Red Tide

I found an article that really caught my interest from last week, which I’m sure you’ve probably already heard all about, maybe even took part in. It’s about the ten-year study on red tide that Mote Marine finished up last Thursday.

I had never heard of red tides until last year when I had some friends in the Ecology of Water class and they had to do an assignment on it. My family has a condo on the Atlantic coast in Cocoa Beach that I used to visit at least once every summer, but even then I never knew about it. Actually, I’m not even sure if they have red tides on the East coast or not, that’s something I’ll have to look up later.

Anyway, the study is the “most cohesive and longest-running scientific study looking at how humans are affected by Florida’s red tide.” What I found most interesting was not the negative side effects to human health that was tested, but rather the findings that could lead to potential new drug treatments. K. brevis was found to have approximately twelve toxins that could be harmful, yet there are at least three antitoxins as well. One of them is being used to develop a drug to treat cystic fibrosis. It makes sense to me that there would be an antitoxin to a lung disease when the blooms themselves cause problems in the lungs. I’m relating it to a snakebite and how the anti-venom comes from the snake itself.

Here’s a link to the article on the Mote Marine website: http://www.mote.org/index.php?src=directory&view=topic&srctype=detail&back=topic&refno=1179

SRQ

I know for a fact that I will not be making it off campus this week since it's the first week back from Spring Break and we're going to be pressing on ahead in my CA classes. I went home to Minnesota over break, like I do on just about all school breaks, so I've been to the SRQ airport quite a few times over the years.

It's extremely nice to have an airport so close, for when you need it, but other times it can get annoying with how much noise it causes. At home I live about 20 minutes from the Minneapolis airport, and it gets noisy from time to time even being that far away, yet here at Ringling I hardly ever hear an airplane overhead.

Not many people think of noise as being a sort of pollution, but if it disrupts your everyday life I'd classify it as pollution. Most outdoor noise is from either construction or transportation vehicles like airplanes, motor vehicles, and railways. It can even affect peoples' health because when people get annoyed, it usually leads to aggression, high stress, sleeping disturbance, and hypertension. Not to mention it helps aid in hearing loss, but that's usually if you're exposed to noise everyday for a certain amount of time.

I thought it was strange that SRQ, even though it is a small airport, is so quiet so I did a little research and found out that SRQ has a noise barrier design in place. There was a lot of mumbo jumbo I couldn't understand, but I was able to gather that they have two noise barriers: one extending along Runway 14, and a noise wall to the northwest of where they extended Runway 14. I never realized them, but apparently they have a nice aesthetic design so the community doesn't complain about them.

Pitch Adventure

This week the only time I was able to get off campus was yesterday with a group of friends in the CA department. We all met in North Hall to try and brainstorm some story ideas for our second Pre-Production pitch. After about an hour of not having much success we ended up deciding that we needed some ice cream to stimulate our brain cells out of hibernation, so we all piled into Jackie Hines' car and drove to Coldstone on Main Street.

The last time I went there was probably close to a year ago. I've been across the street to the Hollywood 20 movie theater a couple times since the beginning of the school year, but that's about it. Nothing had really changed that I noticed. Although, at Coldstone there was only one woman working behind the counter and we had a large group of about twelve people so obviously it took a little while before we all got our ice cream. There's a very nice fountain just around the corner that we found and ended up playing at for a bit before sitting down and trying to brainstorm again. But yet AGAIN, we didn't have much luck until a friend mentioned a board game he has that would help us come up with ideas.

Oh, and I finally found out where the Sarasota Courthouse is located. We’ve talked about it in class a couple times but I never had seen it before. It’s a rather pretty building and the little garden out front was very nice.