Talk:Exploding whale

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Exploding whale is currently a Biology and medicine good article nominee. Nominated by Cheers, FriyMan ^talk at 08:07, 13 March 2017 (UTC)

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Exploding whale is a former featured article. Please see the links under Article milestones below for its original nomination page (for older articles, check the nomination archive) and why it was removed.

This article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page as Today's featured article on November 7, 2004.

Article milestones
Date	Process	Result
September 18, 2004	Featured article candidate	Promoted
January 17, 2007	Featured article review	Kept
May 9, 2008	Featured article review	Kept
February 27, 2011	Featured article review	Demoted
Current status: Former featured article

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Toastk (talk · contribs)

Inconsistent masses of sperm whales

Florence, Oregon, USA: ... a 14 m (45 ft 11 in), eight-ton sperm whale ...

Tainan, Taiwan: ... a ... sperm whale, measuring 17 m (55 ft 9 in) long and weighing 50 tons ...

These two masses are inconsistent. There is no way that two sperm whales of a similar length can have such disparity in the masses. Both masses are probably incorrect, because the sperm whale article suggests that sperm whales have masses between 14 and 41 tons. -- B.D.Mills (T, C) 02:24, 12 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Indeed, it is. A 45 ft (13.7 m) sperm whale would weigh between 25 and 30 metric tons (Ellis, The Book of Whales, 1980, pp 102-103). And the estimated weight (that's all it could be) for the 56 ft (17 m) individual is about right. News reports are usually way off when it comes to estimating weight (recently a 43-ft fin whale was "estimated" at only FIVE tons). SHFW70 (talk) 22:05, 24 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Paul Cooper's opinion

Paul Cooper, the explosives expert, mentioned in one of his short courses on explosives engineering that blowing up carcasses into tiny morsels for scavengers is a fine way to get rid of them, but the rule of thumb is that you need a mass of explosives equal to the mass of the carcass. Half a ton of dynamite for an eight-ton whale is grossly inadequate. On the other hand, eight tons of TNT would be a bit tough on the local glazing.

Since I can't verifiably link Cooper's comments, I don't think that they belong in the article. But I thought this might be of interest for the talk page. 192.12.184.2 (talk) 17:37, 12 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

New section needed

New section ("In popular culture") needed.

Items for this section:

1) Fallout 2

2) The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

etc.

Can somebody make it? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Masterius (talk • contribs) 16:24, 28 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

None of those examples add enlightenment to the topic, and tend to attract drive-by useless trivia. See WP:TRIVIA. —EncMstr (talk) 18:36, 28 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Hoax?

I think this is either a hoax or a very bad joke. --75.10.49.208 (talk) 01:55, 5 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

It's probably a copyright violation so Wikipedia shouldn't link to it, but you can easily find the 1970 television clip with a Google search on exploding whale video. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:51, 6 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

It's neither. - Tbsdy lives (formerly Ta bu shi da yu) ^talk 13:25, 7 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Copyedits ... and more

I don't really know how some articles get FA. Be that as it may, I've copyedited the carp outta this article -- trimmed some of the blubber, you might say. Or not. ;^D The only real change I made to the semantics was to remove the dimensions given for the whale in Tianan City, since those dimensions were not cited (I think... I was not rigorous in checking), and (as noted above) they are suspect. I also rearranged the order of stuff somewhat.

Oh, ok. I made a major change to the lede, if you must know. (lol) Controversy, anyone? As far as I'm concerned, the phrase "exploding whale" refers to the internet meme event in Oregon. The fact that other incidents also fall under this rubric is certainly notable, interesting, and encyclopedic, but this article (I think) should say what it says now: that 'exploding whale' most often refers to the Oregon incident. BRD if you disagree, but I'd also appreciate a comment here if you do so. Eaglizard (talk) 04:51, 15 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

You really should check when that was made FA. It was like 2 or 3 years ago, and since then it's changed hugely, and the standard of course has risen. - Tbsdy lives (formerly Ta bu shi da yu) ^talk 14:01, 5 November 2009 (UTC) (the original author)[reply]

I think it remains featured because it's now an indelible part of Wikipedia culture. Tisane ^talk/_stalk 03:49, 2 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Featured quality?

I know this article has sentimental value, but is it really up to today's featured article standards? Tisane (talk) 07:32, 7 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Quite frankly, in my opinion, it's not. This article achieved featured status in 2004, when Wikipedia was much smaller. This article is not even comparable to other featured articles such as Cougar and American Airlines Flight 77. -xwingsx- (talk) 20:42, 14 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

this is a classic case of changes to the a reticle making it degrade over time. Much worse than it was before. - 114.76.227.0 (talk) 08:42, 9 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Time discrepancy

1970 is not "approximately twenty-five years earlier" than 1990. - Elmarco 15:41, 12 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Guts?

Not exactly the most scientific term available.

"The explosion threw guts and chunks of whale flesh over 800 ft..." How about "The explosion threw chunks of whale flesh over 800 ft?" —Preceding unsigned comment added by Slipdigit (talk • contribs) 14:04, 12 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

"Others" section

As pointed out in the FAR, none of the sources tie the other exploding-whale incidents to the 1970 one. As a result, the entire "others" section is synthesis and should be removed. Ten Pound Hammer, his otters and a clue-bat • ^{(Otters want attention)} 00:25, 17 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Although the article says that "The term exploding whale most often refers to an event at Florence, Oregon, in 1970", there is no reason why the article shouldn't also mention other examples. It is not necessary to "tie the other exploding-whale incidents to the 1970 one". JamesBWatson (talk) 11:18, 16 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

About the www.offbeatoregon.com citation:

One of the citations on this page leads to a newspaper article I wrote. I've been advised to declare this connection so it won't look like a conflict of interest, or as if I'm trying to pull a fast one for some free publicity. FWIW I make no money on my articles and the archives are licensed under Creative Commons 3.0. For more info, please see my Talk page. Finn-jd-john (talk) 17:58, 1 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

“In popular culture” section

On August 8 of 2008 the whole section was deleted with a comment about how it's “not because it's trivia, but because it's unsourced”. So several questions arise about it:

shouldn't there be source-request tags first, before deletion?
if the problem is only with sources, would it be ok to recover the section (or its parts) with additional source refs where needed?
higher on this page there was already a little talk on similar issue, where as an argument was used the Wikipedia:TRIVIA style guideline. I guess it was meant to be linked to this page, so I'll ask about the latter one. It says, that in case of passing mentions there should be included refs of significance, so at least in cases with poetry, song and children's book the whale mention is not a passing one.

So, I need help with sorting this all out. Thanks. DaemonDice (talk) 02:09, 29 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

A new incident in Faroe Islands

http://kvf.fo/netvarp/sv/2013/11/26/video-her-brestur-hvalurin — Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.78.142.203 (talk) 21:21, 26 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I added the KVF footage via the "External Media" template to the bottom of the article, along with the same footage from the Huffington Post. The HP footage is easier to download, has English text in the story, and has a title that warns those with queasy stomachs 2 times. Hopefully this won't surprise anybody who has read to the bottom of the article. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 03:22, 4 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Why is there no link to the Oregon Video?

Just curious... there is a whole paragraph about it and yet when links are added to the video we have people delete the links. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.226.213.17 (talk) 23:09, 26 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]