Oops, in my previous article about a Randy Newman “Politicial Science” flash animation I forgot to actually paste the link into the HTML.

I’ve fixed that story, and here again is the flash animation.

New Scientist had a really interesting article about how humans are driving natural selection in a number of areas, and how mechanisms that were put in place to help the survival of species is actually having the opposite effect due to the action of evolution .

The example that caught my eye is the one of only catching fish larger than a certain size, the idea being that by only taking the more mature adult fish you are leaving more fish to reproduce and to keep the population sustainable.

The problem comes when you think of what that means from an evolutionary point of view.

In that scenario it is an evolutionary advantage to be a fish that stays smaller than the allowed catch size, and conversely a disadvantage to grow big. Now both data from fisheries and experimental data has shown that this policy does indeed result in the sizes of fish decreasing over time. In one lab experiment on Menidia Menidia (the Atlantic Silverside) they found that it rapidly evolved into a size that was outside of the catch regime. So when they took large fish they evolved into a smaller size and when they took small fish they evolved into ones that grew bigger.

One solution that’s been posited is catching only medium size fish, the hope being that this will result in selection of fish that grow rapidly from small to large. Of course, if you catch too many then you could end up with a situation like on the Grand Banks where the cod fishery collapsed through overfishing, and even after 13 years of no cod being taken at all they have not bounced back (the suspicion being that this has tipped the balance against code in that ecosystem now).

Of course, designing a net that will only catch fish between certain sizes will be a headache, but then humans have gotten ourselves into this mess in the first place..

My wife bought me a subscription to Current World Archaeology, including the last years worth of magazines which I’m rapidly working my way through. Anyway, issue 8 had an excellent article about Çatalhöyük, possibly the oldest known city in the world and included a link to the Çatalhöyük excavations website and I noticed down the bottom that they’re using a Attribution, NonCommercial, ShareAlike Creative Commons license for almost all their material.

That, along with a link on their front page to an Open Source VisualizationToolkit gave me a nice warm fuzzy feeling about how they are going about their science and I felt they deserved a plug and some kudos for it.

I was searching for the lyrics to Randy Newman’s excellent Political Science after listening to it on the excellent BBC “Old Grey Whistle Test” DVD when I stumbled across a suitably satiricial flash animation which both accompanies the song and matches it to a T.

Probably best avoided if you’re a fan of Bush.. 🙂

Cleaning women working at the European Union get fed up over a shody bus service and start car pooling to save costs and the environment. Bus company gets upset and sues them for “unfair and parasitical competition” – demands they are fined and have their cars confiscated!

This is over a service where “we didn’t have the right to eat or even to speak” and instead of coming to get us at 9.30pm, the bus would arrive at 10.30pm. If you made any comment to the driver you’d get a mouthful of abuse.“.

Found via this Groklaw article, reported in the Sydney Morning Herald (subs required) and also this Google News search.

Stewart writes:

Every year our heating breaks. Every darn year. Aparrently the way to get a reliable central heating system is to have one that’s 15 years old.

Don’t count on it, our 15-year old hot water system self-destructed over the weekend..