Fish Work as Anti-terror Agents 227
sdriver writes "San Francisco's bluegills went to work about a month ago, guarding the drinking water of more than 1 million people from substances such as cyanide, diesel fuel, mercury and pesticides. "There's no known manmade sensor that can do the same job as the bluegill." The New York City Department of Environmental Protection reported at least one instance in which the system caught a toxin before it made it into the water supply."
I don't feel safe! (Score:4, Funny)
This is hardly guarding (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This is hardly guarding (Score:5, Funny)
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Its actually way less dumb than that metaphor. I agree with your first sentence, but the second is a perfect example of quitting while you're ahead.
Re:This is hardly guarding (Score:4, Funny)
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In Korea, only old people use stingrays as guards.
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In Soviet Russia, fish use you to guard for toxins.
Surely you mean "Pesterers"? (Score:2)
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It's an insult to bimbos.
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I think you'll find Paris is the dog's pet, not the other way around.
The question is (Score:4, Funny)
*ducks and runs*
Could you speak up please? (Score:5, Funny)
I'm hard of herring.
Re:Could you speak up please? (Score:5, Funny)
You appear to be a dab [first-nature.com] hand at these fish jokes, and I don't want to carp [wikipedia.org] and knock you off your perch [anglerstimes.co.uk], but maybe you didn't do it on porpoise [theporpoisepage.com]?
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Re:Could you speak up please? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:The question is (Score:5, Funny)
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Fishing? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Fishing? (Score:5, Funny)
Yes. You should get your fish from a market. Preferably fish imported from Japan. If you are self-sufficient in some respect, you are destroying the pillars of mutual dependence on which current capitalism and world economy are built.
Besides, the fish are not privately owned. You are benefiting from public property. Which means that:
When you're fishing, you're catching communism !
Re:Fishing? (Score:5, Funny)
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I have heard that hardcore fishermen like to assault fish in schools.
much worse than I feared (Score:3, Funny)
good idea! (Score:4, Funny)
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According to the DHS system of accounting for targets, that means you have the world's largest fair along side the world's largest petting zoo?
Offtopic, name (Score:2)
for those who don't speak dutch [lookwayup.com]
Re:good idea! (Score:5, Funny)
Only mercury? (Score:2)
It's way worse than that. I just met GWB on the White House lawn. He said the CIA is reporting unusually many sightings of fishy A'rab looking fellas in San Francisco sporting goods stores buying scuba gear. The CIA, FBI and the NSA are now convinced that task-force 'Bluegill' has been infiltrated and that the terrorists infiltrators plan to spike the San F
007 (Score:2)
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nerdy enough? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:nerdy enough? (Score:5, Funny)
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Not likely method (Score:5, Insightful)
Plutonium would work much better.
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On the subjec
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Keep the water temperature in the test tank around 37 degrees Celsius ?
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very difficult to make that effective (Score:5, Informative)
But the descriptions you hear all the time about how one gram can kill a bazillion people assumes that each person gets exactly a lethal dose and no more.
In reality, this is difficult to do. Plutonium, for example, is not soluble in water and is very heavy. So distributing it through the water supply would be very difficult.
If you drop a bit in the water supply, it'll just sink to the bottom in the first eddy it reaches and sit there, killing only things that come near it instead of the intended targets. It might kill nothing except a few rats.
http://www.llnl.gov/csts/publications/sutcliffe/ [llnl.gov]
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Plutonium, for example, is not soluble in water and is very heavy...
Re:very difficult to make that effective (Score:4, Funny)
I mean, what sort of an idiot needs to even ask this question - obviously the plutonium weighs more.
Re:very difficult to make that effective (Score:5, Funny)
Or turning them and four baby turtles into ninjas, heros in a half-shell so to speak, which grow up to be a crime-fighting team of pizza-loving mutants.
OH MY GAWD! (Score:5, Funny)
E-Mail, eh? (Score:5, Funny)
To: Bob Thompson <bthompson@dopw.sf.ca.us>
Subject: Our Contract
Dear Bob,
We don't want to seem ungrateful and we appreciate all you've done. However, it has just come to our attention, and our solicitor's attention, that our job is to test the water for poison. In light of this we'd like to renegotiate. We're looking forward to hearing back from you ASAP concerning this issue.
Sincerely,
Tim, Ed, and Bill
The Bluegills
DHS screws up again (Score:2)
Animals as agents of terror. (Score:4, Informative)
At the other end of the issue, we've used animals as agents of destruction in some pretty weird ways. Probably everybody here has heard of the U.S. Navy's experiments using dolphins or porpoises as a delivery system for below-the-water-line bombs targeting ships. The weirdest I've ever heard of was the Army's Bat Bomb project during WWII:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_bomb [wikipedia.org]
Does anyone here watch the History Channel (North America)? Didn't they run a documentary on this project a couple of years ago?
* * * * *
My goal is to someday be the person my dog thinks I am.
--Unknown
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(Or so I recall from history class)
It was on again last week (Score:2)
I saw the episode that you're talking about last week. The idea seemed crazy at first, but after some research they were able to craft incredibly effective incindiary devices that were small and light enough for the bats to carry. They were so effective that when several experimental bats escaped, they promptly flew towards some of the buildings at the test facility (in Arizona or New Mexico, I belive) and wound up burning most of it down.
The idea was to outfit the bats with t
Well, Bushie predicted this one (Score:4, Funny)
-George W. Bush, Saginaw, Mich., Sept. 29, 2000
Give credit where credit's due.
Geeks at work as counterterrorists, too (Score:5, Funny)
SAN FRANCISCO, California (AP) -- A type of person so common that practically every American who ever attended grade school has probably harassed one is being enlisted in the fight against terrorism.
San Francisco, New York, Washington and other big cities are using computer geeks -- also known as computer nerds or slashdotters -- as a sort of canary in a coal mine to safeguard the internet.
Small numbers of the geeks are kept in cubicles supplied with Mountain Dew and a broadband internet connection from local internet service providers (ISPs), and sensors in each cubicle work around the clock to register changes in the breathing, heartbeat and browsing patterns of the geeks that occur in the presence of internet attacks.
"Nature's given us pretty much the most powerful and reliable early warning center out there," said Bill Lawler, co-founder of Intelligent Automation Corporation, a Southern California company that makes and sells the geek monitoring system. "There's no known manmade sensor that can do the same job as the computer nerd."
Since September 11, the government has taken very seriously the threat of attacks on the U.S. internet. Federal law requires nearly all internet service providers to assess their vulnerability to terrorism.
Big cities employ a range of safeguards against chemical and biological agents, constantly monitoring, testing and treating the water. But protection systems for electronic networks can trace only the hacks they are programmed to detect, Lawler said.
Computer geeks -- a hardy species about the size of a normal human being, but thinner and paler -- are considered more versatile. They are highly attuned to internet integrity, and when exposed to even brief internet outages, they experience the geek version of coughing, compulsively reloading browser windows and pinging gateways to determine the source of the congestion.
The computerized system in use in San Francisco and elsewhere is designed to detect even slight changes in the geek's vital signs and send an e-mail alert when something is wrong.
Re:Geeks at work as counterterrorists, too (Score:4, Funny)
Idiotic government contractors.
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Re:Geeks at work as counterterrorists, too (Score:4, Funny)
PETA & SPCA (Score:3, Funny)
Probably (Score:2)
Re:PETA & SPCA (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:PETA & SPCA (Score:2)
The idea's not exactly new. (Score:5, Informative)
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The city of Zurich [zuerich.com]. uses trouts to check for problems with the processed water for (literally) decades. A few hours before the processed water hits the distribution system and the pipes it is piped through a fish tank with said trout. The fish tank is under constant stream and the trout swims against the stream.
If something , er! fishy occurs the dead or knocked out trout passes a sensor and raises alarm.
This of course is not the only me
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Yeah, when they tested the water using birds the only conclusion was 'That must be REALLY poisoned water!'
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You must be really new here!
Still Don't Trust The Fish (Score:5, Funny)
And there isn't a change in hell that I would drink any of the water in those lakes. Those fish are survivors, and although I am not a scientist, I could only conclude that the fish in the lakes nearby had to have gone through some type of resistant mutation... That really doesn't help my confidence in the safety of the water.
I say use goldfish. Those little bastards take one day of me forgetting to feed them to go belly up.
"Fishkill" test (Score:5, Informative)
I wonder ... (Score:2)
Or, for that matter, viagra. [angelfire.com]
(If anyone feels like responding "your can't trip on viagra" - that depends on how big the pill is, and whether you're looking where you're walking.)
Not the first (Score:5, Interesting)
There was a video camera trained on the tank and the operators in the control room could cut off the canal if they noticed the fish were dead.
There was a guy whose job it was to feed the fish and run the dechlorination system that removed the chlorine from the water going into the tank, since that's also toxic to fish.
One weekend , he forgot to top up the sodium thiosulphate solution that was used for this purpose, and all the fish died from chlorine poisoning some time on Sunday night when it ran out.
That was bad enough, but it was Monday morning before the operators noticed.
They don't use that system anymore. The canal has been filled in and there is a pipeline and a fully filtered treatment plant.
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I took an environmental law class once, and the guy who taught it used to work county health or something.
In California, there are a few ways of determining if somethning is toxic, and one of the ways is to put the suspected agent into a fish tank with an "indicator species" of fish and wait a few days to see if the fish live or die. If the fish die, then the suspected agent is thus toxic.
Well, one time he was infront of a judge explaining the test, and presenting th
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bluegills? (Score:3, Funny)
Animals against terror? (Score:3, Funny)
At least I can count on moles to uphold le resistance.
My Dear American Friends (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Support Our Fish! (Score:2)
If you were American, you would be accused of being unpatriotic for suggesting such a thing.
Wonderful news (Score:2)
so polluters are terrorists now? (Score:3, Insightful)
ISTM that each time "terrorism" is included as a reason to improve public safety, it's just assisting the terrorist agenda by keeping them inthe news and instilling fear where it didn't previously exist.
Better to celebrate the improvements that progress brings, rather than trying to keep everyone cowering in fear with cheap, sensationalist news copy.
Clams deserve credit too (Score:4, Funny)
Has to be said (Score:2)
- because, they, um, have, er, clammed up?
Fitted with Laser on Head? (Score:2, Funny)
By the way this news is too old. I read it in print media couple of daze ago.
Just a new application (Score:3, Informative)
Terrorism? Factories and stupid neighbours first (Score:2)
Not new (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Sounds like a job for the FCPD (Score:2)
The fish can't do everything though ... (Score:2, Insightful)
<i>... hey are no use against other sorts of attacks -- say, the bombing of a water main, or an attack by computer hackers
Really, and what about a mass spectrometer? (Score:2)
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Water Test Results 21-09-2006 13:01 (Score:2, Funny)
Bluegill B: HEARTBEAT lub but still waiting for the dub, BREATHING laboured due to lungs hanging out of mouth, SWIMMING PATTERN thrashing about madly next to the castle
Bluegill C: HEARTBEAT n/a, BREATHING n/a, SWIMMING PATTERN n/a
Please note: Bluegill C exploded
Conclusion: Possible contamination of drinking supply? Will ask for second opinion when Shift Manager returns from holiday
Aha! (Score:2)
Has been done for decades ... (Score:2)
The modern equivilant of a soup taster! (Score:2)
I also like the article's forced effort to explain how the fix cannot stop the bombing of a water main or the release of germs which target humans. Clearly, the system is insufficient due to those limitations and must be replaced with a hundred million dollar project. LOL.
It's the canary in the coal mine.
Hazmat team joke: "How do you know if a scene is IDLH? (Immediately Dangerous to Live or Healt
Bluefish on a plane? (Score:4, Funny)
Absurd, exaggerated claims (Score:3, Informative)
This claim is absurd on its face. Who told him that? The guy who sold him the fish? He's obviously not an analytical chemist. Things like high-resolution mass spectrometry can detect cyanide, diesel fuel, mercury and pesticides at parts-per-trillion levels, far lower than anything that could ever possibly have any sort of detectible biological effect on a fish. There is no way that a fish is going to be effected by a nanogram/liter concentration of mercury, but a good mass spec would be able to see it.
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OMFG! My daughters are drinking fish sex water? Won't someone please think of the children!
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It's worse than that... we've got wolves guarding this henhouse...
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The quote is on the video at