Rebreather Dive goes wrong - Dave Shaw in Bushman's Hole

If there is one thing in common for most rebreather dive fora and discussion groups, it is maximum depth. Rebreathers have the potential to take you significantly deeper than conventional "open-circuit" scuba gear with much lower amount of gas consumption - and therefore tanks to haul. Also, modern advanced rebreather systems monitor and adjust your gas mix (oxygen and nitrogen, at greater depths also helium) but in turn, these electronic compounds demand careful attention and constant monitoring themselves.

But as more and more of these (previously exclusively military) systems have become available to the civilian public, along with certification agencies and demanding training programmes, deep wrecks and especially caves have become the rebreather diver's preferred playgrounds.

In South Africa, a rebreather diver named Dave Shaw successfully completed a world record dive two years ago, inside a huge freshwater-filled cave known as Bushman's Hole. While he spent a few precious minutes exploring the bottom, he found the body of a diver who died here ten years earlier. He was unable to move it as it was stuck in the mud, but marked it with a line and returned to his long ascent and hour-long decompression schedule.

As soon as he surfaced, he announced a plan to his dive buddies: to go back and retrieve the body and return it to the dead diver's family.

Read the full story in this article of Outside Magazine.

But beware: this is a tale of an extreme dive gone tragically wrong, the diver who set out to recover the dead body he found ends up dead himself, his best friend and backup diver gets seriously bent with permanent consequences, and due to a grim twist the two deceased divers surface by themselves while the team is picking up their shot lines and safety gear...

A terrible story, but a well-written account of it. If you wonder why people do things like this, maybe you will get a better understanding after reading this article. And if you are more into audio (and can stand ABC's style of reporting) you can also listen to a podcast about the story, provided by ABC News.

Sweden gets 14-month-rule

According to a report by The Scientist, Swedish Parliament has approved of a law effectively limiting temporary employment to a maximum of 14 months (within a 5-year period). Unfortunately, this employment rule applies to all sorts of temporary contracts, including scientific positions.

This law is even more drastic than the infamous "Twelve Year Rule" in Germany, which was initially also meant as a tool to force universities to hire scientists as staff, rather than letting them jump from project contract to project contract.

Unfortunately, though, it has instead become an "expiry date" for young researchers - if you have not managed to secure a permanent position, i.e. professor or staff researcher, within 12 years of scientific employment, you are effecively unhireable - but in Sweden, you do not even get that far as its legislature already cuts off young researchers from even getting a PostDoc.

The ironic fact about this is that Sweden invests a total of 4.3% of its GDP in R&D, which is more than any developed country. Good for those old boys with professor hats on - too bad they do not get any PostDoc's any more - to do all the work...

Cindy the Dolphin - DEAD!

In January, the news story of "woman marries dolphin" made some - rather odd - headlines. As the story goes, an English woman named Sharon Tendler, 41, of London, married a dolpin named Cindy, 35, of Eilat. Sadly, recently "Cindy the Dolphin" died and guess what - was buried at sea.

They even had a pre-nup, allowing 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. In fact Cindy -- the only male dolphin at the dolphinarium -- sired offspring with several of the local females...

C'mon, what do you expect: THEY HAD A PRE-NUP!

PhD comics - Piled Higher and Deeper

iChat, iBlog, iWeb!

After a lot of half-hearted attempts with open-source (and badly hacked) website creation tools, I finally settled for iWeb for refurbishing my personal website.

The upside: there was a style fitting my blogger css style ;-)

The downside: it will not run on my good ol' PowerBook Wallstreet G4/500 (tuned by Sonnet)

Maybe it's time to review my options again...

(a lifelong struggle for any mac fan - a good thing the Apple online store is eternally patient).

And as a footnote to that iName mania, where everything is WHITE:

all my pages are BLACK, my powerbook is BLACK, and I will not buy a new iMac until they come in black, too ;-)

Now do not make any premature assumptions about my soul, mind you...

Australia's scientists allowed to speak freely (maybe)

The Scientist reports:

Australia's top government science organization has completely rewritten its policy on public comments by staff this week, after admitting that the existing policy had discouraged staff from speaking about their research in public.

...

Crucially, the new rules don't require staff to seek permission from management before speaking publicly. "We have taken out the word 'permission'," Garrett said. "Scientists are CSIRO's frontline communicators, and we trust them to discuss their science, even in potentially controversial areas."

But others were concerned that the policy tells CSIRO staff not to advocate, defend or canvass the merits of government or opposition policies.

Ian Lowe, president of the Australian Conservation Foundation, warned that ministers in the past have seen any comment on the need to reduce greenhouse emissions as a challenge to policy. "I would like to be reassured that scientists will be free to tell the public what the science says, even if that makes politicians …uncomfortable," he said in a statement.

scary polar bear attack pictures

So here it is, the nightmare come true:

A guy sets up his tent and goes to sleep. Next thing he knows, a f****ing polar bear jumps and crashes through the tent!



Somehow, the guy survived and somebody (apparently not the victim of the attack) managed to kill the bear before he could do any more damage.



Follow the link to read the full story, as well as some more truly stomach-turning pictures (the guy apparently got scalped halfway).



UPDATE:

an anonymous comment has pointed me to another report about this incident, here. There seems to have been some confusion on the legal aspects of whether guides are allowed carrying guns, but although the story is titled "Polar Bear Attack Legend - the true story" I cannot see how this adds any more substantial insight into the events: bear jumps on a guy, guy gets badly scratched and halfway scalped, (and somehow shot through the ankle, but that is not explained further here either), guy ends up in hospital, bear ends up dead.

So any other anonymous sources out ther who wish to contribute with more details are welcome to add to this story.