h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

No Sal, we're not powerless.
Remember all those little eccentricities they mocked you for, that have now become fashionable? (Recycling, using less salt, growing native plants for the wildlife, eating wholemeal bread, yoga, organic gardening/eating, a belief that cybernetics could work. . .?)
How many of us are out there?
Many more of my daughter's generation (18-30) take such things for granted and are forging further ahead. And they are more vocal than we were.
Come to that, my little ones are actually taught a certain amount of environmentalism at school (not enuf but it's a start ).

What a cheering person you are! I need to have the good things pointed out to me from time to time. It's a bit of personality defect of mine that I'm always very quick to spot the negative and slow to notice the positive. Thanks for that the person who is Trillion no more!

Sal

That's what we Earth Mothers are for.

You know, I always wanted to grow up to be Granny Weatherwax, but somewhere along the line I took a wrong turning and ended up more like Nanny Ogg

Goodness gracious the entity who is evolving into some other entity before my very eye's - how shall I address thee oh protean one?

I fear you're going to give yourself a headache! But don't worry about me - it's too late for me. I'm already confused beyond saving. Save yourself. Find a name that fits and doesn't itch.

Actually I've been Madam Kat for most of my lives

Almost ¾ to be precise (I knew I'd eventually find a way to use that )

Have you passed your broomstick test then and been promoted to the driving seat?

Yep

G'night

G'day

The metamorphosis of Madam Kat continues. How about the Cheshire Cat? Now there was a cat who knew how to confuse!

I was trying to find a 3/4 like yours in post 25. Is there an easy way to do it without messing about with the alt key or having to remember the code?

Congratulations on passing your test, by the way

Start menu/Programs/Accessories/System Tools/Character Map.
Use your Edit menu to copy and paste

Hey Sal,
BBC2 8pm

Yep, got it covered Kat. Well spotted!

Quick Kat, tell me something optimistic about that documentary. I just couldn't see the good thing. Could you? I'm just grateful I'm a vegetarian. Suppose we at least know that the Food Standards Agency is a waste of tax payers money and we shouldn't trust them.

Sal, I couldn't bear to miss Monarch of the Glen (I'd have been outvoted anyway 3:1 )
Please tell me about the documentary.

It seems that salmon are being intensively farmed on the west coast of Scotland, in the fiords of Norway and the coasts of Canada. The farmed salmon are harbouring sea lice, which kill them and this causes a problem for the fish farmers who are trying to combat the problem by adding stuff to the feed. More worryingly, the concentrations of farmed salmon at the mouths of salmon rivers is causing a problem for wild salmon who have to swim the gauntlet of high concentrations of sea lice. This is killing them and it looks as though extinction of wild salmon is a real possibility in a fairly short time.

The ocean floor beneath the fish farms is being badly unbalance by the concentration of salmon poo and uneaten fish pellets.

Farmed salmon are being engineered in every way possible to make them grow quickly to saleable size. They are a very unhealthy, mutated looking lot. They showed samples from one fish farm with a hump back mutation which is, apparently very common in all fish farms, and 70% of the salmon on this particular farm have the deformity. The hump deformity is caused by heating the eggs to get them to hatch more quickly. Lots of them are blinded by cataracts. The conditions they're kept in look very cruel.

Loads of them escape (30,000 in one escape alone, I think they said) into the wild. In some places, few wild salmon are caught any more. The fish that are caught are often escapees from salmon farms. They can be distinguished from the wild ones easily because they're a lot bigger and look unhealthy and are very often deformed in some way. Because wild salmon return to the river of their birth, the salmon of each river are genetically different from each other. The few that are surviving the lice to return to their river to breed, are breeding with the escapees and their genetic diversity is being lost. Some salmon are being genetically engineered and they're trying to make them sterile so escapees won't be able to breed with wild salmon. This is to protect their investment/invention (like the sterile engineered seeds sold farmers to make them buy new seeds each year).

One third of the fish that are stripped from the sea (which is also running out of fish, by the way) are rendered down to feed to fish-farm fish and live stock. They said it takes many kg (they said a figure but I can't remember it) of fish pellets fed to salmon to make 1 kg of salmon, so it's not very efficient - and wouldn't be even if there were plenty of fish left in the sea. Also, the fish in the sea concentrate PCBs and all sorts of other toxins in their bodies which the farmed salmon then concentrate in their bodies, making them considerably less healthy to eat than the industry would have you believe. The Food Standards Agency representative wriggled like a worm on a hook when questioned by Julian Petifer and finally cut the interview short rather than answer his questions. Remember that agency is there to protect the public - but guess who they're really protecting (as usual). It seems that pregnant women, feeding mothers and young children would be better off steering clear of farmed fish. Very low levels of these toxins are sufficient stunt growth and retard children.

It was an hour long programme so as long as that explanation is, I've left a lot out.

I don't know how long it'll take to post this. It's hard to get through this evening and everything's taking ages. Ah well, here goes.

Sal

Apologies for butting in to your conversation, but you may wish to go here http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/earth/salmon for a brief precis of the issues covered, useful links and a message board for discussing the program.

That's terrible Sal. But it's just about what I expected.
Greed and stupidity strike again

Thank you for taking the not inconsiderable time to relate it to me.

Of course you're not butting in. You're welcome here Metal Chicken.

Thanks for the link. I had intended to go and have a look. There was less information at the site than I expected. I was a bit surprised to see The Food Standards Agency recommendations there, despite their shifty behaviour in the interview and refusing to finish the interview. My surprise wore off though.

Did you watch the programme? Were you surprised at their unwillingness even to say "it would be best not to eat much more than the recommended weekly portion"?

Sal

You're welcome Kat. The BBC link that Metal Chicken has posted is worth a visit, especially if you eat salmon. There are sections about wild salmon, organic salmon farms and the ordinary salmon farms. There's a brief explanation of the PCB's and dioxins that build up in the fish. The Food Standards Agency recommendations can be accessed from there, but I wouldn't trust them after seeing that interview.

Sal

Thanks, Both of you.
I don't eat salmon, but I'm always interested. . .will pop over

I was planning to write an entry on Dyslexia, because I want the other 90% of the world's population to understand, but when I logged on today I found this:

http://www.h2g2.com/A489684

Please, please, please, please, please go and read it