Been a while since we’ve had a good old fashioned technical glitch; I thought this had posted yesterday evening and then I went to bed, so this week’s update is slightly belated. Welcome to June.

This class is Coastal and Marine Management: Practical Applications and Challenges, and despite an overlong and slightly vague title, the class itself is covering actual information. We’ve been talking about why, on a global level, do Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) struggle to get implemented. A lot of it is money, because no one ever wants to cough up funding to do maintenance and monitoring even though that is bulk of literally all projects, they’re supposed to last longer than the time it takes to set them up, it’s why you established them in the first place, and it’s beginning to drive me a little crazy how bad people are at conceptualizing the future. You’re fighting against entropy! That’s a worthy opponent! It’s going to take a constant inflow of energy and money!

Anyway, some of it is also the nightmare that is international maritime law; there’s SO many agreements and working groups and NGOs and the whole artifice is just a little fragile, and it would be a little funny if it wasn’t such a headache. It can take these committees a decade to define their damn terms, and I can’t even argue that that isn’t a good use of time because words have to have meanings otherwise all your problems are worse. We were reading snippets of the proceedings for a treaty regarding international waters and one of the representatives said, “Gentlemen, we defined this term in the 90s. It is now 2015, can we move along” and it makes me so relived I’m not a UN diplomat. We have to write a 2000 word essay about this treaty and its implications for ecosystem based management, and I’m only struggling a little because I just don’t think I have 2000 words worth of thoughts; all I have so far is: woof. also Yikes. And that’s just not essay length.

We have a final exam for class, which is writing two 1000 word essays about topics that will be revealed in the exam session, all in 2 hours. I’m a tiny bit fretful because I just don’t write essays that fast, and certainly not good ones. Ah well. That’s a next week problem.

Wednesday was 9C and actually sunny, so I ignored all my homework, climbed through the micro-forest, and sat on a rock and read for most of the afternoon. I had lovely time.

I’ve also been re-watching a lot of old Nova episodes in a fit of nostalgia, and there’s something very reassuring about the things I loved as child still being good. My favorite is still the Four Winged Dinosaur episode, where after finding several fossils of a dinosaur species with feather impressions off the legs as well as the arms, they built an articulated model and put it in MIT’s wind-tunnel to test its potential glide ratios.