Friday, July 25, 2014

The Internet is a Fractal: A Hare Tale

My three rabbits are simply not breeding like ... well ... rabbits.

Coconut, on the right, just doesn't get it.
It's a double entendre. 
This weekend, I'm going to be restraining my does so my buck can have an easier time. I've bred them, all together, on at least 7 different occasions, and have no litters to show for it. I think the buck was too young, and I need to help him figure it out.

This has of course led me into a rabbit hole: the internet.





A 2006 "freewebs" posting for Creekside Rabbitry had some great, general info on rabbit breeding. Among the advice,

"If you have a doe that will just not let the buck near her you can use a technique called forced mating. This is wear you hold the doe down for the buck. If you are sure a mating has taken place, which is usually after the buck mounts the doe and falls off of her, you can return the doe to her own hutch."

Great! But I knew that already. I quickly located a 2011 homesteading forum thread on rabbit breeding yielded much more detailed results:

keep your bucks gentled and tame by petting and scratching them occasionally.(it doesn't take much time and will pay you big dividends) this will help you when you need to restrain a doe for breeding. the buck will "pay you no mind" as he goes about his business.

A 2014 one provided even more specificity:

It is pretty easy to restrain a rabbit just by covering its face.

At this point I remebered that I have all the information I need in my rabbit book. There's a whole section dedicated to that.

But regardless of the fact that I now need to shut off the laptop and pick up a book, it got my mind going about the nature of the internet.

The internet is a fractal. The internet is also a tool. The level of detail in each iteration makes the internet a more and more powerful tool. It is a tool much like the way a scythe is a tool, or a machete. Each neo-subgenre, hyper-clique, and act of #reselfreferrentialismness yields a deeper fractal, each split maintaining an indefinitely-growing division, just as each slide of the whetstone yields a more honed, conditioned, and strong- edged blade.

whooooaaaaa..........

Like continually zooming in on a fractal, the internet is a growing, branching, crawling tool. Just in a simple, search on rabbit breeding (which, I am surprised, didn't yield many usable results), the evidence of that growth and diversity is evident. Each iteration yields new information, and each new piece of information yields synthesis and further branching.

2006 mentions that it can be done. New information.
2011 gives techniques. New information.
2014 expands these techniques. New information.

It got me thinking that so many of the very specific things that I do are pulled from very specific syntheses of other niches that have grown through similar patterns. How much of the information about my chicken coop is a new sub-niche addition to cyberspace?

I don't know. It's just one of those moments of deep thought. But I must go - I have some rabbit breeding to prepare for.

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