Aw jeez.. I suck at this updating thing. At updating this thing. At thing updating, this.
Catch up. There you go, you're caught up. This is what I've done in the past 6 days. There. That's it.
No, there must have been more than that.
Items of interest:
1) It's possible for a woman to have fraternal twins with two different fathers. Apparently, if she has sex with two men close enough together (temporally, that is) the two eggs can be fertilized by different men. Seems reasonable, but I had never thought of it before. How fucking weird would that be?
2) On a related note, the average man produces 1000 sperm every heartbeat! A typical ejaculate (there's something unsavory about that word when used as a noun) has up to 200 million spermies per milliliter. That's almost the population of the United States, if we were all sperm, per milliliter. I don't know how little a milliliter is, but it sounds really small. (In case you're interested, the context here was how difficult it is to develop male contraception. They're really "fighting the tide" as it were.)
3) According to one astronomer's calculations, in any given year there is a 1-in-5,500 chance that an asteroid or something will hit earth causing more than a million fatalities. The odds of winning $100 from a New York scratch-off lottery ticket are 1-in-9,600. My money's on the asteroid.
There's been a lot of talk lately about a new book, published today, called The Blank Slate. It's by Steven Pinker, the author of The Language Instinct and a leading authority on the study of language and mind. His basic idea, as I understand it, is to bring back the notion of human nature. He discusses how the accepted wisdom is that people are essentially a "blank slate" and that we are shaped by our environments, most directly by the way we are raised. Examples would be that we believe that children who are abused become abusers, boys fight and argue because they are encouraged to do so by the society while girls are not, etc. The extreme end of this argument is the current debate over teaching girls and boys in completely separate schools, and even re-segregating schools by race.
Pinker argues that most of these conclusions are based on very little actual evidence, but instead come from just what has become a dominant point of view, to the exclusion of others. The idea that people have inborn talents, skills, intelligence and tendencies is anathema to most people's general way of thinking because we feel that it restricts free will and precludes the wonderful world of complete equality that we like to pretend exists or can exist. The argument is that it is just as possible, and in fact more in line with actual data, that people become abusers because they have certain genes that were passed from their parents, who were abusers for the same reasons. This is not to say that it is predestined, but just that they have a higher propensity for abuse. We seem to be well prepared to accept that our physical traits are determined by the genes we get from our parents, but not so with our emotional or mental traits.
Liz brought up an example that I thought was particularly telling. We have a friend who was adopted, a fact he was not aware of until he was a teenager or older. His adoptive family was conservative, Christian, and Republican. His whole childhood, he felt strange about his family's beliefs, had no interest in the religious school he was sent to. He joined the Democratic party when he was 11 and started canvassing for them. It was only when she met her birth parents for the first time years later that it all made sense. They were liberal Democrats, religious skeptics, basically shared all or most of her political and philosophical views. This is a direct example of the problems Pinker points out with most of our accepted conclusions about personality, that the studies from which these conclusions are often done are almost never done with adopted children, the only way to really test the hypothesis.
Anyway, I thought it was interesting, I want to read the book.
In other news, Liz and I rode our bikes around the perimeter of Manhattan yesterday, a ride of 46 miles (including from our house to Manhattan and back). It was really fun, we got to see many parts of the city we'd never seen before, staying within a block or two of the water the whole time, most of the time right on the shore. I thought it should be called, "Circle Line. My Ass." because we followed the same route as the Circle Line boats, but our way was better, so we say "my ass" to them. Also, for an extra entendre, it really hurt my ass, so it's both "Circle Line, my ass" and "Circle Line. My Ass!". Some better ideas for taking pictures along the way occured to me when we were almost done, so maybe next time, the pictures will be more interesting. Here are the ones I did take.
Q&A with Pinker from the NY Times Magazine
Excerpt from the book, Part I
Excerpt from the book, Part II
Oh, P.S. - Apologies to my sister for not including her in my list of people I'm trying to get Phish tickets for. She's right there, in the thick of things, and I really really really hope she can come.
