Escapity

nellorat doesn't seem to have mentioned this on her journal, so I shall.

As I was just finishing mowing, the mail arrived, including a package I'd been looking forward to--a Barnes and Noble shipment containing Evolution Control Committee's new album, Plagiarhythm Nation, Vol. 2.0, which was recommended to me by the Mistress of Groovitude, Sarah Ovenall. So I rushed inside and sat down in the living room to sort through the mail.

From my chair (we all have designated seats in the living room), I have a good view of both cages of female rats. I noticed that Missy was peeking out from the big wicker ball in the main cage, and I said to her, "Are all of you hiding in the ball?" Since she couldn't actually answer me, I had to supply my own answer: no.

The big cage has an open bottom and rests in a large metal pan. It turns out that when I changed the shredded-paper litter in the pan last weekend, I had managed to put the cage on top of enough paper that the rats could burrow through the paper between the bottom of the cage and the pan. Four of the five were at loose in the house.

Now, as nellorat noted on her journal, this ratscape happened (via a different egress) two weeks ago, too, so I was moderately prepared. I immediately scooped out paper so that the cage would sit flat on the pan (so that Missy wouldn't escape and so that the others wouldn't, either, when we caught them and put them back in) and set about the task of finding the others.

It didn't go very well this time. After an hour of moving the couch around (and generating an amazing pile of the things which had slipped under, behind, or within it over the many moons since we last moved it ), I barely managed to recapture one rat--Connie, the escape artist. Quelle irony. I discovered that she was actually hiding inside the couch, which I hadn't realized was possible. So I put her back in the cage and, unfortunately, had to leave not too long after to go for comics and NYRSF. With three rats still on the loose, I set up the humane trap (which did a fine job with Millie, the last escapee, last time) and set out.

I met up with nellorat in the city around 9 PM and came home. I heard one of the escapees rustling around in the couch, so we took the back cloth off of it, and after about fifteen minutes of hide-and-seek, managed to catch Cinnamon. Back into the cage. Then we watched the West Wing season finale--boy, do they know how to layer on a cliffhanger, or what?--and then went upstairs.

Remembering a trick which had proven remarkably effective years before when we had a 'scapity hamster, we brought Dr. Butch down into the living room to try to lure the two remaining girls to the trap by force of personality (and pheromones). As nellorat lay on the bed in my study playing with Rufus and listening to his favorite song (a techno remix of GIR's "The Doom Song" from Invader Zim, I heard some rats scuffling in the living room. I rushed downstairs and...

saw Connie climbing on top of Dr. Butch's cage, trying to get in, and then saw that Millie was back in the cage of her own free will. Evidently, I had done an inadequate job of re-securing it.

I managed to grab Connie and block Millie from re-re-escaping. We took out all of the paper, put the cage level on the metal pan, and put everyone back where they belong. Dr. Butch still sits in the living room, an attractive nuisance; Sookie, we hope, will fall prey to his seductive charms any second now and all will again be swell.

Other pet note: supergee mentioned to me this morning that he had forgotten to stock up on food for Courageous, and would go and get some today. When I went into the garage to get the lawnmower and weed wacker, kittikins mewed most pitifully at me, and there was a lump of uneaten food in one of her bowls. Since it's been about two weeks since her last steroid shot, I assumed this meant that she had left food uneaten from yesterday, so I went in to get her a carton of "cat milk" (a milk-based product engineered to not upset a cat's digestion; it's intended as a treat, but we use it as a substitute for food when she reaches the point in her steroid cycle when she can't eat). Poured it in, she dove for it, slurp slurp meow. Supergee got home about fifteen minutes later (while I was working on catching Connie) and, in the conversation which ensued, we established that indeed he had fed her this morning, and she had eaten it all. So she managed to scam a full carton of cat milk from me. I couldn't be happier for her.

Update, Thursday morning: Sookie is still loose in the living room--supergee saw her on top of Butch's cage, but she fled as we approached. She also managed to get a yogurt drop off of the activation lever in the trap without setting off the trap; at nellorat's suggestion, the yogurt drops are now imbedded in the peanut butter which is also on the activation lever, so it should be impossible for her to get them without setting it off.

Hard and soft

I've been nibbling at an idea for the last week or so since I read an annoying self-satisfied post on my friend Greg Morrow's blog, Frothing at the Mouth. The post, "Physicists Are Great", is a celebration of the "hardest of hard sciences":

The hard sciences have a profound virtue, especially compared with social sciences: it's easy to tell when you've done good science. Your results are rarely ambiguous and quickly replicated; your experiments are easy to design, easy to control (in the technical, scientific sense of "control"), easy to interpret. And good science is the best marker of status in the field.

The rest of the post elaborates on this contrast to the social sciences, where results are ambiguous, hard to replicate; experiments are hard to design, almost impossible to "control", and difficult to interpret.

In short, physics is precisely the opposite of "hard": Physics is easy. Objects move around, but the rules describing their motion are simple enough that elementary-school students can solve a lot of them, and high-school student most of the rest. Subatomic particles are more difficult, but they can be studied in isolation and weighed to the billionth of a gram. Every electron is like every other electron, so what holds for one will hold for every other.

Chemistry is harder, because chemists have to study groups of atoms in a way which leaves the groups intact. Combining two complex chemicals will result in a huge variety of resultant products.

Biology is harder still, because living systems will fight against experimentation, individual living creatures are tremendously variable, and cause and effect are separated by an unknowable number of intermediary steps. Even the simplest system of a living creature involves hundreds or thousands of moving parts.

Social science is the least easy family of sciences--the hardest--because everything that I said about biology is increased a hundredfold. The types of "control" which are possible in physics, or even in chemistry and biology, tend to be called "crimes against humanity" in the social sciences; you can't take a population of 100 test humans and subject them to traumatic stress just to see how they break. Truly unobtrusive measure are more difficult to design, but if people know they're being studied, they change their behaviors; test subjects will lie and cheat. People behave counter-rationally, no matter how you define rational, and unpredictably no matter what your models. And, because the results of social science experiments are clearly related to issues of human interest, the funding is subject to levels of political and superstitious interference which physics is much less likely to experience. (I'm trying to think of a physics study that would be as likely to get killed, defunded, or subverted by fundamentalist Christians as a study of male-male parenting would be.)

In short, physics is easy; economics is hard. So let's lay off the congratulations.

The most succinct review so far of Matrix: Reloaded

"Unfortunately, I cannot tell you how bad the Matrix Reloaded is.You have to see it for yourself."
--from Scott Kurtz, of the webstrip PvP.

Hell hath no fury like a fanboy disappointed.

I haven't seen it, probably won't see it for a few days; I go into it expecting it to make no sense, but the visual effects had better wow my non-existent socks off or I'll be bitter.