Delicious LiveJournal Links for 12-11-2008

[andrewducker]

• 8 really, really scary predictions about the economy
  (tags: economics 2008 depression predictions)
• The digested read: The Tales of Beedle the Bard by JK Rowling
  Very, very funny
  (tags: funny books harrypotter)
• Chinese girl gets 'kiss of deaf'
  The chorus of warnings was echoed by the Shanghai Daily, which wrote: "A strong kiss may cause an imbalance in the air pressure between two inner ears and lead to a broken ear drum."
  (tags: weird biology kissing)
• Man's genes 'key to baby's sex'
  Raar! My sperm have The Power!
  (tags: genetics gender)

Comments

[andrewducker]

Care to explain in more detail?

[call-waiting.livejournal.com]

The fathers of the military have nothing to do with the generation following the war. All that matters to a generation is the genetics of its direct progenitors.

The above statement, while true, can be reduced to "fathers with more boys in the war stand a greater chance of having a boy survive the war". It's trivially true, and doesn't explain anything at all.

In order to explain the post-war boom in baby boys using the data they claim to have, their data would suggest that soldiers with higher numbers of brothers are more likely to have survived the war than those with lower numbers, or with more sisters. Now you could draw all sorts of interesting conclusions from that and speculate on explanations, such as: "kids with lots of brothers are better prepared for war because they'll have been playing at soldiers since they were wee", but the data doesn't do anything more than -suggest- that sort of thing. The data is certainly no "explanation".

[andrewducker]

Got it - the war wipes out boys without reference to what family they come from/their genetics, so killing (say) 50% of them would leave the same proportions of the genetics as before the war, yes?

The only way the proportions would be changed would be if the draft only took one son from each family - thus increasing the survival rate for boys in multi-boy families.

[call-waiting.livejournal.com]

Now that never occurred to me. The idea that the draft would be anything other than fair, with any eligible individual having an equal chance of being drafted, seems morally repugnant to me.

[randomchris.livejournal.com]

I'm inclined to agree with your analysis of the stats on the face of it, but I think you may be forgetting the "Saving Private Ryan" factor - if somebody dies in the war and they have a brother who is still out there, they may be moved to a safer position; at the very least, they'll get a little bit of leave to attend the funeral, thus increasing their chances of survival at least a small amount.

However, a more useful point is possibly that somebody with more sons would have a higher chance of at least one of them being too young / too infirm / too short-sighted to fight (too young being the most likely), and thus a better chance of passing on their genes.

[andrewducker]

Not really - the proportion of boys who are age 1-15 who have this gene will be the same as the general proportion - so letting them off fighting won't increase the number of boys who have the gene.

[randomchris.livejournal.com]

I can sort of see what he means with the proportions; if, say, there are odds of 50% of returning alive, then if you've got two sons at war, there's a 75% chance that one or both will return alive (87.5% for three, etc.)