Journal Articles

These are the most boring things on the face of the entire planet. Which is a little bit strange because the stuff that alot of them imply is all so very frickin' cool. Yet, somehow they are tres tres boring. If you're ever having trouble sleeping, the hell with traditional methods. Throw out your sleeping pills, put that book down, and if you even think about having some warm milk I will fucking kill you. Instead, try to slog your way through a couple pages of riveting literature such as the following example,

"Let us postulate by ascertaining the community composition, we can unambiguously state the instantaneous rate of change of both the predator's and the prey's density" (Rosenzweig 1963).

I guarantee you'll be asleep in minutes (patent peding). Anyways, after reading about 15 of these in a row, constantly battling an ever-increasing desire to pass out until December, one's brain tends to... oh what's the word... commit suicide. Which is why, every once in a while it is so refreshingly nice and beautiful and hilarious to find something so bizarre or unnatural that you just have to laugh... or giggle silently to yourself.

The first of these I found was an article called "Populations of small mammals cycle - UNLESS THEY DON'T!!!11!!" (Hanski 1987). Now, Hanski didn't actually capitalize the "unless they don't" part because that would have been unprofessional (he also left out the exclamations and the ones). However, that was how I read it in my mind and, also, how I imagined Mr. Hanski imagined it in his mind when he wrote it. It reminds me of a frustrated person who doesn't really have any good supporting reasons behind what they think so instead they just yell "BECAUSE THAT'S THE WAY IT IS OKAY NOW SHUTTUP AND LEAVE ME ALONE". I don't blame Mr. Hanski for this - in fact, good on him! The dude's probably published 6 or 7 other articles and he's even got a model named after him and still no one knows why sometimes, some small mammal populations don't cycle when, in a different place, the exact same species does experience population cycles. It's kindave annoying and I can see him getting very frustrated at the issue.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have cookies to eat


References

[1] M.L. Rosenzweig and R.H. MacArthur. Graphical representation and stability conditions of predator-prey interactions, The American Naturalist, 97(895): 209-223, 1963

[2] I. Hanski. Populations of small mammals cycle - unless they don't. Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 2(3): 55-56, 1987