Mouse, Baghdad Social Discord, Fin whales, Evolution in 10 words

3 am this morning, Rugby with no hands dressed down by off-form Brazil
- some big money on 2-0? That missed Brazil goal was too easy...

---

My house has regressed from untidy to trashy, the mammals are moving in. What I suppose (hope) is a brushtailed possum scrabbles noisily round my attic most nights. I havn't been up there to check on my stored stuff. Any stuff not used within 6 months belongs to the critters, they say. A fat mouse has taken to tintambulating noisily around my dishes pile, maybe she'll scrape them clean. I left a dozen ganja seeds on a saucer for her, she labouriously scraped the insides out. The woody husk is, as I suspect, indigestible. The insides have the only perfectly matched Omega3|Omega6 EFAs in the plant kingdom.

---

digbysblog
wapo pdf
[Apologies for the jpg, but the wapo doc is in pdf (ugh!) that well-known turd on the Internet shag-pile]
[oddly Digby's link gets into the wapo, other links dont & bugmenot.com is blocked in wapo]

---

more Digby

So I grabbed her little sister and pulled her in front of me.
As the bullets began to fly
The blood sprayed from between her eyes
And then I laughed maniacally
Then I hid behind the TV
And I locked and loaded my M-16
And I blew those little fuckers to eternity.
And I said

Durka Durka Mohammed Jihad
Sherpa Sherpa Bak Allah
They should have known they were fucking with a Marine

---

18Jun06
Starting from last November it has doubled its quota of minke whales, and started killing highly endangered fin whales, the second biggest species. And from next year it will start slaughtering the humpbacks.
Yesterday Joji Moshita, "we put priority on science rather than politics or emotions."
[humpback]is at less than a fifth of its former abundance.
So if emotion doesnt count, lets grab a typical Japanese whaler, strip him naked and plunge him in icy water until just before he dies or gets frostbite. That way, no scientific harm would be done, just some emotional upset.

---

ruckus .. punkasscrusade .. not your soldier

---

The Perth-based company that markets the sunscreen Invisible Zinc, Ganehill Pty Ltd, said it also had no safety concerns. Megan Gale invisible zinc $30 150g

---

Evolution in 10 words:
evolution_in_less_than_10_word
drrob

"Discrete Genes imperfectly reproducing vary organisms success at reproduction."

I believe the discrete 'digital' nature of genes is important. The alternative pre-mendel 'analog' or 'continuous' gives 'blending' which caused CD some head-scratching.

The 'imperfectly' is best very small. Organisms spend as much as they can on DNA repair. Wouldnt you want to stay the same if you were the product of 4.5 billion years of testing?

A common mis-understanding is that the purpose of sex is to 'increase variety' to 'enable evolution'. Whereas organisms desperately want not to change. Bill Hamiltons idea that sex is to resist faster smaller biters, ie parasites, seems the best.
.... .... .... .... .... .... ....
I'm a big fan of Bill Hamilton, but not his rather silly ideas on human eugenics. He seemed to be worried that we are headed to a 'hospital' society while we allow mutants to survive. He vaguely suggested a 'voucher' system for good breeders. My leftish anti-authoritarian views immediately ask 'who dispenses the vouchers?'
S J Gould had politics more sympathetic to me, but I note his fat book has just one line on Bill H. even though Bill was called 'the greatest theoretical biologist since Darwin' or some such, by someone big (?)
.... .... .... .... .... .... ....
typepad levels of selection
gene expression

---

Mouse Discord whales words