Wibbs wrote: » That's wrong. AFAIR the oceans make up closer to 60% of all life on earth?
dxhound2005 wrote: » You could be right. Scientists estimate that 86% of species remain undiscovered.
Wibbs wrote: » Ancient Rome at one time had a piss tax. They also placed large cauldrons on streets to collect the stuff. Wasn't just for tanning either. They used it to wash clothes(steep, then rinse with water of course) and even as a mouthwash. Yep. They thought piss would clean and whiten teeth. They also added ground up pumice to piss to make toothpaste. And they were somewhat right. The ammonia(IIRC) in piss will whiten and clean teeth and kill bacteria. One Roman dude in denouncing a fellow politician called him "piss face" because his teeth were so white. Urine was added to mouthwashes until the 1600s. Diabetes was diagnosed by doctors who would taste piss. If it was sweet you had it.
Zadkiel wrote: » Who mentioned definition, i said methods of measurement. My post was a comment on where the confusion could possibly have come from but anyway... 'Bill. Several types of bill measurements can be found in the modern literature. The most common and replicable is the bill length mea- 25 Several types of bill measurements can be found in the modern literature. The most common and replicable is the bill length mea- sured from the anterior edge of the nostril to the tip (Baldwin et al. 1931: 16). This measurement is popular because in most taxa both ends of the measurement are readily definable points where calipers can be placed. Two other methods, the lengths of total culmen and exposed culmen, attempt to measure the entire length of the bill. Total culmen measurements extend to the bill tip from the notch on the forehead where the base of the culmen meets the skull (usually just inside the feathers on the forehead; Baldwin et al. 1931: 11). Exposed culmen measurements extendto the bill tip from the point where the tips of the forehead feathers begin to hide the culmen (Baldwin et al. 1931: 11). This is not an easily defined point, and hence this is the most variable of these bill measurements (pers. observ.).' ORNITOLOGIA NEOTROPICAL 9: 23–30, 1998 © The Neotropical Ornithological Society SUGGESTIONS FOR MEASURING EXTERNAL CHARACTERS OF BIRDS Kevin Winker University of Alaska Museum, 907 Yukon Drive, Fairbanks, Alaska, 99775, U.S.A.
valoren wrote: » "The Shed at Dulwich”
dxhound2005 wrote: » Reading the Guardian link again, it is 1% of all biomass which lives in the oceans.Another surprise is that the teeming life revealed in the oceans by the recent BBC television series Blue Planet II turns out to represent just 1% of all biomass. The vast majority of life is land-based and a large chunk – an eighth – is bacteria buried deep below the surface.
Wibbs wrote: » Shoot me down in flames D, but I still don't buy it. 1) there is more water than land. 2) Even in the stygian depths there is life and lots of it, and that's the stuff we see with the Mark 1 Human Eyeball. The deep ooze at the bottom of oceans is positively teeming with bacteria and other microscopic life. Consider the white cliffs of Dover and their associated deposits in England and France. They're made up almost entirely of the microscopic skeletons of marine life deposited in an ancient and small enough sea. 3) if there are bacteria buried below the surface of the dry bits, there are almost certainly the same numbers buried below the wet bits. If not more, given water and energy is what feeds them. 4) then there's the sheer volume of water itself across all depths which contains both micro and macro organisms. Granted the lion's share of the latter and the most diverse is at shallower depths, but send down a collecting jar to say 3000 metres below sea level and a litre of seawater is going to be positively stuffed with a myriad of creatures. Could there be more biomass in the "dry" bits? I'd not have an issue with that D, but the claim that the entirety of the "wet" bits only has one percent of Earth's biomass? No way. That has got to be a typo, or some scientists were at the distillation kit in the lab and cooked up a doozie of a beverage.
New Home wrote: » The article quotes this as its source, but I'm too tired to try and concentrate long enough to make sense of it.
So how much plastic is there in the ocean, and how much will there be in 2050? We don't know, but probably a lot. How many fish? We don't really know but certainly a lot. And when will one overtake the other? We definitely do not know.
BaZmO* wrote: » On the subject of biomass, the amount of ants on earth, by weight, is greater than the amount of humans by weight.
New Home wrote: » Half inspired by/half stolen from another thread...In the mid-1800s, paper was made using rags, mostly cotton and linen. However, soon the raw material began to become scarce, so a new source was found: Egyptian mummies (of which, apparently, there was an abundance- by 1856, the New York Tribune was able to report that about two and a quarter million pounds of rags had been imported from Egypt.)! Their bandages were unravelled, torn into tiny pieces and pulped, just like rags used to be. It was a very cheap raw material, and duty-free, too, so, since it wasn't compulsory to declare its provenance, often the cargos were just recorded as "rags".
gozunda wrote: » On the subject of Ants, in 2002 researchers announced that they had found Earth's biggest "super organism" in Europe, made up of a network of communicating worker ants spanning more than 3,700 miles. The ants are Argentine ants of the species, Linepithema humile, and are found in millions of nests in a supercolony stretching from northern Italy, through the south of France to the Atlantic coast of Spain, in what is thought to be the largest co-operative unit of individual organisms ever discovered.
the purple tin wrote: » Red wine has no taste. The flavour you get while drinking it is actually coming from the smell. The next time you have a head cold drink some and it will taste like water.
RIGOLO wrote: » NOT TO REOPEN THE WHOLE WHETHER RED WINE HAS A TASTE DEBATE .. but on the topic of wine, we can all agree that recent wines from certain regions do have gamma radiation fallout from both Chernobyl and post 1945. And this fallout has been used to authenticate the age of expensive wines. So next time your having your favourite tipple you can impress your friends by saying, yes I can really taste the post 1945 , Cesium - 137 coming thru in the bouquet..https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/06/03/318241738/how-atomic-particles-became-the-smoking-gun-in-wine-fraud-mystery
CruelCoin wrote: » The most searched for term on the Bing search engine has been "Google" for 28 months running. RIP Bing
New Home wrote: as its source, but I'm too tired to try and concentrate long enough to make sense of it.
CruelCoin wrote: You could stop a hurricane like "irma" by shooting at it.