Fish drought

Went to the end of Sandberg road to a dirt parking lot part of Santiago Hills park.
Found a cracked mud area, with a small amount of water at one end. There were
maybe 2 dozen fish of various sizes gasping in there. I'm going to post
to Craig's list (never have before) telling fish-rescuers about this. Or
fish-eaters.

OTOH we saw what may have been big cat prints in the cracking soft mud,
and the cat may be dining. Still, tragic to see these fish, and no hope
of water (unless it rains this weekend) as the other side of the dam is
dry.

Strange fish

There is a chain of ponds adjacent to each other, each one lower than the one
before. There walls between them. There are fish that live in them. The fish
can occasionally jump over the walls (only downstream), taller walls being less
likely to be hurdled.

If you start with a certain number of fish in the highest pool, how do they
distribute over time? (You'll need to know exactly how often they jump and how
likely each jump into the next pool down succeeds.
And your answer will only be a statistical one, it will not predict exactly for
a given run.)




Someone starts the very unusual behavior (outside of stars) of throwing neutrons
into pools. They stick to the fish and lift them to higher pools, before
bursting.

.....

If you want to buy some fish, you are a lab physicist or research engineer. If you see the answer immediately you are a mathematician or theoretical physicist. If you write a simulation you are a computer scientist.

I suppose if you eat the fish afterwards, you're a piscivore.



-----

I will gladly borrow a photon from the quantum foam and pay you back Tuesday.

Fish

When I was a kid we fished a stream for horned daces, a small minnow like fish.
Later we had a pond with bass, and I fished that. Even made my own lures.

Eventually I stopped because of the cruelty.

My (upstate NY) grandfather used to fish for trout. I've seen trout in the local SoCal creek, which amazed me. (A few metres from the stream, it was standard semi-arid chapparal.)
I like to eat trout.

My favorite fish is salmon, and I've learned to salt it, to make gravlox. Never caught one though.

I like oily fish, including mackerel, and find bland fish completely boring.
I've caught an ocean mackeral once.

I let the kid catch trout in the mountains in a captive (ie lame) trout pond. We took em home, dissected them, and ate them. This was good, albeit an extremely fake fishing experience. (Time to catch: about 30sec per fish) I had to discretely kill the landed fish so as not to traumatize the kid.

I continue to worry about cruelty, preferring to behead lobsters, crabs, etc cleanly. I only hope I will die similarly painlessly & quickly. I've attended
a pig vivisection, the pig was anesthetized and never woke up. That is perhaps more moral than simply eating them (it was for medicine) but I love bacon and eat pork freely. I've also petted a friends pet pigs. Its a coherent philosophy/morality for me. Way back when, I saw terminal heart surgery on a dog, which is weird: its a dog, ie a "pet", and its surgery (with drapes etc), and the ribs looked good enough to eat, if wrapped in plastic at a grocery.