[English Movie Colossal (English) Download
Rancul Ratha
Colossal describes something as being very large in size, degree, or amount, as in I went to a colossal shopping mall that stretched for a mile. If something is colossal, it is enormous, gigantic, or massive.
Both colossal and colossus make a reference to the Colossus of Rhodes, an enormous statue of a Greek god that was one of the Seven Wonders of the World. The statue was said to be over 100 feet tall, and it was once a common myth that it straddled the harbor of Rhodes. The statue fell after an earthquake that occurred in the third century BCE.
The cemetery contains the remains of the Danish soldiers who fell at the battle of Idstedt (25th of July 1850), but the colossal Lion monument, erected by the Danes to commemorate their victory, was removed to Berlin in 1864.
The colossal squid is bigger than a giant squid. Its body is reddish brown and it lives up to 2000m below the surface of the Southern Ocean. It is the main food eaten by sperm whales. The colossal squid has ammonium chloride in its body, so it tastes bad for humans.
The colossal squid is thought to have a slow metabolic rate, requiring only around 30 g of prey daily.[2] Estimates of its energetic demands suggest that it is a slow-moving ambush predator, using its large eyes primarily for predator detection rather than active hunting.[2][3]
The eye is 27 cm (10.63 in) wide, with a lens 12 cm across. This is the largest eye of any known animal.[4] These measurements are of the partly collapsed specimen: when living the eye was probably 30 to 40 cm (12 to 16 in) across.[4]
WE HAVE rarely witnessed human tragedy on this scale: on 26 December 2004, after a colossal earthquake beneath the sea off Sumatra, giant tidal waves smashed into coastlines around the Indian Ocean, causing one of the worst catastrophes in history. Provisional figures indicate that at least 150,000 people were killed, another 500,000 were injured and 5 million lost, or were driven from, their homes. The disaster was international: the cataclysm struck 13 countries (eight in Asia, five in Africa), and took the lives of some 10,000 nationals from 45 countries around the world - including 2,000 Swedes, 1,000 Germans, 700 Italians, 500 Austrians, 400 Britons and 200 French. Mexicans, Colombians, Brazilians, Filipinos and others died too.
The presence of westerners and their high casualty rate, as well as contributing to the global impact of a catastrophe that happened - by terrible chance - during the celebration of Christmas and new year, helped generate intense media coverage. Sadly, that would not have been the case had the losses been limited to Asia. Western public opinion has understandably been traumatised by the scale of human suffering, destruction and desolation, and responded with an overwhelming desire to help and to express solidarity. Humanitarian organisations say that they have rarely encountered public and private generosity on such a scale.
Beyond the cataclysm, this identification with all those who suffered around the Indian Ocean has opened the eyes of many westerners to the reality of everyday living conditions in the affected countries. It is clear that the level of aid mobilised, however significant, falls far short of what is needed to resolve the structural problems faced by those involved.
It is a simple fact that any natural disaster will have far fewer victims in a rich than in a poor country. A year before the tsunami, on 26 December 2003, an earthquake measuring 6.8 on the Richter scale destroyed the city of Bam in Iran, and more than 30,000 people died. Yet a more violent shock, 8.0, on the Japanese island of Hokkaido on 26 September 2003, caused only a few injuries and no deaths. A 6.2 magnitude earthquake in Algeria on 21 May 2003 killed more than 3,000 people; yet nobody died when a more violent tremor (7.0) shook the entire northwest of Japan on 26 May 2003.
If the tsunami had happened in the Pacific Ocean, the number of victims would have been far fewer, as coastal states there, led by Japan and the United States, have finalised a detection and alert system to issue advance warning of any lethal tidal wave and give coastal populations adequate time to take shelter. Unfortunately the purchase, installation and upkeep of such a system is extremely expensive.
The Indian Ocean catastrophe moves us, not only by its scale and violence, but because the entire tragedy happened in a day. But if, over a year, we were to observe the countries and their inhabitants with the same interest that we are currently devoting to their plight, we would notice an even worse slow-motion human catastrophe. Every year, in the countries around the Bay of Bengal (India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Burma, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Maldives), several million people, most of them children, die because they have no access to clean water and must drink from polluted sources.
Public and private aid commitments to countries affected by the tsunami currently stand at some $3bn. But although the magnitude of this sum has been greeted with universal self-congratulation, it is nothing compared to other spending. The annual US military budget is $400bn. When, in the autumn of 2004, Florida was hit by a series of tropical cyclones, causing damage that, though significant, bore no comparison with the current disaster, the US government immediately allocated $3bn in relief. Realistically, the sums promised are insignificant in comparison with the needs of states overwhelmed by the tsunami.
Latest World Bank figures indicate that five of the affected countries owe more than $300bn in foreign debt. Annual repayments amount to $32bn, which is more than 10 times greater than the promised assistance. Around the world, indebted poor countries repay more than $230bn every year to the richer countries of the northern hemisphere. This is the world turned upside down. Since the tsunami it has been suggested that a moratorium might be applied to the debt burden of the devastated countries. But what is needed is outright cancellation of the debt. Recently the US persuaded its partners in the Paris Club of creditor nations to write off the debt of Iraq, occupied by its troops. If this can be done for Iraq, which is rich in oil and gas, why should it not be possible for countries that are infinitely poorer and afflicted by this catastrophe?
The UNDP has estimated that $80bn a year would be enough to guarantee every human being on earth access to basic services - drinking water, shelter, adequate food, primary education and healthcare. This figure is exactly the same as the supplementary budget that President Bush recently requested from Congress to finance the war in Iraq.
N2 - Background: We recently reported (Curr Biol 22:683-688, 2012) that the eyes of giant and colossal squid can grow to three times the diameter of the eyes of any other animal, including large fishes and whales. As an explanation to this extreme absolute eye size, we developed a theory for visual performance in aquatic habitats, leading to the conclusion that the huge eyes of giant and colossal squid are uniquely suited for detection of sperm whales, which are important squid-predators in the depths where these squid live. A paper in this journal by Schmitz et al. (BMC Evol Biol 13:45, 2013) refutes our conclusions on the basis of two claims: (1) using allometric data they argue that the eyes of giant and colossal squid are not unexpectedly large for the size of the squid, and (2) a revision of the values used for modelling indicates that large eyes are not better for detection of approaching sperm whales than they are for any other task. Results and conclusions: We agree with Schmitz et al. that their revised values for intensity and abundance of planktonic bioluminescence may be more realistic, or at least more appropriately conservative, but argue that their conclusions are incorrect because they have not considered some of the main arguments put forward in our paper. We also present new modelling to demonstrate that our conclusions remain robust, even with the revised input values suggested by Schmitz et al.
AB - Background: We recently reported (Curr Biol 22:683-688, 2012) that the eyes of giant and colossal squid can grow to three times the diameter of the eyes of any other animal, including large fishes and whales. As an explanation to this extreme absolute eye size, we developed a theory for visual performance in aquatic habitats, leading to the conclusion that the huge eyes of giant and colossal squid are uniquely suited for detection of sperm whales, which are important squid-predators in the depths where these squid live. A paper in this journal by Schmitz et al. (BMC Evol Biol 13:45, 2013) refutes our conclusions on the basis of two claims: (1) using allometric data they argue that the eyes of giant and colossal squid are not unexpectedly large for the size of the squid, and (2) a revision of the values used for modelling indicates that large eyes are not better for detection of approaching sperm whales than they are for any other task. Results and conclusions: We agree with Schmitz et al. that their revised values for intensity and abundance of planktonic bioluminescence may be more realistic, or at least more appropriately conservative, but argue that their conclusions are incorrect because they have not considered some of the main arguments put forward in our paper. We also present new modelling to demonstrate that our conclusions remain robust, even with the revised input values suggested by Schmitz et al.
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