12 ms·

Falklands minefields: de facto nature reserves for penguins

85 points by gpvos 10y ago

ptaipale 10y ago
Click-bait headline from BBC. TL;DR: Penguins are not heavy enough to set off landmines left by Argentinians in Falklands War. Plenty are left, now the British government has to clear them due to Ottawa convention, and this will disrupt penguins and the ecosystem.
- gpvos 10y ago
  Yes, the title is unfortunate. The conflict between the Ottawa convention and the environment is the interesting bit.
  - saalweachter 10y ago
    Eh, I don't know that I would really blame the Ottawa convention. I think it's more sad-larious that we can't just not despoil an area unless it's protected by landmines.
  - duncan_bayne 10y ago
    It's only a conflict until you base your value judgements on human flourishing. Then it becomes a relatively easy question - does humanity benefit from having the land mines removed? Pretty sure that anyone living in or around minefields has the answer to that one.
    - ptaipale 10y ago
      Someone living around minefields answers in the BBC story: "Falkland Islanders weren't enthused by the idea, to put it bluntly," says Barry Elsby, a member of the Falklands Legislative Assembly. "We would rather have left the minefields as they were. They are all clearly marked, clearly fenced. No civilian has ever been injured. We said to the British government, 'Don't spend the money here, go to some other country where they have a much greater need to free up farming land.'" "Unfortunately," Elsby adds, "the British government have signed up to the Ottawa convention, which puts a duty on them to do this." It looks a somewhat similar nature reserve to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, which also acts as a superb nature reserve (also a BBC story): http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160421-the-chernobyl-exclusion-zone-is-arguably-a-nature-reserve http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160421-the-chernobyl-exclus...
      - duncan_bayne 10y ago
        Wow. I'm genuinely surprised to find _anyone_ okay with living near minefields. My opinions are probably coloured by growing up with Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees as childhood friends. Their families had strong, and uniformly negative, opinions about landmines. Sounds like the circumstances were very different.
        ptaipale 10y ago
        Obviously. The main difference in circumstances is indiscriminate use near farming lands and dwellings. Landmines can be used properly or improperly. If you lay them properly, map them, and clear them when not needed, they're not any more risky than the typical remains of war (unexploded bombs and shells); less so in fact (considering Molotov breadbaskets scattered by artillery or air). The Ottawa convention will be observed by those parties who anyway would have used mines responsibly (and thereby would have had a cheap, domestic defensive weapon, instead of paying big bucks to high-tech munition makers). And those parties who we can expect to behave irresponsibly didn't join the convention in the first place.
- sitharus 10y ago
  I suspect the title is referencing a monty python sketch about an exploding penguin. I'd find the sketch but I'm on limited mobile data at the moment, but I'm sure YouTube has it.
  - folli 10y ago
    This one? https://youtu.be/EyFxXdqtGNk https://youtu.be/EyFxXdqtGNk
    - ptaipale 10y ago
      Ah, thanks. This makes it better. I could only think of the exploding whale: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFwxH3PPWiU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFwxH3PPWiU
hayd 10y ago
The British should be able to bill the Argentinian Government for the mine removal.
- glibgil 10y ago
  You can send anyone a bill for anything
  - jackweirdy 10y ago
    Often they'll pay it without looking :) https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/05/email_scammers_hit_businesses_5bn/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/05/email_scammers_hit_...
- Taniwha 10y ago
  Ah, the "Trump Fallacy"
  - norgie 10y ago
    This doesn't seem to compare. Argentina did lay the mines.
    - Taniwha 10y ago
      yes but they're not going to pay to remove them any more than Mexico is going to pay to build a wall, no matter how often some blowhard shouts it at clueless crowds
    - throwanem 10y ago
      And then lost the war, yes. The trouble is that reparations, to be credibly imposed, must be backed by the threat of renewed hostilities, compared with which simply paying the weregild looks preferable; without such a threat, or at least the reasonable prospect of some meaningfully opprobrious consequence, the party nominally responsible for paying reparations has little enough reason to do other than simply ignore them. I doubt the UK is about to invade Argentina over the issue, or the UN to vote for sanctions.
andybak 10y ago
> "We would rather have left the minefields as they were. They are all clearly marked, clearly fenced. No civilian has ever been injured. We said to the British government, 'Don't spend the money here, go to some other country where they have a much greater need to free up farming land.'" > "Unfortunately," Elsby adds, "the British government have signed up to the Ottawa convention, which puts a duty on them to do this." > The 1997 Ottawa Mine Ban Treaty compels signatories - which include the UK - to clear minefields in territory under their control. > Since 2009 the British government has spent tens of millions of pounds on mine-clearance in the Falklands. It's quotes like this that make me despair most for human civilisation. Our inability to design systems - or empower people - with the ability to act within a loose framework and avoid institutional insanity.
- Declanomous 10y ago
  That institutional insanity is what makes Brazil such a fantastic work.
  - andybak 10y ago
    Ah. My favorite dystopia.
- icebraining 10y ago
  On the other hand, Michael Poole, Member of the Falkland Islands Legislative Assembly said: "Falkland Islanders are grateful for the mine clearance work carried out by the UK Government in recent years. This work has opened up historically and valuable tracts of land which has been out of bounds since 1982." This further commitment by the UK to clearing more of the Falkland Islands of mines is a welcome move and we remain willing to assist practically and logistically where we can."
- tgb 10y ago
  I agree but also recommend the book "strategy of conflict" by Thomas Schelling. It's a counterpoint that shows why highly specific contracts are important, especially with regards to binding oneself to future actions.
GuiA 10y ago
> Behind their fences, shielded from human encroachment, the penguins have had decades of peace and quiet in their minefield. Native flora has regrown around them. "Natural systems have returned to not quite a pristine state, but a state where you've reached climax communities in certain parts," says Paul Brickle, director of the South Atlantic Environmental Research Institute. The Korean DMZ has a similar thing going on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Demilitarized_Zone#Nature_reserve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Demilitarized_Zone#Natu... "This natural isolation along the 250 km (160 mi) length of the DMZ has created an involuntary park which is now recognized as one of the most well-preserved areas of temperate habitat in the world. Several endangered animal and plant species now exist among the heavily fortified fences, landmines and listening posts. These include the extremely rare red-crowned crane (a staple of Asian art), and the white-naped crane as well as, potentially, the extremely rare Siberian tiger, Amur leopard and Asiatic black bear."
yongjik 10y ago
I'm pretty sure there's no tigers in DMZ. This isn't the Amazon, this is a strip of land between two belligerent countries whose population densities make California look like a rural utopia. If there was a tiger, I think we'd know. :)
- prophet_ 10y ago
  tigers in the amazon? leopard maybe.
  - abrowne 10y ago
    I think you mean jaguars.
- gregshap 10y ago
  California is more dense than NK. South Korea is denser than Cali, but only about as dense as New York State Either way, the DMZ is 400 sq miles largely forested, with about 0 human population density. Maybe its got some leopards, maybe maybe a tiger.
  - yongjik 10y ago
    Eh? Population density according to Wikipedia (person/km2): South Korea 507 North Korea 201 New Jersey 470 (densest amont US states) New York 162 California 97 US average 33 The Korean DMZ is "about 250km long, 4km wide" strip of land sitting between two hostile countries, with hundreds of thousands of soldiers on either side, with barbed wire fences and watch posts running along its length. Thousands of eyes are watching every corner of it right now as I write this. (For comparison, the Yosemite national park is 1,169 square miles, larger than DMZ. Somehow people are sure that it harbors no grizzly bears.) A tiger isn't a bigfoot. It is an apex predator that roams around huge areas and is scared at nothing. I stand by my assertion: if there's a tiger in DMZ, we'd know.
    - Taniwha 10y ago
      for heavens sake someone put a tiger in there, sort of a cat amongst the pigeons
pgodzin 10y ago
Seems like demining is done manually - slow and dangerous. I'm surprised we can't build the tech to identify mines and extract them safely.
- mschuster91 10y ago
  Any robot capable of doing the neccessary manual digging would be so heavy it 'd certainly trigger the mines; also as you can see in the photos the land is not flat but highly varied, so a robot cannot drive there. Another thing that makes demining really tedious is the amount of scrap metal in the earth - and if it's former farm land that's been mined it's bound to have loads of metal in it, mostly remains of agricultural equipment, and on the minestrips of former Yugoslavia you often enough hit archeological artifacts during mine-clearing. If you wanted to do automated demining, you'd need: 1) scanner technology that can differentiate between scrap metal and mines, as well as penetrate at least 1-2m into the ground 2) robots on 2 legs and with 2 arms - basically, humanoid robots. Anything other is only usable on flat fields. 3) robots must be able to conquer vast amounts of vegetation. For example, the Yugoslavian wars were 2 decades ago - many of the minestrips that are still not cleared up are in the backside of the country and heavily overgrown by everything from grass to massive trees now. (Source: am half Croatian, seen some minefields) 4) robots with high-quality visual processing. The most devious mines are those that have been hidden in / masqueraded as stuff like old cans, soccer balls or other stuff that children pick up, play with it and boooom. Any robot which has to do demining in such areas must be able to detect and avoid these. 5) cheap robots. A single robot with above capabilities will run well into the 8-figures at the moment (esp. due to #2), a human is cheaper (especially as there's protective armor available that helps to prevent or soften severe injuries).
  - pgodzin 10y ago
    Thanks for breaking that down. Didn't think about the need to differentiate between scrap and mine. And yes I was thinking specifically about this instance on the beach which faces much fewer issues than areas covered with vegetation.
    - 10y ago
mrleinad 10y ago
They're called Malvinas islands, not Falklands.
- justasitsounds 10y ago
  And the name 'Argentina' come from the Spanish and Italians, not from the Querandí, Mapuche, Serrano, Charrúa, Minuane or Guaraní.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
bulutsuzku 10y ago
The Islands were stolen, so anything British do there is open to International legal issues.
- iso-8859-1 10y ago
  Stolen from whom? The French? Or the US?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
wuschel 10y ago
Breeding ground in mine fields and what not.. [1] penguins are hard-core! Everytime I see the adaptive capabilities of life forms I have to laugh and cry at the same time. It is certainly worth an internet meme... [1] http://time.com/4660247/planet-earth-ii-clip-penguins/
- cryptarch 10y ago
  Very wholesome, meme/10. I wish I could up- and downvote at the same time; I feel like discussions belong at the top and memes at the bottom, but I also enjoy the bits of humor and less information-dense posts at HN, because they help me to humanize the community and they make the rest of the discussions easier to process. Perhaps a "funny" flag could work? Kind of like on Slashdot, but with a corresponding "showfun" setting, for the gravely serious user. A rate or ratio limit for funny posts is needed to not let it spread and dominate the comments, so maybe a heuristic comment identifier that says "I'm glad you're having fun, but this post has reached its meme quotum for today. Have a nice day!" if a threshold is passed would be a solution. That's so much work to implement though... I'm conflicted re: what to do with these meta thoughts. Perhaps I should set up a blog with essays regarding this, and put it there? I do feel it is on topic as in, "in the HN spirit" and relevant to what I'm responding to re: form, but not the content.
PaulRobinson 10y ago
I did a contract down in the Falkland Islands in 2002 for Cable & Wireless, and was in Stanley for about a month with a weekend on Sealion Island. Things the HN crowd might be interested in: When I arrived an army officer in camo fatigues got up on the (tiny) baggage claim carousel before it started running and gave us a brief introduction to how to spot landmines, and instructed us how to obtain ordinance maps of the known existing fields if we wanted to go for a walk one day. I got one and gave it to a friend as a present. I believe he has it framed in his home. That beach they are discussing looks astonishing and there is little doubt if it's reopened it will not remain "wild" for a long time. That said, ozone depletion is still a thing, and whilst the climate is like Northern Scotland, there are sunny days but sun-bathing is not encouraged. Young military personnel are rumoured to occasionally try it, have to get treatment for quite skin burns, and because it's a self-inflicted injury will get court marshalled. Sometimes a penguin or other animal will actually set off a mine on that beach, or at least did in my time there - you'd hear a distant boom, and it was just assumed one had been triggered. However, it's a huge area to clear. Strangely, I seem to recall there had been an offer from a foreign government to run mad cows or unwanted apes along it to try and trigger the mines. Thankfully, it was never taken up. There is a lot of ordinance in the islands. After the war, some of the locals picked up discarded Argentinian weaponry and ammunition and stored it for use in case of another future attack. I sincerely hope that most of it is now discarded. More tech information for this crowd: back then, all phone and data ran over a microwave network rated to 9600 baud but some could get 56kbps modems running well over it. There is a small machine room, and we were running Solaris 7 on Sun kit back then. I got the gig as I was familiar with Zeus which was their preferred web server at the time. Connectivity was via a (very large) satellite dish back to the UK via a geostationary satellite. 1Mbps was the max transfer rate, and ping times back to the UK were > 500ms. They had investigated running fibre optic into the islands, but they (naturally) wanted to avoid that coming in via Argentina, so they'd costed running it up to the US straight up the Atlantic. It was doable, but would cost 10x the then national GDP of the islands, so, yeah, noooo… It's a very beautiful place with lovely people, and I imagine the connectivity is much better than it was 15 years ago - if you ever have the chance to visit or work there, I'd definitely consider it, but the routes in are limited: MoD flight from RAF Brize Norton, via Santiago, or cruise ships sometimes stop by. They actually suggested I might want a full time gig down there. Being in my early 20s and single it wasn't for me, but I could see for the right person, it's a pretty amazing place.
ick 10y ago
We
pc2g4d 10y ago
Could they be disabled by electromagnetic pulse??

85 points by gpvos 10y ago

Click-bait headline from BBC. TL;DR: Penguins are not heavy enough to set off landmines left by Argentinians in Falklands War. Plenty are left, now the British government has to clear them due to Ottawa convention, and this will disrupt penguins and the ecosystem.

gpvos 10y ago
Yes, the title is unfortunate. The conflict between the Ottawa convention and the environment is the interesting bit.
- saalweachter 10y ago
  Eh, I don't know that I would really blame the Ottawa convention. I think it's more sad-larious that we can't just not despoil an area unless it's protected by landmines.
- duncan_bayne 10y ago
  It's only a conflict until you base your value judgements on human flourishing. Then it becomes a relatively easy question - does humanity benefit from having the land mines removed? Pretty sure that anyone living in or around minefields has the answer to that one.
  - ptaipale 10y ago
    Someone living around minefields answers in the BBC story: "Falkland Islanders weren't enthused by the idea, to put it bluntly," says Barry Elsby, a member of the Falklands Legislative Assembly. "We would rather have left the minefields as they were. They are all clearly marked, clearly fenced. No civilian has ever been injured. We said to the British government, 'Don't spend the money here, go to some other country where they have a much greater need to free up farming land.'" "Unfortunately," Elsby adds, "the British government have signed up to the Ottawa convention, which puts a duty on them to do this." It looks a somewhat similar nature reserve to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, which also acts as a superb nature reserve (also a BBC story): http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160421-the-chernobyl-exclusion-zone-is-arguably-a-nature-reserve http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160421-the-chernobyl-exclus...
    - duncan_bayne 10y ago
      Wow. I'm genuinely surprised to find _anyone_ okay with living near minefields. My opinions are probably coloured by growing up with Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees as childhood friends. Their families had strong, and uniformly negative, opinions about landmines. Sounds like the circumstances were very different.
      - ptaipale 10y ago
        Obviously. The main difference in circumstances is indiscriminate use near farming lands and dwellings. Landmines can be used properly or improperly. If you lay them properly, map them, and clear them when not needed, they're not any more risky than the typical remains of war (unexploded bombs and shells); less so in fact (considering Molotov breadbaskets scattered by artillery or air). The Ottawa convention will be observed by those parties who anyway would have used mines responsibly (and thereby would have had a cheap, domestic defensive weapon, instead of paying big bucks to high-tech munition makers). And those parties who we can expect to behave irresponsibly didn't join the convention in the first place.
sitharus 10y ago
I suspect the title is referencing a monty python sketch about an exploding penguin. I'd find the sketch but I'm on limited mobile data at the moment, but I'm sure YouTube has it.
- folli 10y ago
  This one? https://youtu.be/EyFxXdqtGNk https://youtu.be/EyFxXdqtGNk
  - ptaipale 10y ago
    Ah, thanks. This makes it better. I could only think of the exploding whale: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFwxH3PPWiU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFwxH3PPWiU

hayd 10y ago

The British should be able to bill the Argentinian Government for the mine removal.

glibgil 10y ago
You can send anyone a bill for anything
- jackweirdy 10y ago
  Often they'll pay it without looking :) https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/05/email_scammers_hit_businesses_5bn/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/05/email_scammers_hit_...
Taniwha 10y ago
Ah, the "Trump Fallacy"
- norgie 10y ago
  This doesn't seem to compare. Argentina did lay the mines.
  - Taniwha 10y ago
    yes but they're not going to pay to remove them any more than Mexico is going to pay to build a wall, no matter how often some blowhard shouts it at clueless crowds
  - throwanem 10y ago
    And then lost the war, yes. The trouble is that reparations, to be credibly imposed, must be backed by the threat of renewed hostilities, compared with which simply paying the weregild looks preferable; without such a threat, or at least the reasonable prospect of some meaningfully opprobrious consequence, the party nominally responsible for paying reparations has little enough reason to do other than simply ignore them. I doubt the UK is about to invade Argentina over the issue, or the UN to vote for sanctions.

andybak 10y ago

> "We would rather have left the minefields as they were. They are all clearly marked, clearly fenced. No civilian has ever been injured. We said to the British government, 'Don't spend the money here, go to some other country where they have a much greater need to free up farming land.'" > "Unfortunately," Elsby adds, "the British government have signed up to the Ottawa convention, which puts a duty on them to do this." > The 1997 Ottawa Mine Ban Treaty compels signatories - which include the UK - to clear minefields in territory under their control. > Since 2009 the British government has spent tens of millions of pounds on mine-clearance in the Falklands. It's quotes like this that make me despair most for human civilisation. Our inability to design systems - or empower people - with the ability to act within a loose framework and avoid institutional insanity.

Declanomous 10y ago
That institutional insanity is what makes Brazil such a fantastic work.
- andybak 10y ago
  Ah. My favorite dystopia.
icebraining 10y ago
On the other hand, Michael Poole, Member of the Falkland Islands Legislative Assembly said: "Falkland Islanders are grateful for the mine clearance work carried out by the UK Government in recent years. This work has opened up historically and valuable tracts of land which has been out of bounds since 1982." This further commitment by the UK to clearing more of the Falkland Islands of mines is a welcome move and we remain willing to assist practically and logistically where we can."
tgb 10y ago
I agree but also recommend the book "strategy of conflict" by Thomas Schelling. It's a counterpoint that shows why highly specific contracts are important, especially with regards to binding oneself to future actions.

GuiA 10y ago

> Behind their fences, shielded from human encroachment, the penguins have had decades of peace and quiet in their minefield. Native flora has regrown around them. "Natural systems have returned to not quite a pristine state, but a state where you've reached climax communities in certain parts," says Paul Brickle, director of the South Atlantic Environmental Research Institute. The Korean DMZ has a similar thing going on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Demilitarized_Zone#Nature_reserve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Demilitarized_Zone#Natu... "This natural isolation along the 250 km (160 mi) length of the DMZ has created an involuntary park which is now recognized as one of the most well-preserved areas of temperate habitat in the world. Several endangered animal and plant species now exist among the heavily fortified fences, landmines and listening posts. These include the extremely rare red-crowned crane (a staple of Asian art), and the white-naped crane as well as, potentially, the extremely rare Siberian tiger, Amur leopard and Asiatic black bear."

yongjik 10y ago

I'm pretty sure there's no tigers in DMZ. This isn't the Amazon, this is a strip of land between two belligerent countries whose population densities make California look like a rural utopia. If there was a tiger, I think we'd know. :)

prophet_ 10y ago
tigers in the amazon? leopard maybe.
- abrowne 10y ago
  I think you mean jaguars.
gregshap 10y ago
California is more dense than NK. South Korea is denser than Cali, but only about as dense as New York State Either way, the DMZ is 400 sq miles largely forested, with about 0 human population density. Maybe its got some leopards, maybe maybe a tiger.
- yongjik 10y ago
  Eh? Population density according to Wikipedia (person/km2): South Korea 507 North Korea 201 New Jersey 470 (densest amont US states) New York 162 California 97 US average 33 The Korean DMZ is "about 250km long, 4km wide" strip of land sitting between two hostile countries, with hundreds of thousands of soldiers on either side, with barbed wire fences and watch posts running along its length. Thousands of eyes are watching every corner of it right now as I write this. (For comparison, the Yosemite national park is 1,169 square miles, larger than DMZ. Somehow people are sure that it harbors no grizzly bears.) A tiger isn't a bigfoot. It is an apex predator that roams around huge areas and is scared at nothing. I stand by my assertion: if there's a tiger in DMZ, we'd know.
  - Taniwha 10y ago
    for heavens sake someone put a tiger in there, sort of a cat amongst the pigeons

pgodzin 10y ago

Seems like demining is done manually - slow and dangerous. I'm surprised we can't build the tech to identify mines and extract them safely.

mschuster91 10y ago
Any robot capable of doing the neccessary manual digging would be so heavy it 'd certainly trigger the mines; also as you can see in the photos the land is not flat but highly varied, so a robot cannot drive there. Another thing that makes demining really tedious is the amount of scrap metal in the earth - and if it's former farm land that's been mined it's bound to have loads of metal in it, mostly remains of agricultural equipment, and on the minestrips of former Yugoslavia you often enough hit archeological artifacts during mine-clearing. If you wanted to do automated demining, you'd need: 1) scanner technology that can differentiate between scrap metal and mines, as well as penetrate at least 1-2m into the ground 2) robots on 2 legs and with 2 arms - basically, humanoid robots. Anything other is only usable on flat fields. 3) robots must be able to conquer vast amounts of vegetation. For example, the Yugoslavian wars were 2 decades ago - many of the minestrips that are still not cleared up are in the backside of the country and heavily overgrown by everything from grass to massive trees now. (Source: am half Croatian, seen some minefields) 4) robots with high-quality visual processing. The most devious mines are those that have been hidden in / masqueraded as stuff like old cans, soccer balls or other stuff that children pick up, play with it and boooom. Any robot which has to do demining in such areas must be able to detect and avoid these. 5) cheap robots. A single robot with above capabilities will run well into the 8-figures at the moment (esp. due to #2), a human is cheaper (especially as there's protective armor available that helps to prevent or soften severe injuries).
- pgodzin 10y ago
  Thanks for breaking that down. Didn't think about the need to differentiate between scrap and mine. And yes I was thinking specifically about this instance on the beach which faces much fewer issues than areas covered with vegetation.
  - 10y ago

mrleinad 10y ago

They're called Malvinas islands, not Falklands.

justasitsounds 10y ago
And the name 'Argentina' come from the Spanish and Italians, not from the Querandí, Mapuche, Serrano, Charrúa, Minuane or Guaraní.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

bulutsuzku 10y ago

The Islands were stolen, so anything British do there is open to International legal issues.

iso-8859-1 10y ago
Stolen from whom? The French? Or the US?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

wuschel 10y ago

Breeding ground in mine fields and what not.. [1] penguins are hard-core! Everytime I see the adaptive capabilities of life forms I have to laugh and cry at the same time. It is certainly worth an internet meme... [1] http://time.com/4660247/planet-earth-ii-clip-penguins/

cryptarch 10y ago
Very wholesome, meme/10. I wish I could up- and downvote at the same time; I feel like discussions belong at the top and memes at the bottom, but I also enjoy the bits of humor and less information-dense posts at HN, because they help me to humanize the community and they make the rest of the discussions easier to process. Perhaps a "funny" flag could work? Kind of like on Slashdot, but with a corresponding "showfun" setting, for the gravely serious user. A rate or ratio limit for funny posts is needed to not let it spread and dominate the comments, so maybe a heuristic comment identifier that says "I'm glad you're having fun, but this post has reached its meme quotum for today. Have a nice day!" if a threshold is passed would be a solution. That's so much work to implement though... I'm conflicted re: what to do with these meta thoughts. Perhaps I should set up a blog with essays regarding this, and put it there? I do feel it is on topic as in, "in the HN spirit" and relevant to what I'm responding to re: form, but not the content.

PaulRobinson 10y ago

I did a contract down in the Falkland Islands in 2002 for Cable & Wireless, and was in Stanley for about a month with a weekend on Sealion Island. Things the HN crowd might be interested in: When I arrived an army officer in camo fatigues got up on the (tiny) baggage claim carousel before it started running and gave us a brief introduction to how to spot landmines, and instructed us how to obtain ordinance maps of the known existing fields if we wanted to go for a walk one day. I got one and gave it to a friend as a present. I believe he has it framed in his home. That beach they are discussing looks astonishing and there is little doubt if it's reopened it will not remain "wild" for a long time. That said, ozone depletion is still a thing, and whilst the climate is like Northern Scotland, there are sunny days but sun-bathing is not encouraged. Young military personnel are rumoured to occasionally try it, have to get treatment for quite skin burns, and because it's a self-inflicted injury will get court marshalled. Sometimes a penguin or other animal will actually set off a mine on that beach, or at least did in my time there - you'd hear a distant boom, and it was just assumed one had been triggered. However, it's a huge area to clear. Strangely, I seem to recall there had been an offer from a foreign government to run mad cows or unwanted apes along it to try and trigger the mines. Thankfully, it was never taken up. There is a lot of ordinance in the islands. After the war, some of the locals picked up discarded Argentinian weaponry and ammunition and stored it for use in case of another future attack. I sincerely hope that most of it is now discarded. More tech information for this crowd: back then, all phone and data ran over a microwave network rated to 9600 baud but some could get 56kbps modems running well over it. There is a small machine room, and we were running Solaris 7 on Sun kit back then. I got the gig as I was familiar with Zeus which was their preferred web server at the time. Connectivity was via a (very large) satellite dish back to the UK via a geostationary satellite. 1Mbps was the max transfer rate, and ping times back to the UK were > 500ms. They had investigated running fibre optic into the islands, but they (naturally) wanted to avoid that coming in via Argentina, so they'd costed running it up to the US straight up the Atlantic. It was doable, but would cost 10x the then national GDP of the islands, so, yeah, noooo… It's a very beautiful place with lovely people, and I imagine the connectivity is much better than it was 15 years ago - if you ever have the chance to visit or work there, I'd definitely consider it, but the routes in are limited: MoD flight from RAF Brize Norton, via Santiago, or cruise ships sometimes stop by. They actually suggested I might want a full time gig down there. Being in my early 20s and single it wasn't for me, but I could see for the right person, it's a pretty amazing place.

ick 10y ago

pc2g4d 10y ago

Could they be disabled by electromagnetic pulse??