Picture of the day

Via New Scientist and the book/exhibition The Heart of the Great Alone comes the photographs of Herbert Ponting and Frank Hurley, who documented Robert Scott's ill-fated Terra Nova expedition and Ernest Shackleton's slightly more successful Nimrod expedition in the early 1900's.

Picture of the day

From the New York Times and its article Afloat in the Ocean, Expanding Islands of Trash, comes said floating, expanding islands of trash in the Pacific. Aint' my fault baby, I only pollute the Atlantic.

Picture of the day

From the always indispensable Boston Globe's Big Picture blog comes a photo series on everyone's favorite high seas rapscallions, the Somali pirates. Click to embiggen.

Sub Crash by Robert Ludlum

We should thank the British and French navies. They took the unthinkable and made it possible. No longer do you have to wonder if two submarines crashing into each other is even plausible, thus providing the impetus to finish your terrible political potboiler about a Jack Ryan-ish figure having to stop a war and recover nukes after two submarines hit each other. Get it done quick, Tom Clancy has already spent the morning churning out his version, it'll be at the printer's tomorrow. Yes Virginia, apparently two machines carrying dozens of nuclear warheads and navigating by sonar can hit each other in an ocean.

A cross-channel investigation has been launched after two submarines carrying nuclear weapons – from the Royal and French navies – collided in the Atlantic.

HMS Vanguard and Le Triomphant crashed on February 3 or 4, despite both vessels being equipped with sonar.
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Armed with 16 ballistic missiles, it is now believed to have been towed last night to Faslane, a nuclear submarine base in Scotland, with dents and scrapes to its hull. A senior Navy source was quoted in The Sun as saying that the potential consequences of such a collision would be "unthinkable".
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"It’s very unlikely there would have been a nuclear explosion," the source told The Sun.

"But a radioactive leak was a possibility. Worse, we could have the crew and warheads. That would have been a national disaster."

Does this happen often? Are subs constantly hitting other ships, denting precious whales, or knocking over the majestic spires of the castles of undersea societies? It seems to me, what with sonar and everything, a submarine 20 feet away from you shouldn't just "sneak up on you", let alone completely baffle two separate captains. Ah well, it seems perhaps America doesn't need to spend as much as it does on being the world's greatest navy, we just need to set up some rudimentary obstacles around our coastlines. It'll protect us from incursion from British and French submarines at the very least.

Horrible irony two-fer

Man Who Campaigned To Protect Sharks Is Snatched By Great White

A snorkeller is believed to have been snatched by a shark as he swam last weekend with his son at a beach south of Perth. Witnesses reported seeing a dorsal fin and thrashing in the water before the sea turned red and the man vanished at the scene on Australia's west coast.

Father-of three Brian Guest, 51, who had campaigned for many years for the protection of sharks, had been looking for crabs on yesterday morning with his 24-year-old son when he was attacked about 30 metres from the shore.

NPR Reporter Laid Off While Reporting Layoffs

In September, Ketzel Levine, a senior correspondent for National Public Radio, came up with an idea for a series about how Americans were handling economic pressure. Called “American Moxie: How We Get By,” it began in early December. The subjects were people like an Illinois farmer who loved tending to his cows, but was having to sell them. “My idea was to look at how we adjust, how we change, what we have to dig deep and find in order to do what it takes to get by, and that’s where moxie came in,” Ms. Levine said.

But there was an unexpected ending. Midway through her reporting, Ms. Levine found out that she had been laid off as part of a 64-employee cut at NPR.

A pirate life for me

So these Somali pirates, why do they do it? Is it just because they have no other jobs, the infrastructure and government of Somalia is so poor that this is the best option for them? Money and pussy? The feeli....actually it was the last one.

"Is there any Somali who can earn a million dollars for any business? We get millions of dollars easily for one attack," bragged Salah Ali Samatar, a 32-year-old pirate who spoke by phone from Eyl, a pirate den on Somalia's desolate northern coast.
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"It is true," said a 28-year-old pirate who identified himself as Jama. "We are getting very rich."

Jama, who described himself as a high-ranking member of a group based in Eyl, has earned $375,000 as a pirate, enough to buy a Toyota Land Cruiser and to begin building a six-bedroom house in Garowe, the regional capital, for his family.
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"Once there was a girl who lived in Garowe," 100 miles from Eyl, Jama said. "I loved her. I tried to approach her many times, but she rejected me. But since I became a pirate, she has tried nine times to get with me.
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"The pirates are the hottest men in town," Abdi said. "Girls from all over Somalia moved here to marry pirates. But if the girl isn't cute she's out of luck, because the pirates only go with beautiful girls."

Yeah, the money's good, but the ladies are what piracy is really about. And parrots, bomb ass parrots. Keep in mind that all of this, the dozens of hijackings resulting in millions of dollars in ransom, is being done with little more than small fiberglass boats and AK-47's. These guys have so disrupted trade that the UN is going to send naval support, led by the Chinese, into the area to pursue the pirates on land or sea. Not bad for a couple of guys who wanted Land Cruisers and get with the easily impressed girls of Garowe. They'll all be killed by the Chinese, but not bad.