Redwood Forest

horse deals @heymermaid • 14 May 16 Stop saying I'm my own worst enemy. My worst enemy is Johan, from the stables; 1 want him dismissed, but he's curried such favor with father

Scientists in China have developed a more efficient form of solar desalination that uses 47.4% less energy than alternatives. After the first year of testing, the scientists believe that at scale it would be able to desalinate water more cheaply than producing bottled water.

Obviously, the goal of this experiment is to grow the lobsters until they’re big enough to settle to the seabed and then release them, because they have a much higher likelihood of surviving to adulthood when they’re able to hide. Ideally, captive lobster hatcheries can boost the wild population and keep things stable, so we don’t have a major crash in a decade or two.

The first year we tried this was pretty bad. We had a lot of eggs, but very few babies. It turned out that the CO2 levels in the building spiked as more guests visited throughout the summer, and that settled into the water and threw off the pH and caused a chemical reaction that prevented a lot of the eggs from hatching. I think we ended up releasing three baby lobsters (which is still better than their wild survival rate but not great).

The second year was a little better. We added a de-gasser to the aquarium and got a ton of larval lobsters, but right as they were settling to the bottom we had a disease outbreak that killed most of them. We ended up releasing four babies at the end of the season.

But this year? Oh boy. We have so many lobsters that we had to release the first round early (usually we wait till September or October so guests can see them). We just released a total of FIVE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE baby lobsters, and we still have over a hundred who haven’t settled to the bottom yet. I genuinely don’t even have words to explain how cool this is. OVER FIVE HUNDRED. We just added hundreds of lobsters to the wild population that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.

"Deconstruction" does not (necessarily) mean "Adding a bunch of sex and violence and drug use and suicide to a work to make it grimdark"; it means, essentially, "foregrounding the implicit contradictions in a work by making them explicit in the text to showcase and critique their ideology in the wider culture."

So, for example "Watchmen" was deconstructive because superhero comics up to that point had, by and large, not really interrogated their own role with respect to things like the military-industrial complex or the rather sordid real-life history of vigilantism in the United States or the sexual psychology of an individual dressing up in (essentially) bondage gear and going out to beat people up on the street. The sex and the violence serve a thematic purpose. It doesn't become more deconstructive by adding *more* sex and violence to it; it depends on what was in (or left out of) the original work.