Pour vous, une attention immédiate - dernière signaux enregistrés avant sémaphore ligne brisée

"Aha! the french pan-continental semaphore tower system - with... metal arms - a mechanical scribe?... - wobbling as I speak - Raff, here look at this oddity, another of Boney's confounded devices ... note how it moves with our very words but holds still with our silences, I have a wonder that it might be sending each utterance to Paris itself - if i wasn't aware of the work of Lagrange I'd believe it to be some Eldritch device, no wonder those peasants were afraid of this place. ...--... yes, signaling, ah yes, i can see it ...--... damn, it's in French Code - quick we need to redirect the flags to point to the Tribute, see if we can get a semaphore to the fleet, and to Sir Walston-Bilbarage at once! ..--.. yes, glorious idea, Raff, you move tha-XXX-

basic stuff

There are two basic flaws with this approach. One is the fundamental notion that some species are more highly “evolved” than others. We might naturally think of monkeys occupying a position higher on the phylogenetic scale than cats, and cats higher than rats. Yet the fact is that primates, carnivores, and rodents all diverged from a common ancestor at the same time. They are all equally “evolved”. The branching tree of evolution has not just one culmination, but millions of culminations - represented in every living species on earth today. Each is a brilliant success at what it does.

- excerpt from “If a lion could talk”

How animals think

by Stephen Budiansky

Phoenix

ISBN 0-75380-772-6

of note

NSA (not NASA) has more PhDs in mathematics than any other organization in the western world.

from under a stone

I had always thought of fairies as dull, too pretty to be interesting. But suddenly I found myself reading about a fairy that wasn’t pretty at all. He was Yallery Brown, a sprite from the Fen Country of Eastern England, and he was inexorably, mindlessly cruel. He was found by a farmhand who heard a soft weeping sound, like a child crying. The man was a kindly soul, and he searched for the child, to comfort it. What he found, when he overturned a rock, was a little withered thing with bright dark eyes and cloud of long yellow hair. The little thing made him a promise: to stay with him for ever and to help him with his work, as long as he was never thanked. So far, not too bad. But Yallery Brown’s help turned out to be no help at all. Everyone avoided the farmhand because they could see his work being done for him by invisible hands, Things went from bad to worse, until one day the poor farmhand thanked his helper in a despairing effort to get rid of him. From then on Yallery Brown spoiled everything he did, and haunted him day and night, crying out,

“Loss and mischance and Yallery Brown

You’ve let out yourself from under a stone.”

The farmhand died friendless and destitute, with that voice ringing in his ears.

- excerpt from
Introduction: Fear of Fairies
“Troublesome Things”
A history of fairies and fairy stories

by Diane Purkiss

Penguin Books
ISBN 0-140-281-72X

a quick mention

Bristle 2 is out

details here

(Here is the image that inspired my tale within it)

...a while more...

...this is the Conpernicum Principle - there is nothing special about the time you arrive at a phenomenon.

So, given that the human race has been around for 200,000 years, the chances are I have arrived at the mid 95% of the range of the human species and hence the human race has at 95% chance it’ll last AT LEAST another 5,100 years and NOT LONGER than 7.8 Million years.

on average mammal species last 2 million years...

- bad Paraphrasing of J. Richard Gott