Yesterday was wildlife day at the apartment: fruit flies and baby squirrels. These are different in every regard:

Fruit flies:
Very annoying
Lots of them
All over, in the apartment
But given that we have fruit flies, we've got (I think) the coolest species to have, Drosophila melanogaster itself (the standard genetics experiment fly)

Baby squirrels:
Very cute
Not many (I don't think, but:)
Hiding, not in the apartment
But given that we have baby squirrels, probably the least cool species to have. I'd like to think they were Sciurus griseus (the western gray), but they're almost certainly actually S. carolinensis, a nasty invader from the east.

In other news, we're starting to have actually furniture in our room. We spent 6 hours assembling our bed on Thursday, picked up miatauro's old dresser on Friday, and took a bookshelf and a file cabinet off ceolrince's hands on Saturday.

Though the file cabinet was for ostone and the bookshelf didn't end up in our room either, it turned out to be a better fit for the living room, we moved the dvds which were previously forming a small wall across the living room to it.

Moving Week, Day One

I packed up stuff this morning to take to the new apartment, since I left Santa Cruz today and won't be back until after we move in.

But I will be back in Santa Cruz in a week and a half, and most weeks thereafter. So for now, I only packed up basic essentials that I'll need in the next week, like The Pterosaurs: From Deep Time, Mammalology, and the complete works of Lois McMaster Bujold. (Including my copy of Hallowed Hunt! which I found hiding on a shelf in the hall.)

When we got to San Jose, we went to Sears for their extra mattress sale day. Though, if I understand it correctly, we could have bought the mattress on the normal sale on Friday, because it wasn't expensive enough to qualify for the extra sales.

So we own a mattress now! It won't be delivered until Friday, though, because they don't build it until you buy it. We own a mattress that doesn't exist yet. A mattress of the future!

Somebody was wondering to me recently (I don't remember exactly who, chances are sarkat), "why are sea birds almost always black and white?" I didn't have anything to say at the time, but I was thinking about it yesterday and today.

I had some ideas, but I had some more questions, so I went looking around for answers today. I found a couple answers, but mostly I found that the questions I had are still up in the air.

Superficial discussions say that seabirds are black and white as camouflage, particularly aggressive camouflage: it helps them hide from their prey. I think that's true. But I also think that's fairly true of land birds. I think that is not sufficient to explain the magnitude of difference between land birds and sea birds. (Though it is worth noting that hawks and similar predatory birds tend to much drabber than other land birds.)

I think more to the point is that sea birds are, as a class, very sexually monomorphic. There tends to be small differences between the sexes. Notable black-and-white land birds are all corvids, which also have very low sexually dimorphism. So plumage color in land birds is probably largely an adaptation to sexual display (that's not a new and shocking statement); and it's probably expensive, either in development energy, or in camouflage opportunity costs, or both.

On the other hand, the gulls around here are notably sexually dimorphic in plumage, while still being basically greyscale: the males are stark white-and-dark-grey, the females are sort of pale grey all over. But it's still low-ish.

So, sea birds are grey because the have low sexual dimorphism, plus possibly some other reasons, too. Why do sea birds have low sexually dimorphism. Because they are overall more K-type than land birds. Why are seabirds more K-type? That's a good question. Size is probably a significant factor, seabirds have to be bigger. Patchy resources are probably a factor, as is distance between resources and nest sites.

In the end, my conclusion is: we know a lot of reasons it makes sense for seabirds to be how they are, but it's not enough to really explain the strong pattern of difference between land and seabirds that we observe.

Thinking about pre-modern machines this past week. Lionardo's, and Heron's. And those of kobolds and gnomes and dwarves and humans (A. gracilis, not H. sapiens).

Now I want to build wood machines.

Picked up the 4th sharing knife book today. It wasn't yet on the shelf, someone had to go pick it up of the carts in Recieving.

Damn but it's so like the magic I plan for Sedes. This is definitely a science fiction setting that looks like fantasy, which is my favorite. Also briefly winking at us in this book is a genetic problem I found in my elves.

Thinking about my first principles of sociobiology again. They present an interesting problem for bird societies. Working through form first principles, the major step from a standard bird social structure toward a full society is... oh, hey, raven society. But I'm not sure yet how to motivate the next step after that.

...

headasplode.

ETA: oh yeah, and there's a major Warcraft event going on right now.

Trichromat (e.g. humans, bees)
Cones: S, M, L

Combinations:
SM, ML: metamers
SL: purple (not metameric to any pure wavelength)
SML: grey/white


Tetrachromat (e.g. most lizards, fish, birds, etc.)
Cones: U, S, M, L

Combinations:
US, SM, ML: metamers
UL: purple, similar to trichromatic purple
UM, SL: greenish purples (bluegreen purple, and greengreen purple)
UML, USL: brownish purples (orangebrown purple and indigobrown purple)
USM, SML: purples??? probably not separate ones, these are probably border regions of other purples (similar to magenta, perhaps)
USML: grey/white

So, at least 5 totally different purples. Note that these purple types probably don't look similar. They look like 5 totally different colors. 5 totally different colors, none of which appear in a spectrum.

Schematic answer, because it ignores antagonist processing, and the various possible versions of such. And ignores the shapes and spacings of the response curves.

quick background: hryaxes are small, vaguely rodent-like animals related to elephants. They have no good name in English, being called hyraxes (from Gr. ὑραξ/hýrax: "shrewmouse") or dassies (from Dutch dassie, dim. of das: "little badger"). In the King James Bible, mentions of hyraxes were translated as coney (rabbit), because the English had no idea what a hyrax was.

This all, I've known for many years.

Fascinatingly, the confusion has also gone the other way in at least one important instance. When the Phoenicians sailed to Iberia and saw hares, they called them hyraxes, or rather שפנים/šəpānîm. This was then the basis of their name for the place: ʾÎ-šəpānîm: "island of hyraxes". The Romans adapted this as Hispania, from whence, España and Spain.

(Or at least that's a leading theory with some credence)

It seems to be oft repeated on the internet that octopuses seem to be color-blind. Or, as Wikipedia says, "Surprisingly, they do not appear to have color vision". This is surprising, but I think it is poorly backed up.

I find two studies. One from 1977 which puts forward evidence that "Octopus is Colour-Blind", by which Messesnger means O. vulgaris. The other is from 2001 (Kawamura, et al.) and agrees that O. vulgaris acts as if color-blind, but that "O. aegina" (or Amphioctopus aegina) behaves as if perceiving color.

These two species are both part of the same subfamily, and some still consider them part of the same genus. Unless there's a significant body of work out there that I can't find reference to, I think any statements about the color vision of octopus are premature.

It does seem to be a pretty good bet that O. vulgaris is color-blind.

I can't get to the reference section of the Kawamura, unfortunately, to look for more studies.

So. The other day, pne made a post that included the word Rotwelsch, as the name of a language. After a little bit of research on the language I had a sudden analysis of Rotwelsch as "Road-Welsh", i.e. a foreigner language spoken by Travellers.

sarkat wondered if that had anything to do with rottweilers. I can find no etymology for Rottweil, but I did find that it had two 't's, so there's probably no connection to Rotwelsch.

In the mean time, I learned the the ancestors of the rottweiler include Roman war dogs that accompanied the legions to Germany. This got me looking at war dogs.

( War Dogs )

Bonus: Voytek the Soldier Bear. No, really.

I'm rebuilding this chart in DOT, a graph scripting language (graph as in a flowchart type thing, not the graph of an equation).

While I'm at it, I'm revising, correcting, and expanding the chart. I'm trying to add in every tax on this list for one thing.

When I'm done, it should be the definitive resource of Sedes taxa. Though, some of these taxa could also use some descriptions, that would be a good addition to a definitive resource.

See, the list is largely Linnaen in taxonomy, but the chart is largely cladistic. Which means when I go to add taxa that are on the list, but not on the old chart, I have to have information which is not contained in either chart or list; namely the interrelationships when the list gives 3 or more sister taxa (because cladistics only acknowledges pairs of sister taxa).

In some cases, such as the Maniraptora superfamilies, I can look up that information, or at least enough related information for me to assign relationships for the Sedes analogues of these Earth taxa.

Then I tried to do that with the Hadrosauran taxa, starting with looking up the subfamily Agrostosaurinae that i have listed. Actually, I expected there probably wasn't a subfamily Agrostosaurinae but that I was generalizing something, so what I really looked up was "Agrostosaurus".

No luck. So I looked up "Agrosto". Turns out that's Greek for "grass". Ah! On Earth, Hadrosaurs were extinct ten million years before grass started showing up (or at least maybe, there's some new evidence suggesting an earlier origin). This is a group of Sedes dinosaurs which has no Earth analogue, because they live in an ecology which dinosaurs never encountered.

So some taxa I could look up, and some I could remember, given a clue or two. But then I got to "Mhleasaurinae" on my list.

Huh? I have no idea. Anyone have any idea what I might have been thinking when I named a group Mhleasaurus? Lia maybe?

My only clue is it's a Lambeosaurid (Lambeosaurine, in Earth terms). If I made up the word, there has to be a greek root i found somewhere (but I can't find it either on the internet, or in my botanical latin dictionary); if I didn't make it up, there should be a Mhleasaurus somewhere. The other possibility is it's a typo, but I haven't been able to track down any variant of the name, either.

It doesn't look like anyone has ever done an analysis of the hydrogen trees in Titan A.E. It's hard to be certain, because "hydrogen tree" gets all kinds of stuff on google, but I don't see anything. Biochemistry isn't my strong point, but I'll give it a shot.

I've always been thrilled with the hydrogen trees because they're a really clever biological design. And by clever, I mean rooted in realism and totally original, which is about as cool as you get in ConBio.

Plants have a perennial problem. They compete with each other for access to sunlight. There are various ways this competition can go, but one obvious direction is up. Many plants are trying to be as tall or taller than all the other plants around them, to make sure they don't get shaded out.

But a tree is an incredibly complex design problem. The structural integrity required to hold up a tree is hard to evolve and hard to build. A tree is enormously heavy, and a lot of that weight is very high off the ground.

On Sesharrim, the trees took a different path. Or at least some of them, but while we're probably seeing some of the most spectacular, chance are good that there's a large group of relatives using the same basic tools in various ways in various habitats. Because that's how life works. Anyway, on Sesharrim, instead of holding up the weight by rigid force, the weight is counteracted by buoyancy: they're great, hydrogen filled balloons holding up their photosynthetic surfaces.

Note: a great hydrogen filled balloon is a bomb waiting to happen, just as depicted in the movie.

This means they just need to hold themselves together, not hold themselves up. The trade off is they need to produce lots of hydrogen. Where does this hydrogen come from? Well, why do you think they're all growing in the water? They're electrolyzing the water to break it into H2 and O2 gases.

There are a couple other methods they could be using to produce hydrogen. But my first guess was they're electrolyzing it, admittedly influenced by the same guess made by Cordelia Naismith regarding the floating animals on Sergyar.

There are complicated electron moving machines in all our cells, so supplying the charge to the anode and cathode shouldn't be too difficult. Wikipedia tells me that the most commonly used anion for electrolysis is sulfate. Which means there are probably a noticeably large number of sulfur compounds in the hydrogen tree's chemistry.

Though pure sulfur is odorless, and some organic sulfur compounds don't smell bad, some do. Skunks use organic sulfur compounds, for example. Also, whenever one of those trees goes off, it's going to produce hydrogen sulfide (rotten eggs smell) and sulfur dioxide (brimstone).

Cale's first impression of the planet: "It stinks!"

The cations are probably calcium or sodium, both are suitable ions that are already used in biological processes.

----

As I said, this use of hydrogen is probably widespread in plants on Sesharrim. But under what conditions could it thrive most spectacularly? Well, you'd want lots of water. You'd want the temperature to be warm to increase the electrolysis rate. Salt in the water is also a good thing, since it acts as a catalyst to the electrolysis.

So, you'd want large areas of warm, shallow salt water. Just exactly like the environment we see the hydrogen trees growing in. Very nice.

----

There is one problem. A big problem, if you will. The trees shouldn't be using single, large balloons, they should be using many, smaller balloons; for all kinds of reasons. But when you've gotten that much right, for no good reason, I'll grant you some dramatic license.

I've sort of started reading my new book: Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California's Natural Resources. It's a sort of ethnoecology* of California. I'm very interested in ethnoecology at the moment, in semi-agriculture, as it were.

I've only sort of started it, because I'm struggling with my attention span this month. But so far, I'm really happy with it. Andersen is really clear eyed about the relationship of Native Americans to the ecology: they affected it profoundly (effected it, even). The effects were not always positive, but many were.

The argument is that we have much to learn from their techniques. Not because they are mystically in tune with the land, or because, by having less technology they are inherently better, but due to the simple fact of more than ten thousand years of experimentation.

This book can be thought of as taking up where Twilight of the Mammoths left off. Very interesting sequence: both focus on the changes pre-Columbian peoples have had on the ecology, but one on overwhelmingly negative changes, the other on mainly positive changes. But the message of both is the same: leaving nature alone to do it's own thing is not the right path. We must actively meddle to maintain and restore the ecology of North America.

She hits another point i agree with in the opening, too: John Muir wasn't a very good naturalist. He had way too many preconceptions that he tried to force his observations into, instead of seeing what was actually there (in this case, re: the myth of California as a pristine wilderness).

*ETA: I guess more than "a sort of ethnoecology": "Kat Anderson is the national ethnoecologist of the United States Department of Agriculture's Natural Resources Conservation Service" ref. I just strung the word together as seemed appropriate, I've heard of ethnobotany before, I don't remember ever having encountered the word ethnoecology before (my spellchecker agrees on both points).

ETA2: I just found a paper which Andersen co-authored more specifically on forest management, which I'm particularly interested in: "Native American Influences on the Development of Forest Ecosystems". I should go back and read that entirely sometime.

I got offered the contract at Powerset! This is the same job sarkat's had for a while. I guess no one ever told kellan what company she was contracting for, when it came up before, because when I told him i got it this morning, he said:

"fucking awesome! Powerset is hot! i didn't know you were applying."

Apparently he used to go there thursdays for a Ruby meetup.

I can haz werk! It'll probably take two weeks to get the contract set up, though.

I was getting worried, cause he thought he'd be able to get back to me last Wednesday, and I was planning to send an e-mail this morning, but I didn't have to. I thought the interview had gone mostly well, but I did flub answering the question about what I'd learned in my semantics classes (;P to other UCSC ling undergrads).

Also, what's this new link-y thing going on in livejournals? It seems to be on user generated links, but it doesn't seem to show up on all of them, even allowing for the fact that it doesn't show up on friends-page views of posts, only? on the pages for the posts themselves. Will it show up on Burrowing Dinosaurs? How about on Oryctodremus cubicularis (burrowing hypsilophodons no less! Ornithopods rock!)

It has been a pterosaur week.

My family all got new phones, see. So I had to go sticker shopping for stickers to put on my phone, and while I'm at, on all the rest of my personal electronics. I got a little booklet of dinosaur stickers, but I thought I should get some smaller stickers, too. I found a pack of small dinosaur stickers, but they weren't very good, except the pterosaur was good enough. Then, looking at my new phone, I didn't think I could fit any of the big stickers on it well. So pterosaur stickers on everything! Ptiny pterosaurs.

banjomensch gave me a "pterodactyls are pterrifying" t-shirt yesterday.

Then last night I got to the "Babes on the Wing" chapter of my Pterosaurs book. This is a very exciting chapter. It's about pterosaur development (ontogeny), which is the really exciting thing about pterosaurs.

But before we get there, I shall point out that pterosaurs were the very first flying vertebrates, the very next group of animals to challenge the insects for control of the skies. Incidentally, the giant flying insects vanished around the time pterosaurs would have been evolving (another assumption about the limits of flying animals that pterosaurs challenge).

So anyway, turns out not only did pterosaurs continue to grow significantly after they started flying (totally different from any living flying creature); they started flying more ore less immediately after hatching! ( rambling pterosaur biology )

I probably had other things, but that's enough pterosaur burbling for now.

Some MLP, 'cause I need to restart my computer, so I can't leave these tabs open any longer:


Straight Dope quote:
"It's not apples and oranges, but no one paying attention could compare these apples without noticing (a) one is 12 times bigger and (b) both of them are rutabagas."
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/070907.html

Two SciAm.com articles on human evolution:
Schizophrenia: a team of geneticists looked at the 78 gene variants most closely associated with Schizophrenic disorders. After examining the frequencies and distributions of these genes in various human and ape populations, they came to the conclusion that at least 26 of these have been under positive selective pressure for a significant amount of time in human evolution, continuing up to the present.

That is, the genes that cause schizophrenia are conveying adaptive benefits to the people who carry them

Social Intelligence: a team of German researchers gave a set of tasks to both human toddlers between two and three years old and the same tasks to adult chimpanzee and orangutans of various ages. They found that at an age when the general problem solving skills (involving space, quantity, and causality) of the toddlers was comparable to the apes, the toddlers were already twice as successful at tasks involving social skills than the apes.

This is interesting because it is support for the theory (which I hold to) that the increases in human intelligence that have evolved since our split with living relatives have been driven significantly by specific need for social processing skills, and rather than a drive toward general intelligence.

There are other possible explanations of these data, but they do support the theory.

ETA: comments disabled on this post because it has been particularly attracting spam.

In a previous post I discovered Alan Weisman's book-Gedankenexperiment of an Earth suddenly depopulated of humans. The review mentioned the Korean-Demilitarized-Zone-cum-accidental-wildlife-preserve; plus, at the end, it mentioned the Paul Martin book I've since read most of.

I got stuck in the Martin book at a point I've been meaning to post about about. So now I'm posting, and then I will read the last little bit of the book.

Martin also mentions the Korean DMZ. To re-cap, the Korean Demilitarized Zone, which no one has really gone into for the past few decades, as it's mined to hell and surrounded by hostile standing armies, has become a refuge for two species of cranes, which use the area as a crucial part of their winter migration, and would probably otherwise be extinct. Martin goes in to mention several other instances of this phenomenon, apparently first recorded by Lewis and Clark.

Clark wrote, "I have observed that in the country between nations which are at war with each other the greatest number of wild animals are to be found." While camped in warzones, Lewis and Clark saw unuasuall large numbers of bison, elk, wolves, and especially porcupines (the last being very rare around settled areas, being hunted for prized food and quills). This phenomenon was apparently written about in general by an anthropologist by the name of Hickerson in 1970.

It has also been noted to extend beyond humans: intermediate zones between the territories of hostile wolf packs have denser deer populations.

All makes sense, but I hadn't thought of it specifically.

I finished re-formatting my version of the GURPS Uplift random species design tables, plus a light revision. I'm working on cleaning up my Features section on Sedes Draconis to make the additional content more interesting and useful.

SciAm.com is the only news source i follow these days, because, these days, i have enough trouble keeping myself moving without getting the news.

And I like reading it. It's got good pieces. But damn, they need to review their headline staff, recently. There have been two articles i've noticed recently where it appeared the headline had been written by someone who hadn't read the article it was attached to. In each case, the headline made an objectionable claim in the form of a question ("Is greed good?" and "Is the Out of Africa theory out?") which were totally unsupported by article itself.

The article headlined "Is greed good?" was about why eBay works (and game theory economics doesn't). People are sending off money to complete strangers, trusting that the goods they are paying for will be actually shipped. Because fairness and reputation are more important to the human mind than "rational self-interest". There is no support whatsoever in the article for a contention that greed is good. In fact it is part of the ongoing realization in game theory that people do not act as "rational self-interested entities", and that greed does not self-organize into a benevolent invisible hand; rather that humans are deeply social entities whose true rational self-interest involves looking out for the people around them, or at the very least doing their best to look like they are.

The article headlined "Is the Out of Africa theory out?" is, if anything, even more moronic, since it's a much less murky topic. The summary paragraph at the beginning seems to be written by the headliner as well, and is totally at odds with the rest of the article.

this is the summary paragraph:
"All the ancestors of contemporary Europeans apparently did not migrate out of Africa as previously believed. According to a new analysis of more than 5,000 teeth from long-perished members of the genus Homo and the closely related Australopithecus, many early settlers hailed from Asia."

First: knowing where "early settlers" of Europe hailed from tells you nothing about "the ancestors of contemporary Europeans", because there is no evidence of continuity between the behaviorly modern humans of Europe and any previous humans in Europe.

Second: Know how you get from Africa to Europe? That's right, through Asia! Early humans expanded fastest along coastlines and slowest across deserts. The most direct routes to Europe from Africa pass through only a little of Asia, but they also past through some really nasty deserts. Early humans often ended up going around those deserts and approaching Europe from the east instead of the south.

The rest of the article makes a distinction between the waves of migration out of Africa, and makes it clear that the new data is only significantly questioning the second wave (1-0.5 million years ago). This wave, again, has nothing to do with the modern population of Europe, because the modern population of Europe shows no signs that there is any genetic input whatsoever from any population that had already left Africa by 200,000 years ago. It fails to make that last part clear, but it wouldn't have to except for the misleading intro paragraph.

For support of this claim, we need only look as far as the "related links" automatically generated on sciam.com for the article: "Skulls Add to 'Out of Africa' Theory of Human Origins", reporting a study that shows a smooth linear relationship between intragroup variability in skull shape in behaviorly modern human groups, and distance from Eastern Africa. This relationship should only hold true if modern humans expanded outward from Africa in genetic isolation from pre-existing hominid species in other areas.

via sciam.com

The Baiji, or Yangtze River Dolphin, is announced to be functional extinct. There has not been a confirmed sighting in 5 years. A team searched its habitat extensively, but found no trace of them. If there are any left at all, they are too few to last much longer in the Yangtze, and the failure to find any means they cannot be removed to captivity for preservation.

"This represents the first global extinction of a large vertebrate for over 50 years, only the fourth disappearance of an entire mammal family since AD 1500, and the first cetacean species to be driven to extinction by human activity."*


"The dead cannot cry out for justice; it is a duty of the living to do so for them."
-Lois McMaster Bujold, Diplomatic Immunity, 2002


*replaced second hand quote with factual errors with quote from the abstract of the peer-reviewed paper which announced the extinction: "First human-caused extinction of a cetacean species?" by S.T. Turvey et al., Royal Society, Biology Letters.

from Martin:

*Many predators will engage in surplus killing in circumstance in which killing the prey becomes very easy: in one documented case, spotted hyenas killed 82 thompson's gazelles and seriously injured 27 more over a 4 square mile area. They ate only the best parts of only some of the gazelle. This happened on a moonless and stormy night, and tracks show that hyenas just walked up to each gazelle at a normal walking pace and killed them without much struggle. Presumably the gazelles were uniquely vulnernable at that time to the hyenas "which had not hestitated to kill far mroe than they could eat".

*"In addition,... what might appear to be wasteful killing may not be. Much of the carcass of a large animal is inedible; consuming too much protein can even be poisonous. People active in an outdoor life have high caloric requirements; often their prime need is fat. In times of drought and for much of the late winter and spring, bison, and presumably other Quaternary mammals, would have been in poor condition, with minimal body fat. Most of the carcass would have been unfit to eat, as Lewis and Clarke discovered." This also probably accounts for the cases of orcas killing grey whales and then eating the tongue and leave the rest of the body, too.

Reading Martin recently, I've been thinking about what would have happened ont he Hajasith when the sentient species started expanding out of their origin zones. All the sentient species north of the Edgewall, with the possible exception of the dire wolves, would have been at least upper paleolithic, and therefore extremely deadly to naive prey species.

But I was thinking, since the sentients were constrained by largely artificial boundaries that did not constrain prey species, many species would already extend through and past the ranges of the hunters, and so there would be non-naive populations already throughout much of the Hajasith.

This is supported by some info i just got to in the Martin book: "Interestingly, many of the North American large mammals to survive human contact originated in or were closely related to species found in the Old World, where they overlapped with humans. Examples include caribou, elk, moose, and mountain sheep.... The extinction of large mammals of North America eliminated mostly long-established natives." So any species that overlapped with, say, the dwarven origin zone, would be non-naive throughout its range.

At least, non-naive with respect to dwarves. That's the other question to figure out. If a species has been exposed to upper paleolithic+ dwarves, is it non-naive with respect to other sentients? Probably any species familiar with any of the 5 hominid species would generalize its predation defenses to the other 4 (with the possible exception of some animals familiar with trolls may not be properly wary of the smaller hominids).

What about the non-hominid species, though? Is a species familiar with humans and normal wolves sufficiently well prepared to avoid local extinction as dire wolves move in? Probably. Is a species familiar with advanced hunting techniques in dire wolves prepared to deal with human or trollish hunting? Maybe not.

What about a species familiar with trolls, when the goblins move into the Yari? I'm not sure.

I think some more.