by thepackrat
Innovan wrote:
misteralan wrote:
There is a ****load of plastic floating around the world's oceans these days
False and grossly over-exaggerated by people that get confused dealing with powers of magnitude. NPR and other failed-at-science organizations have claimed there is a plastic patch in the Pacific "twice the size of Texas".
Yet it's too small to spotted by satellite.
Away from media exaggerations, its appears to be a 50 mile x 50 mile patch. Not the 500,000 square mile patch claimed by the media.
Likewise claims that it has been increasing 10x in size each decade since the 1950s, and that the oceans are filled with more plastic than plankton, are false.
The amount of plastic in the world's oceans hasn't increased since the mid-1980s, despite greater production and consumption of materials made from plastic. The elimination of off-shore garbage dumping in international waters seems to be the largest factor.
http://notrickszone.com/2011/01/05/the-great-pacific-garbage...
Here's an article which reiterates a couple of your points, but disagrees with some others and has a link to some recent published research.
http://io9.com/5911969/lies-youve-been-told-about-the-pacifi...
To go back to talking about games, it's interesting to note that all that plastic in one area represents an opportunity. At some point, petrochemical prices will get high enough that harvesting it for plastic could become an interesting activity. I wonder how you could make agame that models making harvesting runs through a slowly rotating mass of stuff without far too much fiddly board upkeep.
I think it's sad when cool games ideas might not ever be practical on a physical board :( Maybe tablets could save it.
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