Author Archives: dr.hypercube

I’m in, you’re in!

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A great web collision! First, a flickrfind:

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The juxtaposition of the peeing boy and the Coke bottle – memorable… It strikes me that I’ve always just accepted the spouting cherub/little boy theme; I wonder where it came from? Just an obvious water-emitter, or is there something more to it? Perhaps it ties back to some pre-classical Amanita cult (I’m joking – I think). So, from the Golden Guide – Hallucinogenic Plants, a couple fly agaric pix. A Golden Guide that covers hallucinogens? Wow! I mean, I owned Pond Life, Birds, Reptiles and Amphibians, and a couple other guides, but somehow I missed this title. Is there a Ladybird book equivalent on the other side of the Atlantic, I wonder?

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Golden Guide ht – boingboing

Airstream

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I’ve started to do some research into Airstreams. As a child of the space age, I find these silver pods fascinating – after all, an Airstream served as the quarantine space when astronauts returned from the moon.

My current thought is to find an Airstream in the 27′ range, customize the heck out of the interior and maybe, in a few years time, go ‘fulltiming’ for a few years. Key elements of the customization:

  • room for dogs and hawks
  • robust networking (stompbox, media server, etc.)
  • storage for fishing tackle, tack, firearms, etc.
  • lounging around area (at the expense of elaborate sleeping quarters) – if I need more sleeping room, a small (13′) yurt pitched when needed may be the answer.

I took my first look this past weekend – a 1975 27-footer. I have a lot of learning to do – what to look out for, what systems I’ll need to modify, etc., but a little learnin’ never hurt anyone. So, with this post I’ll inaugurate a new category on the blog – nomadics!

cattle:aurochs::dogs:wolves?

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Darren Naish, in his great post on the origins of the domestic dog, writes:

As a rough rule of thumb, the domesticated forms of wild mammal species (1) revert back to wild-type after being feral for a few generations, and (2) readily interbreed with their wild ancestors. If domestic dogs are wolves, then the many populations of feral dogs that live world-wide should theoretically have reverted back to being wolf-like in appearance and behaviour. But they haven’t. Instead, domestic dogs always end up looking like pariah dogs – the relatively small (11-16 kg), socially flexible semi-domesticated and feral dogs of the Old World tropics.

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Archaeological data shows that pariah dogs have a stable history, with dog skulls from 4000 year old deposits in Thailand being essentially identical to the modern dingo-like pariah dogs of the area.

A recent post on O&P regarding Heck cattle got me thinking about this point. For those who don’t want to click through, Heck cattle are an attempt to breed back to the extinct ur-cow – the aurochs. The general consensus on Heck cattle seems to be that the attempt was a failure; “once a genetic lineage is gone, it cannot be ‘bred back'”*. My thought on all this is that it seems to show that once genetic material is lost in a population (as a result of domestication) it’s gone – all the king’s horses, etc. Perhaps, then, it’s not shocking that dogs revert to pariah dogs in some number of generations – the genes that would allow reversion to a more wolfy form are just gone from the domesticated dog’s gene pool. To extend the title of the post a bit – border collies are to pariah dogs as Holsteins are to criollos/Texas longhorns? Don’t get me wrong – there are a number of other persuasive points in Darren’s post – I’m just not sure about the ‘won’t revert to wolves’ argument at this point.