Wednesday, September 05, 2007
Nature notes
Tried another Cox today - have got a good bit riper since I last tried one. Much better. And the Lord Lambourne is in flower - maybe a dozen flowers - which look a little odd next to the ripening fruit. Global warming has clearly reached Epsom.
Pampas grass flower shoots just starting to break. Very handsome against the late afternoon sky, as are the hop plants, now in full flower.
Weeded cabbage enclosure number 2. Plants doing better than in enclosure number 1 - maybe they like being where the potatoes were earlier in the year - but plenty of slugs doing a fair bit of munching. Rather outside the enclosure I came across two slugs curled up with each other in the lee of a large clump of grass - one light brown and one dark brown with some odd white things between them. Maybe the odd white things were baby slugs. In which case, all very cuddly.
Very quiet in London yesterday. Either people are still on holiday or they couldn't be bothered to fight their way in through the tube strike. Never stopped me. And a nasty surprise at the Upper Crust at Waterloo having declined the preposterous bread sold in the preposterous restauranty thing in one of the new bits of the South Bank complex. (They have something called the common table that you can eat at). Upper Crust have started putting mayo in their cheese and tomato baguettes - with cheese and tomato having been one of their last conventional offerings. Perhaps it is just as well that I don't pass through Waterloo very often these days.
Interested to see the claim in yesterday's DT that the industrial revolution was in part fired by natural selection driven improvements in the human stock. Pointing out that one can improve a line of pigs a good deal in say 25 generations - a period of some 500 years in our case. Which leads to the unpleasant thought about what the stock will be like in 2500 after 500 years of no selection at all (assuming that we survive that long. Doesn't look too great at the moment) now that mortality among the young is so low. Will the world be full of hoodies and mindless louts? What on earth will we do with them all?
Pampas grass flower shoots just starting to break. Very handsome against the late afternoon sky, as are the hop plants, now in full flower.
Weeded cabbage enclosure number 2. Plants doing better than in enclosure number 1 - maybe they like being where the potatoes were earlier in the year - but plenty of slugs doing a fair bit of munching. Rather outside the enclosure I came across two slugs curled up with each other in the lee of a large clump of grass - one light brown and one dark brown with some odd white things between them. Maybe the odd white things were baby slugs. In which case, all very cuddly.
Very quiet in London yesterday. Either people are still on holiday or they couldn't be bothered to fight their way in through the tube strike. Never stopped me. And a nasty surprise at the Upper Crust at Waterloo having declined the preposterous bread sold in the preposterous restauranty thing in one of the new bits of the South Bank complex. (They have something called the common table that you can eat at). Upper Crust have started putting mayo in their cheese and tomato baguettes - with cheese and tomato having been one of their last conventional offerings. Perhaps it is just as well that I don't pass through Waterloo very often these days.
Interested to see the claim in yesterday's DT that the industrial revolution was in part fired by natural selection driven improvements in the human stock. Pointing out that one can improve a line of pigs a good deal in say 25 generations - a period of some 500 years in our case. Which leads to the unpleasant thought about what the stock will be like in 2500 after 500 years of no selection at all (assuming that we survive that long. Doesn't look too great at the moment) now that mortality among the young is so low. Will the world be full of hoodies and mindless louts? What on earth will we do with them all?
# posted by Jim @ 9:20 AM 
