Chapter 70.75: Oh, the Deep Places You Will Go

I was fascinated by an article in Tuesday's Science Times about the eating habits of baleen whales. Apparently, a group of marine biologists were studying several baleen whales and trying to record the latest hit Fin Whale Song. But the whales they found weren't singing, they were hungry.

Their study may have been considered wasted time except another biologist recognized that this was the first analyzable data of these whales feeding. It turns out that most of the suppositions about how these giants feed were all wrong. What they do is launch themselves hundreds of feet down into schools of krill -- tiny shrimplike creatures that are the favorite meal of fin whales -- but as they approach, they open their large mouth, which acts like a parachute to slow the whale down. This massive creature can stop on a dime -- well, it takes three seconds, which is mighty fast when you're talking about an 80-ton finback; your train doesn't do that. This is pretty interesting stuff to a whale geek like me.

I might have let it go at that, but then I received an email from one of my brothers noting the excellent crossword puzzle word that the article included: "rorqual," which is a group of baleen whales that includes the fin whale, the Minke whale, the humpback, and the blue whale. I went to Wikipedia to learn a little more about rorquals and discovered that there's another type of whale in there that I'd never heard of. It's called Balaenoptera omurai and it was only discovered four years ago in waters outside Japan. Whether it's a distinct species has yet to be determined, but it resembles a fin whale, only smaller. According to the wikipedia entry, it's likely to be called Omura's Whale, after the Japanese cetologist who discovered it.

To me, this little experience is a perfect example of how newspapers, simple curiosity, and the Internet blend to educate the world. Pretty deep stuff.

Chapter 62.4: Conservative Truth?

Ok, a quick note -- but I'll need to read on. I can't believe what I've just read in the Los Angeles Times: a history teacher got angry because a student used the term BCE (before common era) rather than BC (before Christ), which the student got it off of Wikipedia?! And as a result of this anger, the teacher decided that conservatives needed to create a wiki-based encyclopedia that conveys the conservatives' perspective.

That's ridiculous! The point of an encyclopedia is to convey information in as objective a manner as possible. It should inherently be neither conservative nor liberal, Democrat nor Republican, western nor eastern. I recognize that objective truth is a matter of debate, but that's part of the point too. If this teacher wants to dispute BCE, wonderful! Go for it. But it's not as though it was created by Wikipedia. The term has been around for many years. Personally, I think it's an unnecessary attempt at political correctness: the timeline starts at the same point, so the Christian bias remains intact. But I think Muslims and Buddhists recognize the historical significance of Jesus, regardless of whether they agree with the tenets of Christianity. Jews have a different calendar than Christians; these things coexist without any significant problems, right?

If the teacher wants to complain about the potential for anonymous changing of Wikipedia entries, fine. That's actually being addressed in something called Citizendium. I'd rather complain about why a teacher seems to have a problem with a student venturing beyond the teacher's information in order to learn. The teacher should be helping to mold this student's mind, helping the student to think for himself and assess the veracity of sources of information. Just because a book is published, for example, doesn't mean it's accurate. Interpretations cannot be assumed to be fact. As far as I can tell, BCE is a term of art -- and not a particularly elegant one. But teaching students to only use one perspective is simply ugly.