New Blog!

Hello,

I have been running a little knitting, spinning, dyeing and various other crafty things blog for a while now over at michaelaknits.blogspot.com, and that shall continue to have all sorts of fun and exciting things on it.

This blog shall be reserved for the somewhat less exciting job of providing me with a journal/online space to store ideas and notes about my PhD. "The PhD" does not yet have a title, or a second supervisor, or even a coherent idea about what I'm supposed to be doing, but has been going since Thursday October 14th, 2010, so 4 days. I do hope these minor(!) issues will be resolved soon.

Today I have finished reading Sam's introduction, and have pulled out a couple of things I'd like to read. As I don't have his complete references, hopefully google will fill in the gaps.

Iwasa & Sasaki (1987) - The number of sexes

Hurst (1995) - The number of sexes

Bulmer & Parker (2002) - Anisogamy

Kruuk et al. (1999) - Condition/rank dependent sex ratios in red deer

Ridley (1978) - Male parental care

Gage & Barnard (1996) - Ejaculate plasticity

Chapman et al. (2003) - Choice to obtain benefits vs. choice to avoid costs

Sheldon (1994) - Phenotype-linked fertility hypothesis

Pizzari et al. (2004) - Phenotype-linked fertility hypothesis

Grafen (1990) - Maths model of handicap theory

Iwasa & Pomiankowski (1994) - Theory of multiple sexual ornaments

Turelli et al. (2001) - Modeling speciation

Kirkpatrick & Ravigne (2002) - Modeling speciation

Gavrilets (2003) - Modeling speciation

Panhuis et al. (2001) - Modeling speciation with sexual selection

Ritchie (2007) - Modeling speciation with sexual selection

Burger (2000) - Population genetics

Kirkpatrick (1996) - Models incorporating evolution into G-Matrix

Lande (1981) - Original quantitative genetic sexual selection

Iwasa et al. (1991) - Quantitative model of sexual selection

Mead & Arnold (2004) - Quantitative genetic model

Iwasa & Pomiankowski (1995) - Quantitative genetic model

Otto & Day (2007) - Quantitative genetic model (chapter 11)

Bost et al. (2001) - Quantitative trait loci distributions

Bell (2010) - Quantitative genetic model

Maynard Smith & Price (1973) - First evolutionary game theory

So that list is in fact vastly longer than I had anticipated. Still, it's hardly as if it all has to be read now! Which is perhaps not the best attitude.

I have also today been to the library, perused the collections, and come away with Birkhead and Moller's Sperm Competition and Sexual Selection, and Andersson's Sexual Selection, which is very boring of me. I had a look for some bedtime reading, found a book on leks which was so out of date it irritated me (this shocked me, normally I find such writing twee) and a book my a man who believed that the hypothesis of sexual selection was false because animals were too "friendly" (taking the concept of the pity shag a bit too far!). It's frustrating to be unable to find something easy to read that's not exceptionally political and/or moronic. This is probably why I knit so much......