Posts by Ronan Tumelty

US woman spends two years on boyfriend's toilet

Her boyfirend...

What I don't get is why, if she spent two years on the toilet, he didn't 'dump' her?

Sod robots, send people into space: report

SEWG

I'm not too enthused by the idea of a project suggested by a group that could be confused with the word "sewage" during charades.

UK plans surveillance for Earth-menacing asteroid

I don't wanna close my eyes...

Am I the only one hearing Steve Tyler's dulcet tones here?

Dominos trns 2 txt

Crap and over-priced...

...they may be, but when a friend of yours works there and regularly puts credit on you account, you find that such things don't matter so much.

Yangtze river dolphin is an ex-cetacean

@Clovis

"Those of you who thought this dolphin was worth saving should be ashamed of yourself for letting it become extinct. You have more than enough money to have preserved it, but chose not to."

That's a bit of a stupid compliment. Conservation requires much more than just money. It requires time, organisation, a suitable alternate habitat in which the dolphin would have thrived with minimal detriment to the rest of the ecosystem (and zoos can't help an animal thrive anywhere near as much as it would in a natural habitat), and countless other factors. It also requires highly specialised knowledge.

I know that I don't have or have access to most of those things. Very few people do. A concerted effort is the only way that a conservation attempt could be achieved. I believe that the recent search was a precursor for such an effort; unfortunately, it came a bit too late.

It's all very well to say "you should have done something about it", but if it were that easy, we wouldn't have to worry about situations like this.

A disgrace...

Cuddly equivalent? Dolphins are one of the most intelligent species on our planet, and judging by the first two comments, I wouldn't be surprised if they outstrip quite a few humans.

And "adapt or die" is a bit stretched to the limit when unregulated fishing and the pollution of about 600 million people are factored into the equation. I'd like to see humans put up against those odds... At the rate we're going it doesn't look like we'll take all that long.

Calling this a failure of evolution is just copping out. It's humanity's fault that the species died, and if we'd taken measures a few years ago, when we knew there were only a dozen left, we might have been able to preserve the species.

Quite aside from the distaste I feel for yet another creature being wiped out by our lack of caring, it's a huge loss for the scientific world. The Yangtze River dolphin was an example of a creature that had been cut off from the rest of its kind (ie. cephalopods) for millions of years, and as such it was a living specimen of how evolution works in closed environments as opposed to open ones.