A thorn in a beaver's mind

I read somewhere, a researcher was studying behavior of a beaver, that other animal who profoundly changes his environment (the number one animal who does it is us humans). It is a well-known fact that beavers watch out tirelessly for leaks in their dams. If they hear the sound of running water they rush to the site and execute repairs. The researcher played a trick on the beaver – played the sound of running water on a tape recorder. The beaver rushed in. Went to work. He worked and worked on a perfectly intact dam, while the tape played on.  The researcher concludes that the industrious rodent lacks in a certain kind of operational intelligence.

As a scientist, I agree.  As a writer, I see a caveat and a metaphor.  Do we not react the same way, when faced with an upset to our own little orders of things? We do what we can. We do our personal best. We do what we are used to do, trained to do. And sometimes, when the upset is beyond our comprehension or ability, we still do just that, keep patching a perfectly intact dam because we just can’t help it. Because all we know is that something, somewhere, somehow, is wrong -- we just can't understand what it is, exactly, that is broken.

The Age of Ice is on IO9! Plus: a free e-book offer on Amazon

An excerpt from The Age of Ice is up on IO9!

And, a short story called The Colors of Cold is now available on Amazon as a free e-book. This story's events happen next door from the mainline narrative of The Age of Ice. The characters of the two tales may have passed each other in a hallway. 

An article about my novel The Age of Ice is up online in Seattle Magazine!

 Seattle Magazine published online an article by Brangien Davis about me and The Age of Ice, my upcoming novel. I may be considered partial but I think that Brangien has done a great job, and I really appreciate it.
Thanks!
     

And now - a website!

My website has matured enough that it can entertain visitors. Check it out: The Triple Point

Another quorum sensing idea

For those who read my post about quorum sensing and quorum phenotypes in bacteria, now consider this marvelous idea (I write this while my partner, who sits next to me on the couch, is playing one of those epidemic games on his cell phone, where you are a pathogen and the goal is to infect the world):
What if a pathogen had a mechanism for sensing the quorum of having infected a certain threshold number of  people, after which point a new phenotype would trigger in, such as increased virulence, for example?
Just think about it.
But seriously. As the game of Epidemic progresses next to me on the couch, and the game responds with messages like "American scientists are 25% done on the cure," I ask my partner, "Is there a 'defund the National Institutes of Health' button in the game, that you, as a pathogen, can press to slow the progress of scientists with regard to finding the cure?"
No, there isn't, he says.
Not in the game, that is. But in our reality, there is such a button, sadly. And it is being pressed.

Norwescon 36

I will be attending Norwescon 36 this year. 
Read more for my schedule:

Another sweeping pronouncement by a non-expert

To a biologist, the term quorum sensing in nothing new. Perhaps it is familiar to all, but just in case,  Wikipedia article  on it is very nice and detailed. Let me define it nonetheless: quorum sensing has nothing to do with voter turnout or voting machines, it is a particular phenotype, or behavior, that certain living organisms begin to show when their population reaches a certain density in a certain environment -- such as bacteria in a carton of milk, for example.  This threshold of  "crowdedness" of bacterial individuals in a milk carton is called a quorum. Apparently, they have a way of knowing that they reached a quorum: they sense it (and there is nothing mysterious as to how -- they have ways, and the point of the story is not about those ways).
At any rate, having sensed the quorum, bacteria begin to display a new behavior, or activity.