Inspired by Craig’s post today:
A red robin sings
Rain drops falling in a beat
Home from Washington
March 2nd revision
Red robin singing
The beat of falling rain drops
Home from Washington
And again…
Back home from DC
Falling rain drops to a beat
The red robin sings
The BBC suggests the debate over the sinking of the “mightiest vessel of the 18th Century” can now be put to rest with the ‘Mighty’ HMS Victory wreck found:
The discovery of HMS Victory exonerates Admiral Sir John Balchin, who came out of retirement to command the ship, on what was meant to be his final voyage.
Historians believed the ship was lost due to poor navigation on the Casquets, a group of rocks north-west of Alderney.
But the wreck’s location, 62 miles (100km) away from the rocks, suggests the 74-year-old admiral was not to blame.
Who then? Who is to blame? Mother nature? The architects? How could this 2,000 ton, 175 ft, 100-gun entirely brass cannon First Rate ship of the Royal Navy sink just three years after being name the flagship of the Channel Fleet?
A friend of mine reported today that she successfully deployed a Monterey Bay surveillance system:
A new camera will spy on sea creatures at the bottom of the Monterey Bay south of San Francisco starting Wednesday, if all goes as planned on the boat trip to install the Eye-in-the-Sea.
Congrats!
This is part of the research on bioluminescence that seems to be funded by the US military. Why the military? Covert operations are very difficult to hide when they give off bioluminescent traces — easy to use simple technology to spot even the most sophisticated navy commandos. Aside from the inquiry for security, I am sure there are scientific reasons for the study.
A Flickr stream has already been started with photos from the research boat.
I had to bite my tongue as I read about “a stunning rise in pirate assaults” in a new AP article about a New US-led naval force to battle Somali pirates. The rise in piracy was not only tracked and I would argue predictable (as I argued back in January of 2006!), but it also followed the intentional disintegration of the situation in Somalia by US and Ethiopian intervention. Correlation? I think there is ample reason to see causation. Notice how the AP article concludes:
The flagship, the USS San Antonio, is an amphibious ship capable of bringing hundreds of Marines ashore.
This is the type of action needed to truly rattle the pirates, said Noel Choong, head of the International Maritime Bureau’s piracy reporting center.
“Right now there is no major deterrent,” he said. “The military maybe chases away the pirates, but they regroup and come back for another attack on another ship. Piracy will continue until their networks and bases are hit.”
In other words, they found a convenient place to build networks and bases — a set of vulnerabilities they could exploit. It is hard not to get into hindsight mode, but the suggestion that stability and security in Somalia will cut down the piracy is surely a way of questioning the tactics that undermined the formation of a popular government. I guess the question is whether the cost of piracy and related activity, such as the Mumbai attacks, is higher or lower than if the US had allowed a hostile but potentially stable Islamic state to form?