stoutfellow

In the past couple of days, I've finished Grant's memoirs and Voyage of the Beagle.

I've commented before on Grant's writing. Towards the end of the book, there was rather less wit, but it was made up for by his description of his strategy near the end of the war. I hadn't realized how much the entire affair - Sherman's march, Sheridan's raid on the Shenandoah, Stoneman's cavalry tearing up the tracks - was a matter of logistics, aiming at cutting Lee's army off from all supply: a smaller-scale and land-based version of the Anaconda Plan. He made it very interesting. (There was one bit of humor, late, but I'm not sure whether it originated with Grant or with Lincoln, or was simply "in the air": the story of General Cass, in one of the Indian Wars, pursuing the Indians so closely that, first thing he knew, he passed their front line and the Indians were pursuing him! Reminds me of the mob scene in Freefall....)

Though abridged (the editors say, by about a third), Voyage of the Beagle was worth reading. Darwin's meditations on coral islands are there, and his thoughts on uplift and subsidence as driving forces in geology. (Reading this just after Simon Winchester's treatment of plate tectonics in Krakatoa was especially interesting, comparing Darwin's views with modern theory.) He was quite thoroughly middle-class English in his estimations of the peoples he met; he approved of the Tahitians, but ranked the Maori only slightly higher than the pathetic Fuegians. I was particularly pleased to find Darwin's brief account of the time he spent an afternoon throwing a marine iguana into the water. (Yes, one iguana, over and over again. He was quite puzzled by the iguana's behavior, and eventually developed an explanation. The iguana's opinion of Darwin's behavior is, alas, lost to history.) I had first read of this incident in David Quammen's vivid - and occasionally vulgar - The Song of the Dodo, which, incidentally, I heartily recommend to anyone interested in the workings of ecosystems.

So. What have y'all been reading that's interesting?

It looks like we're going to be in serious trouble in about 1.5 million years:

Gliese 710 is coming.

(Hat tip to nancylebov.)

but this is still pretty cool. (Hat tip to filkertom.)

To clarify, if it's necessary, these are the books that I read for the first time in 2007 that I enjoyed the most, or got the most out of. I don't think any of them were actually published in '07.

( The List )

In an earlier post, I lamented the apparent extinction of the Baiji, the Yangtze river dolphin. Now, I hear from the World Wildlife Fund that a living Baiji has been captured on film. Maybe it's not too late.

Some time ago, pompe raised a question: what might have happened if foxes, instead of wolves, had been the first canid to be domesticated? In response, I mentioned an experiment in domesticating foxes I'd read about.

In an effort to maintain some of the housecleaning momentum from mbernardi's visit, I've been cleaning off the desk in my computer room. One of the unexpected items unearthed by this effort is the March-April 1999 issue of American Scientist, which contains an article on the experiment I mentioned. Without going into the details that I'd forgotten, I'd like to quote the following passage, which seems relevant to pompe's question.

Over the years, other investigators and I have raised several fox pups in domestic conditions, either in the laboratory or at home as pets. They have shown themselves to be good-tempered creatures, as devoted as dogs but as independent as cats, capable of forming deep-rooted pair bonds with human beings - mutual bonds, as those of us who work with them know. If our experiment should continue, and if fox pups could be raised and trained the way dog puppies are now, there is no telling what sort of animal they might one day become.

(It should be noted that the fox pups in question are the product of some thirty generations of selection for tameness; they are not wild foxes.)

That's the headline on this New Scientist article. All I can say is, "Wow - if true".

Courtesy of threeringedmoon, an article by PZ Myers on How the Cavefish Lost Its Eyes. (For the record, I always assumed explanation #1 was the correct one.)

The late Douglas Adams wrote a book in 1990 entitled Last Chance To See, describing a number of critically endangered species. One of the species mentioned was the Yangtze river dolphin.

For that species, the last chance is gone.

Apparently the IAU has settled on a different definition of "planet" than the one mooted earlier, in favor of one that's pretty close to pompe's suggestion. Tenser, said the Tensor isn't happy about this.