If your not from a part of the world that is blessed with poison ivy you probably won’t be able to appreciate what a frightening object this is. My cell phone camera is really horrible, so you can’t see how every leaf on this vine is huge, juicy, and glossy.

Poison ivy is a funny thing. Generally it takes a few exposures before the body starts to have a reaction. Then each time the reaction gets worse. The patch of poison ivy this sign is planted in runs along this road for miles. It’s been a very good year for poison ivy so far.

There is a fun meme wandering about that proports to explain why the Cicadias pop out on cycles that are long prime numbers of years.

Are there other things in life that intentionally use prime numbers to avoid synchronization? Could this be the reason that weeks are seven days, and months strive to be 31? Are there traffic light synchronization or land development patterns that avoid synchronization? Do some of the peer to peer systems use prime numbers to reduce chance congestion? Could prime numbers play a role in regulatory systems to temper the natural tendencies toward market concentration?

It appears that Kenneth Deffeyes’ talk at WTF 2004 is finally getting some traction for Hubbert’s Peak.
See: Fast Company or these notes from the talk at Telepocalypse

“Managers hate uncertainty. There’s going to be a lot more of it.”

…

“It’s not outside the realm of possibility that there will be an international effort to seize the Middle East’s oil fields. But to go back to your industry, the two realms are going to diverge. There’s going to be a big squeeze on hauling molecules while there’s increased capacity to move bits. The EFF folks get a lot of mileage out of the frontier theme. It’s the Wild West. Well, my great grandfather drove cattle on the Chisholm Trail. I’m afraid that my grandson will have to drive cattle on the Chisholm Trail to make a living.”

…

“Need to get word out that there is a serious problem. I am quite upset.”

The notes on the talk over at telepocalypse are good because they include some of the Q and A. People would ask “What about X” where X was solar, tidal, etc. etc. and his response was again and again. “I’m worried about the next 5 years, that’s 15 years out.”

Read his book., visit a a web site

“It is as important to be of a size that does not fit in someone else’s mouth as it is to have a mouth suited to the size of one’s own prey.”

I can not too highly recomend Paul A. Colinvaux’s classic book “Why Big Fierce Animals are Rare.” I learned dozens of deep important things from that book; for example why the ocean is a desert.

The big fierce animal’s problem is two fold. He sits on top of a complex food web, a pyramid. It takes a big base on that pyramid for a few animals to sit on top. His second problem is wounds. He can’t take the risk of attacking anything that might wound him; since once wounded infection will do him in. For this reason preditors tend work very hard to avoid taking any risks when getting their prey.

Apparently if you plot the size of various species in a food web you notice that they are arranged in a stepwise manner. The species in any given layer in the web are sized so that they can pop their food, i.e. the next layer down in the web, quickly into their mouths.

Once you start looking at the world this way it can get quite amusing. Snakes and whales are extreme examples of ways of solving this problem. After reading the book I was very amused to notice how the foods in the grocery store have all adapted to fit easily into my mouth.

There was a time when strawberries were shaped to fit into the mouth of a sparrow. That sparrow would then complement the strawberry by planting it’s seeds in a distant location, complete with a little fertilizer. No wonder fruits are a diuretic. These days strawberries fit into the house wife’s mouth. Strawberry farmers fill in for the sparrows.

One model for the species-area relationship mentioned earlier  that is is a side effect of food webs. The depth and breadth of a food web defines how many species a ecology can support and the larger area an ecology is the larger the web it can encompass.

These days I’m finding it interesting to note how there are some rules, like the mouth size rule, that create layering in a network. Which leads to questions like: are there similar ordering effects in social networks, or economic networks. What does this tell us about the striving of computer system architects to layer their systems?

Some species are generalists; i.e. omnivores, and they tend to undercut this model. A species that can eat off different layers in the food web takes energy that might support some more specialized species. In  the business ecology we  call such things Microsoft.

“What the hell are you leaving us?” Chad Waite, OVP – via Mark Tobias.

I didn’t know this. The number of species in an ecology is strongly corrolated to the size of it’s zone. If N is the number of species and A is the area then log(N) = c + a*log(A). This paper (and source of the illustration) is a good short overview.

What that curve shows is that if you increase the area an ecological zone by a factor of 10 then the number of species in that area will increase by 186% (i.e. 10^0.27 where 0.27 is the slope of that line).

In turn this allows you to estimate how many species your going to drive into extinction when you decide to take land out of some zone and switch in another; say by filling in wet lands and replacing them with suburban housing.

I wonder where that number, 0.27, comes from?

Is this a sign I should learn Python?

Since I know nothing about genetics I can have the fun of making up theories all on my own. So here’s a little insta-theory

Let’s assume that genes give rise to traits; so for example you might have a gene for shy, or a gene or sociable, or gene for a strong immune systems. Now let’s assume that genes can migrate from one place in the genome to another. Now let’s assume that gene that are physically close to each other in the genome are more likely to be transmitted together while those far appart are more likely not to be transmitted to the next the generation.

Let’s say there is some advantage to having two traits at the same time. For example if you highly sociable then it might be good to have a strong immune system. Or alternately there is some disadvantages so for example if your shy you may not get much benefit from paying the expense of a strong immune system.

So, it seems reasonable that selection pressures would cause genes for particular traits to migrate into a physical ordering that sorts out the cost/benefits of their being inherited together.

I’m unhappy that this becomes a weak argument for prejudicial behavior.

In a somewhat cruel posting Ken Coar decides to share that he has forsythia blooming. I don’t have a picture of our fosythia; they are at the bottom of the driveway on the left, not really visible in the picture above.

The tread came off the snow blower. It won’t go back on, too much rust on the axle. I can’t remove the wheel.

Oh hell – put it back on the list of things to worry about. SARS case.

It’s one thing to blame an outbreak third world overcrowding, it’s entirely another to have it escape from a world class research facility. Shame!