March 08, 2005

3/9 - The Slut of Fisk?

Update: Thanks to Jason Lefkowitz (see comments) we achieved translation and are now fairly certain the slut of fisk means "the end of fish."

En stor del av överfisket började faktiskt tidigare än på 50- talet? Det visade en uppmärksammad studie i den vetenskapliga tidskriften Science redan för två år sedan (läs mer på: http://albaeco.com/htm/artiklar/webbart/fiskehistoria.htm). Studien visade också att överfiske gör så att havsekosystemen blir mer känsliga för övergödning, klimatförändringar, invaderande arter och sjukdomar. Vi jämför alltså ofta med ett tillstånd i havsekosystemen som vi tror var “ursprungligt”, men som faktiskt redan det var väldigt påverkat av överfiske och andra mänskliga aktiviteter. Detta fenomen kallas “Shifting baselines” (läs mer på: http://www.shiftingbaselines.org)

fiskslut.jpg


Name that country: In this country, if you sell fisk you are a slut.

Posted by Randy Olson at March 8, 2005 11:45 AM
Comments

A quick WHOIS on the domain shows that it's owned by a guy in Sweden. So my guess is the language is Swedish.

Not that I can translate Swedish to English or anything, you're on your own there :-)

Posted by: Jason Lefkowitz at March 8, 2005 03:58 PM

Aha!

Check it out, I found an online Swedish-English dictionary:

http://www-lexikon.nada.kth.se/skolverket/swe-eng.shtml

Not that it helps much with the page text, but at least we can use it to make sense of the image...

FISK: "English translation: Fish." (Makes sense -- anyone who's been to Minnesota knows about lutefisk...)

SLUT: "English translation: over, at an end, finished."

So it would appear the graphic is a clever way of saying that the fish are gone ("FISH", with "GONE" spraypainted over it).

If I was a betting man I would say that based on some other words in the story itself it looks like it's about how sensitive ecosystems are to human activities like overfishing. And it credits you for the idea of "shifting baselines" ("läs mer på" == "read more at"), so it's good :-)

Posted by: Jason Lefkowitz at March 8, 2005 04:12 PM

Ha! In that case, I am slut.

Thanks, Jason.

Posted by: Randy Olson at March 8, 2005 04:53 PM