I saw some people comment on a thread similar to this yesterday called, "Sailor says pacific is lifeless form Japan onwards for 3k Miles". I am guessing it is the same gentleman in this article and this is the full article. Some comments there were skeptical and suggested they had been at sea and hadn't caught anything or had not "seen any whales or dolphins". Let me say that there are countless counter arguments but try to view it from another angle. Lets say you are a developer and you do that most of your life day in and day out for years and years - just as this man sails the seas. After years you will have certain observations that will be a culmination of your experience and accumulated knowledge for doing that job for many years... And perhaps young developers will not understand it or will question how you came to such a conclusion, although it is evident to you and experienced peers like yourself. You can't put it into a white paper because of several reason's like time, money, and test conducting. This is like that, its experience and years of wisdom that are talking. Maybe a state will fund a study which will cost 10 million bucks and 5 years to do statistical fish and trash sampling to confirm it later on but without doing such things in the immediate term such a keen observation has and should have the weight and impact it deserves, by that I mean not being brushed off as there is not data and " I didn't see fish either", its deeper than that and the approach should be constructing rather than deconstructing.
This is nonsense. A classic case of mistaking an anecdote for data.<p>There's lots of year-to-year variation in currents which affect life in the ocean. In turn, the birds which depend on seafood vary tremendously.<p>For example, two years ago Pelagic Cormorants had tremendous problems with their food source off of Northern California. So the Cormorants moved around seeking food. Santa Clara County, which normally goes years without seeing this species, saw dozens.<p>If you want to find out if something is actually going on, go talk to the ornithologists who monitor the nesting sites for the seabirds.
This was the most depressing bit for me:<p>"But they said they'd calculated that the environmental damage from burning the fuel to do that job would be worse than just leaving the debris there."<p>I think that's a fairly neat example of a weakness of modern environmentalism: an obsession with CO2 over everything else.
The US, and other nations, have nuclear powered ships for war. Why not use these ships for peace, and try cleaning the ocean?<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Pacific_Gyre" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Pacific_Gyre</a><p><a href="http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/campaigns/oceans/pollution/trash-vortex/" rel="nofollow">http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/campaigns/oceans/...</a>
It's really really sad, and no less ironic, that in the midst of this government shutdown, particularly with the zealotry from the tea party about the evils of government, that a problem which so obviously needs addressing, and should naturally and probably only can be solved by governments, goes unaddressed like this. Surely we must all be able to agree on this. What is government for at all, if not to harness our collective will to solve problems that economics deem impossible to solve by individuals?
Why oh why do interface designers ever think it's a good idea to hijack the browser's keyboard controls, especially if it's only to make them do <i>nothing</i>?
The good news is that apparently the Japanese aren't having sex anymore, so maybe the ocean around Japan will soon get a bit of a break:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6579294" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6579294</a>
<i>It was like sailing through a garbage tip</i><p>:(<p>As an individual, what are the things we could do (other than using less plastic), so we don't contribute to this mess?
This comment is going to get downvoted for meta-ness and probably because everyone disagrees with me but I just have to speak my mind: I'd like a version of hacker news sans the constant hysteria all the time.