> More people have been in space than have lived underwater to do science.
The qualifier, "to do science" in the above quote is important. Nuclear submarines stay submerged for up to three months, with normal patrols lasting 3 to 6 weeks.
While true, you also have to take into consideration that generally submarines are in normal pressure conditions, as they are not really designed to let people in and out all the time. I would imagine that living in a submarine is way more comfortable than what described in this article.
No, you're nice and dry in a military sub. These scientists are living underwater in order to study the reef as efficiently as possible, which means they're out all day in wetsuits and thus need to deal with the havoc that being wet all day eventually wreaks on the body.
That said, I don't quite understand why they don't just wear drysuits then? They're a bit fiddlier to use, but pretty commonplace these days, and don't keep the entire body dry, but that still seem a lot better than keeping none of it.
This comes up regularly. Quoting myself from an earlier comment:
So the BBC is... weird. The majority of the operation is a taxpayer-funded public broadcaster with a remit to produce high quality programming for free; but there's a unit called BBC Worldwide whose job it is to battle it out in the red-in-tooth-and-claw world of commercial TV programming, selling BBC programmes overseas and minting money that can then be used to subsidize the public broadcasting component.
While this sounds laudable as an idea, for this to work it also means that the British taxpayer is not allowed to subsidize BBC Worldwide in any way. For example, BBCW pays rent at market rates for its office space to the rest of the BBC, even though they're in the same building, and they're virtually prohibited from selling anything in the UK. Add in the fact that the rest of the British media business is (understandably) quite pissed off about having a competitor that operates under a different set of rules, meaning they watch it like a hawk and squawk as soon as there's even a hint of unfair advantage, and you get all sorts of bizarro-world conflicts and overblown solutions like this that throw the baby out with the bathwater.
(Disclaimer: I used to work for a company owned by BBC Worldwide. This is my personal opinion.)
> [...] making the content available to UK audiences is not
> as simple as removing the ads. bbc.com/Future is a
> commercial website produced by BBC Worldwide. Under the
> BBC’s fair trading rules, commercial websites are not
> allowed to receive unfair promotion from the BBC’s public
> services. This prevents us from being able to provide Future
> on bbc.co.uk
Essentially, if the BBC shows you this content, BSkyB cries unfair, and - in their opinion - The World Ends.
Nothing whatsoever to do with BSkyB, don't be silly. What that says is that the commercially-led, sponsored content of BBC.com is not content which they wish to (or would be allowed to) display on bbc.co.uk.
"BBC Future" in particular exists because it is ripe for sponsorship by companies that want to be associated with blue-sky thinking and "building the future of tomorrow" - Honda, Huawei, etc.
The BBC go to the extra step of blocking bbc.com in the UK purely because they realise that most people would not appreciate the difference between the two sites and just increasingly associate the BBC name with commercially-led content, which is deleterious to the non-commercial image that makes UK residents feel better about paying the licence fee.
BBC/the UK government should stand up to Rupert Murdoch on this issue, rather than creating so-called "fair trading rules" which harm UK license payers.
Besides, Facebook and Twitter (external commercial websites) receive plenty of unfair promotion from the BBC.
My understanding is that they're not allowed to serve that website in the UK because it contains advertising and they're not allowed to advertise in the UK. I'm not sure where I heard/read that though.
What's idiotic is that nowhere do they actually explain that's the reason they block access, instead they just give a meaningless non-answer about it being a commercial venture, ignoring the fact that plenty of other BBC Worldwide run commercial things, such as http://www.bbcshop.com/, are available in the UK.
All it would take is a slightly more apologetic page that spells out the actual legal reasons they can't make the content available, and people would probably get a lot less annoyed. Instead, every time a link is posted to BBC Future, people have the same reaction and ask the same questions. And if you search, you'll find plenty of blog posts and articles with people complaining and trying to figure out why the content is blocked in the UK, with absolutely no effort on the part of BBC Worldwide to clear things up.
It really seems to be a case of total incompetence on behalf of BBC Worldwide. The licence fee is already controversial, and stuff like this only serves to toxify their brand and give ammunition to their enemies. It's baffling.
People have complained in the past[1] and only received the same vague BS that the blocking notice gives. The Daily Mail ran an attack piece when BBC Future launched[2], but it didn't prompt them to change anything. Whether due to incompetence or apathy, BBC Worldwide seem incapable or unwilling to improve their communications.
That's not the case, because the main BBC websites (e.g. bbc.co.uk) serve the same content to UK and non-UK visitors, with adverts showing to the latter, so they could easily do that on this site too.
Another solution is to put the URL into Google Translate, set the 'To' language to English and the 'From' language to something like Arabic or Chinese so nothing on the page will actually get translated.
The idea that this is a potential haven after a man-made apocalyptic event is very much in line with the "well, we fucked up that environment, let's try this one next" way we've led most of our existence so far.
Don't get me wrong, this is interesting. But that as even a secondary motivation is fairly repulsive.
The qualifier, "to do science" in the above quote is important. Nuclear submarines stay submerged for up to three months, with normal patrols lasting 3 to 6 weeks.