A New Kind of Ocean Pollutant: Noise

By Ransom Riggs
MentalFloss.com
Click here for the original article

Sleeping with the fishes is getting a lot harder these days. And not because the FBI finally has the mob on the run, either — rather, because noise levels in the world’s oceans are lately reaching staggering levels, in some areas doubling each decade. Whales, dolphins and other marine mammals are finding their feeding and mating patterns disrupted, and some of the noise — like that produced by high-energy military sonar systems — have been linked to outright death in some species of whales.

It’s not so much that the noise we humans produce underwater is greater than what we produce on land, but that creatures of the sea are so much more sensitive to it. Baleen whales emit low-frequency calls that can travel a thousand miles in water — an essential kind of long-distance calling plan for an animal whose kind are far more sparsely distributed than before commercial whaling took hold. Other kinds of whales and dolphins use high-frequency clicks to locate prey, and sound is important to all marine mammals “in ways that are clearly important to their survival, though not completely understood,” according to the BBC…

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(Photo from MentalFloss.com)

Why I love Bill Maher…

Watch this and reflect about what the founding fathers would have thought about terrorism and what America’s response should always be in the face of terrorism…

Experimenting with Photoshop Layers

Just felt like posting this for the heck of it. I’m taking a class at Ohio University called Graphics and Audiences (JOUR 338) and we’re learning about Photoshop layers/effects. I made this in about 10 minutes toward the end of my last class:

I wanted to juxtapose tanks shooting something other than ammunition, so I made them shoot fish.

Below is my homework, where we had to take nine of the same object and apply different effects to each of them. It’s not much to look at– I mean it meets the general requirements for the assignment– but I like it nonetheless:

Any critiques/comments from some Photoshop gurus out there? Your constructive criticism is always appreciated!

-Mike

Facebook passes the 100,000,000 user mark

That’s right– Facebook officially now has more than 100 million users.

That means that if it were a country, it would be the world’s 12th largest— falling between Mexico and the Philippines.

Facebook = a force to be reckoned with?

(Sources: Wikipedia, CNN)