just reached the fourth level

I just came up with this "7-levels-of-enlightenment" kind of model for doing a PhD, and thought it might be fun to make it a post. This is based on observations of some colleagues, some friends, and myself. Listed are the level, a description of a candidate's main activity, and his/her emotional state.

First Level:
writing a proposal/applying for a position

-> anxiety/uncertainty

Second Level:
starting your project, fieldwork, experiment etc.

-> euphoria

Third Level:
realizing what has gone wrong, or what simply does not work

-> frustration

Fourth Level:
accepting that the likely result will not match your initial plan

-> fatalism

Fifth Level:
restructuring the available sample/data material

-> numbness

Sixth Level:
deciding on the new goal or deadline, and gritting of teeth

-> determination

Seventh Level:
approaching the end, struggling to deliver in shape and on time

-> exhaustion

------------------------------------------------------

P.S.: If you are already (or almost) on the seventh level and wonder "what now?" you can find a comprehensive "six-week plan for recovery" at Just Another Day in Paradise, Maria's blog.

put on your universal-binary pants!

Time and again, Daring Fireball delivers the most well-informed, level-headed, in-depth comments on the current state of Apple affairs. In this post both the new hardware and software announced at Macworld San Francisco are thoroughly reviewed.

The author manages to give a balanced evaluation of Intel- vs. PowerPC-performance and offers a reasonable explanation why the new Intel models are in fact neither so much faster nor so much cheaper, as expected or predicted by various other fora and Mac-related journalism. [1. they are not 2-3x, but "in real life" 20-25% faster; 2. the G5 was - and still is - in fact a quite powerful processor; 3. the new chips are dual-core rather than single, and this has obvious consequences both for their pricing and for the way their performance can be gauged].

Also, the issue of the unchanged (or in the case of the MacBook Pro, only slightly improved) case design is addressed. Sure, everybody expected something completely new and different, but as the post argues, making the transition only in the interior while leaving the (so far successful and popular) exterior virtually intact makes sense, in taht it is highlighting the fact that "it is just a mac with a new, faster and more powerful processor chip". As Daring Fireball puts it: "A shift, not a schism".

But also finer points like the altered disk partition format and its possible consequences are discussed, a point that will likely be vital for those of you safety-conscious enough to have an external (FW) hard drive from which to boot a Mac in case your main system is crashed, or you need to run "your" system, i.e. your entire OS, home folder, apps, in short your whole computer setup, on a different Mac, p.e. while your main system is down, unavailable or away for repairs. This will not be possible for the new Intel Macs, unless you reformat your FW drive to fit that new partition format, which in turn will not work with your old system any more!

For those of you as "widget-happy" as myself, the newly released widgets are discussed, and the author also takes a closer look at the pros and cons of iLife '06 and explains the new features of the newest addition to the iLife suite, iWeb which are good for "the Mac on the street" but not as good as various stand-alone software for web publishing already available.

Also, iPhoto 6 and iWork '06 get their - apparently well-deserved - beating.

"iPhoto 6 doesn’t understand the first thing about HTTP, the first thing about XML, or the first thing about RSS. It ignores features of HTTP that Netscape 4 supported in 1996, and mis-implements features of XML that Microsoft got right in 1997. It ignores 95% of RSS and Atom and gets most of the remaining 5% wrong." ;-)

Finally, the Postal Service issue is addressed conclusively:

“Never would we characterize our customers that way,” Intel Vice President Deborah Conrad said in an interview.

Don’t believe it. Intel loves this ad. This ad makes Intel processors look better than any ad Intel has ever produced itself. The feeling this ad conveys is that Intel’s chips are going to be kicking some goddamn major ass inside Macs.

After such a comprehensive review of all the MWSF, it only remains for me to add both in the direction of Intel and The Postal Service:

"Remember the First Law of Advertising: any publicity is good publicity."

P.S.: Who has EVER heard of a band called "The Postal Service" before this new "rip-off" ad?

whale invasion - natural desaster or human misconception?

So here we go: first a fin whale dies in the Baltic Sea and gets carted off to the Japanese Embassy in Berlin to make a point (and certainly also to make a buck) for Greenpeace; then a bottlenose whale dies in the river Thames while a massive rescue attempt fails to transport it back to the sea.

What the appearance of these "whale tales" in the mainstream media represents is not so much a "natural desaster" as many reporters ad news editors would like to make you think; rather, it is underlining the fatal misunderstanding of "nature" being something incompatible, even alien, to people's everyday lives.



If you want to experience "nature", you pack a lunch box and the kids and drive up to a National Park where you can go on a "nature trail". Once you are done with nature for the day, or the National Park closes, you drive back to your ordinary "civilized" lives.

But if nature comes into these "civilized" lives and shows up, say in the shape of a whale having taken a wrong turn, everybody is surprised and startled, some people get emotional, and enormous resources are deployed to "reunite the poor creature with nature". Out of the civilized realm of central London, back into the "wild and untamed" North Sea!



Try to think like a whale for a moment: he/she certainly did not realize that this murky river water of the Thames is flowing through central London, and the idea that this was "unnatural" probably did not occur either. It just happened to be where he/she ended up, for reasons that may or or may not be related to pollutants affecting the whale's navigational capacities. Sure, it ended up there by accident, but this is certainly neither the first nor the last whale that has taken a wrong turn and got lost, and not more or less of a tragedy than a monkey in the jungle that jumped from one tree to the next - and missed.

If more people realized that we cannot draw such a distinction between "Nature" as being "pure and in perfect balance", another sphere "out there" that has to be fenced off and protected from us, and our everyday lives in the sphere of "Human Civilization", then such events would become more "natural" in more than one sense.

We are as much a part of nature as is a bottlenose whale, and we should start behaving accordingly again.

Volvo reinvents the Audi A3

I really thought Volvo had a good thing going with their 3 CC Concept Car, a cool next-generation electric sportscar.



Note the ultra-streamlined aerodynamic design and the compact size.



I just loved this view, I know it is not exactly practical for the family dog - or for divers, for that matter, but what a design!



True, it is not yet running on hydrogen fuel cells or even as hybrid, but is instead purely electric. The concept designers mention a range of 300km on a fresh charge, that sounds decent. Also, it's a three-seater, in case you wondered...



But instead of this really cool design, Volvo recently announced that they would convert another concept car into a production model later this year, and this is *yawn* going to be the so-called C30.



Derived from the Safety Concept Car, another design concept developed by the Volvo Concept Lab, it is apparently more of a "common sense" model rather than a true innovation.

At a closer look, it is just a V50 shrunk to the size of the Audi A 3, but not as well-designed and puristic in its lines. AND, it's a copy/remake rather than the original thing...;-)

The thing that disappoints me most is that most automotive journalists - and even its designers - compare it to the 1960's to 1970's model P1800,



while indeed its design has much more in common (in fact I would even speak of "direct ancestry") with the - also much more recent - 1988 to 1995-produced 480 model.



But truth to be told, that 480's project was never liked much over at Volvo headquarters: one, its design had been outsourced through a design contest, two, it was not even 'built in Sweden' but instead licenced to Netherlands Car, the automobile producer formerly known as DAF ;-), three, it was also some sort of a "concept car" at its time, with a lot of electronic gizmo's - most of whom did not really work all the time... and four, only about 80.000 units were built and sold, so it was largely a flop...

The Human Genome Project

I came across the Human Genome Project of NZ on a small sideroad of Dunedin, South Island, New Zealand.

Rather than the "real thing", this was not actually trying to decipher the human genome any more, but rather study the ethical implications - for New Zealand!

To give you some more of the "oddness of New Zealand" flavor, here comes christmas down under:

Darth Vader meets Legoland

Darth Vader and friends - made of Lego blocks



(picture taken at Billund Airport, close to Lego a/s Int. headquarters in Jutland, Denmark)

LA seen through a phonecam

California Sunset



Drugs on Balboa



Wonderpills of Hollywood



Pretend You#r pregnant - then take the Catholic pills

wreck diving - out of a personal submarine?

A good (old) SCUBA joke goes like this:

"Young attractive male seeks female dive buddy for shared recreation and friendship, must have boat. Please sent photo of boat."

Apart from a car, which is the one vital component of any SCUBA gear (to haul all the assorted other components from home to beach or lake), a boat probably ranges second on any ambitious sports diver.

But for wreck divers, there is a new fancy to replace it: private-owned submarines!



Sounds crazy? Well, remember that every dive flick, or any action movie including diving (like virtually all 007 episodes) includes at least one "sub scene". Cousteau had one, (so did Steve Zizou;-), his grandson even has a "shark sub".

If you look past the technical and logistical problems and challenges that clearly arise from getting, building or even operating a non-military, non-scientific, recreational submarine, it all seems quite appealing (at least to wreck divers):

• more often than not, wrecks lie in deep water. That means long descents, several gas mixes, even longer ascents, endless decompression stops etc.

• the one thing most feared by divers (and especially dive boat crews) is not sea sickness itself, but "anchor sickness", i.e. the unpredictable movement of a boat at anchor, or even adrift, as there is no main propulsion component any more, i.e. the boat is rocking in ever direction seemingly at once, even in comparatively calm conditions. And this is when you have to set up your equipment, get into that gear, check your stuff, wait until everybody is ready, move around with weights and tanks and all... and nausea is rising. As far as I have heard, subs do not have that problem.

• the cool factor: hey, you can shoot your very own James Bond scene!

In fact, there is a guy that seems to be able to pull this off: Carsten Standfuss and his team are building their 16m-submarine including a diver recompression chamber and everything that is needed for a week-long trip at sea, diesel-electric propulsion and all.

Here is a more extensive documentation of their efforts in German version.

So, what about a post-colonial Arctic?

Just as another thought, while I am in this "colonial" thing:

• Denmark's relationship to Greenland could certainly be described as "colonial", i.e. the Danish occupied it (only after some quarreling with the Norwegians, who claimed to have been there before, as Erik Raude (i.e. "the red") had settled southwest Greenland, and later Norway actively maintained human trapping outposts on North-East Greenland), and they both abused, relocated, exploited and "civilized" the native Inuit in best colonial style. Nowadays, Greenland has its "hjemmestyre" (home rule) with its own parliament, which even sends a few representatives to Denmark's parliament, but they seem to be quite content with their role of being a dependent part of the Danish kingdom. Realistically, they would not want to have to live without the substantial subsidies from the Danish gouvenment.

• Canada has a similar "mixed performance" track record with its Northwest Territories, but decided recently to allow the formation of a new Inuit-ruled territory, Nunavut.

• Norway has - as always - the smallest presence but the biggest ambitions of all the Polar players ;-) and while its sovereignty over Svalbard, that archipelago halfway between Scandinavia's North Cape and the North Pole is not resulting from formal colonial occupation, but stems from a history of coal mining "company towns", it is certainly going through something similar to a "post-colonial phase", as it transformed itself from being a (now state-owned and administrated) company town to a democratic society over the last few years. This transformation has many symptoms which again remind of post-colonial nations, like lack of proper administration and management personnel, a sudden reduction of financial resources and a somewhat inflated self-image.

• Russia - or rather the former Soviet Union - is maybe the area where (at least Polar) post-colonial fragmentation seems to be at the earliest stages only, although there are also attempts among the decimated, relocated and culturally diluted nations living in its Arctic territories to reorganize themselves and get a better representation of their cause.

Postcolonial Antarctica

In the recent issue of Polar Record, there is an article about "Post-colonial Antarctica: an emerging engagement" by Klaus J. Dodds. The abstract admits that the title is actually misleading, as it states:

"Although ‘post-colonialism’ is a term that covers a great diversity of theoretical and political perspectives, it is generally agreed that it is united in its critical evaluation of colonialism and associated practices. Antarctica, thus far, has not attracted a great deal of attention from post-colonial scholars."

Well, you could argue that it is not only post-colonial scholars that have not been attracted to that continent yet, but in fact also any sort of colonial power...

Nevertheless, the author blazes on:

"By drawing on the limited engagement with Antarctica thus far, it is proposed that there are the intellectual resources for a deeper interrogation of polar colonialism and associated practices such as territorial claiming and base construction."

Fair enough, there is both territorial claiming (and quarelling at overlapping sector claims) as well as base construction and maintenance of presence. One of the best examples for that is the United States Antarctic Program (USAP) with its base at all strategic positions (Palmer St. on the Peninsula, McMurdo ST. in the Ross Sea, and Amundsen-Scott St. on the Pole, plus a varying number of field camps at other locations).

As readers are reminded of repeatedly by N. Johnson in his "BigDeadPlace" book as well as website (see previous posts), any and all of these stations are first about being there, and staying there, with "scientific projects" being the "front" of these operations.

But back to Antarctica as being post-colonial. The abstract of the paper ends by optimistically proclaiming the following:

"The paper is intended to be a starting point for a more sustained and potentially unsettling engagement with post-colonial Antarctic projects."

First I thought it was a hoax, clearly it could not be a joke, given its placement in an otherwise quite serious peer-reviewed journal. A reference to Post-colonial Austria came to mind, which I came across just recently on Distraction Economy, a blog about "attention and its deficits" ;)

Just to mention that briefly, that post discusses the (fictional) post-colonial history of Austria.
Given the fact that Austria is often conceived as suffering from being no more than an amputated version of its former Austro-Hungarian empire - although that empire was by no means as extensive as the British empire, where similar "post-imperialism" could be assumed - the story was given an extra twist by proposing Malaysia (of all countries) as its former colonial power...

But the bit where I am still wondering is the "post-" in "colonial". What make the author assume that there is any such thing in Antarctica?

Although I am no historian, I would argue that Antarctica could only be described as "pre-colonial" or "quasi-colonial" at best, if one wanted to employ the term "colonial" at all. The fact remains that although claims have been staked, and permanent human presence in the form of "research stations" have been established and are maintained by several nations, some of them even as "family societies" with even the odd child being born "Antarctican", the Antarctic Treaty has been negotiated and established exactly for one reason, and that is to arrest (and postpone) all such claims, debates and resulting attempts of industrial exploitation. And, to get back on the aspect of "science" being a "front" to such a presence, the Antarctic Treaty requires signatory states to "perform substantial scientific activity".

So far, the treaty has fulfilled its goals, and the human presence as well as political interest in Antarctica has been limited to the so far hypothetical scenario where real "colonialism" could eventually take place.

the ARCTOS network

I have recently been invited to join the ARCTOS network, an international network for marine ecology in the Arctic.

ARCTOS is a consortium of scientists in Arctic marine productivity and ecology founded by Akvaplan-niva AS (APN), The University Centre in Svalbard (UNIS), Norwegian Polar Institute (NPI) and The University of Tromsø (UoT: Norwegian College of Fishery Science (NCFS) and Faculty of Science).

To visit me on the ARCTOS homepage, click this link.

Coral reefs going online

The Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS), in conjunction with university researchers, is placing strategically-positioned “smart sensors”, dubbed Digital Skins, in the ocean. These sensor systems were originally designed to monitor nuclear power plants and will now be recording key environmental parameters such as salinity, temperature and nutrient levels.

The hope is to be able to continually observe the dynamic changes in processes like coral bleaching, and to be able to retrieve that data in real time. As one researcher states it: "One of our problems is that we tend to monitor after things happen, and so what we see is not so much the cause as the effect,"..."A good example is coral bleaching,"..."It becomes hot, we see corals going white, we then start measuring. It's all over. What we need is continuous monitoring of these systems."

And that's where the "smart" comes in, as these sensors apparently will be interconnected, although the exact details are as yet unclear to me (wireless microwave signal transmission is mentioned, which should cover a range of up to 70 km "in one hop") while GPS receivers are mentioned to ascertain positions of the sensor systems (which apparently are also deployed on floating devices). Sounds quite cool, all in all.

Apparently, those researchers responsible for such a sensor grid of "digital skins" have thought their project through, as they also invested in some high-speed network infrastructure to receive and handle such a stream of real-time sensor data.

The main investment was a link consists of 12 pairs of glass fibres, which connects the Australian Institute for Marine Science (AIMS) in Townsville toJames Cook University (JCU) in Queensland, and from there to Brisbane and into a high speed national link operated by AARNet - Australian Academic Research Network Pty Ltd.

This should enable AIMS scientists use the JCU supercomputer as though it was sitting in their office, and it will let JCU scientists use AIMS data and modelling capabilities in the same way. Through the AARNET link, AIMS and JCU scientists can then also use these and similar facilities across the globe, enabling immediate access to scientific analysis systems, and allowing other research agencies to utilise their data and cooperate closely with them.

"We have come a long way in the past 20 years. In 1985 our data link to the external world was 9,600 bits per second, today our new link to the Internet will be 1,000,000,000 (1GB) bits per second," as the AIMS Information Technology and Data Centre Manager, Scott Bainbridge stated proudly.

Click the link in the headline for the recent BBC.co.uk news report or go to the AIMS homepage for more details.

Svalbard warmer than ever

According to official sources in the Norwegian weather service, Longyearbyen, the "capital" of the archipelago as well as its main port and airport, has measured a new a January record high temperature of 7.7 °C this monday morning.

If you read Norwegian and want to verify, you can click here.

Also Bjørnøya, or Bear Island, reached a record high in temperature observations, and while Longyearbyen's 7.7°C have last been measured as recently as 1996, Bjørnøya's value of 5.3°C has last been registered in January 1937.

Eat Phytoplankton!

For those less familiar with the scientifc term, phytoplankton designates the part of the all the tiny floating organisms that are plants rather than animals, also called microalgae, while all these other things making up the animal contribution are called zooplankton.

Without going much further into details and terminology (I leave this to Wikipedia and others, if you want more, go there), I present this weird news report about a guy that "decided to eat his own phytoplankton". Sounds weird, eh?

As it turns out, the man is a shellfish farmer, and to feed shellfish, he produces phytoplankton on site, which the shellfish then filter out of the water. So far, so good :)

But here comes the fun part:

"When he developed a serious health challenge whereby doctors gave him only months to live, Tom Harper decided to start eating his phytoplankton. He thought "if it is good for my fish, why not me?" Harper attributes his recovery to eating phytoplankton..."

So, if I am a soy farmer who industrially produces soy beans for livestock feed, and I see all these "happy" piglets being raised on my soy meal, do I turn to that stuff myself when I develop "a serious health challenge"?

See the link to get the full story.
___________________________________________

P.S.: Truth to be told, phytoplankton of course has some nutritional value, otherwise it would not work to raise shellfish on such a diet, but whether or not such a diet is also appropriate for humans, especially for individuals with "serious health callenges" is a different story altogether. And then are lots of other aspects of "how to" but I leave them to you to figure out.

new book review at PolarLitBlog

I have finally managed to post a new review on PolarLitBlog, and this time it is about the great book about McMurdo Station by Nicholas Johnson a.k.a. F. Scott Robert, the man behind BigDeadPlace.com. Check it out, I gave it my best shot. Also, Nicholas seems to have taken renewed interest in his website, although I doubt that he has managed to return (or will ever manage to be hired again) to the US Antarctic. So check out the site, too.

Initially, I also had scheduled Gretchen Legler's "On the Ice" for review (you can find it at Amazon.com) but after reading it, I decided to give it the benefit of some through editorial review since I had gotten an advanced reading copy, and this being an unedited manuscript, I was not to quote it without publisher's consent.

But now it turns out, the publisher has in the meantime released the book and if you are still curious you can find it at Amazon or other (online) bookstores.

As I was incredulously reading the summary of the published version as well as associated reviews from professional as well as individual reviewers, I realized that the book was still as bad as in its earlier version, and instead of correcting its major flaw - being an incredibly self-centered, self-infatuated report of a confused woman's soul searching - the publisher was now advertising this as its major feature.

The fact that the author finds not only her true self, but also her tue love, Ruth the Electrician, does not help much either, but it proves the point of a good Antarctic proverb: "Down here, the odds are good. But the goods are odd."

Diving Icebergs, part II

...two American cave diver dove not only under but in fact IN TO icebergs in the Ross Sea, and did "deep penetration dives" (yeah, that's what they call it) of the mega-sized iceberg (some even called it a "teraberg") B-15.

It turns out they used CCR systems (which stands for closed-circuit rebreather) - which makes sense for extended cave diving - but of course the berg calved while some of them were inside, and of course their entry was blocked by that... but miraculously they came out again, and lived to turn a profit out of it by selling it as both science and a cool documentary. And they even had the blessing and support of the US Antarctic Program of the NSF! Now, this is just too crazy and weird NOT to be true.

If you want to hear Jill Heinerth, one of the iceberg divers, you can load a podcast from "bottom time radio" (you can find it on the iTMS) or you can actually buy the documentary film that came out of that expedition, as a DVD on Amazon (look for the "Ice Island").

Diving Icebergs, part I

I also found a cool report on a recent campaign by the staff of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute - which by the way must be the grown-up version of a childhood dream to join the Cousteau team. Okay, maybe before you have seen "A Life Aquatic" ;-)

Anyway, these researchers spent December in the Weddell Sea diving a ROV around and underneath icebergs to study their impact on the water masses around them. Here is another link to their project.

Since I am myself extremely interested in ice diving, whether it is SCUBA, ROV or even AUV, this was quite cool to read.

But wait: one more thing as we talk ice diving and icebergs (two things that sometimes confused), let me state this clearly: normally, ice diving involves going through and under a more or less thick, more or less solid layer of sea ice (or fresh water ice, if you are in a lake) and NOT icebergs. Or at least that's what I thought. Who would dive under an iceberg, as a diver, anyway? And what for? Turns out, a team of US cave diving experts did just that...

Woman marries Dolphin

In Eilat, apparently an English woman named Sharon Tendler, 41, of London, married a dolpin named Cindy, 35, of Eilat. Apparently, they know each other for quite some time already, in fact they met 15 years ago. For the full story, click Woman marries Dolphin.

I found it through a posting on Divester.com which by the way is an excellent dive blog, and here is how they comment it, and I can only agree (and thus scavenge;-)

"Of course, all scuba divers just love dolphins. But when I read about Sharon Tendler recently, I wondered if perhaps she hadn’t taken her love of dolphins just a bit too far. Dressed in a white dress, a veil, and sporting pink flowers in her hair, Tendler got down on one knee on a dock in the southern Israeli port of Eilat and married a dolphin. After she kissed the 35-year-old dolphin, she gave it some fish. And then she went swimming with it. Ah…there’s nothing purer and more wonderful than true love. Oh, who am I kidding? The whole story, frankly, is just too freakin’ bizarre.

First, the dolphin – a male – is named Cindy. Second, although Sharon is leaving open the option of “marrying human” in the future, for now she’s strictly a “one-dolphin woman.” Which is a bit strange, I think, because according to Sharon , she arranged a pre-nup, which allows Cindy to “play with all the other girls” in the ocean. “I hope he has a lot of baby dolphins with the other dolphins. The more dolphins the better," she said.

Among the approximately 3 million other questions I have, I wonder how one arranges for a pre-nup with a dolphin? How did Cindy sign it? What lawyer in their right-mind would draft this agreement? I wonder if their first dinner as a couple was held at The Red Sea Star? If you need to see it to believe it, I found some video of the ceremony."

The link to the video can be found here.

Dare to dream

So here we go: another record attempt at diving, this time on the total time one could spend immersed underwater. This guy, Khow Swee Chiow, apparently has tried a bit of the extremes already, among them several high mountain peaks (he had done the famous "seven summits"), the South Pole, the North Pole (twice), Mt Everest without oxygen, and so on. Guinness (the brewery) even sponsored him for the "English Channel Swim" from which he unfortunately had to be pulled out of after a few hours, as hypothermia had gotten to him.

So what does somebody who has "Singapore's first professional adventurer" as job description and a mission to "...have others believe in themselves and to dare to dream..." pull as his next stunt? He locks himself into a giant aquarium, and stays in there - until yet another record is broken. Sure, he had a continuous surface air support, a professional diving helmet to breathe and communicate easily, and lots of support stuff to keep him from complete boredom. Also, he only has the privacy of a small cubicle (underwater) to do all the things you could wish to do in private, if you decide to live in a publicly accessible aquarium.

So he managed to spend a whole 220 hours under water, which run up just on christmas day, but in contrast to the rest of us, he managed losing 3.6 kg of weight in the process ;-)

finally back online

It seems that my blogging has been bogging, as coming home from NZ and SoCal, christmas, a severe influenza, my gilrfriend's new apartment, new year's and - oh well - another serious harware malfunction in my 1998 Powerbook has kept me from posting stuff.

I would have expected that christmas and the days following it would have given me time to do some writing, especially since I got several books which are now itching to get their entries on PolarLitBlog, among them:

"On the Ice":
the story of a unhappy lesbian finding her true self and rebuilding her entire personality while reciting Thoreau all the while dutifully writing praise for the NSF on a writer's grant at McMurdo;

"BigDeadPlace - The Book" (I mentioned the website earlier in this post as well as some more stuff...

Interested? Check out PolarLitBlog over the next days then.

But now to something serious. I also noticed over the holidays that although I proclaimed this blog to be about diving stuff and stories and what not, I had yet to deliver some content on that. So I have been digging around on the net and found some cool stuff that could fill that gap, until I can post in some of my own stuff again (going back to the Coldest Continent for some diving trips in just a few weeks!).

So in the following posts I will present some of that, ranging from unbelievable to hilarious, from scientifically sound to absolutely stunningly weird, and hope you will have as much with it as I did.