April 03, 2003
The Kraken wakes
God in heaven. They just caught this giant squid off New Zealand. It weights 330 pounds and, apparently, was feasting on "Patagonian Toothfish" which themselves are about six feet long. As one of the scientists said in a story about this on CNN.com, "This is a very aggressive animal and moves quickly. If you fell in the water next to it you would be in big trouble."
No kidding. As the story also notes:
The half-grown female colossal squid is only the second intact example of the monster cephalopod known to have been found, said marine biologist Steve O'Shea of New Zealand's national museum.
"I've seen 105 giant squid, but seeing something like this is pretty sensational," O'Shea told Reuters.
Okay, maybe this guy is a bit blase after having stared down his 100th giant squid. But for me, this is more proof that we need something like a NASA space program for the ocean. Not to diss outer space -- I'm as much of a fan of space exploration as anyone else, believe me. But if we can spent billions of dollars over the the last 30 years hunting for signs of life on hunks of frozen rock like Mars or Io, why the heck aren't we more interested in the deep sea? It's surrounding us on all sides, it's about 99.9% completely unexplored ... and it's teeming with incredibly strange forms of life that want to kill us.
Man, I can't even look at that picture anymore. It's seriously freaking me out.
Posted by Clive Thompson at April 03, 2003 03:21 PM
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Clearly, you are a man who needs to see more giant squid.
Ahahahahha!
Also, I'm never going to be able to eat sushi again.
The giant squid is a mysterious creature. When I visited the Natural History Museum in Washington, D.C. a few years ago, they had an exhibit on the giant squid. I remember they mentioned the fact that live giant squids had never been observed in the wild. Scientists had only found dead ones (or parts of them) washed up on beaches. So I assume when this guy says he has seen 105 giant squid, he means dead ones.
Man, you're reading my mind!
See first post at: http://www.melanson.ca/
Great minds think alike!!
this is stupid i thought you were talking about the book not some giant squid thankx for wasting my time
That bad boy is wonderful, and yes folks they get much bigger than that. However, off the west coast of Mexico they have a resident squid type called the humbolt squid. They grow to 1.5m in length plus the arms and they hunt in packs. Signalling to one another with bright light emissions from their chromatophors there is a video of two divers filming them flashing. Its an attack sequence. Several squid drag the diver down into the depths as his mate keeps filming. 15 seconds later he comes past in full ascent which is very dangerous. He got bent, but he lived to tell the tale.
Steph, its not stupid its fascinating and if you werent always reading dated literature (although classic) and spent some time looking at what the oceans held you'd probably agree.
That gives us a pretty good starting point to understand a lot more about variables, and that's what we'll be examining next lesson. Those new variable types I promised last lesson will finally make an appearance, and we'll examine a few concepts that we'll use to organize our data into more meaningful structures, a sort of precursor to the objects that Cocoa works with. And we'll delve a little bit more into the fun things we can do by looking at those ever-present bits in a few new ways.
But variables get one benefit people do not
Since the Heap has no definite rules as to where it will create space for you, there must be some way of figuring out where your new space is. And the answer is, simply enough, addressing. When you create new space in the heap to hold your data, you get back an address that tells you where your new space is, so your bits can move in. This address is called a Pointer, and it's really just a hexadecimal number that points to a location in the heap. Since it's really just a number, it can be stored quite nicely into a variable.
When a variable is finished with it's work, it does not go into retirement, and it is never mentioned again. Variables simply cease to exist, and the thirty-two bits of data that they held is released, so that some other variable may later use them.
Let's see an example by converting our favoriteNumber variable from a stack variable to a heap variable. The first thing we'll do is find the project we've been working on and open it up in Project Builder. In the file, we'll start right at the top and work our way down. Under the line:
When the machine compiles your code, however, it does a little bit of translation. At run time, the computer sees nothing but 1s and 0s, which is all the computer ever sees: a continuous string of binary numbers that it can interpret in various ways.
Note first that favoriteNumbers type changed. Instead of our familiar int, we're now using int*. The asterisk here is an operator, which is often called the "star operator". You will remember that we also use an asterisk as a sign for multiplication. The positioning of the asterisk changes its meaning. This operator effectively means "this is a pointer". Here it says that favoriteNumber will be not an int but a pointer to an int. And instead of simply going on to say what we're putting in that int, we have to take an extra step and create the space, which is what does. This function takes an argument that specifies how much space you need and then returns a pointer to that space. We've passed it the result of another function, , which we pass int, a type. In reality, is a macro, but for now we don't have to care: all we need to know is that it tells us the size of whatever we gave it, in this case an int. So when is done, it gives us an address in the heap where we can put an integer. It is important to remember that the data is stored in the heap, while the address of that data is stored in a pointer on the stack.
Let's see an example by converting our favoriteNumber variable from a stack variable to a heap variable. The first thing we'll do is find the project we've been working on and open it up in Project Builder. In the file, we'll start right at the top and work our way down. Under the line:
When a variable is finished with it's work, it does not go into retirement, and it is never mentioned again. Variables simply cease to exist, and the thirty-two bits of data that they held is released, so that some other variable may later use them.
Let's see an example by converting our favoriteNumber variable from a stack variable to a heap variable. The first thing we'll do is find the project we've been working on and open it up in Project Builder. In the file, we'll start right at the top and work our way down. Under the line:
i was raped by a giant squid in my bath tub
