Breeding
Today’s Telegraph has an image gallery showing captive tigers in a Buddhist enclave in The Tiger temple in Kanchanaburi, Thailand
Image number seven bears the caption “Conservationists worry that the temples allows different subspecies of tigers to interbreed”.
Hah!
I think that the definition of a species is that (set of animals) which can breed with each other successfully.
We humans are all of the same (human) species, so Australians can breed with Poles can breed with Chinese can breed with Africans can breed with …
Horse and Donkeys can breed, but they are of different species, so they cannot breed successfully; the offspring is a sterile mule, a device that cannot propagate, a dead end.
So either the (unnamed) conservationists are wrong, dead wrong (species don’t interbreed, by definition), or their true fear is that (presumably) valuable mammalian eggs and sperm are being tossed into dead-end offspring, reducing the pool of larger available fertile members of the parenting species.
If the latter, then they should say so.
Perhaps they did.
Then The Telegraph should report that rather than the bleak mis-informative text of the caption.
Cat Horsepower
My cat, Jupiter, crouches on the carpet below the window, then leaps up onto the window-ledge, a leap of thirty-nine inches.
Jupiter is overcoming gravity; that is, he is reversing what would happen were he, or a marble, to roll or fall off the window ledge onto the floor.
I know that acceleration due to earth’s gravity is 32 feet per second per second.
I know that Newton’s formula for distance is
S= ½ a t^2
Since I know the distance (39 inches or 3.25 feet) and I know the acceleration (32 feet per second per second), I can work out the time it would take him, at most, to fall from the ledge, and hence the time taken, at most, to leap onto the ledge.
0.45 seconds. Roughly (!)
Now Jupiter weighs thirteen pounds, roughly. I know this because I picked him up yesterday and stood on the scales with him. Then I put him back in the green chair and weighed myself.
So when Jupiter leaps up to the window ledge, he is lifting 13 lbs through a distance of 3.25 feet. In other words, he is doing 13×3.25=42.25 foot-pounds of work.
And he does it in 0.45 seconds.
It’s not a truly fair translation, but roughly speaking, he could lift 93 foot pounds in a second, could he maintain his rate of work. Which he probably couldn’t.
Since a crude definition of “One Horsepower” is 550 foot-pounds per second, and Jupiter can manage 93 foot-pounds per second, I conclude that my cat Jupiter is rated at about 0.17 of a horsepower!
Or, if you prefer, 5.8 cats like Jupiter would be as good as having a horse.
He doesn’t eat like a horse, though.
So Near, And Yet So Far!
I like reading Alan Caruba’s blog, and I’m referencing here because (a) I hope you’ll start to read Alan Caruba’s blog and (b) Alan passes on (but does not create!) a little bit of under-information that needs to be revealed.
http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com/
Quotes Caruba: It does note that “The University of Arkansas’ Applied Sustainability Center estimates the dairy industry contributes less than 2 percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.”
Whenever someone (again, in this case NOT Caruba!) tells you that something is “less than” or ‘more than”, be on the lookout.
Suppose that the contribution is 1.9 percent. Then the statement is true, and no harm is done.
But suppose that the contribution is 0.0009 percent. Then the statement remains true, since 0.0009 percent is indeed less than 2 percent, but Oh! How misleading it is.
It is, to coin a phrase, less than true.
In this particular case, when The University of Arkansas’ Applied Sustainability Center estimates … less than 2 percent …I suspect that someone is trying to hide a real fact.
In this case, perhaps the contribution is 0.0009 percent, and there really, really is nothing to fear from dairy cows. But then the government grants would not be forthcoming, would they?
Less Than Two Percent
I like reading Alan Caruba’s blog, and I’m referencing here because (a) I hope you’ll start to read Alan Caruba’s blog and (b) Alan passes on (but does not create!) a little bit of under-information that needs to be revealed.
http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com/
Quotes Caruba: It does note that “The University of Arkansas’ Applied Sustainability Center estimates the dairy industry contributes less than 2 percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.”
Whenever someone (again, in this case NOT Caruba!) tells you that something is “less than” or “more than”, be on the lookout.
Suppose that the contribution is 1.9 percent. Then the statement is true, and no harm is done.
But suppose that the contribution is 0.0009 percent. Then the statement remains true, since 0.0009 percent is indeed less than 2 percent, but Oh! How misleading it is.
It is, to coin a phrase, less than true.
In this particular case, when The University of Arkansas’ Applied Sustainability Center estimates … less than 2 percent …I suspect that someone is trying to hide a real fact.
In this case, perhaps the contribution is 0.0009 percent, and there really, really is nothing to fear from dairy cows. But then the government grants would not be forthcoming, would they?
