In the linked article, towards the middle, the photo shows 2 people reading the plaque next to a pink structure, which appears to be that of a whale's heart. That, combined with the skeleton hanging over them, should give us an idea that we are no bigger to these whales, than probably an average snail is to us (between 5 cm and 9 cm).
Interesting in that now we're looking to move away from hydrocarbons which ultimately was how much of the electricity has been produced.
New Bedford is really one of the hidden gems of this state - I'm really glad South Coast Rail will be connecting it back to Boston after decades of being ignored. Worth a visit.
This was the story that inspired Melville to write Moby Dick.
The book is both a survival story and an investigation of the Nantucket whaling industry and whaling in general, as well as the social and economic background.
“The oil catcher consists of a series of tubes that start at the tip of KOBO’s rostrum and funnel down into a beaker.”
That’s an Erlenmeyer flask, not a beaker. The quote gets it right in the next sentence. Just sayin’ :)
Interesting bit of trivia, New Bedford used to be the richest city in the planet because of the whaling industry.
All jokes aside, this got me curious to look for the definition of "oil", a word used to describe stuff extracted from plants, rocks and, apparently, animals too.
It turns out that for a liquid to be classified as oil, according to Merriam Webster, it needs to be "flammable", "not dissolve in water" and "greasy".
What's greasy, you ask? Well, it's smeared in... "oily matter".
Kerosene, refined from crude oil, was at least as good as whale oil for lamps. It was also cheaper, so that was the end of the whaling industry. There were pathetic advertisements from the whale oil people of that time arguing for 'pure' whale oil over 'impure' substitutes. However kerosene was so obviously a better deal consumers switched with lightning speed anyway.
As an aside, gasoline was a waste product of the crude oil refining process that produced kerosene. That meant very cheap fuel for the internal combustion engine which was starting its climb up the technology s-curve at the same time.
It's the same today: people pay premiums for vegetables fertilized with "pure" bird poop (guano) over equivalent phosphate rocks mined from the earth.
e.g.
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/30/world/americas/30peru.htm...
Its usage gradually expanded to include other vegetable fats, liquid animal fats such as whale oil, and finally mineral oil when it was discovered.
People back then weren't particularly interested in the chemical compositions of the different oils, only that they felt similar and served similar purposes.
Meanwhile, animal fats that are solid at room temperature, such as butter and lard, were never really called "oil" despite being much closer to other edible fats than anything we dug up from a desert.
Awful website.
- it’s coming from the bone marrow
- it has a reddish tint
- the curator says the smell is reminiscent of a whaling ship and not, say, a machine shop or oil rig.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/found-the-worlds-tinie...
But let me just add up their lengths, along with the lengths of all giant african land snails and all other snails, and divide by the total number of snails in the world ... is there a statistical trick that could answer this, like the one for counting undiscovered species? Probably not.
Note the size of the people.
https://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/10/e1/e9/42/...
[2] “The marrow is oily and the oil is a source of energy for these animals. Especially the baleen whales, who typically have a period of the year where they don’t feed,” Robert Rocha, the New Bedford Whaling Museum’s Associate Curator of Science and Research, tells Popular Science. “There’s energy stored in the muscles and in the blubber, but the energy stored in the oil and the bones is a reserve energy source for them.”
[3] "Their bones contain a lot of oil. In life this substance is critical for the animals to maintain buoyancy in water and was the reason why so many were slaughtered during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But it can cause major issues when trying to preserve their remains in collections."
[1] https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/whale-oil-and-half-an-inch-of...
[2] https://www.popsci.com/science/blue-whale-leaking-oil/
[3] https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/whale-oil-and-half-an-inch-of...
But both whale fat and petrol oil are possible here. Maybe the whale died by a black tide and was floating some time before to be scooped by the ship. Fin whales type are fast cetaceans and crashing with a ship is not so usual like in other cetaceans. Not unless is an ill animal.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/malm-whale
(Got the "only one" bit by googling further for a long time.)
What killed off whaling was that they killed off the whales - it simply wasn’t economically viable to send ships out any more.
Funny anecdote: The automatic transmission used to be lubricated with whale oil because it (whale oil) could handle higher temperatures than petroleum based lubricants. It was banning whaling in the 20th century that lead to developing petroleum-based high-heat lubricants.
And if your rulers are bloodthirsty heart burners and skin flayers, even satan will be received warmly. I mean Huitzilopochtli is giving Kali run for her money in the deities I don't to live under competition.
And east india - you replace the elite and the people underneath will continue following orders - the same happened with the Manchu conquering of china.
The article clearly explains that it is oil form the bone marrow of the animal. Quoting the relevant part:
"Rocha explained that KOBO’s bone marrow is actually 'full of oil,' even though the whale has been dead for more than two decades.
'It’s seeping out through the pores of the bones,' Rocha said. 'The outer edges of the bone are a little more porous than human bones and [gravity is] just pulling the oil out.'"
Plus, is it even an inaccuracy? In common parlance beaker and flask are synonyms.[1] Simply regular people talking to regular people describing some glassware are not as accurate as a chemist talking to a chemist.
1: as evidenced that thesarus.com identifying `beaker` as the strongest synonym match for `flask` https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/flask
The nomenclature isn't that clear, and none of us have first hand experience with any of them anymore so all of our knowledge about this is from third hand reddit TILs and moby dick.
> Rocha explained that KOBO’s bone marrow is actually “full of oil,” even though the whale has been dead for more than two decades.
> “It’s seeping out through the pores of the bones,” Rocha said. “The outer edges of the bone are a little more porous than human bones and [gravity is] just pulling the oil out.”
https://www.norskpetroleum.no/en/petroleum-resources/petrole...
And note that the person quoted uses the term “flask” exclusively. The word “beaker” only shows up parenthetically, because the reporter spent their time in chemistry class asking, “when am I ever going to need to know this?”
Practically speaking, you can't easily just let the whales go out into the open due to the risk of someone else hunting them down vs cost of captivity or having them be 'monitored' in the wild.
Rather than being an ass, perhaps you could read my comment and note that I quote the article in which it appears to reference a goddamn oil tanker as the cause of death. We fucking know whales were hunted for their oil, now are you ready to join the adults in the conversation or are you going to continue to be a know-it-all prick?
Lowell is a great analogy to Troy since it has UMass Lowell to pump it full of money and it's arguably the least crappy of the "not Boston" cities in MA.