Cephalopodcast

Discovery Channel is celebrating their 20th anniversary of Shark Week beginning July 29. Not everyone is enthusiastic.

How can we support Discovery Channel when we are fighting for shark conservation, and its biggest obstacle is the monster image given to sharks by the media, including Shark Week programs? Further, some of us who have been directly involved in the production of your documentaries feel disgusted at the way that our interviews were censored and our words twisted around.

• Letter to the Discovery Network

Mingle is a Web 2.0 dating site. They have a marketing ploy that’s got the blogosphere buzzing. It’s a rating system for blogs based on the MPAA rating system. The MPAA’s system is proprietary, so I don’t think Mingle will be allowed to continue this for too long. And the automated results are also somewhat questionable. It just seems to scan the text for objectionable keywords. A more effective system would also consider what sites a blog links to and what sites link back to it.

More importantly, there are better, less gimmicky ways to rate your blog. If you have control over your metatags, consider adding your own rating to the header.

Attributes:
<meta name="Rating" content="text">

Safe For Kids	G
General	Roughly equivalent to PG
14 Years	PG-13
Mature	R rated more or less
Restricted	X rated

Of course, there is no uniformity or consensus on what constitutes objectionable material. This metatag can also be replaced by the more targeted PICS tag.

• How To Label Your Pages With PICS Meta Tag

PBS is airing its tenth installment of Journey to Planet Earth series tomorrow. The show is hosted by Matt Damon, which is kind of annoying. Expect a disheartening survey of the many ills facing our planet’s oceans interspersed with optimistic words about mankind’s resourcefulness and the hope that technology and international cooperation will someday solve all these problems.

STATE OF THE OCEAN’S ANIMALS
Premiers March 28th, 2007 at 8pm on PBS
Check local listings

Nearly half the world’s marine animals may face extinction over the next twenty-five years. Global warming, over-fishing, and habitat destruction are emptying the world’s oceans. Join host Matt Damon as “State of the Ocean’s Animals” takes a hard look at the future of our watery natural world: the beauty, the incredible animals, and the dangers that threaten them.

Features scenes from the Pacific Northwest (whales, salmon and sea otters), Florida (sea level rise and its effect on loggerhead turtles), Japan (the slaughter of dolphins), China (shark fin trade), and the Antarctic (threats to Emperor Penguins).

• Journey to Planet Earth - State of the Ocean’s Animals
• Educational materials, including Teacher Guides.

In the tradition of Internet adages, I’d like to add another. In any discussion of sea life, no matter how rare, strange or disgusting, some knucklehead will always ask how well it goes with lemon or butter. I am calling this Gorton’s Law.

Now the more compelling question is to ask why this happens. Why do so many people consider the sea to be a smorgasbord? What difference is there between animals in the ocean and ones on land? For many, I suppose there is none. For example, on a swamp tour in Louisiana, our guide was kind enough to remind us that in his great state, if it bleeds, they eat it. However, Sylvia Earl, in her book Sea Change, makes the point that we often eat higher up on the oceanic food chain than we do on the terrestrial one. She equates eating tuna with eating bushmeat. But it is true that many cultures do not eat large carnivores. Is this just because lions, tigers and bears are comparatively rare in the environment? Is that just because we have already extirpated them in our past? Obviously, it is certainly more dangerous to tangle with them than a herbivore. And perhaps that is the key. Even the fiercest of oceanic predators are manageable once landed. It can be a struggle to get a grouper on board, but once on deck it doesn’t take much to subdue it. So maybe it’s just a matter of buoyancy.

Many who would recognize the absurdity of a plan to sustain large and growing numbers of people by hunting and gathering from the land buffalol, deer, wild birds, rabbits, squirrels, roots, and berries seem to disengage their power of reason when it comes to the sea, apparently believing, somehow, that ocean systems are fundamentally different from those on the land, that they can year after year yield huge, comercially viable takes of wild-caught organisms and rebound indefinitely.

-Sylvia Earl, Sea Change

Sharkfin soup: it’s like a cannibal who kills people only to eat their fingernails.