That cat won't hunt, hopefully

A short non-climate post here.  I've followed the outdoor-cats-are-killers issue for some years now, and as a local conservationist I've seen places where people are supporting large populations of feral cats by feeding them, usually places with lots of vulnerable wildlife nearby.  The capture-spay-and-return argument fails to realize that the non-spayed population will quickly increase to reach the area's carrying capacity.

More recently a non-peer reviewed study (what have you wrought, Muller and Watts?) put video cameras on 60 cats for a week and found nearly 30% hunted successfully in that week, killing 2 animals each.  If those numbers hold up, the figure translates into billions of animals killed by cats annually in the US.  This suggests that owned cats are significant problem as well as feral cats, and that well-fed feral cats will still hunt.

One obvious solution is to stop feeding feral cats and ultimately to ticket people who won't stop.  Another is to stop letting cats outdoors, although that encounters somewhat more reasonable resistance. A third solution I hadn't heard of before today is cat bibs that impede their pouncing. Might be a good thing to use on feral cats too, and a lot cheaper than neutering them.

Then there's my idea - if a majority of pet cats don't hunt for a week, a significant percent probably don't hunt at all, or hunt very little.  It should be possible to create a breed of cats with this temperament a fixed aspect of their personality.  While I'd normally encourage people to get pets from a shelter instead of a shop, if the intent is to have an outdoor cat then maybe a breed that's known not to hunt is a good idea.  And then give it a bib.

Idea of the month: cell-phone delayed response for drivers

My idea is that cell phones should allow drivers to hit a button that would put an automatic one- or two-second delay in transmissions to and from the the speaker, like what used to be the case for international phone calls.

As long as people will use phones while driving, even hands-free versions can be very distracting. A two-second delay slows down the pace of the conversation, allowing the driver to increase the amount of attention paid to the road. It also provides a subtle hint to the person at the other end of the line that the driver needs to concentrate on the road, so the other person can also slow down the conversation, or even offer to call back later.

I read somewhere that children in a car are just as distracting as cell phones, but adults aren't - the implication was that adults understand when to allow a driver to concentrate on driving. Maybe this idea would also help.

A website business I'd invest in

It would be a website aggregator of opinions by people known to generally be on one side of a political question where they favor the opposite side's view for a particular issue. There could be a left wing defection site and a right wing one, and maybe different ones for different countries.

Maybe it's just me, but I think those defecting viewpoints would be some of the most interesting, like the conservatives who can't stand Palin.

I'm not prominent enough to be one of the contributors, but I'd defect and agree with conservatives that Gwen Ifill has a conflict of interest. (The perceived bias could even work the other way, but it's still a problem.) (UPDATE: somewhat less of a problem now - she's just writing a chapter in the book, and hasn't written it yet.)

Meanwhile, my vice-presidential debate prediction: Palin will answer every question with one somewhat coherent, responsive sentence that any middle-schooler could've come up with after some research, followed by a bridging sentence, and then broad platitudes with an occasional memorized zinger. Biden will have a gaffe-free but toned-down performance that ignores Palin and occasionally attacks McCain. Palin will be viewed as having done exceptionally well and their ticket will get a 1 or 2 point bounce in the polls that will fade away after a week.

UPDATE 2: So the debaters performed much like I expected, but the public didn't. They read through Palin's generalities and all three polls I saw gave the win to Biden. Credit where due (to the public, I mean). (Also, everyone says to be skeptical of snap polls - why? As a measure of public opinion, I don't know why they're worse than any other poll.)

UPDATE 3: Ifill responds in a videocast here - the whole book is hers, but she hasn't written the Obama chapter yet, so she doesn't have to screw up the McCain campaign to support some predictions. To the extent it's about intergenerational change in African-American leadership, it almost doesn't matter if Obama wins or loses. Still, it's a little bit iffy.