Monthly Archive for November, 2008

Black Friday

Published
by
Jason
on November 28, 2008
in Moblogging
. 0 Comments

Not-so-black beginning to my post-Thanksgiving Friday.

eFestivus for the Rest of Us

Published
by
Jason
on November 14, 2008
in Events
. 1 Comment
eFest banner showing the logo over a blue sky and green grass [165x165, 20K]

It is eFest time again. If you live in the greater Tampa Bay area of Florida, grab some granola and consider stopping by this annual event. I expect to be there with a little bit of moblogging coverage too.

eFest.us: Florida’s Green Living Music and Arts Festival, November 15-16, 2008, Sarasota Polo Club at Lakewood Ranch


Podcast Aquatic: Making Waves with the NOS

Published
by
Jason
on November 13, 2008
in Under the Bridge
. 0 Comments

On October 31st, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Ocean Services (NOS) Communications and Education Division (CED) launched a weekly “podcast” called Making Waves. The program offers highlights to current activities, recent discoveries, and other happenings around NOS. So far there are two episodes out, each around seven minutes long and they promise to launch a new one each Friday.

Unfortunately, their RSS does not seem to include enclosures for their audio files, so I cannot automatically subscribe to it in iTunes. To listen, I have to actually visit the page and manually download the mp3 files. That’s kind of a pain, so let me know if it works differently for you.

So what is the NOAA NOS? It is part of the US Department of Commerce and is one of the agencies responsible for managing America’s “95,000 miles of shoreline and 3.5 million square miles of coastal, Great Lakes, and deep-ocean waters.” It is is composed of eight program and two staff offices, including the Center for Operational Oceanographic Products and Services (CO-OPS), the National Geodetic Survey (NGS) and the Office of National Marine Sanctuaries (ONMS). Still unsure about what NOS does? Then listen to their new audio program to learn more. :)

NOS is not the only NOAA podcast floating around out there. WeirdFins is a NOAA National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) podcast about some of the strange creatures that live in the sea. Each audio program is about two minutes long and their RSS appears to be valid. NOAA’s Office of Exploration also regularly publishes audio and video podcasts during their expeditions and you can subscribe to them here.

Gelatinous for the Masses

Published
by
Jason
on November 13, 2008
in Meta
. 1 Comment

As a follow up to a previous 30D2BBB post, I’ve made some minor updates to my About page and I’ve created a new header for the blog. This new image puts my mug up there right and center. Too creepy? Let me know.

Beyond All Believable Bounds: Happy Exploding Whale Day

Published
by
Jason
on November 12, 2008
in Life Oddquatic
. 0 Comments

November 12 is the 38th anniversary of the infamous exploding whale incident. Not sure how you celebrate this one without blubbering. From Wikipedia:

Exploding whales have been documented on two notable occasions, as well as several lesser-known ones. The most famous explosion occurred in the United States at Florence, Oregon, in 1970, when a dead sperm whale (originally reported to be a gray whale) was blown up by the Oregon Highway Division in an attempt to dispose of its rotting carcass. This incident became famous in the U.S. when American humorist Dave Barry wrote about it in his newspaper column after viewing a videotape of television footage of the explosion. It later became well-known internationally when the same footage circulated on the Internet.

Related Links:

CephaLOLpod: Elder Ones

Published
by
Jason
on November 12, 2008
in Life Oddquatic
. 5 Comments


The Interwebs are brimming with reports from The Census of Marine Life about cephalopod ancestors mucking about around Antarctica. They believe that the shallow-water cephalopod, Megaleledone setebos, is an evolutionary link to many of the world’s other deep-sea octopuses. The CoML press release was just released, but judging from the pub date of the Shrapnel cartoon above (February 21, 2008), Peter Barbyshire must have had an inkling of what was to come.

The census continues through 2010, and the CoML Web site is a evolving wealth of information. But as Sarah notes, while they are deep in the midst of discovery, it make take some time to make it all classroom friendly.

Of course, cephalopods have a lineage that goes much farther back than Megaleledone setebos. Christopher Taylor recently posted a couple of nice entries on cephalopod early evolution:

Modo del Polipo

Published
by
Jason
on November 11, 2008
in Gefilter Feeder
. 5 Comments

[via highsnobiety.com]

Black windbreaker with an image of purple octopus tentacles screened onto the hood and shoulders [200x225, 20K]
vngrd.org: Octopus Windbreaker - Black, medium

If I spoke Italian, had 94€ in my pocket and was not so extra-large, I might be able to wear one of these boss cephalopod windbreakers from VNGRD. It’s even got the cephalopodcast color scheme! Sadly, it is not available in my size. But they also have T’s and hoodies designed in a similar fashion. I suppose I could settle for an octopus umbrella (though I’d rather have an umbrella octopus, [umbrellopus?]).

Anyone know of other exciting invertebrate-inspired couture?


30D2BBB: Traffic Ahead

Published
by
Jason
on November 9, 2008
in Meta
. 3 Comments
Supplementary Web badge for the 30 Days to Being a Better Blogger program, modeled after a green and yellow highway sign [250x150, 16K]

This is my third entry in the 30 Days to Being a Better Blogger. Today’s topic is about traffic analysis: figuring out who’s visiting, where they’re coming from and how long they’re staying.

You may not know this, but as you route around the Interwebs, you leave a glistening trail of data behind. You produce this information mucus anytime you make contact with the Internet and it acts to both reduce friction and provide propulsion as you move from page to page. But this also means that just like some predatory flatworm, I can follow your spoor whenever you enter my domain. Lucky for both of us, I don’t do much with the data you secrete. And really there is no easy way for me to single anyone out for identification. I just see the aggregated image of all the visitors squiggling around the sidewalks of my site. With this, I can tell how folks find their way here and when they leave. I can also see where the trail dead ends (404) or is blocked (403).

To see these trails, I use a couple of different tools. In the beginning, I would just download the daily visitor logs as a spreadsheet and try to parse the tables out manually. After a couple thousand rows it would get tedious. Not that there is really that much traffic. It is just that every thing you touch gets tagged, every graphic, file and page and that adds up quickly. Fortunately my hosting company offers two options for parsing Web statistics easily, Webalizer or AWStats. Webalizer is the default and the one that I use. Because of this I can show you what it looks like when PZ Myers touches me.

cephalostats_october2008.gif

That big spike on 10/8/2008 is for International Cephalopod Appreciation Day. It’s a fun tradition and many people contribute to the bump, but Myers always ends up being the biggest skew. Webalizer also gives me monthly, daily and hourly statistics, as well as top URLs by hit and by Kilobytes and top entry and exit pages. Because of it, I also learned that oddly enough snapping turtle is one of the most frequent terms searched for on this site.

I have Google Analytics running too. Fun fact: the original company that developed Google’s analytic software was called Urchin Software Corporation and you can see their invertebrate mascot in this picture. Google usually gives a more nuanced and attractive image of my traffic than Webalizer. With it I can easily parse out the perennial popularity of my PowerBook/Macbook power adapter wrapping tutorial.

And because of all these traffic tools, I can easily see so many of you worming your way into my heart. Thanks for stopping by and please pick up a cookie while you are here.

Sleep Typing

Published
by
Jason
on November 9, 2008
in Book Gills and Personal
. 5 Comments

Hey, it’s NaNoWriMo time again. I had a dream about this back in June. I dreamt that I was trying to write my first novel. I could see myself sitting at an old-fashioned typewriter, pecking away, reading and re-reading the words you see below. I woke up and immediately wrote down for real what I could remember. It is not as good as I remember, but I thought it was novel :P enough to share.

In a very long room with an even longer table, Ed Stanwick was about to sit down to an elaborate meal. From the look of the imported linens, the silver and china you might think it was dinner but in fact it was brunch. Ed was an eleven week virgin to the world of high-finance, so he was not expecting the phone call he was about to receive. He was also not expecting the sudden departure party thrown for him at one of those swank bar with too many highballs and too much slipping on acrylic chairs. Nor was he expecting the prospect of spending the rest of his life in Thailand. But this story is not about him.

Instead, it is about Clairice, the girl Ed left behind. She told herself it would have hurt worse if they were married instead of just living together for five years.

30D2BBB: About the Cephalopodcast

Published
by
Jason
on November 8, 2008
in Meta
. 4 Comments
Supplementary Web badge for the 30 Days to Being a Better Blogger program, modeled after a green and yellow highway sign [250x150, 16K]

Continuing with the notion that this 30 Days business is something more linearly sequential than chronological, here’s my next entry. This one is supposed to be about cleaning up the About page, but I thought I’d work on my backstory instead.

Origins

Somewhere early in 2005 I got an iPod shuffle (thanks Aunt C!). Like a many men my age, I was still on dial-up and had a meager selection of CDs, most of which I did not like and hardly ever listened to. So what use was this new little nugget of technology? Fortunately, Apple soon added podcasting support in iTunes and I had more random audio than my one little gigabyte of portable media storage could carry. I quickly added broadband, a Mac mini and a 5G iPod (with video) to my home (how’s that for a halo effect?). Regular readers of this blog will not be surprised to learn that my first podcast experience was something technological. Later I added things like science and the oceans to the mix. And somewhere during that time I became convinced that this was something that I could do*, despite a history of mild stage fright and and an overdeveloped sense of self-deprecation.

It was not until August that I woke up with a headache and the name of the show rattling around in my brain: The Cephalopodcast. It seemed more clever at the time, but I’ve since learned that there are a disheartening number of people who have never heard the word cephalopod before, much less know how to pronounce it or know what it means.

I knew I couldn’t have a podcast without a companion Web site, so I registered my first domain, found a hosting service, figured out how to install MySQL and Wordpress and wrote my first blog entry. It was not until December that I recorded and posted my first show (when RSS was not so simple) and it has been a middling success ever since.

What is this blog all about?

The tag line for the Cephalopodcast is science edu + ocean info. It is about:

  • science
  • education
  • science education
  • marine science
  • marine science education

You might notice a little overlap in those subject areas. Diagrammatically, it shapes up something like this:

cephalogram.gif

However, this is not a complete picture. If I am honest, there is actually another factor at play here, and a more accurate formula might look something like: (science edu + ocean info) x tech. Adding the tech multiplier might seem self-evident if you are reading this blog or listening to the podcast but I mention it for completeness sake. Also, there is an environmental variable which is sometimes thrown in to balance the equation.

*I mentioned my rationale for being here in an earlier entry.

Thanks for all the delish

Published
by
Jason
on November 8, 2008
in All Wild Right Outside
. 12 Comments
Monkfish on Victor Hugo market, Toulouse France. From www.noodlepie.com [179x240, 28K]
“Monkfish on Victor Hugo market, Toulouse France. From www.noodlepie.com“
Flickr photo: DSC06852.JPG, by noodlepie
Creative Commons license, Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic

Monterey Bay Aquarium recently launched their online guide to sustainable sushi. It is part of their overall Seafood Watch program that aims to raise public awareness of sustainable fishing and consumer best practices. This monumental effort involves scientists, managers, citizens and fisherfolk working together to make recommendations on where and what to eat. You can read about all the steps and criteria for ranking in this handy PDF. Suffice to say, it seems thorough and it condenses all the information down into one of three recommendations: Best Choice; Good Alternative; Avoid. These are printed in an attractive format that fits in your wallet or mobile device. And after all that effort to make the decision easy, you’d think I’d be happy. But I am not.

It is because I recently had the option to order the monkfish. It is an animal whose name belies how truly monstrous it appears. Rather than being a sedate and cloistered creature, the monkfish looks as if it might consider me for a meal instead. But not knowing if it was better, best, or bad, I opened up the Seafood Watch Web site to check. After squinting at the margins and mashing the wrong link a few times, I eventually found out monkfish is a bad choice and avoided it and in so doing decided never to order seafood again.

For you see, I am tired of having doubts about what to eat from the sea. Call it blue-green ennui or environmental fatigue, it feels the same. That moment with the monkfish merely made me conscious of a preexisting behavior—I’ve been avoiding seafood for some time. Given the ocean of options at the fish counter, doubt inevitably washes over me and I instead settle for the tilapia or the “Delacata” because I think they are safe. With the snapper, the roughy or the hake, I am never sure. True, I could reference a handy guide, but no matter how sustainable it seems on paper, in practice I know that mongers will lie.

To be clear, I do not think that catfish are sea kittens. For me, it isn’t about the ethics of eating animals or if fish have feelings too. And I am not advocating a piscine proscription for anyone else. Instead, it’s about the recognition that I have too many doubts about what I am eating, more than any card or pamphlet can allay. I am not eating seafood now nor feel the need to eat it in the future and that is a decision which is, by default, sustainable. So, given the choice of A, B, or C, I am opting for D, none of the above. And I am happy with that.

Nom On

But let’s say you are someone who is inclined to nom on fish flesh. What to do? Of course, you can start by consulting the various online guides. And if that does not suffice, try a helping of Jacqueline Church’s blog where she is collecting sustainable seafood recipes to be published later this month. Or join an ocean wise Podmob and try to make a difference en masse.

30 Days to Being a Better Blogger

Published
by
Jason
on November 6, 2008
in Blog, Meta and Under the Bridge
. 16 Comments

Remember when I made that 100 days of 100 words blog challenge? Yeah, that did not turn out so well. But I thought, why not get back on the yo-yo and try a new dietchallenge? This one is called 30 Days to Being a Better Blogger. And since blogging is by nature an iterative process, no one will notice anyway, right?

This latest craze is an initiative started by Steven Dembo, author of the Teach42 blog and Online Community Manager for the Discovery Educator Network. A similar program is going on over at the National Blog Posting Month site (NaBloPoMo).

Steve has a Web badge to go along with the program, but I’ve made one too (above). Using the highway sign motif may be a tad trite, but it is the image that came to mind when I first heard of the 30 Days idea (and I already had the pieces handy). To me, the concept seems as much about distance as about time, like there is some destination up ahead on the Information Super Highway and each day is another mile marker along that road. Let me know what you think, or if you have a better idea.

The support wiki is at 30d2bbb.pbwiki.com. It is a work in progress, and if you would like to contribute, please join in. And keep your readers pointed here if you want to see where this thing goes. With any luck, it won’t end up in the drink again.

Carnival of the Blue #18: Deep Sea News

Published
by
Jason
on November 6, 2008
in Carnival of the Blue
. 2 Comments

Carnival Of The Blue logo, a blue sphere half-filled with water. [100x100, 7K]Carnival of the Blue #18 is now available for your consideration over at Deep Sea News. Deep Sea News is a World Wide Web famous blog that delves daily into the depths of the deep sea.


Next month’s festivities will be hosted at Waternotes. For a list of past Carnivals, visit the mothersite.