Last night I finished putting together the answer to the Marsupials honor. The last time I had worked on that one, I found myself stuck on one of the requirements. That was in November 2006. There are not very many Nature honor left without answers, so it was definitely time to revisit this one. Luckily, the intervening months gave me a chance to quit thinking about it, and this time I was able to come up with a decent keyword: pouch. Armed with that word, Wikipedia saved the day.
Apparently, marsupial pouches come in two basic configurations: rear facing, and forward facing. Marsupials with rear-facing pouches give birth to multiple young. The Tasmanian devil gives birth to up to 50 babies, but having only four nipples, 46 of them don’t make it. The mother is unable to interact with the babies while they are in the pouch, and once they leave, they do not return. Quoll’s behave in about the same way, and have the same rear-facing pouch configuration.
Kangaroos, on the other hand, have a forward facing pouch. They give birth to one baby, and they are able to interact with it during its stay in the Pouch & Breakfast Inn.
It rained here today. A lot. I kept thinking I might get out at lunch and take a walk, but everytime I looked out the window, it was either pouring or threatening to. So I stayed in and wrote code.
The DMA driver I’m working on started giving me fits. As soon as I tried to make it do anything other than the easy move-data-from-point-a-to-point-b schtick, it quickly fell apart. I ended up rethinking its internals, and may have come up with a decent, and perhaps easy-to-use solution. The balancing act is to make it easy to use while preserving its ability to do bizarre things. I thought about it quite a bit while staring out the window watching the rain come down.
After I got home I helped David a little more with his science experiment. We have a large plastic tub filled with water sitting in the dining room floor. We attached the aquarium filter to it and got that going. The trick remaining was to position a sample beneath the stream pouring out of the filter. David attempted to build a Lego tower to set the sample on, but its propensity to float overcame the friction holding it together. He had weighted the base down with a three-pound rock, but the upper part continually kept breaking away and floating off.
We solved it by putting a glass pitcher on top of an upturned glass casserole dish, and putting the dish’s lid atop the pitcher. The height was perfect, and with both the dish and the pitcher filled with water, it was negatively buoyant. He positioned the chalk on the lid right under the stream, and within minutes little chalk particles were accumulating on the edge of the dish lid. Cool.
We then turned our attention to wind erosion. For that, the plan was to use an aquarium air pump and direct the stream onto the sample. Unfortunately, the pump does not make much of a stream. And while we were working on that, Penny came ambling into the dining room and started drinking the water out of the tub! She drank his science experiment! Not enough to matter, but that still makes a great headline!
I doubt we’ll be able to simulate wind erosion. I am not buying an air compressor for this!
