Salmon Days!

This weekend is Salmon days in Issaquah and despite the horribly rainy day I enjoyed visiting the local hatchery and talking to a few people from F.I.S.H. (Friends of Issaquah Salmon Hatchery). Going for salmon days was quite a no-brainer, since the moment I stepped out of my cute house, I'm in downtown Issaquah right where the Salmon days celebrations are going on.

The story of Salmon's is fascinating as I learnt today!

Salmon's are in fresh water and then migrate to the Ocean for a period of 4-5 years where they mature and then return home (homecoming!) travelling miles and miles of Oceans,seas and lakes, typically to the streams where they were spawned to reproduce. This is the last stage of their life and after laying the eggs they soon die. It's fascinating that they travel all that distance to be back they were born.

Even more intriguing is the way they get there. There is apparently no conlusive answer, but I was told today the friendly and knowledge docent at the hatchery that it is strongly believed that while in the Ocean Salmon's navigate through the earth's magnetic field. Once they reach the freshwaters they use their highly (and the way he described highly was that if you put a drop of ink in an olympic size swimming pool the salmon's can sense the difference in the water through the smell!) developed sense of smell to get back to where they were born.

Before the knew the story watching them climb up the ladders and return home was something fun to watch. After I knew the story it was touching in a profound way :)

If you do get a chance, watch the salmon coming home! It'll be worth your time.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

going mobile !

Using the push registry to launch midlets : MIDP 1.0 specified only one way to start a MIDlet: manual activation by the user. However the MIDP 2.0 specification adds two new mechanisms to launch a MIDlet: in response to an incoming connection or at a scheduled time. While the process is not really difficult as explained in the papers and articles given on the net ( http://developers.sun.com/techtopics/mobility/midp/questions/pushregistry/ ) The actual implementation of it is tricky mainly because of the practical difficulties and platform implementations. We needed to auto start a MIDlet each time the phone boots up and the most obvious choice seemed to be using the Java Push Registry Alarm method. Having read a couple of tutorials and seen the example code given it didn’t seem something too difficult to do – however, and such is the software jungle, overcoming the practical difficulties seemed to be the biggest hurdle. For example, in my case I was using Eclipse 3.0 with the java WTK ...
Read more

Expertise

Some of you may be aware of the interesting research done by Dr. Anders Ericsson around the theme of "Acquisition of Expert Performance and Deliberate Practice" An important finding is that it normally takes 10,000 hours of practice to become expert in any discipline. Of course, I can imagine this would vary a lot depending on kind of practice and how it builds on your earlier skill. So I did some quick behind the napkin math: 1. Practice Required = 10,000 hours Assuming a concentrated effort to put at least 4 hours of practice into honing your expertise in your chosen field - the other being taken up by other information tasks (e.g. did you know a large part of the so called “information work” is actually searching for information? – fun fact I gathered while working on Enterprise Search ) 2. Time required to gain that expertise = 10,000/4 = 2500 days 3. Which makes it about 7 years to gain expertise in a discipline. Interesting!
Read more

3 Idiots and Chak De India

I'm a strong believer that who we are shapes a lot of our decisions. So assuming that hypothesis is true, let's try to look at two roles from two major bollywood actors: Aamir Khan and Shahrukh Khan. The purpose to try to see how how they perceive themselves - or project themselves if you will - based on what appeals to them in a role. The two roles we'll look at are - Shahrukh as Kabir Khan in Chak De India and Aamir Khan as Ranchoddas (Rancho) in 3 idiots. Take Racho's character, A genius , who believes the right way is to chase excellence and not success (box office?) which will chase after you if you excel at what you do. The traditional system doesn't understand him and resists his ways at first but ultimately he proves his mettle. Interesting to note that Aamir's characters doesn't do badly in the courses but tops it - despite doing things against the system, and eventually is very 'successful'. If you remove the context of the movie from the a...
Read more