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Fish Work as Anti-terror Agents
Posted by
samzenpus
on Wed Sep 20, 2006 11:24 PM
from the mr-limpet dept.
from the mr-limpet dept.
sdriver writes "San Francisco's bluegills went to work about a month ago, guarding the drinking water of more than 1 million people from substances such as cyanide, diesel fuel, mercury and pesticides. "There's no known manmade sensor that can do the same job as the bluegill." The New York City Department of Environmental Protection reported at least one instance in which the system caught a toxin before it made it into the water supply."
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I don't feel safe! (Score:4, Funny)
This is hardly guarding (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:This is hardly guarding (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:This is hardly guarding (Score:4, Funny)
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The question is (Score:4, Funny)
*ducks and runs*
Could you speak up please? (Score:5, Funny)
I'm hard of herring.
Parent
Re:Could you speak up please? (Score:5, Funny)
You appear to be a dab [first-nature.com] hand at these fish jokes, and I don't want to carp [wikipedia.org] and knock you off your perch [anglerstimes.co.uk], but maybe you didn't do it on porpoise [theporpoisepage.com]?
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Could you speak up please? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:The question is (Score:5, Funny)
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Fishing? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Fishing? (Score:5, Funny)
Yes. You should get your fish from a market. Preferably fish imported from Japan. If you are self-sufficient in some respect, you are destroying the pillars of mutual dependence on which current capitalism and world economy are built.
Besides, the fish are not privately owned. You are benefiting from public property. Which means that:
When you're fishing, you're catching communism !
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Re:Fishing? (Score:5, Funny)
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much worse than I feared (Score:3, Funny)
good idea! (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
According to the DHS system of accounting for targets, that means you have the world's largest fair along side the world's largest petting zoo?
Re:good idea! (Score:5, Funny)
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007 (Score:2)
nerdy enough? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:nerdy enough? (Score:5, Funny)
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Not likely method (Score:5, Insightful)
Plutonium would work much better.
very difficult to make that effective (Score:5, Informative)
But the descriptions you hear all the time about how one gram can kill a bazillion people assumes that each person gets exactly a lethal dose and no more.
In reality, this is difficult to do. Plutonium, for example, is not soluble in water and is very heavy. So distributing it through the water supply would be very difficult.
If you drop a bit in the water supply, it'll just sink to the bottom in the first eddy it reaches and sit there, killing only things that come near it instead of the intended targets. It might kill nothing except a few rats.
http://www.llnl.gov/csts/publications/sutcliffe/ [llnl.gov]
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Plutonium, for example, is not soluble in water and is very heavy...
Re:very difficult to make that effective (Score:4, Funny)
I mean, what sort of an idiot needs to even ask this question - obviously the plutonium weighs more.
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Re:very difficult to make that effective (Score:5, Funny)
Or turning them and four baby turtles into ninjas, heros in a half-shell so to speak, which grow up to be a crime-fighting team of pizza-loving mutants.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
On the subjec
OH MY GAWD! (Score:5, Funny)
E-Mail, eh? (Score:5, Funny)
To: Bob Thompson <bthompson@dopw.sf.ca.us>
Subject: Our Contract
Dear Bob,
We don't want to seem ungrateful and we appreciate all you've done. However, it has just come to our attention, and our solicitor's attention, that our job is to test the water for poison. In light of this we'd like to renegotiate. We're looking forward to hearing back from you ASAP concerning this issue.
Sincerely,
Tim, Ed, and Bill
The Bluegills
Animals as agents of terror. (Score:4, Informative)
At the other end of the issue, we've used animals as agents of destruction in some pretty weird ways. Probably everybody here has heard of the U.S. Navy's experiments using dolphins or porpoises as a delivery system for below-the-water-line bombs targeting ships. The weirdest I've ever heard of was the Army's Bat Bomb project during WWII:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_bomb [wikipedia.org]
Does anyone here watch the History Channel (North America)? Didn't they run a documentary on this project a couple of years ago?
* * * * *
My goal is to someday be the person my dog thinks I am.
--Unknown
Well, Bushie predicted this one (Score:4, Funny)
-George W. Bush, Saginaw, Mich., Sept. 29, 2000
Give credit where credit's due.
Geeks at work as counterterrorists, too (Score:5, Funny)
SAN FRANCISCO, California (AP) -- A type of person so common that practically every American who ever attended grade school has probably harassed one is being enlisted in the fight against terrorism.
San Francisco, New York, Washington and other big cities are using computer geeks -- also known as computer nerds or slashdotters -- as a sort of canary in a coal mine to safeguard the internet.
Small numbers of the geeks are kept in cubicles supplied with Mountain Dew and a broadband internet connection from local internet service providers (ISPs), and sensors in each cubicle work around the clock to register changes in the breathing, heartbeat and browsing patterns of the geeks that occur in the presence of internet attacks.
"Nature's given us pretty much the most powerful and reliable early warning center out there," said Bill Lawler, co-founder of Intelligent Automation Corporation, a Southern California company that makes and sells the geek monitoring system. "There's no known manmade sensor that can do the same job as the computer nerd."
Since September 11, the government has taken very seriously the threat of attacks on the U.S. internet. Federal law requires nearly all internet service providers to assess their vulnerability to terrorism.
Big cities employ a range of safeguards against chemical and biological agents, constantly monitoring, testing and treating the water. But protection systems for electronic networks can trace only the hacks they are programmed to detect, Lawler said.
Computer geeks -- a hardy species about the size of a normal human being, but thinner and paler -- are considered more versatile. They are highly attuned to internet integrity, and when exposed to even brief internet outages, they experience the geek version of coughing, compulsively reloading browser windows and pinging gateways to determine the source of the congestion.
The computerized system in use in San Francisco and elsewhere is designed to detect even slight changes in the geek's vital signs and send an e-mail alert when something is wrong.
Re:Geeks at work as counterterrorists, too (Score:4, Funny)
Idiotic government contractors.
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Re:Geeks at work as counterterrorists, too (Score:4, Funny)
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PETA & SPCA (Score:3, Funny)
The idea's not exactly new. (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Yeah, when they tested the water using birds the only conclusion was 'That must be REALLY poisoned water!'
Still Don't Trust The Fish (Score:5, Funny)
And there isn't a change in hell that I would drink any of the water in those lakes. Those fish are survivors, and although I am not a scientist, I could only conclude that the fish in the lakes nearby had to have gone through some type of resistant mutation... That really doesn't help my confidence in the safety of the water.
I say use goldfish. Those little bastards take one day of me forgetting to feed them to go belly up.
"Fishkill" test (Score:5, Informative)
Not the first (Score:5, Interesting)
There was a video camera trained on the tank and the operators in the control room could cut off the canal if they noticed the fish were dead.
There was a guy whose job it was to feed the fish and run the dechlorination system that removed the chlorine from the water going into the tank, since that's also toxic to fish.
One weekend , he forgot to top up the sodium thiosulphate solution that was used for this purpose, and all the fish died from chlorine poisoning some time on Sunday night when it ran out.
That was bad enough, but it was Monday morning before the operators noticed.
They don't use that system anymore. The canal has been filled in and there is a pipeline and a fully filtered treatment plant.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I took an environmental law class once, and the guy who taught it used to work county health or something.
In California, there are a few ways of determining if somethning is toxic, and one of the ways is to put the suspected agent into a fish tank with an "indicator species" of fish and wait a few days to see if the fish live or die. If the fish die, then the suspected agent is thus toxic.
Well, one time he was infront of a judge explaining the test, and presenting th
bluegills? (Score:3, Funny)
Animals against terror? (Score:3, Funny)
At least I can count on moles to uphold le resistance.
so polluters are terrorists now? (Score:3, Insightful)
ISTM that each time "terrorism" is included as a reason to improve public safety, it's just assisting the terrorist agenda by keeping them inthe news and instilling fear where it didn't previously exist.
Better to celebrate the improvements that progress brings, rather than trying to keep everyone cowering in fear with cheap, sensationalist news copy.
Clams deserve credit too (Score:4, Funny)
Just a new application (Score:3, Informative)
Why the terror link? (Score:3, Insightful)
Bluefish on a plane? (Score:4, Funny)
Absurd, exaggerated claims (Score:3, Informative)
This claim is absurd on its face. Who told him that? The guy who sold him the fish? He's obviously not an analytical chemist. Things like high-resolution mass spectrometry can detect cyanide, diesel fuel, mercury and pesticides at parts-per-trillion levels, far lower than anything that could ever possibly have any sort of detectible biological effect on a fish. There is no way that a fish is going to be effected by a nanogram/liter concentration of mercury, but a good mass spec would be able to see it.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)