Read This Now - Climate Change Can't Wait

Three important, incensed, and increasingly urgent takes on climate change legislation and it's squeaking through the house last week.

Paul Krugman labels climate change deniers traitors to humanity.

NASA's head scientist (New Yorker profile, sub. req. first time I've run into that sorry. blog update) thinks it may be too late already (too bad no one's listened to him as he's correctly predicted climate change for the past 30 years).

And Nate Silver examines the attacks on how much climate change will cost economically and puts things neatly into perspective (hint doing nothing would roughly equal wiping out 43% of the planet's population, in economic terms).

Our Oceans Are Haunted

Regardless of whether you believe in ghosts, ghost nets, traps, and pots in the form of lost fishing gear are a very real problem.

I started thinking about them a while back when the Shifting Baselines blog (currently defunct) ran a piece with video of teams capturing ghost nets in Puget Sound, more recently Tim Wheeler at the (now also defunct) Bay & Environment blog had an interesting story on paying out of work Virgina waterman (due to fisheries closures based on decreasing stocks) to round up ghost crab pots in VA's parts of the Chesapeake Bay.

That effort removed 8,600 pots and 61 nets containing more than 5,000 crabs, the going estimate is apparently 50 crabs per ghost pot a year. NOAA and the MD DNR estimated a couple of years ago that 42,000 ghost pots probably haunt MD's Chesapeake waters. Frustratingly that study has apparently yet to be followed up on even though they promised next steps and information on capturing ghost pots in late 2008. (A recent Environmental News Service article puts the number of estimated Chesapeake ghost pots at 150,000, albeit with no support)

The UN Environment Program released a report this spring on the growing threat posed by ghost fishing gear. Worldwide 10% of ocean debris is thought to be deadly ghost gear (that weighs in at 640,000 tons) which adds up to a lot of dead fish and other critters, none of which we get to eat either.

Here is the first video to pop up on YouTube, from Oregon Public TV...


(if you want to see more just type in ghost nets)

Mama Finally Went And Did It

Even Paul Simon could only delay the inevitable. They've taken Kodachrome away...

PC Speaks At Radio & TV Whitehouse Correspondents' Dinner

John Hodgman on his own personally compelling story and the ability of the Obama Administration to deal with our nation's historic jock / nerd rift...



(via kottke)

Netflix Prize Won

Well, nearly so at least. The 10% improvement on Netflix's prediction algorithm needed to claim the prize has been achieved. The rules give all other competitors 30 days to best the 10.05% mark and then its all over.

Some very cool work has been done on the Netflix Prize and it's been interesting even just casually following the teams' progress.

Wired has the full story.

(vial Bloggasm)

So Long Dan Froomkin

At least say bye bye to his WaPo online column / blog White House Watch. Erik Wemple at the City Paper has the story.

A lot happened while I was on vacation and I'll try to get to some of it at least. Froomkin's commentary was an often invaluable source for me during the W years and I am still reading through pieces from the last month in the RSS reader. Froomkin has written for the Nieman Watchdog Blog so look for him to possibly resurface there.

Froomkin signs off by promising an update at Whitehouewatch.com.

Read This Now - Live Blogging Unrest In Tehran

You shouldn't be here you should be reading niacInsight.