For those who have not kept up with the show, the premise is simple. Every year a Japanese fleet of whaling ships travel to Antarctica and kill over a thousand whales, for “research purposes”. According to an international treaty, whaling is banned except for scientific purposes and each year a quota is set for the maximum number of whales that may be killed for this purpose. One stipulation of the law is that no part of a whale killed for research may go to waste. As such, the Japanese are allowed to sell the whale meat and fat for an enormous profit. The Sea Shepherds see this as commercial whaling, and are willing to do anything to stop it. With each side believing the law is on their side, a game of cat-and-mouse ensues as the whalers race to complete the quota while the Sea Shepherds try to find the whaling ships and stop them.

For the most part, Sea Shepherd goals are admirable. While most legal experts agree that the Japanese are following the letter of the law, they are hardly following its spirit. They are no doubt performing scientific work on the whales they kill, but just because the work is scientific does not make it scientifically valuable. One whale species hunted every year is even endangered. Much more data could be gathered tagging and tracking whales than killing them. But if data collection was the primary goal of the fleet, a meat packaging ship would hardly be necessary. Given the suffering associated with the prolonged death by harpoon, whaling is certainly morally questionable way to make a buck.

However, the methods that the Sea Shepherds use to stop the whaling are downright dangerous, and this can mostly be attributed to captain Paul Watson. He claims that the group is nonviolent, but throwing bottles of butyric acid at the whaling ships is hardly peaceful. This is the group’s primary tactic, as it ruins the whale meat and stinks to high heaven, but no one has yet to be hurt by a bad smell. More concerning is Paul Watson’s “signature tactic” of ramming whaling vessels with the Steve Irwin. This is highly dangerous to crews of both ships, and it is baffling how Watson has never been charged for his actions.

Watson often says that he and his crew are prepared to die to save whales, but he seems a lot more willing to risk the lives of his crew than his own. After asking for volunteers to board one the Japanese ship, he had to order one member of his crew to do it. The action of boarding another ship at sea is not only highly dangerous, but is viewed as an act of piracy according to international law, punishable by up to 25 years in prison. It is one thing to risk life and liberty for a cause; it is another to command that others do it for you. Paul Watson has violated numerous international and Australian laws, and it is time he be charged before he gets someone killed.

Secondly, the article needs to make whatever topic seem like the Most Important Issue Ever. This is usually accomplished by attaching certain doom to the notion of disobeying the message of the article, whether it’s about bird flu or inner-city art programs. To do this the article also needs to be sternly worded. In this editorial from the New York Times, there isn’t a single “should”, everything is a “must”.

Normally articles are kept short (< 600 words) to try and keep people’s attention. The one above goes a bit longer, but that’s okay because it’s a list, and once readers get done with the first item they have to finish the list. It’s addictive like that.

The NY Times says that the recent Supreme Court “showed extreme and troubling deference to the views of the military” in a decision to allow the Navy to use high powered sonar in close proximity to marines mammals. The sonar confuses whales, often causing them to beach themselves. Now, normally I’d consider the needs of the military and national security to be above the lives of whales, but the Navy is just getting greedy. They don’t want to just use the sonar for testing or the war games they occasionally run, but for regular training. Whats more, the requirement to stop the sonar within 2200 yards of whales is hardly crippling. Throw in the the fact that the whales likely to be affected are highly endangered beaked whales, and this just looks like the military is trying to squeeze as much as they can out of the current crop of conservative judges and bureaucrats while they still can. It is disturbing how the Supreme Court has come to continue the Bush administration pattern of sacrificing the environment for human convenience. While the EPA is directly under the control of the president, the courts are supposed to above such damaging political agendas.

Friedman’s basic argument is that Detroit automakers created their own problems. He does this by linking comments made by company executives to the entire industry, and comparing this industry to other industries. First, he uses comments made by the CEO of Chrysler and the vice-president of GM to paint automotive executives as idiots. Then he says that “These are the guys taxpayers are being asked to bail out,” as if the auto bailout is about the two guys at the top, not an entire industry. Next, he blames Detroit Congressmen for cutting the automakers slack in fuel economy, and now it’s catching up to them. He says that companies are supposed to adapt, but the automakers missed their chance. Then he goes on to say that even though it’s the auto industry’s own fault that it’s screwed, we should still bail them out since jobs depend on it. In return he wants the top tier of the companies to be remade.

So to sum it up, he says that the auto execs screwed up the industry, so we should bail out the industry while punishing execs. This author’s choice is somewhat effective, but a lot of the time it’s hard to take him seriously when his article starts to sound more like a rant against auto execs than a constructive argument.

Marty: I’m freezing. Why the heck am I even doing this? What do I get out of all this?
Me: I’ve got something for you!
Marty: 60k a year to live at the bottom of the earth. That’s pathetic.
Me: For your bucket, to be more specific.
Marty: I spend three years in this god-forsaken place, and I get one stinking article published. And only in Marine Biology Quarterly. How many people read that? Like 3? Even I don’t have a subscription.
Me: Heh heh, that might be a two-scooper!
Marty: And then those guys from National Geographic come down here, film for a month, and 100 million people go and watch their movie. There’s nothing in it that we haven’t known for 30 years, but people still flocked to the theaters. My research on penguin diets was ground-breaking, but not even Science or Nature wanted it.
Me: So that’s why you’re out here collecting poop? To find out what I eat? I’ll tell you what I eat. FISH. F-I-S-H. Mystery solved.
Marty: I include 5 pages of data and charts about a never-before researched field of scatology, and what did March of the Penguins discover? That people are willing to pay money to to see pictures of cute birds and listen to Morgan Freeman?
Me: Scatology? You’ve got to be kidding me. That’s an actual scientific field? What in the world motivates people to get into scatology?
Marty: Morgan Freeman didn’t even come down here, and he still got paid a few million to read a script.
Me: I seriously doubt when you were six years old you were telling your parents “when I grow up, I want to study poo”.
Marty: That’s what I should be! An actor! Screw this science stuff. Plus, if I moved to California maybe I could finally meet a woman.
Me: Plus, “Hi, I’m an actor.” will be a much better pick-up line than “Hi, I dissect poop for a living.”
Marty: Bleh. Who am I kidding? Come next week I’ll still be out here collecting crap, and there’s nothing I can do about it.
Me: You can bring a newspaper and some toilet paper!

…And right about here Marty trudges back to the complex, and I’m left wishing that humans could actually understand what the heck I’m saying.

Despite Marty’s constant whining mixed in with his comparison of academic and popular writing, he gets most of it right. Popular writing is written for the lowest common denominator. When writing for a popular audience, it must be assumed that the reader knows next to nothing, but academic writing builds on previous knowledge, and doesn’t usually backtrack to explain things that would need to be explained in popular writings.

Also, the reasons behind academic and popular writing vary. Popular writing is meant to entertain, and sometimes inform, whereas academic writing cares only about informing. March of the Penguins doesn’t contribute new knowledge to humanity as a whole, even if your average movie goer didn’t know a lot of the information in the movie beforehand. Marty’s article, on the other hand, while incredibly dry does contribute knowledge that had not been known to anyone before.

The humans over at the National History Museum in Britain have put together a blog about some conservationist they shipped off to Antarctica to restore the shack Ernest Shackleton lived in during his ill-fated expedition in 1908. I don’t quite understand the importance of this, since the conservationists are likely the only people who will ever travel that far to see it in the first place. If I had to guess, I’d say that they really must have ticked someone high up at the museum off, and got this crappy job in retaliation. Britain doesn’t have an Australia to ship prisoners and idiots to anymore, so they just turned to Russian method: Find the coldest place on earth, and send people you don’t like there.