Word: sorting
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...curious why you decided to write it. Well, Susan Sontag said something which has always fascinated me. She said that her novels don't exist as ideas in her head. They exist only as they are written. I was just ready to write this book. The gun sort of went off and it fell on the page, almost as if I was channeling...
...what was it? An oil slick? Some sort of immense, amorphous organism adrift in some of the planet's most remote waters? Maybe a worrisome sign of global climate change? Or, as folks who followed the blob via the Internet wondered, was it something insidious and perhaps even carnivorous like the man-eating jello from the old Steve McQueen movie that inspired the Alaska phenomenon's nickname? (Read Richard Corliss's review of The Thing, a sci-fi film set in the Arctic...
...hunters got word to the U.S. Coast Guard, which immediately sent two spill-response experts to fly over the mass, which looked sort of rusty from the air. The Coast Guard also approached it by boat. The North Slope Borough, the local government for the vast and sparsely populated cap of Alaska, sent its own people out of the main village of Barrow to have a look. They scooped up jars of the stuff for analysis in a state lab in Anchorage...
...might be a little weird. Brenda Konar, a marine biology professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, says algal outbreaks can and do occur even in icy Arctic waters. It just takes the right combination of nutrients, light and water temperature, she says. "Algae blooms," she says. "It's sort of like a swimming pool that hasn't been cleaned in a while." The blob, Konar says, is a microalgae made up of "billions and billions of individuals." "We've observed large blooms in the past off Barrow, although none of them at all like this," Barry Sherr, an Oregon...
There's a surprising amount of vindictiveness within the department. Just one example: officers are given "highway therapy" - assignments extremely far from their homes - as punishment for angering the wrong people. Is that sort of thing particular to the NYPD? I think it's policing in general. It's very vindictive and retaliatory...