Posts

May 15, 2013

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How many grains of sand are there on earth? That is a good question. But a ball-park estimate is fairly simple. We will look at fine sand (grain size = 100 microns), and coarse sand (grain size = 1 mm). So a cubic mm can hold 1000 grains of fine sand, or 1 grain of course sand. Obviously grain size is important. There are 1x1018 cubic millimeters in a cubic km. How many cubic km

May 14, 2013

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2:51 PM | How many of your co-authors have you actually met?

In my meandering career from academia to government to private sector, and back into all the grey areas in between, I've been an author on a few journal articles, government reports, and other publications. Usually, these are collaborations between groups of separated people, not all of whom interact with every other member of the team. For example, in the academic literature, I have a total of

May 12, 2013

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5:42 PM | Good Conservation Policies Can Push Markets Towards Conservation

A lot of debate among conservationists centers on the conflict between the desire to see a species totally protected from human exploitation and the reality that market forces will continue to exist (see the latest on shark fin bans for a very good example). Ideally, a conservation plan should strike a balance, ensuring the continued [...]

May 08, 2013

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12:52 AM | Predation Matters

Today, Pew unleashed a mini-media blitz on the importance of predation in fisheries management. This got my attention because the interaction between marine predators and fisheries is one of my major research interests. They do a great (and slickly-designed) job explaining the basics of why paying attention to predation matters in fisheries management, and bonus [...]

May 06, 2013

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11:29 PM | Universities Australia sticks it to the Australian high technology industry

Universities Australia has launched a recent ad campaign decrying proposed funding cuts to university research. This ad showcases the products of off-shore corporate giants which are trying to destroy the Australian high tech industry. The complicated scientific instrument pictured in the ad from 0:12 to 0:17 is something called a IMS-1280, manufactured by the American technology

May 02, 2013

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5:18 AM | Circle Hooks Save Fish

When you work on the water long enough, you encounter some unique situations. Whether it’s getting stranded during field work, surviving massive seasickness, having your equipment attacked by hostile sea life, or just seeing something unusual, these anecdotes are an important part of what makes marine science fun (sometimes moreso in hindsight). That’s why I’m [...]

May 01, 2013

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2:56 PM | The Wool Sock’s Carbon Footprint

Three years ago, I blogged about the cognitive disconnect between the ecological perceptions of wearing wool and eating beef. However, I did not actually calculate out exactly what the carbon footprint of a wool sock is. Here it goes: According to Wikipedia’s wool bale article, a bale contains about 60 fleeces, and weights 150 ± 50 kg. This gives a fleece weight of about 2.5 kg. This

April 04, 2013

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1:51 PM | Why deflecting asteroids is a really bad idea

In the aftermath of the Chelyabinsk fireball last month, there have been increasing calls to identify asteroids on a collision course with Earth and develop technologies to deflect them. This would be a very stupid thing to do. The reason for this can be seen in figure 1, below. In part A, this figure shows the minimum deflection necessary to make an asteroid on a collision course with

April 01, 2013

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4:12 PM | Help with Prey ID

Long time no post, I know. The main reason for that has been the sheer amount of field work I’ve found myself involved with this semester, all of which somehow came to a head in the past month. On the … Continue reading →

March 28, 2013

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3:22 AM | Of Fin-Body Ratios and Smooth Dogfish

As you may have noticed from the previous post, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) is proposing draft addendum to the Fishery Management Plan (FMP) for coastal sharks to bring it in line with the current Federal regulations. These regulations are based on the Shark Conservation Act of 2010, which required all sharks fished [...]

March 21, 2013

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1:16 PM | High mass resolution mass spectrometry

Mass spectrometry is the dark art of separating objects by mass. The name comes from the alchemal days of photographic plate detectors; just like a prism separates white light into a spectrum of colors, a magnet can separate a beam of ions into their component masses, which will then form an image on a plate. These days, electronic counting systems have replaced chemical emulsion ion

March 17, 2013

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11:28 AM | Do you really need a Nobel prize to know...

that heat is most easily lost from the head on cold January mornings...

February 28, 2013

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6:52 AM | The Endangered Species Act and Marine Animals: To List or Not To List?

Endangered species seem to be coming up around here more often than usual, mostly due to the potential state-level listing of great white sharks in California. This move has been resisted from some surprising corners, including researchers who are generally pro-shark conservation. The reasons why scientists might want to oppose an Endangered Species listing are [...]

February 21, 2013

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2:13 PM | Putting the Russian meteorite in perspective

Friday morning, a large meteor entered the atmosphere over the southern Ural area of Russia, detonating with enough force to shatter windows in nearby towns and injure over 1000 people. Preliminary estimates suggest an impactor traveling at 15 to 20 km/s, and weighing 8000 to 10,000 tons, exploding at an altitude of 20-30 km with the force of a nuclear weapon. These are hard numbers to wrap

February 19, 2013

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7:00 AM | Winter of the Shark: It Pays to Know People

This past weekend marked a new venture into shark-related field work. For the better part of two months I’ve been fighting the good fight to keep ECU’s acoustic array up off of Cape Hatteras, and last Friday and Saturday finally … Continue reading →

February 11, 2013

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1:52 AM | Shark DNA Used to Buff Up Aquacultured Fish

It’s not every day that catching up on scientific literature causes you to almost do a spit-take on your laptop screen. This happened to me recently due to the weird and wild world of aquaculture. Aquaculture is the practice of growing aquatic animals such as fish and shellfish for the purpose of food, and [...]

January 31, 2013

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6:32 AM | Inaugural Post: Fishermen Are Not Evil

Hi everyone. I’m Chuck and I used to blog primarily over at Ya Like Dags?, where my main focus was on interactions between apex predators (sharks mostly, but I also occasionally dabbled in other large fish and sea mammals) and those other top marine predators, humans. This was not in the “shark attack” sense, but [...]

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2:36 AM | Age and Growth

As you may have seen on Southern Fried Science, I and three other more-than-deserving bloggers have been pulled up to the big leagues. I’m excited about this opportunity and looking forward to contributing to what has been one of my … Continue reading →

January 26, 2013

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6:10 PM | Happy Birthday to The Blog

Posting may have slowed a bit, but this blog has managed to stay up and swimming for three years as of yesterday. In that time, I’ve made 290 posts, gotten 57,320 page views (roughly equivalent to a slow week at … Continue reading →

January 18, 2013

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3:28 AM | I build huge cans of learning named after a small pink water animal with lots of legs.

I build huge cans of learning named after a small pink water animal with lots of legs. The can of learning fires the tiniest bits of air, hurried up by a field, at rocks to break them into the tiniest bits of matter. We suck all of the air out of the box, leaving only empty space. That way the bits of the rock don't hit bits of air that are in the way. Another field sucks these bits off of the

January 15, 2013

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4:08 AM | Adventures in Acoustic Telemetry

One of the reasons posting has been so sparse lately is that I’ve been busy putting gear together, scheduling, breathlessly paying attention to the weather, and finally getting out on the water to work on the acoustic array off of … Continue reading →

December 31, 2012

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3:34 AM | Spiny Dogfish Ecotourism?

One of the biggest challenges in conservation has been making the continued existence of a species or environment worth more than its value as food, real estate, or any other consumptive use. Like it or not, some policymakers and populations … Continue reading →

December 20, 2012

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1:02 PM | The world has ended, but this blog rambles on.

In this timezone, it’s the 21st of December already, and the world has been destroyed. Sorry guys, but the Mayans were right. At 12:01 am, Eastern Australian Daylight time, this section of the world was destroyed. The planet is disintegrating along the time-zone lines like the segments of an orange getting peeled off and tossed into a juicer. Sorry folks, it’s all over. And they didn’t

December 12, 2012

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11:09 AM | Odd-shaped lakes in Google Earth

I was goofing around in Google Earth this evening, performing an activity that started out as meaningful and quickly degenerated into a Game of "Ooh what's that", when I came across the following: Note the very strange shoreline on this lake, with numerous straight line borders. The first time I saw this, I thought I was looking at some dams I didn't know about, but I quickly realized that

December 08, 2012

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7:00 PM | Predation

A quick look around this blog will tell you that I’m very interested in fish eating other fish. My Master’s research was on the feeding habits of spiny dogfish, and I’ve tried to keep up with the literature on shark-related … Continue reading →

November 23, 2012

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4:55 PM | Big Moves Proposed in U.S. Shark Management

It’s been quite the week for sharks and the fisheries that target them. First, ICCAT managed to disappoint on shark management (largely through the actions of Canada of all places) but finally started following scientific advice on bluefin tuna quotas. … Continue reading →

November 18, 2012

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12:28 PM | Pre-Proterozoic Political Proletariat

For those not familiar with old Earth geology, the conglomerates of the Jack Hills contain detrital zircons, and the 1% of those zircons which are older than 4 billion years consume 95% of the resources used to study these mineral grains. Clearly, this is the longest-running example of economic inequality on this planet.

November 15, 2012

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1:21 PM | Misunderstanding and Abusing Ecosystem-based Management

That ever-reliable settler of internet arguments, Wikipedia, defines ecosystem-based management as “an environmental management approach that recognizes the full array of interactions within an ecosystem.” At heart, this type of management is supposed to keep all the cogs of an … Continue reading →

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3:44 AM | The trouble with climate models

For the past 20 years or so, people who have not wanted to consider the possible issues relating to increasing the atmospheric load of carbon dioxide and other IR-adsorbing gasses have tried to play down the dangers of potential climate change by pointing out that the computer models used to predict it were not very accurate. The implication behind this argument is that the uncertainty in

November 14, 2012

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1:13 AM | http://lablemminglounge.blogspot.com/2012/11/it-has-been-year-since-solar-panels-on.html

It has been a year since the solar panels on our house were installed. In that year, we consumed about 2750 kWh of electricity, and produced about 3370 kWh.