Evening all. I hope you are all well fed and feeling perky.

I don’t have an awful lot to write, this will just be a quick update. Biggest news, I am a licensed submariner now. Yes that’s right I, Kelly, Yas and Alice all successfully completed the padi openwater scuba diving course under the watchful eye of Diving Dave. It was pretty good fun, quite a relaxing activity even, well relaxing in as much as anything can be relaxing when you are constantly coming in close proximity with colourful and weirdly formed creature which may or may not be deadly and of course the fact that your life depends on some evidently much used scuba gear rented from some slightly unhinged looking Japanese chaps. Luckily the one of the pipes (on one of the girls scuba units) exploded when we were on land not under the ocean. At the time it didn’t unduly perturb us but in hindsight, THAT’S KINDA WORRYING! Anyway, the main thing is we survived. Kelly was the star of the day, persevering with a set of ears which were determined not to equalize. She had to abandon our second dive of the day after a long but unsuccessful battle to equalize her ears. If perhaps you don’t know, if you descend just a few meters your ears with get very, very painful due to the water pressure on them. To counter this one must blow through ones sinuses to apply equal air pressure from the inside of your ear, this is equalizing. Sometimes for a raft of reasons it may not work. Well, the story ended happily as Kelly bravely sallied forth again and this time got the better of her uncooperative lugs. The wealth of the underwater environment in Okinawa never ceases to amaze me, it is just jam packed with weird and wonderful life. In fact the ocean in general is. It is still true we know more about the surface of the moon and even Mars than the ocean floor. The discovery of black smokers is one example of how life under the ocean is more diverse and exotic than we thought life could possibly be! The black smokers support an ecosystem entirely independent of the sun btw (based on chemosynthesis instead) and at temperatures of around 400 degrees Celsius and pH as low as 2.8 to boot! We are all mostly aware of the biological diversity and importance or shallow water coral (ie. what we see scuba diving and the great barrier reef for instance) but the majority of corals are found in deep cold water. It seems these are at least just as biologically diverse and important however due to the expense and limited equipment available to study these ecosystems we know little about them. What is worse is they are being destroyed at a sickening pace by the prevalence of commercial bottom trawling. Huge weighted nets are dragged over the sea floor obliterating any coral or sponge growth in their path. To make things worse it appears that these corals and sponges grow and repair themselves very slowly, perhaps living for centuries. Progress does seem to be being made though, although international water are almost entirely without protection.

http://www.mcbi.org/what/dscstatement.htm

http://www.oceana.org/north-america/what-we-do/stop-destructive-trawling/deep-sea-corals/

In a related matter the recent capture of an intact and complete colossal (as opposed to giant) squid was not as a result of intrepid scientists who had finally obtained one of these elusive animals but rather a sign of how commercial fishing is plundering new ecosystems (having exhausted shallower ones) deeper and deeper in the ocean.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6385071.stm

How that I no longer have to study I have been reading for pleasure again. I have just finished ‘the loved ones’ by Evelyn Waugh and ‘the crow road’ by Iain Banks (Scottish author whom I highly recommend, he also write brilliantly imaginative science fiction under the name Iain M Banks). What an unlikely looking couple! Andy was in town hence the jump suit.
My better shoudou offerings from this wednesday.
The top one means water and the lower one means heaven/air/sky.
One is a frigid bird.........the other is a penguin - HAH!

This last picture is a poster I saw in a train station in Tokyo. Miss Diaze (however it's spelt) is pretty big in Japan as of now, with several TV adverts and at least one HUGE (side of a building covering) poster in Akihabara. Apologies for the lame tag line, and 'bird' is the British-slang meaning which is a woman (like Americans would say chick).