Seen here dropping like a billion kids off in the deep-end of the pool, whale sharks are mysterious leviathans of the sea. And now, thanks to one man's quest to collect their doodie, some questions might finally get answered. LOLWUT?!
Georgia Aquarium zoologist Alistair Dove snapped the photograph from the window of a Cessna plane during a recent research trip to the Gulf of Mexico, where he studies whale sharks. He's been less successful in capturing whale shark defecation in the water, though not for lack of trying. It's hard to keep up with the fast-cruising giants, and their deposits fall quickly. And for a zoologist like Dove, the feces are research treasure.
Dove estimated the main plume in the photograph to be 30 feet long and 20 feet wide, and the smaller about 8 feet by 10 feet. If it's three feet thick, the nutrient slurry would have a volume of 2,000 cubic feet. “Imagine you've got a big aggregation, dozens or hundreds of whale sharks, doing this all at the same time. That's a lot of nutrients,” he said. Dove hopes to collect samples from just such a group.
“Nobody has done this analysis yet,” said Dove, who referenced a scene from Jurassic Park, when Laura Dern's character is ecstatic at the chance to poke through a pile of dinosaur droppings. “It could be a literal gold mine.”
A literal gold mine! WHY DIDN'T SOMEONE TELL ME?! So check it, here's my new get-rich-quick scheme: 1. I find a whale shark and force-feed that f***er beans until it looks like it's about to explode. 2. ??? (Possibly involving a gold shit-cloud the size of a football field) 3. Profit. See you in Forbes, suckers!
Hit the jump for a closeup in case you don't know what a whale shark looks like.
When the World's Biggest Fish Poops
Thanks to Divo, who agrees this certainly brings new meaning to the term 'fish sticks'. Pfft, sticks? That thing just dropped a whole f***ing forest!
Even at the Barneys launch party for his own T-shirt collection with Archive 1887, Iggy Pop was as close to shirtless as possible. “I don't have great taste in clothes, so I don't wear much of them,” he said, cocking his head toward his top, which was slashed all the way down to his chiseled abdomen. “When I get up in the morning, I stay nude for three or four hours. And if I really feel like getting formal, I'll put on board shorts. I own about a dozen pairs of Quiksilver board shorts. That's my mainstay.”
What does he do if he has to leave his house to buy, say, toilet paper, or put gas in his Ferrari? “If I have to actually go out somewhere, then I make a big decision: Am I going to wear something besides the board shorts? I almost never do. But if I'm going to go out to dinner, I favor Brioni.” Really? “Yes, I dress like Donald Trump. I wear very nice Italian things. Brioni, Cerruti, and some Versace and some Dolce & Gabbana, but classic, old-school shit. And I like some nice Brioni polo shirts, things like that. They make me look like a perfect gentleman.”
The irony of the chronically bare-chested Pop doing a T-shirt line was apparently an ongoing joke among the design team. “We were like, 'Wow, Iggy will never wear one of these shirts,'” said Grieg Bennett, the collaborating creative director of Thread Shop. “I don’t recall ever really seeing him in a shirt.” Barneys creative director Simon Doonan, who has known Pop since the early eighties, agreed: “There's a fabulous irony about Iggy being associated with a T-shirt line, because one associates him with no clothes. Or maybe with gold lamé tights.”
The T-shirts are printed with vintage photographs of Pop, including one from the early eighties where he's missing a front tooth and staring slack-jawed into the camera lens. Pop has some trouble remembering when and how the image came to be, but he assured us that the gap tooth was actually just black paint. “That's from '81 or '82, and that's as far out as I ever went in my uh, explorations,” he said. “Musically, at that time — well, for instance, I had to open for Flock of Seagulls, and it was the hair gel, and the long hairdo, and the rigidity of the skinny early eighties ties, fake drum machine, faux-irony vocals, and I hated it. So with the tooth out, I was trying to show my kinship to thieving gypsies, drunk itinerant bluesmen, pirates — stuff that had fluidity and humanity. That was the idea.”
Pop also supplied the design team with a full-frontal nude photograph of himself, which Bennett really liked and may decide to feature on a shirt in one of their future collections. “We were thinking about using it. We might still. it was a little much for the first go-round,” he said.
So what does Pop actually think of the Archive 1887 shirts? “I asked that the cuts and the fabric be a step up from schmatta at a merch stand at a concert, and they definitely are.”
wow buy gold
Uh, because they can't, at the same price point.
Who said anything about same price point? We said they offer MORE VALUE. And they do, which is obvious by the fact that EVEN THOUGH these servers are available out there, most people still choose to use the official one.
Why? Because they *know* that's the real, authentic version, and it's the version they want to support, and the version where new stuff will happen first, and the version where most of the players will be.
It is basically economically impossible.
Other than the fact that this is entirely wrong. See above.
Blizzard must shoulder the dual burden of maintaining and managing a healthy and fun set of servers to play on, as well as the cost of developing the game itself and its expansions (probably in the $100s of millions range for a game like World of Warcraft).
Indeed. Which is why most users will want to play it on the official servers. Because the experience is better.
Any “competing” entity that must shoulder only the first burden, without the hundreds of millions of dollars to recoup, will be able to do so at an equivalent or better level at a fraction of Blizzard's costs.
You (conveniently, but wrongly) leave out the cost of *getting anyone to know you exist* and then *convincing them that it's worth using your servers*. I wouldn't underestimate that cost. You, instead, ignore it 100%.
That's wrong.
Suing anybody who gets big enough to notice is a decent strategy, because it limits the amount of resources a “competitor” will be able to bring to bear at making a competing server farm. If a competitor gets big enough to where their server and support quality is equivalent or close to Blizzard's, offered at a fractional price, Blizzard will likely see mass migrations away from their “official” servers.
Why? Why would people migrate away? I don't believe that's true.
Let's say it was a free-for-all, and this form of DRM was not effective. Other companies can run their own servers without fear of prosecution. What, in your mind, could Blizzard do or offer that these other companies could not do or offer at a lower price
One, it would be the easiest and most obvious servers to connect to — which would drive a huge amount of business. We've seen this time and time again, where the “official” version gets a lot more traffic, even if others are cheaper.
Other than their imprimatur (of questionable value in such a world) and personal access to their developers and other personnel, Blizzard has nothing that can't be copied or reimplemented.
Other players? Faster access to changes and updates? Easier access? All of that is worth quite a bit.
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In the pantheon of video games, Leeroy Jenkins is a legend. Leeroy, the World of Warcraft character of mild-mannered Lafayette native Ben Schulz, shot to stardom thanks to a 2006 YouTube clip (seen below).
His gaming fame earned Leeroy a Howard Stern reference, a mention on Jeopardy and a spot on schoolgirls' T-shirts in Asia — and now the Army thinks it can use Leeroy to inform its multi-billion-dollar operations.
That's at least the perspective of Captain Robert M. Chamberlain, who authored a curious article published last year in the prestigious Armed Forces Journal titled, “Let's Do This! Leeroy Jenkins and the American Way of Advising.”
What's the connection? In the clip, Leeroy is seen screwing his WOW teammates by charging blindly into a dragon's den hollering “All right chums, let's do this! LEEROOOY JEEENKINS!” — and then, when everybody follows him in and dies, mumbling incoherently, “At least I have chicken.”
According to Chamberlain, this maladroit and disastrous battle charge, which completely disregarded his teammates' planned course of action, is analogous to the gung-ho way the Army used to run missions in Iraq. The Armed Forces adopted a more successful battlefield strategy when it embraced more culturally sensitive counterinsurgency tactics, says Chamberlain — but now he believes the Army is once again “pulling a Leeroy” in the blunt and awkward way it's approaching the task of advising Iraqi forces that are in the process of taking over security operations around the country.
The problem, writes Chamberlain, is that typical military approaches to advising Iraqis fail spectacularly because “like Leeroy Jenkins, these solutions substitute individual initiative and ability for meaningful planning.”
The solemnly worded article evokes a fantastical image of Iraq, where U.S. soldiers arm themselves with broadswords, call each other “chum” and chase madly after imaginary dragons. No wonder our overseas wars are going to Hell in a hand basket.
In conclusion, Chamberlain proclaims it's time “to put a stop to the ad hoc, idiosyncratic, Leeroy Jenkins philosophy of advising and replace it with a coherent institutional approach that acknowledges Iraqi politics and is driven by Iraqi concerns.”
And if that doesn't work, at least they have chicken.
Here's the famous Jenkins video:
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