But ecology is mostly not like billiards, or falling dominoes, or Rube Goldberg machines. Rube Goldberg machines are sequences of causal events. Falling dominoes are sequences of causal events. For instance, you can have a sequence of causal events in which the magnitude of the effect is nonlinearly related to the magnitude of the cause. For instance, let’s say the system is at equilibrium, meaning that predator and prey abundances aren’t changing over time. UPDATE: I’m not saying that ecology, or dynamical systems in general, aren’t causal systems. 2: Nor am I saying that ecological systems are "nonlinear" or "nonadditive". Inputs and outputs are in balance. Inputs and outputs, not colliding billiard balls. When 3-ball began, what is billiards everyone had more of a choice about the particular balls they tried to pot. The number of shots they take to pot all three balls is added up, like a golf score, and their opponent tries to pot them in fewer shots.

Individual World Championships usually take place every two or three years. Pull the unknotted end up toward your closed hand and secure it in place by holding your index finger over it. And again for the sake of simplicity, let’s say it’s a constant environment and there’s no particular time at which organisms reproduce or die (e.g., there’s no "mating season"), so reproduction and mortality are always happening, albeit at per-capita and total rates that may vary over time as prey and predator abundances vary. Or, let’s say the predators and prey exhibit cyclic dynamics. Predators convert consumed prey into new predators, and they die. Why do the predators and prey cycle? Purely for the sake of simplicity (because it doesn’t affect my argument at all), let’s say it’s a closed, deterministic, well-mixed system with no population structure or evolution or anything like that, so we can describe the dynamics with just two coupled equations, one for prey dynamics and one for predator dynamics. For concreteness, let’s say it’s a limit cycle in the Rosenzweig-MacArthur model. It’s just a bit of ecology I know well. I've never seen the location of the Nathanson shoot discussed, and if people have been able to pinpoint the billiard room scene as being the Royal Suite at the Lanesborough, I'm assuming that if the Nathanson shoot was there as well then this would also be known.

What is next important to realize is that the game became popular with not only aristocrats, but also certain royal families. If you make your game pieces from foam, you can even play inside. You can even get transparent billiard balls filled with glitter. You can get them monogrammed with your company logo on. You can get billiard balls split between the colors of your favorite sports teams. When the cue ball is of the same size in other instances then why is the cue ball slightly bigger than the other balls on a coin operated table? A table scratch occurs when a player fails to hit an object ball with the cue ball. Three balls are selected, with the addition of just the one solid white cue ball, and a player plays a speed round. Your cue strikes the cue ball, causing it to roll into another ball, causing that ball to roll into the corner pocket. The toy car is pushed into a line of dominoes, the last of which falls onto another toy car, which rolls down a ramp and runs into a ball, which rolls down another ramp…

An alternative endgame is "poison": in this variant, a player who has scored the last wicket but not hit the starting stake becomes a "poison ball", which may eliminate other balls from the game by roqueting them. But in more serious games, where there may be betting on the results, the color of the balls usually reverts to the yellow, blue and red combination. If you’re new to pool, you may be confused by the term "English" that’s commonly used among pool enthusiasts. They are, but that’s not my point here. So except for the occasional maverick glittery soul, the colors of billiard balls will likely stay as they are, each set specific to their game, for the foreseeable future. It’s a significant advantage, as it allows the player to set up the perfect shot. Like history, ecology is (mostly) not "just one damned thing after another." But it’s hard not to think of it that way, and to teach our students not to think of it that way. This is a case where it’s sooo tempting to think in terms of sequences of events; I know because my undergrad students do it every year. You cannot think about equilibria in terms of sequences of causal events, it’s like trying to think about smells in terms of their colors, or bricks in terms of their love of Mozart.