Clancy Brothers, The Mermaid (better than Animal Planet on mermaids)

Our song for the day is "The Mermaid", by Tommy Makem and the Clancy Brothers. I don't have the lyrics memorized anymore, but it was one of my favorite Irish folk songs to sing:

Why is the narrator alive to tell the story after his ship sank to the bottom of the sea? I think it's because the mermaid rescued him.

While I'm fond of fictional works involving mermaids, I draw the line at cable channels trying to drive up ratings by claiming that mermaids actually exist. This is a problem with Animal Planet:

In May 2012, a Mermaids: The Body Found, a television docufiction aired on Animal Planet which centered around the experiences of former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists, showing a CGI recreation of amateur sound and video of a beached mermaid and discussing scientific theories involving the existence of mermaids. In July 2012 in response to public inquiries, and the possibility that some viewers may have mistaken the programme for a documentary, the National Ocean Service (a branch of NOAA) made the unusual declaration that "no evidence of aquatic humanoids has ever been found". 

A year later in May 2013, Animal Planet aired another docu-fiction titled Mermaids: The New Evidence featuring "previously unreleased video evidence", including what a former Iceland GeoSurvey scientist witnessed while diving off the coast of Greenland in an underwater submersible. The videos provide two different shots of what appears to be a humanoid creature approaching and touching their vehicle. NOAA once again released a statement saying "The person identified as a NOAA scientist was an actor." The actor is separately identified as David Evans of Ontario, Canada.

It appears that market incentives aren't set up to prevent for-profit TV channels from boosting ratings with mermaid pseudo-documentaries.

Siberian regionalist flag

I recently played in a historical live-action roleplaying game about the Russians and British in colonial India. It got me curious about the history of Siberian independence movements (in the game, I started one, and courted British support in breaking away from Moscow). Apparently in 1917, a "Siberian National Banner" was chosen, and this is what it looked like:

Kazantzev, who designed it, said: "The National Siberian Banner shall be a combination of 2 colours: white and green. White colour means Siberian snow, whilst green colour - Siberian taiga. The banner shall be rectangular, split into 2 parts diagonally from the left top to right bottom. Thus, the upper triangle shall be of green colour, and the lower one - of white colour."

I agree that green and white is a good color scheme for Siberia, but I think a more symmetrical design would've looked better. 

Astatine

I'm planning to post random cool stuff that I found somewhere on the internet every Wednesday. Today's post is just a quote about astatine, the 85th element on the periodic table. Its name comes from the Greek word astatos (αστατος), meaning "unstable".

Randall Munroe of xkcd writes in What If?:

We don’t know what astatine looks like, because, as Lowe put it, “that stuff just doesn’t want to exist.” It’s so radioactive (with a half-life measured in hours) that any large piece of it would be quickly vaporized by its own heat. Chemists suspect that it has a black surface, but no one really knows.  

There’s no material safety data sheet for astatine. If there were, it would just be the word “NO” scrawled over and over in charred blood.