Every once in a while along comes some great shark blogging and this week it is our high honor to introduce you to some thought provoking stuff from
Deep Sea News and rickmac.
For Want Of A Shark
Causal relationships can be fiendishly tricky. Spend an hour watching any of
Star Trek Voyager’s time travel episodes
and you begin to understand why the show’s writers often resort to
lines such as, “It’s better if we don’t talk about this too much.”
Consider another example of causality. I’m hammering-out this post at
home with a real doozy of a head cold. My sinuses are completely
congested. I can feel a chest full of gunk as I breathe. And my body
generally feels achy and sore. Retracing my steps, I might place
contraction from surface contact or airborne transmission at work where
one of my officemates was complaining last week of “a cold.” Or it may
have been aboard the overheated, moist Petri dish of my commuter ferry.
Or maybe it was from the plates, silverware, water, or food from any of
the restaurants I visited last week.
Not having the
Center for Disease Control’s Epidemic Intelligence Service
activated at every case of the common cold, I will likely never know
the ultimate cause of my dreary, mucus-filled weekend. But I can connect
enough dots, enough small actions, to construct a few compelling
transmission scenarios that might hold water. The more dots I connect,
however, the more provisional and potentially implausible my scenarios
might become. Causally, they may seem tenable. But at some point, the
casual relationships become so tenuously hair-thin that it simply
strains credibility.
Red complete
post here.
