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Low Frequency Active Sonar Gains US Gov. Approval
burntout writes "According to bbc online the US government has finally approved the use of low frequency active sonar. Apparently the navy has been granted an exemption from the marine mammal protection act for this, which is apparently 'necessary because of new superquiet Chinese, Russian, and German subs'."
Though this issue is a bit overhyped, once in a while, the Navy does kill a few whales. For instance, in March, 2000, 17 beaked whales died due to getting battered with sonar. (Link to NOAA press release here.)
Holy sheeet! Anyone know how much juice that must take? http://www.fas.org/irp/program/collect/lfa.htm The shallow-water acoustics problem has risen in importance due to the increased salience of regional conflicts where the US Navy may to encounter slow, diesel submarines close to shore. The shallow-water, slow submarine is significantly more difficult to detect and classify acoustically than the cold war threat, due to the complex propagation, high clutter, and low target Doppler. Effective sonar performance requires new processing algorithms which cannot be implemented on current Naval platforms due the high processing requirements. A Hybrid Digital/Optical Processor (HyDOP) is to demonstrate the feasibility of using embedded scalable high performance digital and optical processing to solve this problem. This requires application of computationally intensive algorithms which cannot be implemented in real time using conventional processors. A high-speed optical correlator being developed by the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) will act as a coprocessor to an Intel Paragon XP/S-25 computer.
Smoking is an expensive, slow, and unreliable method of suicide.
Yes... it causes whales and dolphins to die. Much of the experiments were carried out in the water around Hawaii, thanks to the military idiots that abound here.
And yes, they know that it cause havoc with the animals. It's sad, because whales travel thousands of miles each year to give birth to their babies off the coasts of our islands. Not only will this dissrupt their normal cycle of life, but also will drive them away (which also hurts our tourist industry as well as our scientific industries who try to study the whales).
But, like everything else... our government has it's preverbal head up it's ass and only thinks of itself with it's MIGHT MAKES RIGHT mentality.
I think personally, it is time for Hawaii to secceed the US... kick out the military, and bring back a balance to life on these beautiful islands.
We aren't the only animals with hands, nor with big brains, but we're the only ones who have both hands and the brains to use our hands to develop much in the way of technology. (As one of the Leakeys pointed out, many other animals make tools; the critical distinction between us and them is that we _use tools to make tools_. After that, there are no limits.) But we're not the only violent animals, nor in fact are the only ones who fight wars -- read up on baboons some time.
Look, I'm not defending killing whales, nor bombing wedding parties. But the idea that the rest of nature is gentle and peaceful and we're the only ones who destroy each other and/or our environment is romantic foolishness.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.