it's not firewire, but hdmi. *grumbles*. screwed...

...except...

....i could in theory work out the crux of what i was working on by installing the pod drivers direct through usb.

and on that note, i've wanted to set up my other (half broken) laptop as a real-time sound processing device for a while. guitars, mostly, of course - but drums, too. see, the hard drive comes up and down. i was going to wait until i could replace it....

i also wanted to dual-boot it. that's something to keep me occupied as i'm waiting...

i'm just finding the idea of blowing this time reading to be depressing. i jumped through hoops to set this up. i'm pissed off that i'm dealing with broken hardware, and depressed that it's my own stupidity at the root of it.

the problem with the hard disk, btw, is physical. and the way the heads are aligned in the model is really tricky. i don't want to open this up, but i'm going to have to. however, i'm also only going to touch it under the precise circumstance that the arm is unaligned. anything else, and i'm screwing it back up and throwing it in the freezer, because it's pretty much hopelessly broken.

i didn't realize that my bus pirate was being shipped from asia. i'm pretty sure that the website was registered to chicago. i would have picked somewhere closer, if i realized that.

as far as i can tell, it's sitting in a boat off the coast of singapore, waiting to be filled up with mail.
and it could be there for weeks...

so, i'm considering converting the laptop, which is what i'll have to do if the bus pirate doesn't work anyways. i'm going to do some reading and decide in a few days.

i don't see any rational reason that this couldn't handle a firewire device. i just really don't like the idea of mixing with a laptop sound card. ugh...

but, at least if i get the tracks down, i can remix it later.

that other pandora's box...

it's about time. but, these groups are american-backed. it wasn't that easy.

crushing defeat for sovereignty? hardly.

liberals: 42%
sovereigntists: 55%

the charter split the vote, and while many analysts will express confusion, this was fully predictable. this happens over and over again in canada - the centre shifts it's policy to appeal to the right, and merely loses support on both sides. ask paul martin. ask dalton mcguinty. right-wing voters tend to interpret these shifts as validation for their right-wing cause, rather than as a reason to support the centre. the more the centre appeases the right, the stronger the right ends up.

the appeasement needs to stop.

i want to say "fuck the adq/caq"; i want to say "the results demonstrate that this kind of bullshit is not to be tolerated", but what the results actually suggest is that marois' validation of racist bullshit emboldened the right to take a stand.

and, of course, the principled aspects of the left abandoned the centre, moving to the more principled qs instead.

the result is the liberals split the vote.

completely predictable....

in the long run, a sovereign quebec needs a spectrum, and one is beginning to develop with the pq in the centre and the qs and caq to it's left and right, respectively.

hopefully, what happens over the next few years is that the right moderates and the centre recalibrates.

but i fear that, by giving these voices a podium, marois has opened up a pandora's box. quebec is viewed throughout most of the country as an insular, xenophobic society. it's been argued forcefully for many years that this is an exaggeration - and perhaps a little bit racist itself. would a policy be less popular in calgary, if not in toronto? would borden's "white canada" still resonate if campaigned upon? it's hard to say.

what is clear, though, is that the liberals must close this box before what was unleashed gets out of hand.

that's their mandate, and they'd better follow through on it, or face an emboldened monster the next time around.

so, i've seen some videos about rabbit-squirrel hybrids. i have an interest in this.

something i noticed living in ottawa was that the urban rabbit population was increasing. of course, wild rabbit populations are known to increase and decrease wildly due to predation, but it's hard to see what kind of predation would exist in downtown ottawa. coyotes (and incresaingly coywolves, actually) are known to exist in the suburbs, but there are many serious barriers to moving right into downtown. who knows, though. these animals are shy and good at being evasive. yet, even if there were a few wild coyotes, i couldn't imagine them acting as a check on the rabbit population.

rabbits and squirrels would occupy similar niches in an urban setting. they're also mildly related (i'll get to this in a second). so, we have a situation where i believe hybridization would be more likely than competition, if it is indeed possible.

now, the only way to know if it's possible is to check. i haven't been able to find anything useful with a quick google search and would suspect that such a targeted breeding program would be considered useless. nothing could be gained except a more hardy nuisance species. well, that's exactly the possible evolutionary advantage, though. about the only realistic proof of such an idea would be to find a specimen and test it. it also falls under the category of questions that cannot be effectively disproven, not even with tests.

one of the arguments against this will no doubt be to point out that they exist in different orders, but this is a bad argument. it's circular. species are indeed partially defined by their inability to mate outside their boundaries, but we're learning that the methods used by naturalists (number of teeth, or bone structure) are not remotely conclusive regarding the question of genetic compatibility. all kinds of animals that have been defined as different species are in fact genetically similar enough to mate. rather than argue that they're in different orders (because they look different) and therefore cannot mate, we need to carry out experiments to determine if their differences in physical appearance actually provide enough of a genetic difference to justify putting them in different orders. this process of updating linnaeus to a genetic basis is an ongoing process that in many ways is still in it's infancy.

the tree of life has many pending revisions.

it's currently understood that lagomorphs and rodents are cladistically closely related. that is to say that rabbits and squirrels, while in different orders based on physical traits, are considered to share a relatively recent ancestor. certainly, rabbits and rodents are more closely related to each other than they are to other animals. of all the other mammals, rodents provide the most likely cross-order hybrid potential to rabbits. we simply cannot know until we experiment, or until we find a specimen in the wild.

one clue, though, is chromosome count - and this is actually quite promising. rabbits are at 44, while rodents are at 40. this provides an intermediate point of 42. while it would be most likely if they had a shared number of chromosomes (cat hybrids are possible due to a shared 38 chromosomes across the different subspecies), the second best is an even split. an example of this kind of intermediate argument comes in whale/dolphin hybrids, where everything gets split - chromosomes, teeth number and other features.

i'm not wiling to say it's possible until i see a specimen, but if such a thing were presented i would definitely want to present it as evidence of my alternate theory of evolution. i'm certainly not willing to write it off offhand. the shared common ancestor is too recent, regardless of what the aristotlians classified them as.

i want to clarify the can't disprove thing, because i over-simplified. what i meant was that just taking a few rabbits and trying to cross them with squirrels and seeing it fail isn't rigourous enough to disprove the possibility.

now, if the precise genetic incompatibility could be isolated, and if it could then be proven that this incompatibility is constant throughout one or both genomes, then that's conclusive. then you could say that they're incompatible due to whatever genetic component that is characteristic of all rabbits and/or all squirrels.

otherwise, there's the lingering doubt that this population of rabbits or that population of squirrels has some kind of mutation beyond the shared ancestor that prevents mating. and, in full generalization, it couldn't be anything other than a mutation that would prevent mating - because they share a common ancestor.

so, you need to get into a lot of details before you can rule this out. what you'd want to do is find the most archaic representations of both species to test. and what that even means is difficult to determine without mapping out all the mutations in the first place.

i'm not an expert on rodent or rabbit dna, so maybe that work is further along than i realize. but my oversimplification stands, until the genomes of both species - and the mutations that led to them as distinct species - are fully understood in concrete, quantifiable terms.

it's not as simple as just taking random variables. it's the exception to the rule, the negation of the probability, that is what is being sought, here, to disprove the claim.

it's not just theology that runs into the unicorn problem. it's an issue within science itself.

there's even the bizarre possibility of rabbits back mutating to a more primal state. i mean, fins have become legs have become fins, and there's some suggestion that this has to do with turning things off and on.

if rabbits and squirrels live within close quarters, could rabbits even return to a "genetic memory" in order to breed with squirrels? i'm being teleological. but the epigenetics just might....

regardless, all it would take would be a handful of viable individuals to conceivably create the material to allow for a back-crossing, at which point all linneaen hell then breaks loose.

mind-boggling.