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Pataphysical Oarfishing

by Crazy Horse Mon Oct 21st, 2013 at 03:22:20 PM EST

Over the past months on ET, we've been treated to many authoritative discussions about the Ganz Genau-ness of empirically tested models of the global economy, and the completely exact science of of carbon and methane in the atmosphere and oceans. Not to mention that EPR reactors will operate until 2400 AD, should one ever get built on time, much less fired up, or down, as the case may be.

Diluvially, we've stimulated almost zero discussion on the ability of oarfish to predict large movements of the earth. Luckily, a British science journal, The Telegraph (noted for predicting the Fukushima melt), opens the door for pataphysical discombobulations.


At 7am GMT on the Fourth of March 2010, a mere 11 days (+/- 36 hours) from the Brides of March, The Telegraph detailed Japanese folklore on earthquake prediction, which allowed us to present for your pleasure This Link.


Japan is bracing itself after dozens of rare giant oarfish - traditionally the harbinger of a powerful earthquake - have been washed ashore or caught in fishermen's nets.

Complete with documentation...

Though the prestigious journal also linked to "Egyptian tomb discovered with 'spells helping travel to afterlife'," diligent analysis was able to unearth (pun unintended) the core of the research.


According to traditional Japanese lore, the fish rise to the surface and beach themselves to warn of an impending earthquake - and there are scientific theories that bottom-dwelling fish may very well be susceptible to movements in seismic fault lines and act in uncharacteristic ways in advance of an earthquake - but experts here are placing more faith in their constant high-tech monitoring of the tectonic plates beneath the surface. (the same faith-based high-tech used to design seawalls? -Ed.)

On May 11, 2011 (notice the two elevens, which don't add up to 23) The Daily Onigiri, which is not the Japanese version of the Onion, is it?, blessed us with deeper research... well, ok, copied, but still.


According to traditional Japanese lore, these fish swim to the surface and beach themselves to warn of a coming earthquake. There are also scientific theories that animals are more sensitive to movements beneath the surface than humans. Some scientists believe that deep sea fish may be susceptible to movements in seismic faults and act in unusual ways before an earthquake occurs. However, most seismologists don't see any scientific relationship between these sightings of oarfish and an earthquake.

Did eye mention that dozens of oarfish washed up on Japanese beaches in the year before the quake? No? Were you wondering the meaning of this exercise in perspicacity?

Please don't choke on your Hamachi... but two, count them, two, oarfish have graced the southern Californication shores in the past week, a week of nearly seven days. And a whale... and a casino of white sharks.

Notice the arrows going in two directions, as if this were Schrodinger-with-an-umlaut's Fault. But seriously, that could be trouble, which could be trouble.

The Before It's News site spotted the anomalous prediction anonymously by Susan Duclos, adding sharks and whales to this actual news video... which includes crazy surfers standing on boards to seek out the great white sharks.


(YSFW)

Yes, this prediction site referred to The Telegraph story, and queried...


Is it a myth if they have evidence of it happening?

California has seen swarms of minor earthquakes, with a recent 6.5 magnitude hit, with another 6.5 hitting Mexico on October 19, according to USGS.

For generations we have heard the expression  one day California is going to have "the Big One," because experts and scientists have warned it is going to happen, meaning the mother of all earthquakes is going to devestate the state.... are these sea creatures warning of it now?

Does putting a question mark after a statement make it acceptable for polite discerning sleepwalkers?

Well, those of us writing this diary have yet to figure out why. Eye could have written about the sailor who's crisscrossed Pacific for decades, and just wrote an article saying, "The ocean is broken." Eyetoo could write about the radio-monitored tuna who crisscrossed the Pacific from Fukushima three times already, to Cali and back.

Me wishes the coral reefs weren't silently dying, and the seas weren't broken... but are the oarfish a warning out of water? Did the IPCC stop listening to the Elders? What if an oarfish ate Schrödinger's cat?

Display:
Conspiracies: Five things THEY don't want you to know

Exploding the myths about the paranoid tales we tell

HERE

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin

by Crazy Horse on Mon Oct 21st, 2013 at 03:37:47 PM EST
PS. the analysis discussion after the news portion of the video is just... is just...

pataphysical.

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin

by Crazy Horse on Mon Oct 21st, 2013 at 05:33:53 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Are you suggesting oarfish conspire?
by de Gondi (publiobestia aaaatttthotmaildaughtusual) on Mon Oct 21st, 2013 at 05:39:33 PM EST
[ Parent ]
yes.

alternative explanation: old, weird friend posted the conspiro link just then on facecrack. my minders "told" me to run with it.

actual truth: the Elders always remind us of the days when we listened and learned from the animals, not to mention trees and winds and rocks.
 

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin

by Crazy Horse on Tue Oct 22nd, 2013 at 02:32:13 AM EST
[ Parent ]
What are you on CH? Can I have some? :-)

Index of Frank's Diaries
by Frank Schnittger (mail Frankschnittger at hot male dotty communists) on Mon Oct 21st, 2013 at 06:04:16 PM EST
Nada, zip, zilch. Was only some synapses firing away.

while i was experimenting with expert procrastination on important "stuff."

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin

by Crazy Horse on Tue Oct 22nd, 2013 at 02:28:55 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Is California due for a major earthquake, as predicted by various dead fish?

Maybe.

by Zwackus on Mon Oct 21st, 2013 at 06:50:32 PM EST
Giant oarfish have washed ashore recently in Southern California.

Glad I am 2000 miles away and at +600 foot elevation.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

by ARGeezer (ARGeezer a in a circle eurotrib daught com) on Mon Oct 21st, 2013 at 08:38:05 PM EST
[ Parent ]
And here I was ready to blame the US Navy!

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
by ARGeezer (ARGeezer a in a circle eurotrib daught com) on Mon Oct 21st, 2013 at 08:39:56 PM EST
[ Parent ]
They Hayward fault which runs parallel and to the east of the San Andreas is apparently on a 140 year "timer" and we're six years overdue. That's what is expected to pop next here in the San Francisco area.

you are the media you consume.

by MillMan (millguy at gmail) on Tue Oct 22nd, 2013 at 01:12:18 AM EST
[ Parent ]
the woman "analyst" in the video likens the San Andreas to a fifteen months pregnant woman... 140 years overdue for the biggie.

Thinking tsunami between San Onofre and Diablo Canyon. angry ocean is pissed off.

but then i listen to rocks.

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin

by Crazy Horse on Tue Oct 22nd, 2013 at 02:25:52 AM EST
[ Parent ]
I don't know about crazy tsunamis - we don't get the 9.0 subduction fault quakes on this side of the pond.

you are the media you consume.

by MillMan (millguy at gmail) on Tue Oct 22nd, 2013 at 02:54:04 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Err sorry, Oregon and Washington are in a subduction zone, along with far northern CA. But not the rest of CA.

you are the media you consume.

by MillMan (millguy at gmail) on Tue Oct 22nd, 2013 at 02:55:43 AM EST
[ Parent ]
tsunamis following an Alaskan quake?

Miwok say it's in the racial memory. Do i know?

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin

by Crazy Horse on Tue Oct 22nd, 2013 at 03:28:12 AM EST
[ Parent ]
The ocean is broken | Newcastle Herald
Exactly 10 years before, when Newcastle yachtsman Ivan Macfadyen had sailed exactly the same course from Melbourne to Osaka, all he'd had to do to catch a fish from the ocean between Brisbane and Japan was throw out a baited line.

"There was not one of the 28 days on that portion of the trip when we didn't catch a good-sized fish to cook up and eat with some rice," Macfadyen recalled.

But this time, on that whole long leg of sea journey, the total catch was two.

No fish. No birds. Hardly a sign of life at all.

"We told them there was no way we could possibly use all those fish. There were just two of us, with no real place to store or keep them. They just shrugged and told us to tip them overboard. That's what they would have done with them anyway, they said.

"They told us that his was just a small fraction of one day's by-catch. That they were only interested in tuna and to them, everything else was rubbish. It was all killed, all dumped. They just trawled that reef day and night and stripped it of every living thing."

"After we left Japan, it felt as if the ocean itself was dead," Macfadyen said.

"We hardly saw any living things. We saw one whale, sort of rolling helplessly on the surface with what looked like a big tumour on its head. It was pretty sickening.

"I've done a lot of miles on the ocean in my life and I'm used to seeing turtles, dolphins, sharks and big flurries of feeding birds. But this time, for 3000 nautical miles there was nothing alive to be seen."

In place of the missing life was garbage in astounding volumes.

[...] "In a lot of places we couldn't start our motor for fear of entangling the propeller in the mass of pieces of rope and cable. That's an unheard of situation, out in the ocean.

This civilization is leaving an interesting geological imprint.
by das monde on Tue Oct 22nd, 2013 at 01:20:58 PM EST
Yup, that's the sad article i referenced. Here's what i wrote about it when i first saw it...

"When i saw this a few days ago, i wanted to cry. The anguished, silent cry of coral reefs dying."

Best way to sum up all the science to date... "the ocean is broken."

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin

by Crazy Horse on Tue Oct 22nd, 2013 at 01:51:25 PM EST
[ Parent ]
why can these fishermen get away with this? are they too far out to see in international waters to police?

can't they understand that without those little fish their money-making big fish won't survive?

damn...

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

by melo (melometa4(at)gmail.com) on Tue Oct 22nd, 2013 at 05:23:46 PM EST
[ Parent ]
If there are police there it is to make sure the fishermen are not harrassed by Greenpeace pirates and such.

I remember reading nearly ten years ago about global catches going down due to over-fishing. As I was at the same time learning about peak oil, I realised we had hit peak fish - we won't ever fish as much as we did in the 1990ies, even if we vaccuum the seas. If the geologicla peak model can be transfered to biological systems (which is doubtful) then we would have depleted about half of fish, but any way you put it so much of the fish have been killed that populations are collapsing.

The sane solution would have been to stop fishing and give the oceans a chance to catch up, but that did not happen. The EU fishing quotas are a joke, fighting over who will get more of the scraps. So fleets are seaking new grounds, over-fishing them rapidly. Like the Somali waters.

Sweden's finest (and perhaps only) collaborative, leftist e-newspaper Synapze.se

by A swedish kind of death on Wed Oct 23rd, 2013 at 05:23:39 AM EST
[ Parent ]
If the geologicla peak model can be transfered to biological systems (which is doubtful) then we would have depleted about half of fish, but any way you put it so much of the fish have been killed that populations are collapsing.
If I am not mistaken, the geological depletion model roughly reduces to a logistic assumption on discovery of available resources.

Biological systems are self-renewing (which does not apply to geological resources unless you subscribe to the abiogenic hypothesis) and the predator-prey model is more appropriate.

In the Neurozone, there can be only one.

by Carrie (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Wed Oct 23rd, 2013 at 05:46:02 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Er, logistic.

In the Neurozone, there can be only one.
by Carrie (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Wed Oct 23rd, 2013 at 06:35:13 AM EST
[ Parent ]
The upper bound ("carrying capacity") is crashing down. When we run out of tricks (like intensive agriculture) to hide the crashing limits, oh what an overshot that will be. We know nothing about real Darwinian struggle for resources.
by das monde on Wed Oct 23rd, 2013 at 08:23:55 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Like I said, logistic applies to discovery of nonrenewable resources.

Renewable resource depletion or erosion of the carrying capacity can be seen in the predator-prey model.

In the Neurozone, there can be only one.

by Carrie (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Wed Oct 23rd, 2013 at 08:31:58 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Unless you're an adherent to the (crackpot) abiotic oil hypothesis, the logistic model on discovery still appears to hold - although I've wondered if/how the emergence of shale oil/gas reserves affect it or give it even further credence.
by Bjinse on Wed Oct 23rd, 2013 at 06:35:49 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Still holds, both for the individual wells and for the whole field - but tar sands and shale oil and gas start the Hubbert curve over... at +60 USD/bbl.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

by JakeS (JangoSierra 'at' gmail 'dot' com) on Tue Oct 29th, 2013 at 01:33:26 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Biological systems are self-renewing but not necessarily at human timescales.  For example, trilobites were the "fish" of the oceans until the Permian Extinction killed them off and opened the ecological niche, allowing the evolutionary development of fishes.  

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre
by ATinNM on Tue Oct 29th, 2013 at 01:03:06 PM EST
[ Parent ]
But that's taken care of by the Lotka-Volterra equation.

A society committed to the notion that government is always bad will have bad government. And it doesn't have to be that way. — Paul Krugman
by Carrie (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Tue Oct 29th, 2013 at 01:12:13 PM EST
[ Parent ]
It is if the investigator understands the equation.  In my experience the majority do not.

Let me put it another way.

Why is the Lotka-Volterra equation mapped to a 2D Complex Plane?  What Law of the Universe mandates that?  Why not a hypercube, Sierpinski Triangle, Klein Bottle or Watts-Strogatz Local Area Network ... or ... or?  Feigenbaum never gave a moment's thought to the problem as far as I can tell.  

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre

by ATinNM on Tue Oct 29th, 2013 at 01:38:55 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Perhaps they're not. ObligatoryWikiCutNPaste:

In the late 1980s, a credible, simple alternative to the Lotka-Volterra predator-prey model (and its common prey dependent generalizations) emerged, the ratio dependent or Arditi-Ginzburg model. The two are the extremes of the spectrum of predator interference models. According to the authors of the alternative view, the data show that true interactions in nature are so far from the Lotka-Volterra extreme on the interference spectrum that the model can simply be discounted as wrong.

But of course:

The Lotka-Volterra equations have a long history of use in economic theory...

In any case, LV is a specific case of chaos-prone feedback, so there's the usual underlying Verhulst thing going on.

It's just not simply and literally recursive like a Sierpinski etc.

by ThatBritGuy (thatbritguy (at) googlemail.com) on Tue Oct 29th, 2013 at 02:09:39 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Lotka-Volterra used historic data for predator/prey population to compute the chart; anything outside that strict data regime is "extraneous to the Model." Arditi-Ginzburg looked at predator/prey population within an ecology.

Big difference.

 

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre

by ATinNM on Tue Oct 29th, 2013 at 02:46:30 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Why is the Lotka-Volterra equation mapped to a 2D Complex Plane?

What!?

A society committed to the notion that government is always bad will have bad government. And it doesn't have to be that way. — Paul Krugman

by Carrie (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Tue Oct 29th, 2013 at 02:28:39 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Damn it.  Brain fart.

Trying to do too many things at the same time.  I meant the Feigenbaum map.  

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre

by ATinNM on Tue Oct 29th, 2013 at 02:34:40 PM EST
[ Parent ]
I'm still not sure what you mean. As far as I remember Feigenbaum worked on real functions of one real variable, and doing that on the complex plane is just for convenience manipulating analytic functions (and for algebraic closure).

A society committed to the notion that government is always bad will have bad government. And it doesn't have to be that way. — Paul Krugman
by Carrie (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Tue Oct 29th, 2013 at 02:39:24 PM EST
[ Parent ]
This gets tricky as it seems like I'm criticizing Feigenbaum when I'm not.

I agree he used a complex plane for convenience and he proved what he proved and he gave us a lot of insight.

However, the questions one asks and the tools one deploys to answer those questions determines the answer(s.)  And it can't be any other way.  What I'm trying - too quickly and superficially - to get across is taking the same questions and using different intellectual tools will give us different answers.  

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre

by ATinNM on Tue Oct 29th, 2013 at 03:13:46 PM EST
[ Parent ]
I greatly enjoy these threads but am somewhat at a loss: Can wanton plunder be factored into this predator-prey model? Or in other words in order to have a couple of ounces of tuna several hundred pounds of fish are slughtered and discarded?
by de Gondi (publiobestia aaaatttthotmaildaughtusual) on Tue Oct 29th, 2013 at 05:16:27 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Sure.  The prey population is dependent on their growth rate minus the rate of predation.  The overall population of the predators can be subdivided with different predation to tune the system to reflect "wanton plunder" by some predators.

The trick would be to estimate how many of the prey population is "several hundred pounds of fish."  Make it too many and the prey numbers dwindle faster than they should.  Make it too few and the prey population is overstated.  

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre

by ATinNM on Tue Oct 29th, 2013 at 09:34:32 PM EST
[ Parent ]
If there are police there it is to make sure the fishermen are not harrassed by Greenpeace pirates and such.
Sea Shepherd has a lot to work against.

Here is an official concern article though:
Pacific Ocean's survival at tipping point

by das monde on Wed Oct 23rd, 2013 at 08:07:01 AM EST
[ Parent ]
The EU finds it difficult to enforce rules against throwing away fish in the Mediterranean, and you expect it to be enforced in the Pacific basin?

In the Neurozone, there can be only one.
by Carrie (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Wed Oct 23rd, 2013 at 05:47:37 AM EST
[ Parent ]
we don't really have a political model for how you tell your civilization it's really ill, it's underlying concepts need complete revision.

Particularly when everything is compartmentalized: the climate change problem, the ocean acidification problem, the nuclear problem, the destruction of topsoil problem, the poisoning of water and air problem, the overpopulation problem, the genetic engineering problem, the food patent problem, the ownership of propaganda media problem, the underlying capitalism problems... me stop here.

Can you believe we're still mining coal, and taking the tops off mountains in Amurka?

What's said about psychogically ill people? First they must understand they're sick, and then must want some help. But for an entire civilization?

There must be an APP for that.

OTOH, civilization's suicide, which is certainly one avenue of health, seems to proceeding apace.

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin

by Crazy Horse on Wed Oct 23rd, 2013 at 07:09:12 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Might the problem be that our civilization is more complex than any individual person can hope to understand?

In the Neurozone, there can be only one.
by Carrie (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Wed Oct 23rd, 2013 at 07:11:13 AM EST
[ Parent ]
the detail of its complexity? Yes.

the vision necessary to understand the illness? No.

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin

by Crazy Horse on Wed Oct 23rd, 2013 at 07:24:24 AM EST
[ Parent ]
To figure out what to do about it.

In the Neurozone, there can be only one.
by Carrie (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Wed Oct 23rd, 2013 at 08:25:14 AM EST
[ Parent ]
There was some hope in the 70s, with the Club of Rome report. But somehow... the report was gradually ignored, then ridiculed, and now forgotten in the politics.

In the last 20-30 years, the politics and industry made every choice wrong. How natural and complex is that?!

by das monde on Wed Oct 23rd, 2013 at 08:13:09 AM EST
[ Parent ]


"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin
by Crazy Horse on Wed Oct 23rd, 2013 at 09:09:15 AM EST
[ Parent ]
of a visit to Australia, in 2000. Visiting my brother who was finishing his doctorate in fish resource management. He was convinced, at the time, that the transferrable quota system was the answer to overfishing : each nation having a sustainable share of the ocean's resources, and allocating that to fishing outfits, who had the freedom to subsequently sell their quotas to others. Australia was a pioneer of this system, and it was alleged to be working pretty well.

We passed a small fishing port on the South Coast. Brother's wife, also a resource management specialist, says "Oh look, they're unloading Southern Bluefin tuna." Brother says "Nah, that can't be right, these guys don't have any quota for southern blue..."

Yes, it was southern blue.

It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II

by eurogreen on Wed Oct 23rd, 2013 at 11:01:11 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Holy shit.

In the Neurozone, there can be only one.
by Carrie (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Tue Oct 22nd, 2013 at 03:25:18 PM EST
[ Parent ]
If the arrows were pointing in the same direction, it wouldn't be a fault, now would it?

I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
by BruceMcF (agila61 at netscape dot net) on Tue Oct 22nd, 2013 at 06:20:20 PM EST
Hard to say without conjecture. To my knowledge, plate tectonic archeologists have yet to unearth any arrows.

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin
by Crazy Horse on Wed Oct 23rd, 2013 at 02:05:51 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Maybe they will unbury some hatchets instead?

In the Neurozone, there can be only one.
by Carrie (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Wed Oct 23rd, 2013 at 02:22:39 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Scientists Recommend Having Earth Put Down


FORT COLLINS, CO--Claiming that it is the humane thing to do, and that the planet is "just going to suffer" if kept alive any longer, members of the world's scientific community recommended today that Earth be put down.

"We realize this isn't the easiest thing to hear, but we've run a number of tests and unfortunately there's really nothing more we can do for Earth at this point," said leading climatologist Dr. Robert Wyche of Colorado State University's Department of Atmospheric Science. "Earth's ecosystems have hung in there for a while, and you have to hand it to the old gal for staying alive this long, but at this point the chances of a recovery are, I'm sorry to say, incredibly unlikely. It might be time to say goodbye."

"Earth is in a lot of pain, folks," Wyche continued. "Time to think about sending it off peacefully, for its own sake."

We can all rejoice in the knowledge that younger planets will still support living entities in their quest to evolve intelligence back to its omega point.

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin

by Crazy Horse on Fri Oct 25th, 2013 at 02:47:20 PM EST
The removal of the spent fuel bundles from the renovated #4 not-yet-actually-spent fuel pool is about to begin. Given the importance of this effort to the global citizenry having some connection to the Pacific Ocean, in an age where many hundreds of millions watch Champion League matches, and news of missing blondes circle the globe, one might expect this gargantuan, risky undertaking to be beamed live for all of us to savor the wins and gnaw at the losses of the technological top teams.

As of yet, I haven't found live coverage anywhere, even on the illegal UEFA sites.

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin

by Crazy Horse on Wed Nov 6th, 2013 at 05:49:19 PM EST


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