Comment by srean | Hacker News Reader

Comment by srean | Hacker News Reader

Moby dick's kin the sperm whales are incredibly interesting. One of their remarkable ability is to dive deep, fast and long.

Among all free diving warm blooded animals they go the deepest. They dive to depths 25 times deeper than their other equally famous and endangered cousin the blue whales. The blue whale is the largest known animal to have ever inhabited the earth.

To give an idea of how deep they dive, here is a picture http://i.imgur.com/ESp2j.jpg It needs to be magnified for perspective and for the little surprise at the bottom.

It is interesting how they manage to hold their breath for so long and yet manage to survive the bends (decompression sickness).

The whales are seriously challenging our assumptions about animal intelligence, empathy, society, culture and language. For a long time we believed that the primates were at the top. Search Ted talks and youtube for dolphin intelligence, dont miss the Attenborough ones. For lack of a better word they are just amazing.

Dolphins are for example known to build difficult to make toys (air bubble vortex rings) just to entertain themselves.

They have to discover how to make it. Sometimes they can be quite possessive, they would break the toy if someone not so knowledgeable wants to play with it. Once a dolphin figures it out how to make one, his/her peers eventually figure it out too. So it kind of spreads within a group like fashion. This behavior has been observed both in captivity and in the wild.

Dolphins in captivity try to imitate us and seem to have no trouble mapping our body parts to theirs. A story goes that a scientist observing an young dolphin from an underwater portal had blown a cloud of cigarette smoke at it. The dolphin promptly went to the mother and did the same to the scientist with milk ! It is now strongly believed that they call each other by name. They try to imitate human speech which takes enormous effort on their part because unlike for example parrots their vocal tract is not conducive for this at all. People believe this to be an indication of their strong desire to communicate with us.

And they originated from ungulates: hoofed warm blooded animals. It came as a surprise to me that that there were hoofed carnivorous animals.

It is interesting how they manage to hold their breath for so long

Large blood capacity for storing oxygen, I think. Whale beef is very red.

and yet manage to survive the bends (decompression sickness)

Well they don't breathe down there as human divers do. The excess nitrogen pressed into the blood is not more than what the lungs can take out again when rising.

> Whale beef

I'm sure you meant "meat"

> is very red.

Indeed, it's almost black.

Why not "beef"? They're called cows, bulls and calfs after all.

Beef is the culinary name of bovine meat[0]. Calling whale meat beef is roughly equivalent to calling cow meat "pork".

[0] and afaik culinary names come from the corresponding animal's name in french: beef comes from boeuf (~ox, a castrated bos taurus male), pork from porc, veal is veau, mutton is mouton and venison is venaison (replaced by "gibier" in modern french).

Calling whale meat beef is roughly equivalent to calling cow meat "pork"

Yes. But I didn't. I called whale meat whale beef. That would be more like calling cow meat cow pork.

Why is this a discussion?

People found it an interesting topic and started discussing it.

We're a pedantic bunch. I've long noted the tendency of people to eviscerate a casual comment in an online conversation just because it does not extend to encyclopedic thoroughness. Elsewhere I was just upbraided for failing to note that Switzerland was arguably(!) not independent for 0.6% of its 800 year history.

You're right, this conversation is useless. Let's get back to pragmatically discussing how old whales are.

Technically correct, the best kind of correct.

OK. But does whale meat have a culinary term? Do the Japanese, Norwegians or Icelanders have a term for it, that is not a literal 'whale meat'?

While on the topic- why does english have a term for most domestic meats except for 'lamb'. Lamb is lamb, while most other non-game meats have a culinary term.

"Chicken" is the same.

Mutton is an english language term for some to most lamb meats, depending on your area.

The Faroe Islanders have it: tvøst (pronounced like tvirst). Norwegians and Danes don't.

The word 'beef' entered the English language following the Norman invasion in 1066. It's a word with Latin roots, but came to English via French.

Consider the dichotomy between sheep & mutton, or pig & pork. In all instances, the word referring to the animal has "old English", or Anglo Saxon roots. Likewise, the word referring to the meat is Latin via French.

This linguistic gap may have its roots in social divisions. In the years following the Norman invasion, the upper class spoke French. They also consumed most of the meat.

The conquered, who by and large did a lot of the agricultural work & raised the livestock, spoke Anglo Saxon ("old English").

Regardless of etymology, though, beef doesn't refer to generic 'meat'.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/b%C5%93uf boeuf is french for beef

I think we're in agreement.

In French, however, boeuf can also refer to the animal.

As it can in English ("one beef, two beeves").

Sounds anachronistic. I can't imagine going to a farm and inquiring about their "herd of beeves".

Well, it hasn't been in common use for, what, 400 years? But it's a perfectly cromulent usage.

"Beeves" is a little archaic, and if you were to poll most ranchers and traders today, they'd probably use "beefs." But it's still acceptable, and it hasn't completely fallen out of usage. (Nor has referring to a cow as a "beef" fallen out of usage, especially in the livestock trade. It's convenient to refer to a cow bred for consumption as a "beef," to differentiate it from a cow bred for dairy.)

"Beef" in the second case is probably short for 'beef cow,' just like 'dairy' is going to be short for 'dairy cow,' not some weird anachronistic usage (unless the Normans once called cows 'dairies.')

Strangely enough, there's actually an anachronistic usage at the heart of it all. The word "beef" came, originally, from the Norman-French "beuf" (precursor of the modern French "boeuf"), from the Latin "bov," which referred to the animal, not the animal's meat.

"Beef" started switching meaning from the animal to the meat because the meat was something only upper-class, Norman-descended Englishmen could afford. They had less experience with cows in the field, and more experience with cows as slices of meat on a plate. So the snootier, upper-crust "beef" came to be used in the context of food, while the Old English, working-class "cow" was still used by the actual farmers in the fields, who were dealing primarily with the animals. Merchants and middlemen, who dealt primarily in the meat but also in the livestock, adopted the more aspirational "beef" to refer to both. This usage was common until as recently as about 100 years ago. There are probably few people around today who'd call a cow "a beef," though there are still people who'd refer to a herd of cows (or any quantity on a market) as a "beef herd," or a "herd of beef."

I'm not going to go out on a limb and claim that "beef" is common, modern usage when referring to the animal. (And "beeves" is now so uncommon as to sound funny to the modern ear.) But the usage is not entirely extinct, and in instances when differentiating beef from dairy, it's moderately useful.

More likely they would say "head", as in "two head of cattle". In all my childhood days on the farm, I don't think I ever heard the word "beefs", much less "beeves". Usage of the latter would likely get you a look as if you had come from back east.

Yeah, I think the rancher would direct you to the nearest apiary, perhaps gently suggesting that the proper collective noun is "swarm of bees"

It's funny, In Spanish we don't have an equivalent of "beef", we use the word for meat "carne", but we have the anglicism "bife" (from beef) mostly used in South America, or "bistec" (from beefsteak) mostly used in Central and North America.

I thought the word "vaca" meant beef?

It has a more specific connotation of cow and can mean the edible flesh derived from a cow.

Yeah, almost all words for meat in English come from the word for the same animal in French.

  * Beef from Boeuf
  * Mutton from Mouton
  * Pork from porc
  * etc...

> Yeah, almost all words for meat in English come from the word for the same animal in French.

That doesn't apply to doner kebabs.

Worth noting is the constant weight [1] free-diving record is currently 128m (~420 feet)[2] - the human body is also capable of incredible things.

[1] The athlete has to dive to the depth following (but not using) a guide line. The ‘Constant Weight’ refers to the fact that the athlete is not allowed to drop any diving weights during the dive.

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-diving#Depth_disciplines

If you like cetaceans, I strongly recommend Inside Nature's Giants s1e2 (Fin Whale) and s3special2 (Sperm Whale).

s3special (Giant Squid) is also an interestingly related topic. And so are pretty much all other episodes.)

> yet manage to survive the bends (decompression sickness).

But still get it, I remember a report of sperm whale bones being full of holes from nitrogen bubbles.

xkcd Lakes and Oceans: https://xkcd.com/1040/

That Kola borerole is a really interresting thing...

Russians are awesome :D

In case you didn't see the recent XKCD: http://xkcd.com/1330/

Another data point to imagine the depth: USS Thresher imploded at a depth of 1,300–2,000 ft. The implosion took 0.1 seconds. That was a ship of ~3500 short tons of mass.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Thresher_%28SSN-593%29

The Thresher eventually sank to 8400 feet.

According to this article:

http://www.navytimes.com/article/20130404/NEWS/304040021/50-...

the Thresher likely imploded after sinking to 2400 feet, "the water-ram produced by the initial breaching of the Thresher's pressure hull at 2,400 feet entered the pressure hull with a velocity of about 2,600 mph"

129 crew died, it was the worst submarine disaster in history (also the first nuclear submarine to have sunk).

the '10% only' makes me wonder if Elon Musk has ever been interested into deep sea instead of mars-deep space. Also, Cameron is a monster : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepsea_Challenger#Challenger_... .

> If the ballast weight release system fails, stranding the craft on the seafloor, a backup galvanic release is designed to corrode in salt water in a set period of time, allowing the sub to automatically surface.

Not much to say about this other than that's particularly elegant.

Beside very reassuring, yes it is. Secure + good sense.

ok I'll bite - what is the writing at the bottom of the picture?

I’m guessing it’s some variant of “Ia ia ia, Cthulhu f’tagn!”

It's a reference to H.P. Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu".

Took me time to understand it wasn't unicode error but cthulhu runes. Well done.

At first I thought the lurker in the shadows was a smudge on my monitor.

> People believe this to be an indication of their strong desire to communicate with us.

I'd desperately try to reason with my captors too!

As regards origination from ungulates: More recent data suggests origination from artiodactyls.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_cetaceans#Earliest...

>The blue whale is the largest known animal to have ever inhabited the earth.

Arguably the heaviest, most likely not the largest.

> most likely not the largest

What is/was, then?

Possibly the Bruhathkayosaurus

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruhathkayosaurus

First sentence of article:

Bruhathkayosaurus (/bruːˌhæθkeɪ.ɵˈsɔrəs/; meaning "huge bodied lizard") might have been the largest dinosaur that ever lived. The accuracy of this claim, however, has been mired in controversy and debate. All the estimates are based on Yadagiri and Ayyasami's 1989 paper, which announced the find.[1]

Yup, that's why I used the word possibly. Part of the problem is the vagueness of the term largest. Heaviest? Longest? Most mass?

I think the important distinction is not the size term but the "confidence of existence" term: "Largest/heaviest/etc known animal..."

Which is the largest then? Honest question, everything I've ever read says that it's the blue whale, and a quick check on Wikipedia still confirms this. There are some fossil fragments that suggest that some sauropods got bigger than this, but no complete fossils have been found that beat the biggest blue whales.

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