h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I don't hear the local toads as often as I once did. I think it's because of the decade of drought Texas has had. We've had a LOT of rain lately though so I'm hoping I'll hear them again soon.






That looks much better in that order than the reverse I originally typed.

http://animaldiversity.org/collections/frog_calls/

http://sounds.bl.uk/environment/amphibians

August is the month when the crickets and grasshoppers sing the loudest. I find it very comfortable that they can sing so freely.

I don't call that singing. Not the awful noise the crickets make.

Different strokes for different folks.

I don't mind the sound of crickets outside, but I hate it when one is inside.


When I was a kid, I had a couple of lizards as pets. They ate crickets. The crickets were sold in paper bags and sometimes they chewed their way out and would hide in my bedroom.

I lost a lot of sleep.

The sound of village cricket is one of the most relaxing, expecially when you've a nice pint of ale to accompany it.

Thanks, Icy.

When I was a kid, I smuggled a cricket or two into my parents' basement. They reproduced and hung on at least util the big fat toad also took up residence there.

Frogs and crickets, always important in the night time sound effects of jungle movies, imparting some sense of the lurking unknown.

Of course in real life, these are not only jungle noises one does not need to worry about, they also provide an alert service in the event something one may need to worry about is prowling in the vicinity, in which case they abruptly fall silent.

Its then that I wake up.

As well you might.

New to Gnomon's Guide today:

Entry A87871053 Northwest European Stone Circle Glossary

I'm in two minds about this one. I normally don't approve of lists, but this one has quite a lot of extra information if you read through it.

I'm certainly not going to submit it to the Edited Guide in its present form, but I'll take on board any suggestions as to how it might be restructured.

I like the introductory sentence: no pretence of knowledge of the unknowable.

"No one knows who they were or what they were doing, but their legacy remains, hewn into the living rock of Stonehenge." ~Spinal Tap

New to Gnomon's Guide today:

Entry A87870243 Loughcrew - an Ancient Irish Megalithic Cemetery

With all the generations since then, are all the people on the planet descended from the people buried there?

Lots of people came to Ireland over the years but very few left,except for a large group of Irish people called Scots invaded the north of Britain in the 7th C AD and a few million went to America in the 19th C. So everyone in Ireland, Scotland and most of the US can claim to be their descendants.

One doesn't want to forget the Australians.

The Aussie accent owes more to Irish antecedants than perhaps any of the other communities of the British Isles.

That's true.

It's actually very hard to work out how populations move around. Although the average Irish farmer never went more than 4 miles in his whole life, there were traders who brought goods around. They could easily have spread their genes over the whole world.

One might take two extreme models on spread of human population and hence genetic contributions, first the fissioning village cultures model, where a village population having grown to the point its demand on local resources exceeds what's locally available, whereupon yhe village splits and founds a daughter community, a model allowing of very slow expansion of tertitory and spread of genetic traits over time; and second, the far-trekker model where an adventurous individual or party sets out one day and never ceases journeying, which would allow of spread from any point on the Eurasian and African coastlines to any other in less than a human lifetime rather than the thousands of years it would take under the first model.

The truth on rate of spread of population, genetics and culture is really something best determined under a sum-over-histories model between the two extremes and provides a distribution rather than a function describing the material facts.

Populations do tend to keep their local distinctive characteristics over time, while on the other hand, rates of transmission of genetic traits has been high enough as long as humanity has existed keep the species globally unified.

"a large group of Irish people called Scots invaded the north of Britain in the 7th C AD and a few million went to America in the 19th C. So everyone in Ireland, Scotland and most of the US can claim to be their descendants." [Gnomon]

My ancestors became so unpopular in England that they had to move to Scotland in the 13th century. They eventually moved back to England, and thenceforth to other parts of the globe. So, I am one of the people you mentioned.

New to Gnomon's Guide today:

Entry A87870748 - The 'Culture' Fiction of Iain M Banks