Rabbits as "foodies?"

   For many years, my wife and I have grown a large garden, and except for lettuce, kale, and other leaf crops, we've never bother with fencing out the rabbits.  We could plant 75 tomato plants and the rabbits would ignore them.   Then last year,  instead of just buying young plants from the local supermarket, we sent away for some "heirloom variety" seeds and started some of our plants from seed.  But we still bought some commercial variety plants.  But when the stuff was all planted, in one night, the heirloom plants were all eaten off to the ground by rabbits.  And the next night, they pulled up the roots and ate them too.  Yet the commercial cultivars, planted a few feet away in the same garden, were unmolested.
     So, what's going on here?  Do the commercial varieties have some genes that repel rabbits?  Or do the bunnies simply know what is yummy and what isn't?  I had always assumed that rabbits were fairly  indiscriminate in their choice of food, eating any edible leaves.  But given a choice, the bunnies are the real foodies--not we humans.

More Beaver Shots

      I have added an additional photo to the report on beaver activity posted two days ago.  The new photo views the dam itself from a better angle, and shows how its actually constructed.  Also, the dam shown two days ago was a work in progress, as the road crew had ripped the original dam out with a back hoe a week earlier, and the beaver at that time was just beginning to build the replacement.  Now, only 48 hours later, he has added about two tons of sticks and mud, and the dam has started to assume the look of a standard beaver dam.

Limerick of the Day, May 17

A muscular fellow from Gratz,
Who had for his staffer "the hots,"
Behaved rather wild,
And now has a child,
But suffered the loss of his shatz.

Limerick of the Day, May 16

A lady renowned for her vanity,
Which she drove to the point of insanity,
Used oceans of potions,
And various lotions,
But still had the skin of a manatee.

Beaver Shots: Life, the Universe, and Beaver Engineering.

            As you drive north on I-380 towards Waterloo, Iowa, when you reach the I-380, US 20 interchange,  if you look to the left just after you pass under the bridge you’ll see something fascinating.   Some enterprising beaver has dammed off the entrance to a culvert which is supposed to drain the road ditch.  This has created a shallow lake, and since the road ditches on both sides are connected by a culvert, this has backed up water on the other side of the road, where said beaver has built a fine lodge.  This is in a small triangular area, about a half block on a side, where the DOT has planted trees.  And the beaver is chopping them down. 

            But his choice of site is unfortunate.  Assuming that the road dept does not rip out his dam and trap him before he kills the rest of the trees, the site is still doomed.  The only water fed into this area is the runoff from the triangular plot itself, and there is no rain in winter. With no source of year-round fresh water, this shallow lake will surely freeze to the bottom.  Not good news for a beaver.  Today, he is probably a very happy little beaver.  But before next spring he will be a very dead little beaver unless he can manage to beave somewhere else.

            At one point in the Nineteenth Century, science took a sudden interest in beavers.  Engineers in particular were impressed by the fact that beaver dams are always placed in exactly the right position and use an economy of materials.   Many scientists felt that such exquisite engineering indicated that beavers possessed some kind of conscious intelligence.  But recently it has become known that beavers are creatures of instinct, and a very simple instinct.  They are guided by one simple algorithm: to listen for the sound of running water-- and to pat mud and sticks on it until it stops running.  That’s it!    Such behavior will not only repair existing dams, but construct new ones.  Thus dies the notion of the wise and thoughtful beaver.

            I think this may be a useful metaphor for the universe in general.  Among my close friends are persons of a wide range of philosophical persuasions, from traditional Christians, to Atheists, Agnostics, Pagans, Animists, Deists, and just people who use the word “God” to mean the forces of the natural world.  Personally, I am more comfortable as a Deist, (a person who says that,  “Yes, there is a God—and he created the universe,  and wound it up like an alarm clock and tossed it out into space—and hasn’t been seen since.”)   The first five presidents of the United States all claimed to be Deists.   But whatever our philosophy, when discussing the cosmos and its origin we find ourselves using metaphors like “Grand Designer,” or “Watchmaker,” or Engineer.  I think all of these are poor metaphors because they all imply a conscious intentionality.  “Big Beaver” might be a better term.   Just as the beaver’s elegant works are all the result of a simple algorithm, I suspect that the present universe is simply the result of a small number of very basic rules—rules at the particle level—for how mater and energy interact.  And from these rules the cosmos has organized itself into atoms, molecules, stars, planets, life forms—and us. 

Chaos Theory and Klystrons

       Is it possible that klystrons, traveling wave tubes, and all velocity modulation amplifiers are an expression of one of the central elements of chaos theory? These devices  are simply tubes wherein a beam of electrons flowing down the length of the tube interacts with with a tiny e.m.f. introduced by a small antenna at the upstream end.  The signal to be amplified is "broadcast" into the tube, and the individual electrons in the beam are either accelerated or decelerated as they past through the radio wave, depending on the phase of the wave at the instant they encounter it. This change in velocity is extremely minute, but with the passage of time, the electrons which were accelerated drift further and further ahead of the others, and those which were decelerated get further and further behind.  By the time they get to the antenna at the downstream end, there is a pronounced "bunching" effect.  As these grouped electrons strike the antenna, they induce an alternating current waveform identical to the tiny current introduced at the upstream end, only a thousand times greater in amplitude.  But for the process to work, time must be allowed to do its work.  In chaos theory, time is also a central element.  The idea  is not that a butterfly flapping its wings in Tibet might cause a stock market crash in London. It's that a butterfly flapping its wings in Tibet might, after the passage of sufficient time---cause a crash.   Of course, in chaos theory, the idea is that the ultimate results of an action can eventually get so complex that no prediction of that result is possible. Whereas a well designed klystron is quite predictable.

Tom Swiftie of the Day, May 2

"You can have your dog back," he said petulantly.