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Penguins Disappearing From Southern Hemisphere
The Scotsman is running a piece looking at the mysterious disappearance of penguins from all around the world. A biologist who studies the rockhopper penguin characterizes the population crash as 'sinister', as scientists are still baffled as to why almost 30% of the birds have vanished. From the article: "Grant Munro, the director of Falklands Conservation, said there were fears that rockhoppers might become extinct. 'If the present situation were to carry on then it's not a particularly great forecast. It doesn't look like they are suddenly going to start increasing in numbers ... In the Falklands, they are part of everyday life. If you head down to the beach you are going to see penguins.'"
> Penguins Disappearing From Southern Hemisphere
Microsoft must be behind of all of this. Who else would like to see cute little penguins to disappear from the world.
This is obviously a malicious virus propagated by Microsoft to destroy the Linux community!
Today's lucky number is: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
So long... and thanks for all the fish!
I just wasted your mod points! HA!
I felt a great disturbance in the [NOUN] , as if [AMOUNT] of [NOUN]'s suddenly [VERB] out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
Maybe they all just flew to another planet, because someone's about to demolish this one. All because nobody bothered to pay attention to intergalactic politics.
Obviously too many penguins have been reading this book...
If Penguins were featherless, covered in oozing mucous, constantly moaned in pain and had soulless empty sockets where their eyes should be we wouldn't care if they disappeared from the earth or not.
Watch the combined "inconvenient Truth of the March of the Penguins" one more time to see why.
This would make more sense if it were dolphins!
Baby it's harmageddon time soon! Why did we have to crash this planet? Look at what you have done now!
Soon there will be no more Prinnys left!
Today's lucky number is: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
and they will appear on the desktops all over the world!
less is more
My new company KFP is going to put KFC out of business. I was just hoping that no one would notice the population drop until I was ready to go international.
Fuck a chicken wing, penguin wings is the future.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Penguins are not just cute. They're delicious too.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
... until Netcraft confirms it.
From wikipedia: "Penguins (order Sphenisciformes, family Spheniscidae) are an order of aquatic, flightless birds living exclusively in the Southern Hemisphere."
s.clementmonkey@sympatico.ca, remove the 'monkey'.
Just like the T-Rex, the reason they disappear is because they can't break their fall. No arms, no way to save them self. Well, the T-Rex had arms, but they where to short to do any difference.
The people who, along with the oil companies, pretend global warming isn't happening, deserve worse than losing office. They deserve some seriously sinister shit, at this point.
They deserve badness. Personally, and in their homes. They deserve badness. While their children watch, in the middle of the night, these people deserve the equivalent of what they do to everyone else. They deserve the worst. The most abominible thing you can think of is too good for these things. They aren't people, they're animals.
The worst thing you can do to them is too good for them.
It's time to find their names and addresses. It's time to find them in the middle of the night, and make it happen so fast the police don't even have a chance to get there in time. We can do it. We can end them.
It's just like writing a program. We find them, we execute, and the program is gone from memory, just like that.
My script don't crash! She crashes, you crashed her!
Scientists may be baffled by the decline in penguin population, but (judging by the story tag) slashdotters seem to be assuming that it is global warming.
They can't fly but swim and seals easily catch 'em. Hardly mysterious. Seals are getting hungrier, it seems. A lesser reason for the disappearance could be the melting of ice there. Penguins go for a swim and by the time they return the ice has melted..so they drown.
Everyone knows that penguins can transverse galaxies, and until we can fly to Andromeda, well, we'll never have a true idea of their actual population.
Either that, or we need to get these global-warming-studying people out of Antarctica, it's pretty clear those drilling for ice cores are eating all our fucking penguins!
I think you're over-doing it with those silly comments. You can stop now, thanks.
they are wondrously imprecise... barring actually going everywhere and penning them all and then counting them out of the pens, you could say anything you like about the total numbers...
just think of all the fudge factors they use as it is... x% assumed to be underwater catching fish, we've only counted them here and we'll assume things are the same over there...
the only thing you can say with certainty is that the scientists are earnestly trying to count them and they haven't found as many of them as previous guesstimation figured there would be
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
What about the food chain? Is commercial fishing by humans affecting the penguin's food supply? Overfishing can have unanticipated effects on other species.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
There are several species of Penuin that NEVER get anyway near the Antartic Ice Cap.
You can see Penguins in Chile, Argentina, Namibia, South Africa and the Falklands to name just a few places. Oh, I forgot those nice islands near the Equator called the Galapagos.
It is more likely that over fishing is the cause of the decline of the Rockhoppers in the Falklands. If there is no suitable food supply then the population will crash.
An alternative theory could be that this is cyclical variation in population just like Lemmings.
At the moment, it is too early to say.
Anyway, I'm off to the Falklands next month and hope to see some live TUX.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
I can not see how global warming is behind any of this. I could understand if teh species dying were camels, because it'd make sense that less water would be available and they would become more exhausted etc. But with penguins, it only creates a nicer environment; less would die in freezing storms, eggs/penguin chicks would have a higher survival rate and so on. It only points to more penguins. The only thing they have going for the idea of global warming being responsible is about the seas being less populated, and this is followed by "but researchers admit they have not yet established the reasons".
Guys, I just don't think that global warming is behind everything bad happening to the earth and species. It no where near as destructive as it's made out to be.
I heard this chap interviewed on the Today programme yesterday morning. He put great emphasis on pointing out that it's only the Rockhoppers that have declined: the Gentoo and Emperor penguin species seem to be unaffected by whatever's causing this. Readers in the UK running Windows legacy systems can watch the related TV story here. Hmmm, and there's a story here from 2002.
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
the bl00dy great fishing fleets hoovering up the fish... and there's a whole sorry saga here... corrupt officials effectively condoning it.
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Whats the saying? Evil begets evil? We have systems that would be much better used, or repaired, that could probably accomplish more with less. Say a more transparent legal system or accounability (and legal prosecution) for legislators, politicians and people of public office.
But then you'd run into the same problems you'd have with the people tending the animals. People are selfish, egotistical, ignorant, idealistic and single-minded. We are unaware of our own motives as we search for place, meaning and identity. We create confusion, divisiveness and we seek out comfort and distraction.
We are imperfect and yet so easily tempted to ignore this and brand the world with our own limited point of view.
We are coddled, comfortable creatures easily mistaking anger for conviction.
Quack, quack.
Almost every species that thrives in its environment does so because it's reached an equilibrium with that environment. Change that environment, you start adding or eliminating vegetation, adding or eliminating predators, adding or eliminating their animal food supplies, etc. Never mind fucking up their mating, nesting, or hibernating patterns, or forcing them to adapt to new temperatures that conflict with what their bodies have evolved to be comfortable with.
I said "almost" above because there is one species that isn't content to thrive in its environment, but must constantly meddle with it and fuck it up. And that's our species, and that's because we're smart enough to create things that have awful biproducts, but stupid enough to believe those getting rich off the process that everything's going fine... just fine.
Tell that to the disappearing penguins. Tell that to the drowning polar bears. Tell that to extinct dolphins. Tell that to the Siberians who are getting more bear sightings than usual because it's too warm for hibernation.
Tell that to your GRANDCHILDREN. It used to be the older generation's fault for allowing this to happen. Now it's ours for not stepping up and showing the courage to take the drastic changes necessary to stop it.
and my radar-technician mates in her Majesty's Royal Airforce report that using the radar array to fry penguins with massive quantities of high frequency EM is a common pasttime there. Perhaps they've gotten a bit too enthusiastic as of late?
Don't blame global warming - the real culprit is thugs with knives: Penguins killed in sickening beach attack
All you and your moving to the Northern Hemisphere!
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
They've been honing their plan for total world domination for years while lulling people into a false sense of security by appearing cute and harmless cratures who just want to fish and frolic. Well, their plans are now complete and what appears as a mysterious disappearance of penguins is simply the beginning of the great penguin war.
They are assembling an invincible penguin army deep in the secret caves under Antarctica. That's where all the penguins went.
The owls are not what they seem
oh wait, we're destroying the environment they live in.
Dee dee dee...
2. replace them with penguins from free-penguin.org
3. ???
4. profit...
yay
Have they been raptured???
SCIREV.NET - fanfics,reviews & more
In Pittsburgh they are endangered also.
...they're just flying north for the winter. I'm sure they're all up in Hawaii working on their tans.
henry -- the human evolution news relay
Novell did it!
> In just six years their numbers have fallen from 600,000 to 420,000
They're still going to be around for another two years, stop whining. The price of gasoline is lower, an SUV still gets over 15mpg, and all our manufacturing is done in China. There's nothing to worry about.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
give 'em cell phones then we'd know where the blighters are
It looks like the Earth is slowly progressing towards a different climate. How much that has to do with global warming caused by greenhouse gases is anybody's guess. It looks like a natural cycle that comes by every 15-20 000 years or so. Might be the dawn of a new Ice Age for all we know. I hear it starts with a slight rise in temperatures all over. One thing's for certain: this DOES make entire species extinct, it's just that this time there is someone around to worry about them. Mother Nature knows best.
I suspect a conspiracy by FOOS (the Foes Of Open Source) to deprive Linux of its mascot.
Penguins are for life guys, not just for Christmas. Make sure the person you're giving one to really wants a penguin, and has the time to care for one.
They are just going into hiding. They have a secret lair under the ice where they will wait out global warming, patiently sharpening their tools, for they know that when the icecaps melt and humanity is thrown into chaos, that's when their day will come.
And I, for one, will welcome our Eudyptulan overlords!
Some smugglers found a use for something about those species of penguins, and they are harvesting them like mad.
Might be some local 'delicatessen' thing going on in some part of underground china catering to some elite uppity crowd - (they eat anything except humans anyway), might be some collectors, might be some medical lab and so on.
Best solution i think is to set an armed corvette there on patrol and some squad to roam the area as part of u.n. and see if the population will contunie to decline.
Read radical news here
Will they blend
As I have been sayig for years, "The Fundogelicals have it wrong. "It is not the people, but the penguin who will be Raptured.
Hail GNU/Linux
herb
and thanks for all the fish.
mad props to the first person who posted that here. Kudos.
Finally a story where the title fits.
"I felt a great disturbance in the [NOUN] , as if [AMOUNT] of [NOUN]'s suddenly [VERB] out in terror and were suddenly silenced."
;)
I felt a great disturbance in the Constitution , as if all of the founding father's suddenly screamed out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
Offtopic. So what. So is most of Slashdot.
~X~
~X~
One can dream, eh?
I needed SOMETHING to put in my bags labelled 'bags full of penguin heads'.
The great bulk of Antarctica has been cooling over the last 50 years and the major icesheets are growing. The only bit that has warmed is the Antarctic Peninsula, which has warmed by 3-4C
This looks like a typical predator population crash.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
Seals in the southern hemisphere appear to be suffering from an obesity epidemic.
We've had our 20,000 years of warm interglacial, and now it's time to dive right back down into another 80,000 years of glaciation in the highly regular 100,000 year cycle.
Here's a fairly useful time graph of temperature, dust and CO2 over the last 4 periods of this cycle (ie. 400,000 years). Note that time flows from right to left in this graphic, so "now" is at the origin.
The very close correlation between the curves is very interesting. Of course it doesn't tell us which is cause and which is effect at this resolution, but if CO2 is causal then it would indeed appear that the stage is set for the next glaciation, and Mankind's extra CO2 just reinforces the natural CO2 which rises towards the ends of interglacials leading up to the big plunge into coldness.
The single biggest problem for climatologists at the moment is that they can't model the transition from warm interglacial to fully glaciated state, largely because they don't know the full mechanism by which it happens, and hence no current GCM can model the transition. And when you don't know how that works, then all other talk about climate change is pretty pointless.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
We, as humans, feel the need to save every single species on the planet, just because they live in our time and we have direct interaction with them. Unless this is something like the Tasmanian wolf, the Dodo, or the Passenger Pigeon, perhaps the species is simply dying out for evolutionary reasons. Human beings are not the cause of every single extinction on the planet, though we have caused our fair share of extinctions for no good reason, except convenience. Andy
I thought they could introduce polar bears into the Antarctic, since the north polar ice cap is disappearing, but without delicious penguins to eat they'd just starve.
Wow. Slashdot users do surprise me! The joke is funny, but using 'microsoft' on the new tagging system for this story is misleading! (I guess /. editors will have to tweak the threshold values for the number of times a tag must be set for a specific story to be considered valid)
Animoog.org
Maybe this is whats happening to all the penguins http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,20971241-1243 ,00.html?from=public_rss
Splitter!
They're waiting tables in Hollywood waiting for a big break. Penguin movies are hot now.
"On June 4, 1844, three fishermen named Jon Brandsson, Sigurdr Islefsson and Ketil Ketilsson made a trip to the Icelandic island of Eldey. They had been hired by a collector named Carl Siemsen who wanted auk specimens. Jon Brandsson found an auk and killed it. Sigurdr Islefsson found another and did the same. Ketil Ketilsson had to return empty handed because his companions had just completed the extinction of the great auk." - http://www.abdn.ac.uk/~nhi708/treasure/auk/index.h tml
No, putting it on the menu did not save it.
Yes, great species do go extinct.
If penguins are disappearing from the southern hemisphere, the only rational scientific explanation is that global warming is causing their molecules to vibrate a higher rate, which is somehow making them transparent. NOW DON'T F-- WITH THE GLOBAL WARMING THEORY OF PENGUIN DISAPEARANCE, OR WE WILL CAUSE YOUR RUIN!!!
I prefer the register's request for Will it blend:
l end/
"Full marks we reckon to Blendtec, which has found this entertaining way of punting its products. Here's a challenge for the company: A boxed copy of MS's Vista - Will It Blend?"
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/12/24/will_it_b
Java gaming nut - http://www.retep.org/ or for the rail http://uktra.in/
If rubbing frozen dirt in you crotch is wrong then hey i don't wanna be right.
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
Teach them to dance.
In shame of Happy Feet.
No, we all know that when bad things happen, it can only be the fault of video games.
*sets his stuffed penguin under Bobs desk*
It's Bob ! He's been poaching penguins & selling their stuffed remains to Linux enthusiasts for years !
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
... god kills a penguin. Please save the penguins!
I remember what's supposed to happen when all the dolphins leave; but I don't think he wrote about penguins disappearing (only Ford temporarily turning into one)... Now, I'm scared.
"It's time to take life by the cans." ~ Bender ("Bendin' in the Wind", ep. 3-13)
Within New Zealand, the Kiwis (New Zealanders) think that "kiwi" means a native flightless bird. But outside New Zealand, the only thing named "kiwi" that anyone ever sees is the fruit. So just as it's necessary, inside New Zealand, to qualify the fruit's name and call it "kiwifruit", so is it necessary, outside New Zealand where no-one ever sees the birds, to qualify the bird's name to avoid confusing it with the fruit.
I hope this won't affect Linux users! ( Insert Linux Joke Here )
Yeah cuz everyone knows the earth was at a constant temperature with absolutely no fluctuations at all before we turned up, giving all these animals all the time to adapt that that specific "pre-human" temperature that never moved or challaneged animals or anything ever before... ugh
it's a dt/dx'ish sorta thing not an x'ish sorta thing... haploid.
many tens of thousands of pengins are dying, even with conservative estimates. That IS and issue.
Coincidentally, there is a report documenting a rise in the rate of obesity among killer whales during the same time period.
I'm just sayin'....
Sounds like the work of Dr. Claw. Penny, go hide in corner. Go, go gadget mackerel!
I guess that's why the chimps and gorillas being hunted for bush meat are suffering from a population explosion ....
What a long, strange trip it's been.
... they've been eaten by the polar bears ;)
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)
Everyone's got it wrong.
This is the real reason.
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it. -- G.B. Shaw
We thought we were the third most intelligent species, behind mice and dolphins, but we are in fact fourth, right behind penguins, who are currently in the process of beaming up to the mother ship, before the hyperspace highway is put in.
Read my short stories - You won't regret it.
Penguins is SERIOUS! And you can buy a shirt, too!
I'm not associated with this comic at all, I just think it's hilarious.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
They eat the same sorts of fish we eat, and we have literally stripped the seas of all edible fish. And I mean that literally. We are maybe ten years away from the fishing fleets having to be kept in port because there is nothing anywhere worth the cost of running them to catch it.
The toothed whales will disappear too for the same reason.
Dog is my co-pilot.
Pity that didn't help many whale species that nearly got hunted to extinction, and whose recovery coincided with a ban on hunting them.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Can't they just replace them with Hollywood CGI facsimiles? I mean, those ones rap and sing and dance and so forth.
Case in point: March of the Penguins vs. Happy Feet.
Often in Error, Never in Doubt.
It's a very bad sign if we see solongandthanksforallthefish as a recurring tag.
He recruited them all for one last attempt to bring down Gotham City.
... and I see no evidence of diminishing penguin numbers.
I rang a buddy of mine who works with them south of here. He said "WTF?"
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
“Intelligent Design”
Well... for them, it may well be. (-:
...who's shipping the bears between hemispheres?
Hey, hang on... maybe this is what Microsoft meant by "Containing^H^H^Hs our property"?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...which translates like "fast droppers" because they sink so very fast when they dive into the water.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
... must be behind this. Stop abducting the poor penguins.
Other penguins have suffered, but have bounced back, while the rockhoppers only seem to stabilise before falling again... "Zoos generally have found them quite difficult to breed. They are choosy when they go to pick their mates and they like very specific places to nest."