and the court had to sort it out. It was a real battle of wills.
Doug & Marsha
PIX: Marsha and Margaret got back from Minnesota this week. Here’s a few pictures from Marsha's trip to the museum in Seattle. They had a exhibit of costumes from Star Wars and other films, an exhibit of the artwork of Chuck Jones, and a sculpture called The Guitar Tornado.
This came to mind this week when a report came out about a surprising number of whale carcasses that had washed up on the coast of British Columbia and Alaska. Normally there would be a couple of dead whales found in a summer. This year there have been a couple dozen, and the question was why. After looking at the carcasses and ruling out common things like getting hit by ships and entanglement with fishing gear they concluded that it was algae. You see it’s been a very hot year. A big blob of unusually warm water has formed a few hundred miles off the west coast. The theory is that, as is well known, toxic algae blooms happen in warm water. This toxic algae would be eaten by zooplankton, which would be eaten by krill, which would be eaten by fish. Eventually it gets eaten by top predators like whales where the toxins accumulate and cause brain damage and eventually death. Apparently it doesn’t do this to fish, because, well, fish don’t have a lot of brain to start with. This seems to be related to an unusually high number of deaths also seen this year among seals and sea lions in California. It’s interesting how little things snowball and have unexpected impacts.
There are lots of live whales around here. Here is a story from a couple of weeks ago where a pod of killer whales swam around and under a kayak.
http://www.cheknews.ca/watch-several-pods-of-orcas-swim-incredibly-close-to-kayakers-113930/
And more recently someone was paddle boarding, a crazy activity at the best of times if you ask me, when a pod of killer whales passed. They weren’t travelling either. They were hunting and it looked rather dicy for a bit.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/killer-whale-feeding-frenzy-surprises-b-c-paddle-boarder-1.3223368
And just south of here some people got a little closer to a humpback whale than they planned. Nobody was hurt but it was a scary moment when the whale breeched and landed on their kayak.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-34272635
Farther afield there was a seal that photographed surfing on a whale off of Australia.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-34276032
But you know those crazy Australians. Always have to outdo the rest of us in The Commonwealth.
Meanwhile, Marsha and I have yet to see a whale in the wild.
At work, this week was mostly about software testing. Now there are two methodologies to testing software. First there’s following the protocol that tests every feature in every situation so that any and all bugs will be rooted out and fixed. Then there's the "pretend you never read the manual and mess with it until you break something". Guess which finds the most bugs? The trouble is that the formal, systematic, testing protocol was written by the same people that wrote the software and the manual. Me on the other hand never had an opportunity to think "why would anyone in their right mind ever do that?" It also helps that I may not be in my right mind, but that’s another story. Whatever the reason I found a lot of bugs, which have been fixed. This lead to the following bug report. All I did was try to delete something off the screen, and the software crashed. The report entered in the tracking log read: #11331 Bug. Important. Can't destroy a zvol in GUI when iSCSI is enabled and system is possessed by evil spirits." I'm rather proud of that one.
And finally, I want to tell you a story about these two old guys that lived in Eugene when I was growing up. They were close friends but as it happened they both died at the same time. It turned out they had each left all there possessions to the other one. It was a huge mess and the court had to sort it out. It was a real battle of wills.
Doug & Marsha
PIX: Marsha and Margaret got back from Minnesota this week. Here’s a few pictures from Marsha's trip to the museum in Seattle. They had a exhibit of costumes from Star Wars and other films, an exhibit of the artwork of Chuck Jones, and a sculpture called The Guitar Tornado.