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The Wages of Large Mammal Bias
Aug. 15th, 2019 03:49 pmI have a smartphone, so that I won't be left behind when the singularity comes. And I have a corkboard -- I don't know what kind of rapture is corkboard-reliant, but whatever it is, I'm ready. Currently the board supports one inspirational quote and the phylogeny of the eukaryotes.
I did not sign up to the Behavior and Conservation Ecology project about whether the height of chew card placement makes a difference to the accuracy of rat monitoring. I did not sign up to the project about the effects of different kinds of street lamp on moths. No, I had to sign up for seal habitat preference, because seals and the places they live are exciting. Never mind that you can't get within twenty meters of a seal to measure things like the inclination of the rock it's sitting on, or the fact that none of the five of us in our group turn out to be legally able to drive the others anywhere. From the proposal of two seal colony sites and twelve variables measured in multiple transects, we have shriveled like plant tissue in a salt bath to one or possibly two variables, measured at one site. And as a measure of the enthusiasm of the rest of the group, the fact that only one of the four of them replied to my email trying to establish whether we had a full driver's license among us before groups were locked in is not encouraging. My overall enthusiasm for my studies is still sitting at 'Good that this is their last year.' On the other hand -- the lectures for that course have made a hairpin turn in the right direction. One of the dullest lecturers I've ever been lectured by withdraws like a cloud from the sun. What we now have interesting, interested, information-dense lectures on threats to the biosphere.
...
I just finished reading A Verse From Babylon, by Jeannelle M. Ferreira. Beautifully exact writing of place and people, in moments of texture and light and gesture. The place is the Warsaw Ghetto; the people were real, and did not survive it. This is a very good book, and although it is very short I read at least two other books between starting and finishing it because I couldn't bear to read it quickly. I will lend it with enthusiasm to anyone who thinks that would work out emotionally to being a good idea.
One of the books I read between the start and the end of that one was The Scholars of Night, by John M. Ford. (Why yes, I did let myself buy a number of books on Amazon recently). There seems not much point my writing about a John Ford book having read it only once. This is a Cold War spy novel in which one of the spies is, tangentially, Christopher Marlowe, and another one may be an archangel, and questions are in play involving where games give way to reality, and where reality starts to forget that it isn't a game; given all those things, I kept expecting macro-scale twists which didn't happen, or if they happened they were too oblique for me to notice as more than a distant rustling of significance ungrasped. I'm still waiting to feel warm or affectionate towards a John Ford book, as opposed to interested and impressed -- a degree of male gaziness doesn't help, insightful and compassionate though it may be -- but the three I've read all leave me thinking that the more I read them the more I may like them. (This one certainly leaves me feeling newly enthusiastic about boardgames, which seems to be a side effect of his books generally).
I did not sign up to the Behavior and Conservation Ecology project about whether the height of chew card placement makes a difference to the accuracy of rat monitoring. I did not sign up to the project about the effects of different kinds of street lamp on moths. No, I had to sign up for seal habitat preference, because seals and the places they live are exciting. Never mind that you can't get within twenty meters of a seal to measure things like the inclination of the rock it's sitting on, or the fact that none of the five of us in our group turn out to be legally able to drive the others anywhere. From the proposal of two seal colony sites and twelve variables measured in multiple transects, we have shriveled like plant tissue in a salt bath to one or possibly two variables, measured at one site. And as a measure of the enthusiasm of the rest of the group, the fact that only one of the four of them replied to my email trying to establish whether we had a full driver's license among us before groups were locked in is not encouraging. My overall enthusiasm for my studies is still sitting at 'Good that this is their last year.' On the other hand -- the lectures for that course have made a hairpin turn in the right direction. One of the dullest lecturers I've ever been lectured by withdraws like a cloud from the sun. What we now have interesting, interested, information-dense lectures on threats to the biosphere.
...
I just finished reading A Verse From Babylon, by Jeannelle M. Ferreira. Beautifully exact writing of place and people, in moments of texture and light and gesture. The place is the Warsaw Ghetto; the people were real, and did not survive it. This is a very good book, and although it is very short I read at least two other books between starting and finishing it because I couldn't bear to read it quickly. I will lend it with enthusiasm to anyone who thinks that would work out emotionally to being a good idea.
One of the books I read between the start and the end of that one was The Scholars of Night, by John M. Ford. (Why yes, I did let myself buy a number of books on Amazon recently). There seems not much point my writing about a John Ford book having read it only once. This is a Cold War spy novel in which one of the spies is, tangentially, Christopher Marlowe, and another one may be an archangel, and questions are in play involving where games give way to reality, and where reality starts to forget that it isn't a game; given all those things, I kept expecting macro-scale twists which didn't happen, or if they happened they were too oblique for me to notice as more than a distant rustling of significance ungrasped. I'm still waiting to feel warm or affectionate towards a John Ford book, as opposed to interested and impressed -- a degree of male gaziness doesn't help, insightful and compassionate though it may be -- but the three I've read all leave me thinking that the more I read them the more I may like them. (This one certainly leaves me feeling newly enthusiastic about boardgames, which seems to be a side effect of his books generally).
