Any number of times, a large-ship captain would radio me saying, "Whatever you do, don't change course or speed -- we can get past you as long as you don't change anything."
And I was a distant sailboat with a radar reflector, not a subtle biological target at close range.
Question for you as a sailor in a lighter boat. If alerted, would you be able to change direction fast enough?
Also, I’m guessing at some point the collision is extremely dangerous for the boat not the whale.
Meaning the technology, if feasible, might have a market but just to a different buyer than large commercial vessels) (sail boats, yachts, speed boats).
people do need to sleep if they're soloing offshore, so the warning would need to be at least a minute to be able to wake up, then there's putting on the safety equipment to go out on deck etc. So make that multiple minutes of warning for it to be useful..
Im not aware (which is not to say it doesn't happen) of that many incidents with sailing vessels and whales. However, you've prompted me to look, and it's more than I thought.
https://www.yachtingworld.com/cruising/new-approach-to-reduc...
That would depend. While under sail (i.e. 99% of the time during ocean crossings), no, not really -- not enough speed and limited heading change options in the prevailing wind. But this is balanced by the fact that, during a typical ocean crossing, I might see another vessel every 20 days or so.
Notwithstanding those facts, I ran my mast-head navigation light, all night, every night, because I was alone on the boat, therefore ... asleep for eight hours every night. If I hit something, it was likely to be something smaller than another boat. Like a waterlogged container or a sleeping whale, both rare but dramatic events.
> Also, I’m guessing at some point the collision is extremely dangerous for the boat not the whale.
Not normally. I've hit whales several times during my time as a sailor. I could tell it was a whale because the boat "thumped" the obstacle instead of loudly banging as with a floating log. I hated the thought of colliding with a whale and did all I could to avoid it, but after dark, such things can't be avoided.
In the case of a big vessel, it's all reversed -- the risk is to the whale, not the ship.
This isn't a problem for AI/machine vision, IMO.
Sonar is not a valid solution here because it annoys the whales. Or at least high-power sonar, as used by the military, does. It would defeat the point.
NOAA: Track Whale Detections With This Interactive Map - https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/feature-story/track-whale-det...
NOAA: Passive Acoustic Cetacean Map - https://apps-nefsc.fisheries.noaa.gov/pacm/#/
WhaleMap - https://whalemap.org/WhaleMap/
Is it that the noise from the ships is too low in frequency for the whale to be able to tell what direction it is from? If that is the case could the ships add a higher frequency emitter that the whales could localize, emitting some standardized pattern of pings that the whales could learn means ship?
When I was interested in whale collisions I was surprised to read this review (https://doi.org/10.3389/fmars.2020.00292) which didn't even consider sleeping as a large risk factor for collision. Instead, factors included:
- They're involved in distracting behaviours such as feeding, socialising, foraging, resting, etc.
- Acoustics are complex near the surface involving surface reflections and direct paths which can interfere.
- Ships may form an acoustic shadow in front of themselves. Not only the hull shadowing the propeller, but also other hull sounds.
- Sailing vessels, which are the source of a lot of reports (harder for them to miss it happened) are quiet.
- Even when they hear an approaching vessel, some species just move slowly to avoid them.
These collisions apparently used to be much rarer. Ironically, the increasing number of whale injuries and deaths are a result of recovering populations.
Remarkable thing death, figuring things out after it is quite difficult for many beings.
I met people here in Australia doing similar work to spot whales during offshore gas exploration. It was basically a revolving IR camera looking for whale spouts
Seems at least worth researching.
> Zitterbart’s aim is for ship captains to receive zero false alerts, so that every ping truly requires their attention. Removing human oversight risks flooding ship captains with false reports
This sounds great, as long as we're still on track for the whole "A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision."
I don't want to be the one to explain to the whales, "No, look, it's not our fault that we killed your singing partner - the AI told us this was the correct route. See?"
You'll need to speak "whale" first with this awful scheme.
A small whale is a few tonnes in mass a large one can be 150 tonnes. That is very easy to detect via SONAR.
Funnily enough a few specialised Japanese and Chinese ships are capable of detecting whales with amazing accuracy to the point of delivering small warheads.
Persist in using the system for a while, on as many ships as possible, and the odds will get even better as time goes on. Whales aren't dumb, they'll figure it out and probably even tell each other about it.
I appreciate this can be hard to measure, and don't doubt there are some number of whale deaths caused by vessel collisions each year... Just feels a bit wild that a number of this magnitude is being used without much numerical evidence.
Cool product though - perhaps it could help with getting more accurate numbers
Someone should research “sounds that annoy whales that they can hear from a long way off” and then mandate putting a transducer on the front of the hull below the waterline, to run while underway.
Anyway, Chief Engineer of a ship had noticed that slip increased slightly but couldn't account for it. It was a tiny amount, so not worth investigating.
Then the ship comes into port and after taking on a harbor pilot, the pilot asks "do you guys know there's a whale caught on your bow?" The ship was riding fairly high and a whale, now long dead, had been stuck crosswise in the curve just above the ship's bulbous bow: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulbous_bow)
So, if it has a negligible impact on performance, ship owner is unlikely to care enough to spend money on it.
That's because many people allow their (completely warranted) distrust of the CCP to justify all sorts of other spurious, baseless accusations of the CCP.
The CCP has done many things that deserve criticism; let's not invent new ones.
Human morality is above any nations petty laws. Culprit is the right word for those monsters still slaughtering these magnificent creatures.
Animals hunting other animals is a natural part of life.
Very few if any clean kills, infliction of immense suffering on creatures that have a cognitive capacity rivaling that of humans prior to robbing them of life, clear lack of necessity in the first place.
I dunno, seems kind of evil to me. This makes a good argument that the cruelty involved is undue:
Would you extend this to humans hunting humans?
But one thing that sets humans apart from other animals is our development of culture. As part of that we've made rules against killing (and eating) other humans in most cases, which is generally advantageous to all of us. So I'd argue it's a strategic change we've made.
If God didn't mean for people to hunt and eat other people, they wouldn't be made of meat.
But obviously that's not in our own interest, so it's perfectly natural for us to avoid resorting to canabalism.
All those animals had humans to thank for saving them from the wrath of God's genocidal whims and piques of anger.
It's a wonder none of the animals ate their delicious meaty human crew! I wonder how much fresh meat it took to feed all those carnivorous animals for that long, and why it didn't go bad sitting around for more than a month.
Maybe they brought along some extra humans to sacrifice, who would have drowned and been wasted otherwise, to keep the lions and tigers and jackals and pigs in fresh meat.
The Bible is such a great kid's book, especially all that pro-slavery stuff -- it should be mandatory reading in schools! It really makes you wonder. ;)
Oklahoma education head discusses why he’s mandating public schools teach the Bible:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/oklahoma-education-head-di...
This State Requires Schools to Teach the Bible. Parents and Teachers Are Suing:
https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/this-state-requires-s...
Elections have consequences!
The choice of verb is ironic given whales are mammals. I suppose that's why they call it whaling, although even that obscures the horror.
But I find it inconsistent to call China out for this instead of Japan. HackerNews has a tendency to jump through mental gymnastics to justify that Japan is perfect and can do no wrong. I say this after just leaving a Japanese museum 30 minutes ago that had blackface figures on exhibit
Either don’t call any country out for whaling or start by calling the countries typically deemed as more developed, advanced and progressive first. In other words, be moral relativist or if you should to be a moral absolutist then don’t pick and choose countries to exempt
HackerNews has a heavy US skew. From public statments of holders of the highest offices of their country - "they are all pesants" is the extent of US knowledge about Asia and if they knew what a map was they would point to the region inhabited by only pengins and suggest they should bomb them back into the stone age.
Or levy tariffs on the penguins.
This is an interesting comment that seems to suggest that exhibiting blackface figures in a museum context is inappropriate or bad. I have never been to Japan and have not seen this display so I can't comment on the contextual layout.
I am left wondering how future generations can ever benefit from the mistakes of their ancestors if those mistakes are not documented and available to serve as teaching moments.
Maybe this is why it is called a cycle of life - we erase or bury all the uncomfortable stuff so that our kids and their kids have no idea that we (our societies) already suffered the consequences of crossing that bridge long before they came around.
I would argue instead that museums are the best context for displays like blackface where they can put everything into context for future generations and perhaps as a people we can concentrate on solving new sets of problems with each successive generation. That would sound a lot more like progress to me.
It’s just there are people (Americans) who offended by this and riled up about progressive issues such as feminism, for which Japan is behind even China, but then shut that part of their brain off when they decide they want to idolize Japan.
The context is that it was a museum of retro items. The imagery is very similar to the backlash that the Pokémon Jynx received such that it has to be redesigned for the American market [1]. I don’t think the Japanese have any malicious intent, but perhaps unaware (and I don’t blame them) that the visual motifs offend some people.
Another example is social justice warriors recently being offended by the “Manji” symbol present in Japan from Buddhism and other religious for thousands of years, but were later appropriated by the nazis into the swastika. Japan had to change their digital maps recently because of this. [2]
[1] https://lavacutcontent.com/3-pokemon-redesigned-due-to-racia...
[2] https://japantoday.com/category/poll/should-japan-stop-ident...
2012: cloud system alerts ships of whales.
2006: social media alerts ships of whales.
1998: internet alerts ships of whales.
1978: computer alerts ships of whales.
1938: sonar alerts ships of whales.