The fine line between clever and stupid

This advert is on display at many London Underground stations. It's for an energy drink that has never passed my lips, but which I believe is aimed at people who find Red Bull intimidatingly classy.

Let's move beyond the thought that it was someone's job to come up with that combination of words, other people's to approve it, and however much they all got paid is scant compensation for spending your waking hours doing that sort of thing. (Look - the arms holding it have got tattoos! Edgy!)

Instead, let's just enjoy the unintentional parallels with metabolic scaling. Although I'd obviously have been happier had it said 'Relative energy consumption is a function of size'.

Wikiecology

When I saw the graph on the front of today's technology Guardian, in an article about the slowing growth of Wikipedia (it's not in the online version), I thought: "That looks like a logistic growth curve. Perhaps the sum total of knowledge represents a resource that is being exhausted, causing the encyclopedia's growth to slow".

When I got to the end of the article, I discovered that the researcher behind the work being discussed, Ed Chi of PARC, had a similar thought.

"In my experience, the only thing we've seen these growth patterns [in] before is in population growth studies – where there's some sort of resource constraint that results in this model." The site, he suggests, is becoming like a community where resources have started to run out. "As you run out of food, people start competing for that food, and that results in a slowdown in population growth and means that the stronger, more well-adapted part of the population starts to have more power."

But the article also says that the slowdown is caused by a shift in power towards 'deletionist' editors - it's getting harder to get stuff onto Wikipedia. Which suggests that the correct model might not be a sort of density-dependent, resource-limited population (we're running out of stuff to create wikipedia entries about), but perhaps something more top-down, like a predator-prey system (the editor population is keeping the contributor population in check).

I've no idea, but it's a question entirely suitable to the tools of ecological analysis. Someone should get onto it.

Alilo, alilo, alilo

Some of the songs sang by Georgian choirs (not to be confused with Gregorian chant) predate the arrival of Christianity in the country. Or so I’ve read; I’d believe you if you told me they predate the big bang, so bottomless does the music sound.

One of the most spectacular gigs I’ve been to was the Rustavi Choir in London a few years ago. So when I was in the Sounds of the Universe shop in Soho a little while ago, I snapped up the 'Polyphonic Voices of Georgia' cd on Soul Jazz Records' new Word Audio Foundation imprint. (You can also hear Georgian singing on Soul Jazz's 'Faith' comp, which twiddles the dial on a world of religious music.)

The WAF cd, sung by the Anchiskhati Choir (me neither), is all religious songs, which means it misses out on the rougher-edged folk tradition - some of the harmonies are sweet and almost western. But it's still lovely. And, being Soul Jazz, they've made an effort - you get funky postcards, proper sleeve notes, and the cd comes in a cool but slightly-annoyingly-larger-than-usual plastic box - a bit like those cases that cassettes sometimes came in. Along with the monochrome cover photo, this gives the impression that the recording is in fact some academic ethnomusicology project from the 60s.

(if you like this sort of thing, Corsican and Sardinian male voice choirs sound similar to my ear.)

Before the carbon rush

The Economist's Natasha Loder has a post on her blog worth reading about the speculators getting preemptively involved in carbon forest credits in Papua New Guinea. A former Australian horse trader and cock-fighting impresario, it seems, is going around the place "signing up landowners for big carbon trading deals in advance of negotiations to trade forest carbon as offsets between countries".

There's something Conradian about this story; the old one of white folks going into the jungle to try and get rich, making up the rules as they go along. Is this how carbon trading is going to work?

Although not just white folks, apparently. Natasha is commenting on a story by the AP's Ilya Gridneff. I can't find the original elsewhere online (it's reproduced on her post), but a google reveals he's all over this kind of stuff in PNG. Sample first par: "A nephew of Papua New Guinea's Prime Minister Michael Somare is accused of pressuring remote villagers to sign away their land for carbon deals despite there being no carbon trade laws in place."

Thoughts on hearing the 7 o'clock news

A long time ago, BBC Radio 1 broadcast a documentary about Kraftwerk. The thing I remember most clearly from it was a story about how, when they heard 'Billie Jean', the band was thrown into crisis, believing that the song was such a leap forward that there was nowhere for them left to go.

Much later, I saw a clip of Jackson performing the same song at the Motown 25th Anniversay concert, and thought 'Well, pop music should have given up at that point, because nothing is ever going to top that.'



This morning, there were no tracks from 'Off the Wall' in the clips played on the Today programme (not big MJ fans, I guess), so we put the cd on. Anyone who doesn't like this record doesn't like happiness. Let us single out for praise 'Rock With You': that rare thing, a brilliant mid-tempo pop song, totally sophisticated and totally disco at the same time. You can imagine Smokey Robinson or Ella Fitzgerald singing it, and that's the company he deserves to be remembered alongside.

I give in

OK, so I've no desire to read anyone else's tweets, but I've been thinking that it's a good medium for saying 'hey, check this paper out', which is often all I want to do. So I've set up a feed, and put that last post on it. I think it's called @gentraso. We'll see if it's as colossal a waste of time as I've always believed.

9 July update. That really was a very graceless post, wasn't it? On poking around twitter, I can see that there's a some interesting stuff, and I can see how it's potentially addictive. I've still not signed up to follow anyone yet, though (though I may). And I'm still not sure where all the time for this stuff comes from.

Pigeons

They don't know much about art.
But they can learn what you like.

Seeds of an edible city architecture

I've got a piece in today's Nature looking at recent efforts to integrate plants and buildings to help produce food and adapt to climate change.

It's loosely pegged to three recently stopped or upcoming exhibitions: London Yields at the Building Centre; Vertical Gardens at Exit Art, New York (both finished); and Radical Nature at the Barbican, London (starting on Sat 19th).

Best. Title. Ever.

Nothing to do with ecology etc., but I couldn't resist saluting Peter Leeson for calling his book on the economics of piracy 'The Invisible Hook'.

I bet no other blog spots this

So, the avian gunge scraped out of the engine of the US airways flight that ditched in the Hudson river this January was (Canada) goose rillettes. Ho hum.

More exciting is this piece of nominative determinism (from the press release)...

“It’s important to not only know what species of birds are involved in collisions, but to also understand the role that migration plays in the larger picture,” said Carla Dove, a coauthor and program director at Smithsonian’s Feather Identification Laboratory.

Hear my voice

My south-London tones are getting an outing on US radio tomorrow, on New Hampshire Public Radio's Word of Mouth, from 12 noon EST. I'll be talking spite.

5 June Update. Here's what I said.

My journalistic heroes...

...are the guys who couldn't be arsed to follow up on Watergate. That's what I call work/life balance.

Why is it easier to get away with keeping a live leopard than wearing a dead one?

I can see why people take drugs, despite their illegality. Drugs get you high. But I find it a lot harder to understand the massive illegal trade in live animals. I guess a pet leopard or monitor lizard is a status symbol, but not one that's easy to flaunt, and what kind of a dick wants one in the first place?

That's what I thought when I read the excellent New Yorker piece ($) from April about the havoc being wreaked by escaped exotic pets in Florida.

The answer must be partly because the chances of getting caught are minimal and the punishments footling. That's unlikely to change (and besides, drugs policy shows how ineffective prohibition is). What we need instead is an effort to change norms. The animal rights movement has had some success in demonizing the wearing of fur (this train of thought was prompted when I saw the piece in today's Guardian about PETA's shock tactics, which I haven't read, because life's a bit on the short side), likewise the campaign against conflict diamonds. The conservation movement - so polite, reasonable and ineffectual compared with those who campaign for the welfare of captive animals - needs to do the same for exotic pets.

Of course, you wear a fur coat in public. Which brings me back to pondering the point of a status symbol you need to hide, and makes me wonder and despair at what in human nature (including mine) delights in ownership for its own sake.

More research is needed

Apparently, you need to kiss a lot of frogs before you find a prince.

Turns out you also need to examine a lot of piles of elephant dung before you find a frog. 48.33, to be precise.

Now, if someone could be a bit more quantitative about the frog/prince ratio, we could work out princes per pile of elephant dung.

Nascence man

Having been away from my computer, this is now a week old. But I've written a feature for Nature about Mike Russell's work on the origin of life, especially his efforts to recreate the key moment in the lab.