When hunting with bone spears and other prinitive tools the number of whales you inflict fatal wounds on without actually getting the meat home is much greater.
I am not really convinced of this. Whales are incredibly tough creatures, with literally several feet of blubber protecting their vital organs. From what I remember of reading about new england longboat hunting, the whales often took hours to tire, and then they were securely lashed to the mother ship. The coup de grace had to be delivered with a leaf-shaped blade several meters long, to slice down to the heart.
I find it interesting that you would assume that I am white.
I will be happy to keep my opinion out of Alaska the very moment that Alaska stops accepting money that comes from my federal taxes.
You're right, I never spent any real amount of time in any of the villages. Perhaps I missed out on a vital insight I would have gained if had. Naknek and Kotzebue were like all the small towns I have ever spent any time in: kind of poor, but mostly like any other town in the northwest/bc, trying to live off of tourism while everything else dries up and blows away.
I guess my question is, where is the line drawn? How endangered does the species have to be before these 10 villages decide they can live off of something else? What happens when they are gone?
To put it succinctly, you don't decide what constitutes a faithful continuation of their cultural identity.
Oh, ok. So the community as a whole decides what is acceptable, not outsiders, correct? So... then you would have no problem with allowing non-consentual female genital mutilation among African immigrant communities in the US, as long as the community is ok with it?...and predominantly Muslim communities should have the right to live under Sha'ria law, if they so choose? Admit it or not, a line has been drawn between traditional practices and the rule of law. You can argue that the line is in the right place, that's your right. However, you can't argue that it exists.
On your second point, there is a long tradition (which you would know if you were a hunter or fisherman) in this country of managing small, sustainable harvesting of species to seek population balance. For quite a few species, there is a lottery to obtain a permit, with preference given to in-state residents. That is the fair way to do it.
Of course, I kind of doubt that there would be many non-indigenous applicants, because western society generally regards the killing of intelligent, long-lived endangered mammals as horrifying, an opinion I share.
The difference is that I am not trying to justify the killing of an endangered species for "cultural purposes"....and I'm sorry, but exploding harpoons, sonar and chainsaws is not "slightly more modern technology" than bone spears, seal-skin kayaks, and hide&sinew rope.
It's resulted in overhunting because if you have to risk your damn life in some flimsy hand-made kayak, you quickly figure out just how important that dead whale is to your cultural heritage.
Yes, I read the article too. Which is why I also know that they are killing 255 whales a year when there are only about 8000 left alive at all. This species was not long ago on the very brink of extinction, and we just don't know enough about them to be sure how many is "safe" to take. Why risk it?
Every culture on the face of this earth has had to adapt to changing situations, why are they excluded?
So you're actually advocating that they use a method that most likely will leave the whale with a harpoon sticking out of it for 100 years?
I'd think given a choice you'd want them to hunt with whatever would cause the least amount of pain to the animal.
If you had read TFA you would have seen that the fragment they found was also an exploding harpoon, one of the first made which helped to pin down the date.
Personally, I am in favor of whichever method results in the fewest number of dead whales. I suspect that if these guys actually had to put their lives on the line in a test of man vs. nature, a lot less of them would go. Standing at the prow of a factory ship aiming an exploding harpoon launcher has to be a little less scary than paddling out on a seal-skin canoe, with a barbed spear in your hand attached to a rope made of hide and sinew, praying to your gods that you can kill the behemoth before it kills you.
I think I could even respect and understand it, if they were still doing it the old way, but they aren't.
I've actually spent some time in Alaska, in predominantly Inuit communities.
Nobody "lives off the land" anymore. That culture, as it was, is dead and gone. There are remnants, sure, but they are mainly for the tourists. The kids go to school, the parents go to work, if they are lucky enough to have a job.
If they can muster up a factory killing ship with exploding harpoons and chainsaws, arrangements can be made to ship a few shipping containers of frozen chicken a couple times a year. There certainly seemed to be no shortage of new snowmobiles and satellite dishes when I was up there.
The "but they can't afford not to kill endangered species" argument has no pull with me. They do this because they can, not because they need to.
Why is the culture of these people killing critically endangered mammals more important or better than the "culture" of beer-swilling rednecks killing deer, a species which is horribly overpopulated due to the removal of almost all of their natural predators?
No, I'm curious. How does the fact of their oppression in history make a difference? Does the whale care who's shooting the exploding harpoon into its back?
And don't worry, I'm plenty pissed at the Japanese for their whaling, too. When I'm given the option, I try to buy my electronics etc from other sources, and I'm happy to tell them why. The Japanese are a pragmatic people. If it was effecting their trade balance, they would do something about it.
Right, except that other methods of determining age of whales (eye protein degradation, et al.) has put some bowheads at living for upwards of 200 years. Besides, no one can say how old the whale was when he was shot the first time. Could have been 10, could have been 50, 75 or older.
Right, except that there are hundreds of millions of cattle, and they only live for a few years at most, whereas bowhead whales number slightly over 8000 at best estimate, and may live over 200 years, making them the most long-lived mammals on the planet.
It isn't because they are cute, it is because they are rare, unique and irreplaceable. When they are gone, they are gone for good.
Amazingly enough, there are other sources of meat in these modern times. Even in Alaska.
Oh, they're doing it for cultural reasons? Then let them use hand-thrown harpoons to kill it and whale-bone knives to carve it up. You can't have it both ways. I suspect that vast factory ships with explosive harpoon heads and gas-powered chainsaws are not culturally consistent.
I'm sure that killing Mountain Gorillas is culturally consistent for some African tribes, yet no one complains when they are protected.
I agree that maintaining cultural identity is important, but where do we draw the line? To my mind, the law is there to be followed, for everyone. Double standards are racist and backwards. If killing whales is acceptable to our society, then make it legal. If it is unacceptable, make it illegal. The law should not be different because of who your parents were, or what the color of your skin is.
I'll tell you the best reason for taking so many pictures: you never know which ones will turn out to be superamazingfantastic, and which ones will just kinda suck for whatever reason. Out of that trip, I got maybe 100 really great shots, the kind of photo that we'll look at in 30 years. You need to experiment, try things that may not work, and most of all, just keep shooting.
Even with all that, there are a few things I missed, and regret not getting on film.
There is added space after that period, but it isn't a HUGE amount of added space. Just enough to give the capital letter at the beginning of the next sentence some space to breathe. About a half-space. No, it really isn't a new development. It's just doing things the same way typesetters have been doing for centuries.
Why did typing teachers start enforcing double spacing? Who knows?
To quote the first page that came up in Google:
Should you put one space or two spaces after a period? The debate over how much space to put between sentences (whether they end with a period or other punctuation) may seem petty, but often it's the little details that make or break a design.
It is generally accepted that the practice of putting two spaces at the end of a sentence is a carryover from the days of typewriters with monospaced typefaces. Two spaces, it was believed, made it easier to see where one sentence ended and the next began. Most typeset text, both before and after the typewriter, used a single space. Feel free to disagree with it, many people do. Old habits are very hard to break. I feel pretty confidant in saying though that you will be hard pressed to find a typographer that will let even a single instance of double-spacing slip by. Since this is the way it's been done in typesetting for centuries, we kind of have tradition on our side.
In response to your sig, It's not laziness, it's typography. Font designers decided that as soon as they introduced proportionally spaced typefaces (i.e. not courier etc). The period already has additional spacing added to the back side of it. This isn't really an innovation: physical (hand or machine-set) type has had the same properties going back into the very beginnings of movable type. The idea of adding a second space in order to emulate traditional typesetting came about with the advent of fixed-space typewriters, so it's essentially a kludge. Same thing with using two hyphens to simulate an em-dash. Same thing with underlining instead of italicizing.
Ideally, the end of a sentence in the middle of a paragraph shouldn't jump out at you visually: it's supposed to blend in and preserve the flow of the text. If you're still not convinced, feel free to Google it. There's a certain amount of debate on the topic even today: people are notoriously reluctant to give up something that was drummed into their knuckles in grammar school, right or wrong.
Also, you'll note that most of the time it doesn't really matter if you do use them anyway, because HTML renderers are set up to ignore double-spacing.
An urban myth would have the plane crashing and everyone dying. "The system crashed and then it restarted and everything was ok" is kind of weak for an urban myth. I think your call of "bullshit" is a bit premature. Virgin had similar systems in 2005, with the touch-screen, telephone/game pad unit. So did British Air.
And having seen more than my share of buggy interfaces, I'll say that it's not uncommon to have a field capable of displaying more digits than it needs to, even negative numbers. Coders are terribly sloppy interface designers.
As buggy as most of these systems are, frankly I am not surprised at this story.
I know, it's terrible. In fact, I was in a company-wide meeting just yesterday where everyone was just RAVING about the possibility of owning an open-source Linux phone. Marketing just couldn't shut up about it: "OMG, will it have vi or emacs preinstalled? I can't stand the suspense!" No one mentioned the iPhone at all, since it couldn't run Gnome or KDE.
Right.
Of course, if your reading comprehension was up to par, you would have noticed what Jobs later said in an interview: that of course there will be 3rd party apps, but they will need to be vetted through Apple. Kind of like the Nintendo Seal of Approval.
The report says "the U.S. online population", not the overall population.
I'm willing to bet that a majority of the people in whatever "the U.S. online population" is, have broadband.
Most people with dial-up don't sit there for hours surfing, looking for online surveys to fill out. I suspect that there are some flawed assumptions in this study, but adding more flawed assumptions doesn't help.
Slashdot Mirror
When hunting with bone spears and other prinitive tools the number of whales you inflict fatal wounds on without actually getting the meat home is much greater.
I am not really convinced of this. Whales are incredibly tough creatures, with literally several feet of blubber protecting their vital organs. From what I remember of reading about new england longboat hunting, the whales often took hours to tire, and then they were securely lashed to the mother ship. The coup de grace had to be delivered with a leaf-shaped blade several meters long, to slice down to the heart.
I find it interesting that you would assume that I am white.
I will be happy to keep my opinion out of Alaska the very moment that Alaska stops accepting money that comes from my federal taxes.
You're right, I never spent any real amount of time in any of the villages. Perhaps I missed out on a vital insight I would have gained if had. Naknek and Kotzebue were like all the small towns I have ever spent any time in: kind of poor, but mostly like any other town in the northwest/bc, trying to live off of tourism while everything else dries up and blows away.
I guess my question is, where is the line drawn? How endangered does the species have to be before these 10 villages decide they can live off of something else? What happens when they are gone?
To put it succinctly, you don't decide what constitutes a faithful continuation of their cultural identity.
...and predominantly Muslim communities should have the right to live under Sha'ria law, if they so choose? Admit it or not, a line has been drawn between traditional practices and the rule of law. You can argue that the line is in the right place, that's your right. However, you can't argue that it exists.
Oh, ok. So the community as a whole decides what is acceptable, not outsiders, correct? So... then you would have no problem with allowing non-consentual female genital mutilation among African immigrant communities in the US, as long as the community is ok with it?
On your second point, there is a long tradition (which you would know if you were a hunter or fisherman) in this country of managing small, sustainable harvesting of species to seek population balance. For quite a few species, there is a lottery to obtain a permit, with preference given to in-state residents. That is the fair way to do it.
Of course, I kind of doubt that there would be many non-indigenous applicants, because western society generally regards the killing of intelligent, long-lived endangered mammals as horrifying, an opinion I share.
Race-based quotas seem horribly backwards.
The difference is that I am not trying to justify the killing of an endangered species for "cultural purposes". ...and I'm sorry, but exploding harpoons, sonar and chainsaws is not "slightly more modern technology" than bone spears, seal-skin kayaks, and hide&sinew rope.
It's resulted in overhunting because if you have to risk your damn life in some flimsy hand-made kayak, you quickly figure out just how important that dead whale is to your cultural heritage.
Yes, I read the article too. Which is why I also know that they are killing 255 whales a year when there are only about 8000 left alive at all. This species was not long ago on the very brink of extinction, and we just don't know enough about them to be sure how many is "safe" to take. Why risk it?
Every culture on the face of this earth has had to adapt to changing situations, why are they excluded?
M-
So you're actually advocating that they use a method that most likely will leave the whale with a harpoon sticking out of it for 100 years?
I'd think given a choice you'd want them to hunt with whatever would cause the least amount of pain to the animal.
If you had read TFA you would have seen that the fragment they found was also an exploding harpoon, one of the first made which helped to pin down the date.
Personally, I am in favor of whichever method results in the fewest number of dead whales. I suspect that if these guys actually had to put their lives on the line in a test of man vs. nature, a lot less of them would go. Standing at the prow of a factory ship aiming an exploding harpoon launcher has to be a little less scary than paddling out on a seal-skin canoe, with a barbed spear in your hand attached to a rope made of hide and sinew, praying to your gods that you can kill the behemoth before it kills you.
I think I could even respect and understand it, if they were still doing it the old way, but they aren't.
M-
I've actually spent some time in Alaska, in predominantly Inuit communities.
Nobody "lives off the land" anymore. That culture, as it was, is dead and gone. There are remnants, sure, but they are mainly for the tourists. The kids go to school, the parents go to work, if they are lucky enough to have a job.
If they can muster up a factory killing ship with exploding harpoons and chainsaws, arrangements can be made to ship a few shipping containers of frozen chicken a couple times a year. There certainly seemed to be no shortage of new snowmobiles and satellite dishes when I was up there.
The "but they can't afford not to kill endangered species" argument has no pull with me. They do this because they can, not because they need to.
M-
Why is the culture of these people killing critically endangered mammals more important or better than the "culture" of beer-swilling rednecks killing deer, a species which is horribly overpopulated due to the removal of almost all of their natural predators?
No, I'm curious. How does the fact of their oppression in history make a difference? Does the whale care who's shooting the exploding harpoon into its back?
And don't worry, I'm plenty pissed at the Japanese for their whaling, too. When I'm given the option, I try to buy my electronics etc from other sources, and I'm happy to tell them why. The Japanese are a pragmatic people. If it was effecting their trade balance, they would do something about it.
M-
Right, except that other methods of determining age of whales (eye protein degradation, et al.) has put some bowheads at living for upwards of 200 years. Besides, no one can say how old the whale was when he was shot the first time. Could have been 10, could have been 50, 75 or older.
If it's about their traditions, they should be forced to use hand-thrown spears and bone flensing knives instead of exploding harpoons and chainsaws.
You can't have it both ways.
Right, except that there are hundreds of millions of cattle, and they only live for a few years at most, whereas bowhead whales number slightly over 8000 at best estimate, and may live over 200 years, making them the most long-lived mammals on the planet.
It isn't because they are cute, it is because they are rare, unique and irreplaceable. When they are gone, they are gone for good.
M-
Amazingly enough, there are other sources of meat in these modern times. Even in Alaska.
Oh, they're doing it for cultural reasons? Then let them use hand-thrown harpoons to kill it and whale-bone knives to carve it up. You can't have it both ways. I suspect that vast factory ships with explosive harpoon heads and gas-powered chainsaws are not culturally consistent.
I'm sure that killing Mountain Gorillas is culturally consistent for some African tribes, yet no one complains when they are protected.
I agree that maintaining cultural identity is important, but where do we draw the line? To my mind, the law is there to be followed, for everyone. Double standards are racist and backwards. If killing whales is acceptable to our society, then make it legal. If it is unacceptable, make it illegal. The law should not be different because of who your parents were, or what the color of your skin is.
M-
If atheism is a religion, then not collecting stamps is a hobby.
M-
Well, that's the problem, isn't it? Reality has a strong liberal bias.
Arrrrr, 'tis true, he be more stomach than man.
m-
One of the reasons I'm glad my Optoma HD72 will downscale 1080p to 720p on the fly.
M-
Yeah, talk about a lousy living situation...
Thanks, be sure to try the veal...
I did the same thing while Over There.
3500 in Scotland, 2500 in Ireland.
I'll tell you the best reason for taking so many pictures: you never know which ones will turn out to be superamazingfantastic, and which ones will just kinda suck for whatever reason. Out of that trip, I got maybe 100 really great shots, the kind of photo that we'll look at in 30 years. You need to experiment, try things that may not work, and most of all, just keep shooting.
Even with all that, there are a few things I missed, and regret not getting on film.
M-
Why did typing teachers start enforcing double spacing? Who knows?
To quote the first page that came up in Google: Should you put one space or two spaces after a period? The debate over how much space to put between sentences (whether they end with a period or other punctuation) may seem petty, but often it's the little details that make or break a design.
It is generally accepted that the practice of putting two spaces at the end of a sentence is a carryover from the days of typewriters with monospaced typefaces. Two spaces, it was believed, made it easier to see where one sentence ended and the next began. Most typeset text, both before and after the typewriter, used a single space. Feel free to disagree with it, many people do. Old habits are very hard to break. I feel pretty confidant in saying though that you will be hard pressed to find a typographer that will let even a single instance of double-spacing slip by. Since this is the way it's been done in typesetting for centuries, we kind of have tradition on our side.
More of less completely off topic:
In response to your sig, It's not laziness, it's typography. Font designers decided that as soon as they introduced proportionally spaced typefaces (i.e. not courier etc). The period already has additional spacing added to the back side of it. This isn't really an innovation: physical (hand or machine-set) type has had the same properties going back into the very beginnings of movable type. The idea of adding a second space in order to emulate traditional typesetting came about with the advent of fixed-space typewriters, so it's essentially a kludge. Same thing with using two hyphens to simulate an em-dash. Same thing with underlining instead of italicizing.
Ideally, the end of a sentence in the middle of a paragraph shouldn't jump out at you visually: it's supposed to blend in and preserve the flow of the text. If you're still not convinced, feel free to Google it. There's a certain amount of debate on the topic even today: people are notoriously reluctant to give up something that was drummed into their knuckles in grammar school, right or wrong.
Also, you'll note that most of the time it doesn't really matter if you do use them anyway, because HTML renderers are set up to ignore double-spacing.
An urban myth would have the plane crashing and everyone dying. "The system crashed and then it restarted and everything was ok" is kind of weak for an urban myth. I think your call of "bullshit" is a bit premature. Virgin had similar systems in 2005, with the touch-screen, telephone/game pad unit. So did British Air.
And having seen more than my share of buggy interfaces, I'll say that it's not uncommon to have a field capable of displaying more digits than it needs to, even negative numbers. Coders are terribly sloppy interface designers.
As buggy as most of these systems are, frankly I am not surprised at this story.
M-
Any phone will bend. Once.
M-
cannot-run-command-as-unprivileged-user-then.su ?
D'oh.
I know, it's terrible. In fact, I was in a company-wide meeting just yesterday where everyone was just RAVING about the possibility of owning an open-source Linux phone. Marketing just couldn't shut up about it: "OMG, will it have vi or emacs preinstalled? I can't stand the suspense!" No one mentioned the iPhone at all, since it couldn't run Gnome or KDE.
Right.
Of course, if your reading comprehension was up to par, you would have noticed what Jobs later said in an interview: that of course there will be 3rd party apps, but they will need to be vetted through Apple. Kind of like the Nintendo Seal of Approval.
The report says "the U.S. online population", not the overall population.
I'm willing to bet that a majority of the people in whatever "the U.S. online population" is, have broadband.
Most people with dial-up don't sit there for hours surfing, looking for online surveys to fill out. I suspect that there are some flawed assumptions in this study, but adding more flawed assumptions doesn't help.
M-
You know, in the context of this post, your username is truly disgusting.
M-