a few unconnected comments and questions today..
 
I was just in California visiting my brother, and went to the monterey
bay aquarium.  there is a store near the aquarium that was selling these
"hairy otter" tshirts (imagine the typical harry potter image & writing,
and then substitute an otter wearing harry's glasses & the words hairy
otter).  it's really nice, and a great addition to the wardrobe of
otter/weasel lovers.
 
also just finished a scifi novel by Timothy Zahn, in which one of the
characters is an alien Ixil with two ferret-like creatures that normally
sits on Ixil's shoulders.  Pix and Pax were referred to as ferrets
through out most of the book, and they are used to scout and explore and
can exchange info with their alien (would be really cool if we can do
that with our ferrets!).  the book is also really good, I would recommend
it even without the ferrets.
 
more ferret related..  after Bob's posts on restricted diets, and also
starting to worry that my ferrets will start needing different types of
food... I would like to change from free feeding to restricted feeding.
this would be a bit hard for me as I don't have a day to day set
schedule.  I'm wondering if anybody has any advice as to how much, how
often etc. and how bad is it if I don't feed them at the same time
everyday.  I hope people will post how they feed, and perhaps Bob will
post on the topic as well.
 
and not ferret related..  hoping there are biologist types on the list
that can help me answer this.  I recently presented the american
scientist article "the farm-fox experiment: early canid domestication"
to my lab (computer graphics people, we have weekly presentations and I
decided to deviate from comp sci a bit).  anyways, in the article, the
author stated that they have shown the changes caused by domestication
could be a result of selection based on tameness only, and argued against
a couple of other possible alternatives.  I was asked if the author had
looked into "regression to the means" as an explanation of domestication,
and it wasn't mentioned.  I know it is an unlikely reason, but was
wondering if anybody knows about details of the control group of foxes,
or if there are other studies that have disprove this explanation.
 
answers much appreciated.
 
// ***************************************
// Selina, Sprite, Sand, Bear, Dart & Clef
// in spirit - Birch, Dief & Storm
// http://www.cgl.uwaterloo.ca/~ssiu
[Posted in FML issue 4125]