The Big Stink

Last night, our city was beset by millions of visitors that mysteriously turned belly up and died. Was it something we said?
Read the story in the LAT (source of the above photo).

The explanation is that the fish tried to take shelter from the high winds last night in the harbor. There were so many fish that the ones that they ran out of oxygen. First the ones pushed to the shallow waters asphyxiated. There was simply no way out for them. Then the decomposing fish fed a bacterial bloom, further depleting oxygen, and the wave of death moved outwards into the middle of the marina.

I can believe it. The winds were ferocious last night.

Here's the jet-stream analysis visualization courtesy of CRWS, California Regional Weather Server. CRWS gets the data from NCEP, the National Center for Environmental Prediction.

Last November, Iris and I visited the nearby tidepools of Abalone Cove. A small school of small fish were caught in the shallows. I enjoyed watching their schooling behavior. When I tried to record it, the kids became very interested and started stomping around, drastically altering the fish behavior. Imagine if they are this frightened of kids, how they would react to the large waves we had last night.



Anyway, these are the kind of small fish that live offshore. Their abundance was the reason a pod of 50-80 blue whales tarried for nearly a month off our coast last September.

In the video, that's my kid screaming, "the sea anemone is going to eat the fish!" One fish had already been so severely weakened, that it was too weak to escape the tentacles of a sea anemone. She tried to save the little fish with a flick, but sent the fish into the grasp of a sea urchin instead. She was crushed, but I told her that it was too late for the fish, no matter what she did.

Then she started singing a song about the cycle of life. Or was it the circle of life? As they say in Tanzania, hakuna matata.

There are lots more pictures and stories in the tidepooling series.

The BBC video and story about this recent fish die-off shows the magnitude of the clean-up effort.

I am glad that the fish will be turned into fertilizer. It sounds like they were taken to the same place as the contents of our green (waste) bins. Our city parks are going to be very sufficiently fertilized this year. Unfortunately, tax receipts from the marina will be down as long as the smell persists, right at the time we have to pay for the cleanup. So come by and spend some money this summer, OK?

Welcome Fallows' Readers

I hadn't realized how much traffic would be generated by guest blogging for James Fallows. If you are new to this site, then this background may be useful.

• My basic bio is here.
• My spouse used to blog at Bad Dad, but no longer does due to lack of time.
• The Eric that sporadically posts here is a friend from grad school and not my spouse. He and his spouse and kids wrote a very interesting blog about their Bangalore Sabbatical.
• My job is not blog fodder; I can only write about it in a general way if it helps me make a point about STEM (Science/Technology/Engineering/Mathematics). There is a national shortage of STEM workers and volunteers; my employer encourages us to do things that promote STEM education in general and has a policy of giving us flex-time so that we can perform STEM volunteer work with students.
  
• Certain aspects of my home life are also not blog fodder. There is a reason why mommy bloggers do not discuss their older children. What she wants to share, she posts.
  
• I am keenly interested in the culture of making. Because I can't discuss the stuff I make at work, I discuss the stuff I make at home. Some readers skim over it; but there are many tidbits about engineering, design and science in the making posts.
• There are many commercial messages about how to consume with your kids in a way that benefits advertisers. To counter those messages, I write about fun and educational things to do with your kids in Los Angeles that cost little or no money in LA Kids. They also include science tidbits and I am happy to explain/clarify the posts or answer science questions.
• Sometimes I get cranky and want to vent about Bullshit, which often coincides with the misinterpretation of Statistics.
  

The bullshit never ends

My bullshit detector went full tilt when I read Navy seeks to discharge sailor found asleep in bed with another male sailor in the WaPost today. We're fighting two wars. The middle east is aflame. Do you think our military has better things to do than to criminalize the consensual sleeping arrangements of our soldiers?

"The subterfuge is, they believe this kid is a homosexual, but they have no proof of it," said Gary Myers, Jones's civilian attorney. "So what they've done here is to trump this thing up as a crime. This is not a crime."

I read about this case and wondered why there wasn't similarly zealous prosecution for the sexual assaults on female officers at Tailhook. Out of 1,500 participants and witnesses, only 140 sailors were charged and only 80 were fined or moderately disciplined. Not one sailor was court-martialed or severely disciplined--unless you count the whistleblower. See the excerpt on page 256 of Managing Business Ethics.

Navy is reliving the ‘Tailhook’ scandal describes another case of harassment of homosexuals in the Navy.