[HN Gopher] Where Do Eels Come From?
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Where Do Eels Come From?
Author : Thevet
Score : 92 points
Date : 2020-05-21 20:46 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newyorker.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newyorker.com)
| alleycat5000 wrote:
| There is a good RadioLab on this!
|
| https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/silky...
| antsar wrote:
| Interesting topic but this article was tedious.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eel_life_history
|
| TLDR: They spawn in a few places out in the ocean, then migrate
| toward coasts as they mature.
|
| European & American eel: North of the Antilles, Haiti, and Puerto
| Rico
|
| Japanese eel: Near the Mariana Islands
|
| South African eel: North of Madagascar
| billfruit wrote:
| I think this type of descent into "storytelling" is one of the
| anti-patterns of modern journalistic writing. Why isn't there a
| major push back against these anti-patterns among journalists,
| I often wonder.
| jl6 wrote:
| Although the linked article was refreshingly readable, the
| general answer to your question is because more text = more
| opportunity to weave adverts in between the paragraphs.
| Storytelling is an easy way to bulk out the text when your
| facts are light.
|
| Also, to be less cynical, some people are after entertainment
| as much as education, and will enjoy reading a story rather
| than a lecture.
| Larrikin wrote:
| If I had read the story on the toilet at work I would have
| found this style extremely annoying since has presented as a
| mystery at the beginning of the article. Reading this story
| at home on my chick I found it extremely interesting. Not
| everything has to be a quick read and the article does a good
| job of introducing the topic so that one can just wikipedia
| it if they have to
| yborg wrote:
| I think this kind of complaint about the elegant use of
| language in writing is one of the anti-patterns of a modern
| society trained to communicate in 140 character ALL CAPS
| shouting. One of the things that I always find fascinating is
| the level of expression you find in everyday letters by
| everyday people written in the 19th century. It seems very
| sad that despite the fact that long form writing is much
| easier now than when it had to be hand-written in ink people
| no longer have the patience for writing or reading it.
| billfruit wrote:
| I am not complaining about elegant use of language; Use of
| rich language to express complex and nuanced concepts is a
| good thing. But presenting the whole matter as "Story" is
| what I find uninteresting, and oftentimes misleading. Give
| us the facts, the theories and explanations; but telling it
| as "Story" does really a disservice to readers, and even
| seems against the spirit of journalism.
| danharaj wrote:
| What exactly is the spirit of journalism and how did you
| come to know it through your study of the history of
| journalism?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Well, the gold standard is what journalists call
| "inverted pyramid". You start with a TL;DR, and then
| expand recursively. This way, the reader can get more and
| more detailed picture as they read on, and stop at the
| moment they feel they've satisfied their needs.
|
| This is how you present information if you care about
| your reader. The reason it's not done almost anywhere is
| because maximizing profit is done by minimizing utility,
| so that you can drag the curious reader through as many
| ads as they have patience to bear.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Except, according to the article, we've never even seen mature
| eels in the Sargasso Sea, we've never seen them mate, and we
| don't know why their population has fallen so much over a few
| decades.
| pvaldes wrote:
| > we don't know why their population has fallen so much
|
| Nope, nom, nom, we don't know, nom, nom, why they got so
| scarce. Is a mystery.
| toby wrote:
| I thought it was pretty fascinating to read the story of how
| obsessed scientists enlisted sailors to find smaller and
| smaller elvers to figure this out. The actual location isn't
| the interesting part.
|
| I also had no idea that no one has ever seen them mate.
| zetazzed wrote:
| If this article develops your interest in eels, I highly
| recommend following "Surprised Eel Historian"
| (https://twitter.com/greenleejw) on Twitter for approximately
| daily facts about the role of eels in medieval English society.
| (Yes, there are really hundreds of new English eel history facts
| per day.)
| csours wrote:
| I wonder how many things I think I know the answer to but I
| really don't. I find the
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions very
| interesting.
| oliveshell wrote:
| Yes! I point friends to that article all the time.
|
| The first time I read through it I was surprised at how many of
| those things I'd always just assumed to be true.
| staticautomatic wrote:
| Strong opinions, loosely held!
| divbzero wrote:
| Thank you!
|
| Corrected a few of my own misconceptions:
|
| - Microwave ovens do _not_ heat food due to resonance with
| water molecules.
|
| - Spacecraft reentering the atmosphere are _not_ heated due to
| friction.
|
| - Worldwide poverty has _not_ been increasing.
| agapon wrote:
| I wonder if adiabatic compression in front of a reentering
| spacecraft could even occur if not for friction.
| ars wrote:
| I think you should ask instead "if not for viscosity".
|
| And I think the answer is yes, for reasons of momentum. If
| you try to push air out of the way it in turn needs to move
| other air, etc, etc. Even with zero viscosity, it still
| needs to to that, which means the pressure goes up, and
| will therefor heat up.
| mhb wrote:
| I guess that the New Yorker doesn't extend the same
| disapprobation to ending a headline with a preposition as it does
| to writing "naive" or "cooperate" without diaeresis.
| teddyh wrote:
| > _disapprobation to ending a headline with a preposition_
|
| There is no such rule.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preposition_stranding
| dang wrote:
| Churchill didn't make the famous joke about it either.
|
| https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/07/04/churchill-
| prepositi...
| nerdponx wrote:
| https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/prepositions-e...
| [deleted]
| FriendlyNormie wrote:
| Why do people insist on acting as if humans a few hundred years
| ago were completely retarded? No, Aristotle didn't think eels
| spontaneously came into existence from mud and rain water. No, no
| one ever thought eels came from horse hair. They were all joking.
| Obviously. You do understand jokes are not a brand new
| phenomenon, right?
| [deleted]
| protoweek wrote:
| This was a very strange, disconnected and fragmented article by
| the New Yorker
|
| Why dint they break down the supply chain linearly?
| [deleted]
| ncmncm wrote:
| It is sad, tragic even, that the great writing on natural
| history is closed you by your own impatience.
|
| This article is not the best of its kind, but it is very, very
| good. Writing that excels it would frustrate you more, in
| proportion to its quality. The frustration you feel reading it
| is a pale echo of that experienced by the myriad scientists and
| amateurs who puzzled in and out of decades over these
| questions, originally obscure but enlarged by their obdurity to
| have become symbolic of questions of our own existence.
| hpliferaft wrote:
| Oh please. OP offered a position and asked a simple, direct
| question. That is customary here.
|
| Your bloviation about great writing offers nothing except a
| great example of a style you won't find in the New Yorker.
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