A very good and long time diver friend of mine from the upper
east coast posted this to the SCUBA-SE list today. I first met
Carl on the old rec.scuba newsgroup in 1994. Since then he has
been my guest diving here in CA a couple of times when he's
here on business. He's an incredibly intelligent guy with very
diverse interests usually tying into SCUBA somehow.

Anyway, he's involved in First Lego League, a competition of
sorts where kids, and sometimes adults, use Legos to do all kinds of things. This one involves sea turtles.

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Many of you problem wonder what I've been doing with my time. Well,
along
with some personal issues, I coach a couple of FLL (First Lego League)
teams. These teams have yearly challenges to construct robots to
perform
missions on a 4x8 table constructed to certain specifications, build
teamwork, conduct research, etc.

What makes this apropos for scuba-se is that this years theme was Ocean
Odyssey. As part of our teams research project, they investigated Sea
Turtles, how their populations have declined from around 1 BILLION
around
1503 to somewhere in the 1-2 MILLION range today (with a lot of that
happening in the last 25-50 years!).

They investigated the problems they're still facing to this day, some
solutions that have been put in place in an attempt to help and
mitigate the
dangers, and proposed some new and innovative solutions to help them
recover
even more (they are FAR from our of the woods!!!). If anyone is
interested,
please feel free to contact me, we have a complete research paper
written on
the subject. We are also working on a web page that hopefully will be
up in
the next month or so.

Now for the scuba related part :^)

Here's a couple of links to one of their creations that goes along with
their research... FYI, The picture used for this creation was taken by
my
son Joshua (12). Both of my sons are certified scuba divers. 2005 was
Joshua's 3rd year taking underwater digital pictures and Jonathan's (10
years old) first (he only took a few).

Both are pictures of the same thing, but I resized the first one for
people
with slower links/smaller monitors and so you can see the entire
project at
once...

"Small" version
http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?i=1594455

"Large" version (4x size of small one)
http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?i=1594457

Tonight, I will also post the original picture that was used.

Let me know what you think - both of the picture as well as the
"creation" :^)

Our team is still looking for sponsors and we have another followup
project
to this one that is going to be *FANTASTIC*. If you want further
details,
email me, but you will be sworn to a vow of silence!!! :^)

Let me know if you're interested in helping out - the ultimate goal is
to
help the sea turtles and THAT is good for everyone - ESPECIALLY DIVERS!

Thanks
Carl