The holidays finally gave me some quiet to finish Lee Dugatkin's "Dr. Calhoun's Mousery." It's a very readable account of the the life and work of a fascinating figure in rat and mouse research after World War II. John Calhoun used his research on crowding and population dynamics in experimental mouse/rat colonies to muse about the human condition. What do rat experiments tell us about the design of cities? about "the population bomb" in humans? Calhoun himself and those who receive his work swing back and forth between wild extrapolations from mouse to human and careful framing of the research about being only about animals. Today, Calhoun's work is all but forgotten.