Delicious LiveJournal Links for 9-21-2010

[andrewducker]

• Times Higher Education interviews Terry Pratchett. Who has...forthright views on the value of degrees
  (tags: education university terrypratchett uk)
• Sir Terry Pratchett makes his own sword. With meteorites.
  (tags: awesome terrypratchett EpicWin)
• Man Recreates Ex-Girlfriend As Luxury, Realistic Sex Doll
  (tags: technology relationships wtf)
• Brooklyn officials introduce opossums to deal with rat problem. Things go _exactly_ as you'd expect.
  (tags: wildlife newyork usa EpicFail)
• Apex Magazine having an all-Muslim/Arabic issue, to showcase their part in the SFF world.
  (tags: scifi islam writing)
• The Dutch are exceedingly sensible when it comes to teen sex
  (tags: netherlands health sexuality sex parenting)
• Sexual harrassment has _nothing_ to do with clothing - 3/4 of Egyptian victims were veiled at the time.
  (tags: egypt technology women harrassment abuse feminism)
• Why Do Ebooks Cost So Much? (hint, it's because "printing it on paper" isn't the expensive bit)
  (tags: books ebooks)
• Tesco to sell cheap Viagra
  (tags: supermarkets tesco uk drugs viagra sex)
• London to Frankfurt by train being opened up
  (tags: europe transport germany travel rail)

Comments

[matgb]

Frankfurt by Train on an ICE.

Tickets won't be cheap, but still. From Frankfurt, you could get on another ICE and go to a German city worth visiting. Like, well, the rest of them...

[andrewducker]

The question is whether they'll be massively different to plane fares...

[matgb]

True, but by the time you take into account travelling to/from the airport (especially given that Frankfurt Hahn is to Frankfurt what London Luton is to London), a train directly into the centre of town, that I can effectively get from the train station down the road (because I'd have to change plain from Leeds it's fair) is much more convenient.

Plus, train travel is actually nice, air travel, even in Business, is a PITA.

[innerbrat]

Frankfurters and pita in the same comment...

[a-pawson.livejournal.com]

Most likely not if current rail pricing is anything to go by. On short haul journeys the train is generally more convenient, and the journey time shorter, but more expensive than air travel.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Brooklyn officials introduce opossums to deal with rat problem. Things go _exactly_ as you'd expect.

I'm not sure what I'd expect. Was this introduction against expert advice? Is expert advice consistently less reliable than my non-expert guesses in this area, and if so why? Or is it that there are many successful introductions that don't make the news?

[bracknellexile.livejournal.com]

Surely all they have to do is send in the Chinese Needle Snakes, then snake-eating gorillas, and then when winter comes, the gorillas will just freeze to death.

Dammit do environmental officials never learn anything from the Simpsons? :)

[princealbert.livejournal.com]

I expected all the children to be missing after following said expert out of town one morning.

[usmu.livejournal.com]

As Terry Pratchett put it in Making Money:

'Look, I can explain,' he said. Lord Vetinari lifted an eyebrow with the care of one who, having found a piece of caterpillar in his salad, raises the rest of the lettuce. 'Pray do,' he said, leaning back. 'We got a bit carried away,' said Moist. 'We were a bit too creative in our thinking. We encouraged mongooses to breed in the posting boxes to keep down the snakes...' Lord Vetinari said nothing. 'Er... which, admittedly, we introduced into the posting boxes to reduce the numbers of toads...' Lord Vetinari repeated himself. 'Er... which, it's true, staff put in the posting boxes to keep down the snails...' Lord Vetinari remained unvocal. 'Er... These, I must in fairness point out, got into the boxes of their own accord, in order to eat the glue on the stamps,' said Moist, aware that he was beginning to burble.

When you give an animal an environment with a lot of food and no predators, it's going to do what comes maturally: eat and breed. A lot. Which means there's going to be a lot of them running around. Which kind of defeats the purpose of the exercise.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Wow, lots of people are happy to buy the whole "tee-hee, silly scientists!" narrative.

[andrewducker]

I don't see any mention of science or scientists on either this page or that news report.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

That's the first option I mention - but would they really do something that crazy, introduce a new species without talking to someone who might know something about it? I'd be a little bit surprised.

I'm pretty confident that if things had not gone "exactly as you expect", we would never have heard about this.

[andrewducker]

I wouldn't be at all surprised if someone at the local council hadn't decided to just do it - especially as it seems to have been mentioned at a couple of meetings, but never actually documented anywhere, it has all the hallmarks of some idiot doing things in order to curry favour without actually involving experts.

I've never heard of the introduction of wildlife that didn't have negative consequences. I was under the impression that it fell into the "We don't do this, because it just doesn't work" bucket nowadays, after numerous failed experiments in the 1800s and early 1900s.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

If that's really the story, then I take it all back, it's exactly as stupid as it appears.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, sadly we're extrapolating from insufficient information here. If we weren't both civilised people we'd probably already be in a flamewar over semantic mismatch by now :->

[skington.livejournal.com]

Assuming you mean "overall net negative consequences", what about the reintroduction of previously-extinct species like e.g. beavers, lynx, bears or wolves?

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

So far as I know - from chatting to biologists - a lot of those projects have gone very well. Also plenty of successful reintroductions of bird species. The main failure modes tend to be humans killing the introduced species, directly or indirectly (habitat destruction, political campaigning against the project because of perceived disbenefits, etc)

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

I've never heard of the introduction of wildlife that didn't have negative consequences. I was under the impression that it fell into the "We don't do this, because it just doesn't work" bucket nowadays, after numerous failed experiments in the 1800s and early 1900s.

I thought that too, but was put right unequivocally recently when I voiced my doubts about the wisdom of introducing a little invertebrate (psyllids, I think) to control Japanese Knotweed. According to my sources (a bunch of biologists and ecologists) there are lots of examples of it going very well, when done carefully. You just don't hear about those the way you do about cane toads and rabbits and so on.

[andrewducker]

That's fascinating. I'd love to hear some examples if you know of any!

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

Off the top of my head - and mostly biased towards gardening because that's stuff I know more about - there's ladybirds for aphids, all sorts of different nematodes that people use to keep down various populations of slugs, ants, leatherjackets and so on, Bacillus thuringiensis for all sorts of pests on crops ... err ... several parasitic wasps with varying degrees of specificity for problematic insects.

These sorts of species - mostly invertebrates, a few bacteria - are very much the standard armoury for this sort of thing.

That help?

[andrewducker]

I didn't realise that we'd actually transplanted any of those things to different environments! Fascinating, thank you.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

Some are not transplanted any great distance - it's just messing with a population within its existing range. (The original example of opossums almost certainly fits that bill.) But some are moved to completely new bioregions.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

Biological control by introducing introduce a species to an area to control the population of another - is a active field of scientific enquiry. SFAIK the commonplaces of the field are that it's hard to get right, and you need to do a lot of careful, controlled trials, and be very, very careful about specificity.

I'm pretty confident that if things had not gone "exactly as you expect", we would never have heard about this.

There are examples of it going very well indeed. And for many of our most desperate problems with invasive species, it's the only possibility of control. However, most of the ones people have heard of are not just incomplete successes but spectacular, dismal failures. Cane toads are the classic.

It sounds to me like this particular project didn't involve any biologists at all. I know very little about North American biota, but even I could've told you that opossums eat whatever crap they can get their little paws on, and would've guessed that the only way they would be likely to reduce a problematic rat population in an urban setting would be by outcompeting the rats for the same food sources (mostly human rubbish), not directly predating the rats. Which - as they appear to have found - merely replaces your rat problem with an opossum problem. Or, if you're unlucky, a rat problem and an opossum problem.

I can imagine how the thinking might've gone, though, among politicians - it's not as if opossums are non-native to the region.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

What I'd expect is that it all ends with a horse!

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I would have thought it would be fair to say that people would expect a plague of the replacement animal, because it's funny and archetypal, regardless of whether there is evidence for or against it being a good idea in this specific case...

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

London to Frankfurt, hot damn!!!

I'm impressed the tunnel has the capacity.

[a-pawson.livejournal.com]

The channel tunnel has never run anywhere near capacity. Passenger numbers are running at less than 40% of the levels expected when it was built. Freight has performed better, but is also behind their expected levels of usage.

The plan to run trains from London to Germany is not a new one. It was forst proposed in 2007.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

I read once it was the most heavily used section of track in the world. Hence I assumed it was maybe full...

> Passenger numbers are running at less than 40% of the levels expected when it was built.

That could mean the trains are just empty, though...

[a-pawson.livejournal.com]

I don't know about current figures, but according to that piece I linked to from 2007, the tunnel has capacity to carry 20 trains per hour in each direction. Back then they were only running 3 per hour.

[innerbrat]

Sweet Offler, Pterry is Sokka.

THIS IS AWESOME.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

The article about ebooks directly contradicts other articles that you've emailed me in years past that talked about high printing costs being a problem.

Of course, if the industry has very low margins then even a slight change in printing costs would be significant.

[andrewducker]

Cite!