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Vessel does not sink and crew gets safely away in incident off South Africa

By Pete Thomas, Grindiv, May 08, 2014

Video showing a great white shark repeatedly biting an inflatable boat before its wide-eyed crew is being widely shared this week, along with sensational headlines such as this from the Daily Mail:

“Let go of the boat, Jaws! Terrifying moment great white shark sunk its teeth into a rubber dinghy in the middle of the sea.”

And this from Huffington Post: “Shark mistakes inflatable boat for chew toy.”

Actually,
it was quite a spectacular incident last month off South Africa. But
the MaxAnimal film crew did not seem overly concerned as the shark
teethed on and ultimately popped one of the vessel’s pontoons.

MaxAnimal wrote in its video description: “Is the scariest part when the shark eyes our folks on the boat? Ah, yeah.”

But the boat did not sink–it can be seen motoring away at the end of the video–and nobody was injured, according to a YouTube comment by MaxAnimal.

Great white shark takes another bite in what appears to be investigatory behavior; image is a video screen grab

But why was the shark biting their boat?

Amber Marlow was probably accurate when she commented: “Not an ‘attack’ – he was just exploring the boat, and subsequently chomped it to death out of curiosity.”

More than likely, the crew used chum to lure the shark to the boat, and once the shark was close it was simply being a shark by investigate potential prey.

“No uncommon behavior,” Christopher Lowe, a white shark expert at Cal State University, Long Beach, told GrindTv. “But, staying near an adult white shark in an inflatable boat is not a smart move. Expensive rookie mistake!”

Great white shark sinks teeth into rubber boat; image is a video screen grab

Added Martin Graf, whose Shark Diver company specializes in great white shark expeditions at Mexico’s Guadalupe Island:

“I think they had a bait in the water that got the shark close. The vibrations from the engine make it appear alive and the shark is testing it, to see if it is edible. They also bite outboard engines, because of electrolysis that comes from it, for the same reason.”

So it’s good for the crew that the shark was simply investigating. Had the boat been much smaller the shark might have chosen to launch an ambush attack. That would have been truly sensational.

Link to this story

A song from the bollywood movie, Jab We Met starring Shahid Kapoor & Kareena Kapoor.

Photo caption: 50 years of the cassette: In 1963, Philips Electronics officially introduced the “compact cassette,” which contained a length of audio tape approximately 3.15 millimeters wide that ran at 1-7/8 inches per second. It was intended to replace the bulkier reel-to-reel tape and be used for dictation, but over the next 50 years, it would prove to be far more versatile. Lou Ottens, shown here, led Philips’ team.

By Doug Gross, CNN, Thu May 8, 2014

(CNN) — Forget the cloud, and rework your mental image of those mysterious data centers. Sony has reinvented a tool for storing a mind-numbing amount of data:

A cassette tape.

But this isn’t one of those rattling plastic tapes you used to compile your ultimate summer road-trip jams and, too often, were probably forced to rewind with a pencil.

Sony’s record-breaking magnetic tape technology allows it to store 180 terabytes of data on a single cartridge. That’s the same amount of storage as 1,184 iPod Classics, Apple’s roomiest music player, which can hold about 40,000 songs. Using that number, Sony’s new cassette could technically store about 47.3 million songs of its own.

That’s enough jams for a really long road trip — say, driving in Atlanta during a snowstorm.

If you’re more of a movie buff, think of it this way. The cartridge, which stores 148GB of data per inch of tape, has room for 3,700 Blu-ray discs full of your favorites.

Cassette tape could hold 47M songs

The number obliterates the standing record, set in 2010 when Fuji developed a tape that could hold 35 terabytes of data.

Sony, which worked with IBM on the tape, presented the new technology over the weekend at InterMag Europe, a magnetics conference in Dresden, Germany.

In very simple terms, the technology involves shrinking the microscopic magnetic particles on tape that store data. On average, the new particles are 7.7 nanometers wide. There are 10 million nanometers in one centimeter.

In a news release, Sony said it would like to pursue a commercial use for the new cassette tape technology, as well as continuing to improve it.

But if you’re dreaming of someday popping that tape into some sort of digital-age boombox and pushing “play,” you may be in for a bit of a disappointment.

Tape has the potential for massive data storage, but it’s unwieldy to actually use. Recording to, and retrieving data from, tape takes a lot longer than digital storage devices and players we’ve become accustomed to in an era of Web streaming.

So, it’s a lot more likely that tape will be used to back up huge databases than to save, and play, our music collections. That’s too bad. We liked the idea of needing only one cassette for a cross-country drive.