Apology for serial posting – aside from the above piece of pedantry (born that way; can’t help it), I love this column. I love the idea of a columnist attacking himself. And I definitely want to use “microcephalic lemur” some time. May I?

Just an editorial point, Fred – “padi” or “paddy” means unmilled rice – so “rice paddies” means “rice rice”. Not your fault, it’s a very common Americanism – people think it makes them sound in the know to say “rice paddies”, but it don’t. Better to write “paddy fields” aka “padi fields” = fields in which rice is grown. Get this right and you will be smarter than 99% of American writers, who don’t know sh*t.

And the new vaccine also protects against Streptococcus pneumoniae (the most common cause of ‘community acquired pneumonia’ – that is, in the 50% of cases where they can actually identify a causative agent). Sorry, I keep forgetting things. I did mention that I am a biological idiot, didn’t I? That might explain why I chose to breed my own in-house biological expert, so she can explain things to me when she feels like it, although I can’t escape the feeling that she talks to me as if I am a child in kindergarten. I had better get used to it – she has been doing it since she was 9 years old, and it can only get worse from this point.

So, the pneumonia one-shot vaccine is not a panacea. But it’s a lot better than nothing and, for the sake of one simple injection, when my doctor (himself a gentleman of very advanced years who had already injected himself with it) recommended I have it, I jumped at it.

My late mother used to refer to pneumonia as ‘the old people’s friend’ because it kills so many geriatrics ‘quietly’ as it were. To hell with that; I want to go out with my boots on, not lying in some hospital full of tubes and gradually blacking out due to lack of oxygen supply to the brain. I’m not optimistic that I’ll get my wish at this point, though.

Yes, it is the new standard, and my general practitioner (what Americans call primary care doctor) recommended to me that I have it. There was a previous version, also a once in a lifetime shot, but this is claimed to be more effective. It needs to be understood that there are many possible causative agents for pneumonia, but the majority of cases (in which the causative agent can be identified) are caused by a few viruses, and this inoculates against those.

Definitely recommended for your Dad. He should ask his doctor about it.

The weird thing about pneumonia is that in about half of all cases, the causative agent cannot be identified – by the time the blood tests/cultures are done, the causative agent has done its work and has disappeared.

I can’t say anything about them being substandard, dirty or additive filled, because I know of absolutely no evidence either for or against. But I have a very substantial body of evidence in my own case that the annual influenza vaccination has been highly effective in almost all years, and in a couple of years when it did not provide complete protection, I suffered only a very mild dose of ‘flu, indicating that it was still providing partial protection. During periods when a large % of the people working in the densely populated office that I work in were coming into work while obviously suffering heavily from the symptoms of influenza, I have remained free of infection. During periods when both my wife and daughter, sharing a small apartment with me, have been suffering heavily from influenza, I have remained free of infection; this despite the fact that my wife was preparing my meals, and that we were obviously in close contact. My wife and daughter are now both so convinced of the effectiveness of the vaccinations that they now both get them, despite the fact that previously my wife was very resistant to the idea.

Contrast my experience since being regularly vaccinated to the whole of my life prior to that time – I could guarantee that I would come down with a heavy dose of influenza at last twice every winter, and sometimes more than twice.

Further, I have never felt any kind of adverse effect from having an annual vaccination at least once every year for over 15 years, and sometimes two vaccinations in a single year, if I happen to be travelling between northern and southern hemispheres. Last year, I also had the latest once in a lifetime pneumonia vaccination, again with no detectable adverse effects.

I am now heading into the age bracket when influenza can easily be fatal. The vaccines would need to be really ‘dangerous’ to be worse than dying from influenza. The Government health authorities where I live recommend that susceptible people should be vaccinated, and they have no axe to grind (I don’t live in America or any particularly America-friendly place). I guess it depends on what you define as ‘dangerous’.

Not wishing to be offensive, but in the absence of any evidence to support your statements, I currently have you pencilled in as a paranoid conspiracy theorist. Sorry. Come up with some hard, rigorous scientific evidence and I will reevaluate. Until then, my own long personal experience, and now the experience of my wife and daughter as well, not to mention that of several of my work colleagues, some of whom are of advanced age, is going to continue to override a few vague comments from some anonymous person on the Internet.

Apology for serial posting and being a bit OT, and Anatoly can tell me to shut up any time he likes and I will, but I don’t understand why people don’t just get an annual influenza vaccination. If most people did it, the herd immunity would be enough to prevent seasonal influenza epidemics.

I keep reading stuff about how the vaccinations don’t work, how they have harmful effects, how it’s better to develop immunity, etc., but based on my own experience, that is all wrong. OK, N=1, but I have been having an annual ‘flu shot every year for at least the past 15 years, and sometimes an extra shot when I go back to Australia (the prevalent ‘flu strains in the northern and southern hemispheres being somewhat out of step), and my clear recall is that in that 15+ years, I have caught the ‘flu precisely twice, both times only mildly. Before I started having an annual jab, I could be certain to come down with a bad dose of ‘flu at least twice every winter, sometimes more, and occasionally off-season as well, and each dose of ‘flu would mean at least two weeks of feeling awful, not being able to exercise, working ability compromised, etc. My wife and daughter (who is a Biologist – she majored in Biochemistry and Genetics) are now both so convinced of the benefit that they also now have ‘flu vaccinations.

As for developing immunity, it’s just not true. The ‘flu viruses mutate all the time, so the immunity you acquire from getting a dose of the ‘flu lasts for about three weeks, after which you can be infected by the same virus all over again.

And I have never had an adverse reaction to the vaccine; not once; not even feeling mildly off-colour.

If anyone has different experience, I would be interested to read about it. My experience of ‘flu vaccinations is wholly positive, and yet I keep seeing all this stuff on the Internet discouraging people from having them. Yes, I know some small children have suffered bad effects and some have died, but I’m talking about adults.

I never get common colds. Doesn’t happen. The ‘flu vaccine doesn’t protect against those, but I just never get them. No idea why. I know of people (admittedly living in northern Europe, not southern China) who seem to get them all the time.

Sorry, Wikipedia tells me I should be talking about viral particles called virions, not virus molecules. I always was lousy at Biology, mostly because I always found the genetics of plants too boring to get past.

: Here you go – this gives it to you.

Note that the units are micrometres, and the scale is logarithmic. So some airborne particulates are smaller than single virus molecules, and a lot of them are smaller than bacteria molecules. And with airborne viruses, we’re talking about droplets, not single molecules.

Not offhand, and I don’t feel like digging, but they’re very small – like a few microns. The ordinary masks that most people buy in pharmacies won’t filter them out. Slightly tangential, but if you are a quarry worker, for example, you don’t wear a mask like that because it won’t be good enough to filter out the fine silica particles that give people silicosis. You need a much more effective filter. HSE authorities don’t accept such masks as adequate protection for people working in such dusty environments.

Airborne viruses are transmitted person to person mostly by droplets, like the cloud of droplets that someone emits when sneezing. For a person suffering from such a virus, wearing a mask will intercept the droplets – which are obviously a lot bigger than a single virus molecule – so wearing such a mask will be effective in preventing an infected person from infecting other people. So it’s not the size of a single virus molecule that is relevant in this case, but the size of the airborne droplets carrying the virus.

Doctors have told me that wearing such a mask to prevent exposure are pretty much a waste of time, because the droplets only need to land on any mucous membrane, including around the eyes, which are not protected by the mask.

The other consideration is fomites – viruses survive on such surfaces for surprisingly long periods of time, particularly at colder temperatures (which is why winter is normally peak ‘flu season). People pick up viruses on their hands by touching such surfaces, and then rub their eyes, or touch their noses or mouths, and transmit virus to themselves that way.

Again, I have been told by doctors (and again, this is just anecdotal) that the masks worn by surgeons are much more effective (and a lot harder to breathe through) than the masks commonly worn by people in the street. Even then, the surgeon is wearing the mask to avoid infecting the patient, not the other way round.

Masks didn’t save the doctors and nurses treating SARS patients in Hong Kong. Many of them contracted SARS and died. That was before they realised they needed to be wearing full containment suits to protect themselves.

The health authorities in Hong Kong advise people suffering from virus infections to wear a mask when they go out, because they are effective in preventing or at least reducing transmission. They don’t recommend that people wear masks to prevent themselves from being infected, because they know it’s a waste of time.

See my comment at 4. You were partly right. Different Asians do it for different reasons.

Deconstructing the East Asian face mask thing: Chinese wear face masks in public when they are suffering from influenza, to avoid infecting other people; or more likely, to avoid being called out publicly for not wearing one while obviously infectious. Whatever – the social pressure works. Japanese wear them to avoid catching influenza from other people.

It’s not really what you might expect, given the respective stereotypes about ‘social responsibility’.

Face mask wearing by the Chinese to prevent spreading infection was previously unknown, but really kicked in after the SARS epidemic in 2003, whereas the Japanese have been doing it as a defence against being infected for as long as I can remember.

Of course, now many people in the Chinese Mainland wear them as an attempted defence against chronically bad air quality, but it’s futile – the damaging respirable particulates are so fine that they pass straight through, as do the gases like oxides of nitrogen and sulphur dioxide, obviously.

They survived, and avoided inbreeding. In most Australian environments, that takes some doing.

It will not have escaped your eagle eye, Steve, that Allyson Felix is now the most decorated female American track and field athlete of all time, surpassing Jackie Joyner-Kersee.

She didn’t get first place in the individual 400m through just sheer bad luck – the Bahaman lady dived over the line and just edged Allyson into second.

Not bad for someone nicknamed “Chicken Legs” at school.

On that map, red could also stand for countries that have killed people during space flight due to silly engineering oversights.

Americans call them English units. The English call them Imperial units. I’m just saying.

No one yet has invented a 3D printer that makes live bullets – the hard part is the propellant. Guns are just delivery devices.

Agreed, but the IPL illustrates the passion that Indians have for the sport, which is the point I was trying to make in response to the contention that Indians are not interested in sports.

Higher body fat content. It’s genetic. The interesting question is why, but no one knows. Yet.

I meant taking all forms of the game as a whole, and making a value judgement. India’s poor last test tour of Australia was an aberration. We Australians are difficult to play on home soil because we’re just so damned unpleasant about it.

You are confusing state licensing with professional qualification.

And a first engineering degree is self-explanatory unless your English comprehension is defective. In a lot of Anglo countries it will be called a bachelor’s degree, but this is not universal.

And what made you think I was talking only about America? The Washington Accord is about international mobility of engineers. The company I work for has over 100,000 staff all over the globe, including in Russia and China, and we need to be mobile. And no, I won’t give you the name of the company.

As it has become clear that I am talking to a brick wall, I am going to stop.

Come to Hong Kong and I will show you around the cricket clubs, the Indian sporting clubs and some of my Hindu tennis buddies. Some of the Indian sporting clubs date right back to the early days of HK as a British colony, when Sikhs were imported to serve as civilian police, and they have stayed ever since. And Indians are not small in the worlds of high finance, banking and high tech.

Oh, and field hockey. They are absolute demons at field hockey.

They are very prominent in sports in Hong Kong. But they don’t play football.

Training for sports costs money, and expensive facilities. I am not surprised that India under-achieves in international competition.

Yes, of course you are right. And you have also reminded me that India has some fearsome traditional martial arts.

You can’t compare degrees that way. You obviously have no idea how much is involved in degree accreditation. And these days, a first degree in engineering in America will get you an engineering technician’s job, for which IQ of 115 could be possible. To gain professional qualification, you need at least a Master’s, plus minimum about 5 years post-university professional training – and not everybody gets through that either. To become a biomedical engineer in America you need a degree in engineering + a degree in medicine, and you don’t get that with an IQ of 115. Those numbers are worthless.

It’s not *that* accurate. Cantonese and Hakka women can be very fierce. Not such big drinkers, though. But some northerners can’t drink either due to lack of the enzyme to process the alcohol – that is not only confined to the south.

Northern/eastern Chinese eat a lot of fish and dried seafood. (So, getting it inland is no problem – dried scallops, dried sea slugs, etc.)

I don’t know what Steve Sailer is on about – Indians and Pakistanis are absolutely nuts about cricket, much more so than any other country. And all the Hindus I know are very good tennis players. They don’t pull their weight for the size of population in tennis, but they have had some top level players. And currently India has the world’s best cricket team, no question. True, they don’t go in for heavy contact sports.

Incidentally, the Hindus I know tend to be vegetarian when they are ‘under observation’ by other Hindus, although some I know relax their food rules when they go away on holiday. I think at least notional vegetarianism is quite common among Hindus – just as vegetarianism is actually somewhat notional among self-professed vegetarians in the west.

Sorry, I see you are in Brazil, which is not a signatory to the Washington Accord, so you probably don’t understand what I’m talking about; in which case, forget it, but you might not want to comment on the standards of engineering degrees in states which are signatories.

Further, if you are a professional engineer, you should be familiar with the requirements of the Washington Accord for first engineering degrees, including the requirement for a high content of higher mathematics and, in civil at least, physics and numerical analysis. Common sense alone should tell you that no one with an IQ of 115 is going to be able to cope with those requirements. That level of general intelligence would be more appropriate for someone working as an engineering technician, not as a professional engineer.

I have never believed those numbers. No one with an IQ as low as 115 would have got through a first degree in engineering at the university I attended, or any university that graduates civil engineers in Hong Kong. In any case, the competition to enrol in engineering in HK would exclude anyone with an IQ that low. I’m guessing that number came from first engineering degrees at American universities – even then I find it surprisingly low. In any case, it’s pretty outdated now.

What can I say? My daughter and I have done the same IQ tests and she has consistently out-scored me by 3 to 5 points. But if you know that didn’t happen, I guess I must have imagined it.

You don’t need to be that smart to become an Engineer – an IQ of 135 will do it. There are any number of East Asian females who top that easily. My IQ is 140+ and my daughter tops me by 3 to 5 points – and she’s not that unusual. As it happens, she chose a career in Life Science, but with her academic results in Secondary School she could have creamed Engineering.

The Big Three prestige professions in East Asia are Medicine, Law and Engineering, not because you need to be exceptionally bright, but because they pay very well. Having a higher IQ might earn you a career in Physics or Mathematics, but you’re going to be a pauper compared to people working in the Big Three. And some of them in turn probably wish they had pursued a career in banking and finance – not around 2008, but before and since.

Well (sorry, serial posting) I guess I could also add that the HK education system is a fierce meat-grinder that results in kids over-achieving academically (and the suicides of 22 secondary school students last year alone).

I don’t know but imagine that the Macau education system is somewhat more relaxed. Plus they have the difficulty that they have to juggle teaching English, Portuguese and Chinese languages, whereas HK kids only (!) have to deal with learning both English and Chinese (Cantonese + Mandarin + written). Learning Chinese language is so burdensome that most of my daughter’s Chinese classmates dropped Chinese language at age 15 in favour of French. Why French? Because Vancouver – they figure French might be some use to them if/when they migrate to Canada – doubtful, but more use than Chinese.

Macau was colonised much earlier than Hong Kong, and there was much more mixing between the colonisers and the locals, resulting in the Macanese people who form a distinct ethnic group with their own unique cuisine and culture. Being bilingual and bi-literate in Cantonese/Chinese and Portuguese, they have tended to dominate the Macau civil service.

Macau also had (African) slavery, which HK never did. In the Battle of Macau, which resulted in a crushing defeat for the invading Dutch, much of the fighting on the Portuguese side was done by African slaves. Wikipedia: “One black woman was even compared to the legendary baker-woman of Aljubarrota by a contemporary Jesuit for her incredible skill with a halberd during the battle.” I have to assume that there was interbreeding with slaves as well as between Portuguese and local Han Chinese, and that Macanese may have some African genetic component, although it is not visually obvious. It is evident in their cuisine, however, much of which is fiercely spicy.

In HK, mixed marriages were much more rare, even up to today. The biracial population of HK is much smaller than the Macanese, and does not have any kind of separate cultural identity.

That is the only explanation I can think of for why Macau should rank lower in mean IQ than HK or neighbouring Guangdong Province, Anatoly.

Hong Kong is a very wealthy place. As with wealthy people in other modern developed economies like America, Hong Kong people choose to have small families. This is a very common part of the transition to a modern developed economy – it has happened in Japan and South Korea, and it is now happening in Mainland China, having already happened in Taiwan and Singapore.

Unemployment in Hong Kong is around 3%. Most of the women graduating in Engineering end up working in the construction industry. When they want to have a child, they get pregnant, take 6 weeks maternity leave to have the child, and then return to work. In a region (HK being properly termed a region rather than a city) with a population of about 7 million, there are about 450,000 foreign contract workers, almost all of whom are female. They come principally from the Philippines, but also from Indonesia. They are employed as ‘domestic helpers’. They take care of the children during the day while the parents both work, with some input by grandmothers, aunts, etc. It is a system that works very well on the whole.

Why you should think that China needs an even bigger population, I simply can’t imagine. As it makes the transition to a modern automated society, it needs fewer people, not more.

Most of the engineers working in Macau are from Hong Kong. It is only a 45 minute high speed ferry ride away. Macau itself does not produce many ‘local’ engineers.

When I was young and single, we guys would gather around the water cooler to gossip, fart and giggle, and a lot of the other guys would talk about sex. One day one of the most voluble on the subject said to me very suspiciously “How come you never talk about sex?” I replied “Some of us just talk about it, some of us just do it. If you are doing it, you don’t need to talk about it.” He disliked my response, but I have a suspicion there is some of that going on in relation to gender equality – there is endless talk about gender equality in western liberal democracies, and relatively very little discussion of it in China – but the anecdotal evidence of my eyes tells me that gender equality is actually practised more in China than in countries where it is endlessly debated. Why talk endlessly about it if you are already doing it?

Then there is what Razib refers to as ‘difference feminism’ – women demand the right to be a bunch of ditzes because they are female. You don’t see that in China at all. You do see it in Australia, everywhere you look.

When I enrolled in Civil Engineering as an undergraduate in a good Australian university 50 years ago, out of 196 enrolees in Civil, Mechanical and Electrical Engineering combined, 3 were women. Four years later, 20 of us graduated (the remainder having failed or voluntarily dropped out) – 10 Civils, 5 Mechanicals and 5 Electricals. Of those, precisely 1 was a female, a Civil. She was the first female in history to graduate in Engineering from that university. I got an update on her recently – she’s still small, blonde and passingly good looking, and she’s still working as an Engineer; most of her career has been spent in the mining industry.

Fast forward to today. I recently checked on the enrolments in Engineering at that university – 12% female (despite a great deal of talking about the need to attract more women into Engineering -well, I guess it’s progress of a sort). In Hong Kong (which you can take as a reasonable proxy for China in this case), at the leading university, the female enrolment in Engineering is about 50%. That’s not a fiddled result – I know, because I am engaged in Engineering degree accreditation, during which we scrutinise the student intake, among numerous other things. It is just the way it has worked out – take any group of school leavers bright enough to aspire to a prestigious profession like Engineering in Hong Kong, and about 50% of them will be women, just based on academic attainment in secondary school.

In response to surveys in Australia, it turns out that the large majority of bright-enough young women prefer not to aspire to become Engineers (or Physicists or Mathematicians) because they just don’t want to. In Hong Kong, and China more broadly, they want to.

Sorry to be so garrulous, but it’s a subject that has held my interest ever since I read “The Female Eunuch” as a teenager. I think I was born a feminist (in the sense that I believe in gender equality). I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t. Certainly I didn’t get it from parental influence – my mother never had a real paying job, never learned to drive a car, never learned to use a personal computer, and never owned a mobile phone.

You don’t understand the physics. Spin slows the velocity of the ball. If you don’t understand that, you don’t understand anything.

Just making mocking comments is not expressing any kind of useful opinion. John McEnroe has attested to what happened, several times. I don’t see any point in wasting my time in further discussion. Trading mockery doesn’t constitute a reasoned debate of facts.

I measured my shoulders by the way, although I felt foolish doing it – 20″. Weeks before her 18th birthday, Serena Williams’ shoulders, as I saw them standing right behind her, were some inches broader than mine. I won’t risk inducing further pointless mockery by estimating how many inches – it was after all in 1998.

I’m out. Don’t bother responding, I won’t see it. You have nothing to say that is worth reading.

To hit a tennis ball as hard as possible, so that it goes as fast as possible, you need to hit it flat, that is imparting no spin to the ball. Any spin you put on the ball is going to slow it down in flight. That’s just basic fluid mechanics.

But to hit a tennis ball hard and dead flat from the baseline and keep it in the court, the geometry of court and the net dictate that you need to be very tall – like, Ivo Karlović tall. Otherwise you are going to hit the ball long. This is one of many major differences between tennis and baseball – in tennis you are trying to keep the ball inside the court, in baseball you are quite likely to be trying to hit it out of the ground.

If you are not Ivo Karlović, to hit the ball hard and keep it in the court, you need to impart some spin to the ball – in particular, topspin. But that slows the ball in flight. The more topspin you put on the ball, the more it slows in flight. At some point, it becomes a self-defeating exercise, because the harder you hit the ball while applying topspin, the more the ball slows in flight – there is a limiting condition at which it is pointless to hit the ball any harder or put any more revolutions on it, because by the time it hits the ground it won’t be going any faster. Rafael Nadal has just about reached that critical point – there is no point hitting the ball any harder with any more topspin than he does.

So having any more ‘power’ doesn’t help.

Contrary to popular babble, Nadal is not hugely muscular – his left biceps are somewhat developed because he hits millions of balls in practice, during which he is repeatedly applying a huge amount of topspin to the ball. Most players can’t do what he does because they would dislocate their shoulder, the shoulder being a particularly unstable joint. When he takes his shirt off, he has the body of an athlete who trains a lot, with a pretty low body fat %, so his musculature is pretty well defined, but he is nowhere close to having the muscle mass of a body builder. Nowhere close.

If you hit a slice, which is to impart backspin to the ball, then you definitely do not want to hit the ball too hard, because the effect of backspin is to hold the ball up in the air and make it float long. In that case, hitting the ball too hard will simply make your slice shot float long out of the court.

Tennis is far more than being about ‘power’ and hitting the ball hard. For the large majority of players, developing more strength to hit the ball harder is not their problem; their problems are far more likely to be to hit the ball with more control, and to develop their technique better.

Unless you have tried to learn to play tennis with a modern, light racquet with the very enlarged racquet heads that in use now, you probably are not intuitively capable of understanding this. Every rank beginner I have tried to teach to hit a topspin forehand to has had the same problem – they keep trying to hit the ball hard, and just keep hitting it out of the court. The first priority in tennis is to keep the ball in the court, otherwise it’s instantly point over.

Tennis is not baseball, and your baseball logic does not work in tennis. Nor does it work in many other racquet sports, or even in cricket.

If you persist in claiming there is a huge amount of ‘circumstantial’ evidence that Serena Williams is ‘juicing’, I invite you to identify some of it, aside simply from her physical measurements and the rank assumption that no woman could possibly be that shape unless she was taking banned substances. Just saying it must be so a million times does not make it so in the absence of any actual evidence that she ever has.

Venus Williams came reasonably close to beating John McEnroe in a practice match in singles when McEnroe and Sampras went down to see the child prodigy when she was 10 years old. Do you want to tell me that Venus was taking performance enhancing supplements when she was 10?

A voice of reason at last. We’re both in the wrong place.

Madison Keys is about the only up and coming player I have seen anything like Serena, but she’s not close and is not going to come close to Serena in terms of success either.

I’m actually not a Serena fan and don’t like her much, she has too little emotional control and has done too many stupid things, and she’s horrible to watch playing, physically gross. I always admired Venus much more – she’s not as good a tennis player, but she is quiet, almost introverted, and has a feminine athletic grace that Serena just doesn’t have, lumbering around the court. There’s a lot about Garbine Muguruza’s game that reminds me of Venus, except that Muguruza is not as graceful or quite as athletic.

But the thing to understand about Serena is if you were writing a text book on how to hit a tennis ball, you would use Serena for the illustrations – her technique is perfect, with one exception – she is not a good volleyer. Venus is much better than Serena at the net. But serving, groundstrokes, Serena’s technique is perfect.

Yeah. How’s good old Sam doing in the ranking, btw? Ivo Karlović? Feliciano López? Andy Roddick was no slouch when it came to serving speed, and look at what a muscular specimen Roddick was. Not.

I recently read a research paper that said taking fish oil capsules for 6 months was found to increase strength in elderly people by 6%, which is not trivial, even if they did no exercise at all. But taking more than the optimum dose had deleterious effects.

Do you reckon Federer is on the fish oil?

Slightly OT, but Petra Kvitova recently broke the taboo against the M word and spoke about how menstruation makes it difficult for female players. One thing she said that was interesting to me was that they can’t use most of the pain killers marketed for menstrual cramps because they are banned, because they have some performance enhancing effect.

If you think Serena Williams is only 19″ across the shoulders, there’s something seriously wrong with your ruler.

OK, I exaggerated. But her shoulders were broader than mine. Just before her 18th birthday.

Leave out Serena Williams and look at all of the other male and female tennis players – they are notable for not being heavily muscled. Even Rafael Nadal is not heavily muscled, not compared to, say, sprinters.

Then why do we not see more muscular tennis players? Tennis players generally are notable for not being muscular – they look nothing like sprinters.

Dave, have a look at Petra Kvitova, Simona Halep and Maria Sharapova – do they look like sprinters to you? The closest would be Halep – the other two are tall and gangly. They are some of the hardest hitters in the women’s game, currently ranked Nos 2, 3 and 4 in the world.

Halep had to have breast reduction surgery because her bezongas were weighing her down and getting in the way. Watching Sharapova trying to run down a drop shot is like watching a drunken giraffe, all arms and legs going everywhere. None of them is noticeably muscular. Sharapova is definitely no sprinter, and neither is Kvitova.

Sharapova detests weight training – she said she can’t lift more than 5 lbs. You don’t build muscle just by injecting steroids, you have to train damned hard with weights as well. Not that I know that from personal experience, but I know some hard core body builders, and they lift massive amounts of weight.

You hit a tennis ball hard by accelerating the racquet head into the ball as fast as possible with a free swing from the shoulder, striking the ball cleanly and by having excellent timing, not by having strong muscles and muscling the ball. Plus you need to hit it with topspin, otherwise you’re just going to hit it long every time, so you need to have the timing to rotate the racquet head over the ball as you strike it, to put topspin on it. The effect of topspin on a tennis ball flying through the air is basic physics – the rotation of the ball induces greater air pressure on the top of the ball than the bottom, so the ball is forced down into the court, instead of flying long.

I began learning the game of tennis very late, after I had been weight training for a lot of years, and I had to learn how not to try to muscle the ball before I could hit a hard topspin forehand – I had to learn to relax my arm muscles completely, otherwise they slow down the swing. You can try it yourself – clench your arm muscles, then try swinging your arm forward like you would hitting a forehand – it becomes immediately obvious that using your arm muscles to try to hit hard just slows down the swing of your arm.

Yeah – and EPO will do what for a tennis player, exactly? The women play best of 3 sets – they’re lucky if they’re on the court for 2 hours.

Long distance runners and cyclists, sure, EPO helps. But the Ethiopian and Kenyan highlanders don’t need EPO, they were born with high altitude adaptation; their blood is naturally doped. And they are now winning all the middle distance and long distance races.

In tennis, nada. You’re lucky if most points last for a rally of 4 -5 strokes, especially for a first-strike attacking player like Serena, or Venus, or Garbi Muguruza. The days of the counter-puncher staying in long rallies are over, even on clay – Wozniacki made it to No. 1 without ever winning a major tournament by being the girl who ran down everything and bunted it back without making any unforced errors, but she never will again. The all-round attacking net players like Muguruza will beat her every time from now on, and they’ll pull the trigger as early in every rally as they possibly can. They don’t need aerobic endurance.

In the Wimbledon final this year between Serena and Muguruza, the longest rally lasted for 6 strokes. That’s not an endurance sport.

Be suspicious, by all means. I hate doping in sport. But you need basic logic for why you are suspecting particular players – just firing a shotgun at some girl because she has a bit of muscle development (Samantha Stosur, anyone?) without any credible evidence is just trash talk and smearing.

Every tournament win in the WTA triggers an automatic dope test. As the reigning No. 1, Serena gets more testing done on her than anyone else.

If there was ever a player I suspected of possible doping (aside from Martina Hingis, who was caught out using cocaine), it was Justine Henin, who never had a big physique. She finished one season small and skinny, and came back for the next season after a 6 week layoff, and I could not believe how much she had bulked up. As a weight trainer who was not favoured genetically by quick gains, I couldn’t imagine how she could have gained that much muscle mass in a 6 week period. She explained she had hit the weights during the off season because she felt she could not compete in the new era of heavy hitting female players – she was not just referring to the Williams sisters, she was referring to all of the new era female players who were all hitting the ball a lot harder.

I never heard any kind of proof against Henin, but she did suddenly and unexpectedly retire when she was at the peak of her career when she was 26, and I couldn’t help but suspect that it was to avoid being caught out.

The Williams sisters never needed drugs to gain muscle mass, they were born that way. You only need to look at their parents, and particularly their mother, to see where they got those genes from.

And as any tennis player will tell you, beyond having strong enough shoulders, and muscle and tendon linkages from the chest and upper back, you don’t hit a heavy tennis ground stroke by muscling it – that slows it down. You do it by generating fast racquet head speed all the way through the follow-through, and by striking the ball cleanly in the middle of the racquet. To generate fast racquet head speed, you need to completely relax your arm muscles and swing from the shoulder.

So Venus’ and Serena’s naturally large bicep development might look impressive, but it’s doing very little to help them hit heavy ground strokes. In this year’s Wimbledon ladies’ final, Garbeñe Muguruza was giving Serena back as good as she was getting in weight of shot, and Garbi does not have bulging biceps; not at all.

You must be joking – Djokovic stands out for his lack of muscle mass. Surplus muscle mass is a disadvantage to a tennis player because it adds to the body mass that they need to drag around the court. I know, because for decades I had conflicting objectives – I did both weight training to gain muscle mass, and I played competitive tennis, and when my body weight went up, my mobility on the tennis court went down. Nadal never does weight training, he hates it, and you don’t grow muscle mass just by taking drugs, you do also need to do resistance training.

So whatever you think you’re seeing, it’s not what you think it is.

I first watched Serena play live when she was 17, and stood right next to her afterwards – I’m the same height as her, but I was an adult male who had been doing heavy weight training for years, with broad shoulders, and her shoulders were half as wide again as mine. That’s bone structure, not drugs.

When Serena hid in the ‘panic room’ when she was living in LA, she’d had a half-sister murdered, and she was being stalked by somebody – it has been an occupational hazard for her. No one remembers Monica Seles being stabbed on court by a deranged Steffi Graf fan? It’s no mystery why she freaked when some unknown male suddenly turned up unannounced at her door.

It pays to be aware and observant, but you need to know what you are talking about, and you and Steve don’t.

Yes, very good film, and well researched.

Agree.

I’m entertained by the thought that I have a “boutique child”.

In an era when this is becoming increasingly possible, I don’t see why not.

She’s not exactly how I would have designed her – I would have preferred that she had less pale, more Chinese skin. And no freckles. But that’s about it.

She will make more of a positive contribution to humanity and alleviate more human suffering than a very high proportion of others. That’s nothing to jeer at.

I think you are on completely the wrong track here. Do you see what happens in predominantly (like 97%) Chinese societies?

The competition starts at 3 years old. Short term, all that cramming and repetition yields some short term gains, like bragging rights over whose daughter came top of the class in Primary One. Long term – nothing.

Amy Chua was abusive.

I know a lot of Chinese mothers, through my own personal circumstances, and none of them have been anywhere near as extreme as she was. And a lot of them called Chua out for being an abusive mother.

‘Tiger mom’ is not a single condition that describes all East Asian mothers, clearly – there is going to be a wide range of behaviours, just as there is among white American mothers. It means more than just making your kid do his homework, a lot more than that, and Chua was towards one extreme end. I’d say not the complete extreme, because it can get pretty nasty, but heading towards that extreme.

I had to do my homework. It didn’t scar me for life. What I do know is that during adolescence, I wanted as little to do with my mother as possible, and I did not exhibit delinquent behaviour. Sample of one.

Thanks.

“I would not assume lack of contact” – Neither would I.
“I would also not be assuming that bands “exchanged women” – I would. Not all HGs behave the same; in fact, HG practices appear to vary widely.

But what the article is saying is: “This demographic model is based on new evidence that suggests populations were much smaller than is generally thought to be a stable size for healthy reproduction, usually around 500 people. Such small groupings may have led to reduced fitness and even extinctions.”

We have yet to see any data, but in other words, they are talking about bands of maybe 20-30 individuals making up a total population in Europe over that time span of something much smaller than 500. Even if they are talking about effective population size, that makes for how many bands? Daviski’s guess was 30, so total population 600 to 900 people. In an area the size they are talking about, that makes frequent contact pretty dicey.

I’m not convinced – it sounds verging on hyperbole to me. I want to see some data before I am willing to believe what Pinhasi is saying. His statement that one band might range over the whole of Europe is obviously a grossly unrealistic complete guess, so I am regarding him with extreme caution until demonstrated otherwise.

Inuit similarly. In recent nomadic HGs, female exchange by various means between groups is the norm, not the exception. Bands of 20-30 with no regular contact or female exchange would fit the metapopulation model, with individual bands going extinct maybe quite frequently.

No doubt extinction was a close event during the last glacial maximum, the total population in refugia low and diversity very small, but by 14,000 years ago, I doubt extinction was that close unless the number of bands was very small, with virtually no contact between bands. And I simply don’t believe there were nomadic bands that size whose foraging range was the whole of Europe – that is frankly ridiculous.

My mtDNA is U5. I read somewhere that, outside of the Sami, who are 50% U5, with a much lower figure for Basques and Berbers, the frequency of U5 among modern Europeans is about 5%. So it is rare, but not that rare. By the time of influx of Middle Eastern farmers 7,000 ya, the invaded population of U5 cannot have been that small.

BTW, IC, do you know if there is a sizeable reference population for Manchu and whether they have been distinguished clearly genetically between Manchu and Korean? Without being rude or personal, how do you know you have Manchu ancestry – from genetic data or family genealogy? I have a personal reason for asking.

Many remote settlements in Australia (numbering in the 100s) have been logged as having as few as 5 semi-permanent inhabitants. And that is by choice, by ‘connection’ to the land. Those groups are obviously not sustainable, but they object strongly if they are moved, high suicide rates, etc.

So, nomadic bands of effective population size < 30 doesn't sound startlingly small to me. It sounds about right for HGs, or even on the high side. It depends how 'separated' they were, i.e. what their range was, and how frequently they came into contact with other bands, as to how close they were to extinction.

Plus genotype, phenotype, haplogroup…we could scratch around and come up with a very long list of terms it would be useful to define for someone who is interested in pop gen and genealogical stuff, but honestly – the simplest thing is when someone is reading a piece and comes across a term he doesn’t understand, Wikipedia generally has an adequate and comprehensible definition. For someone coming to science that is new to him, to at least some extent, he has to accept that he needs to read himself into the science, at least at a basic level.

Even now I find myself going back and re-reading definitions to remind myself of meaning, because of my late entry – read On the Origin of Species when I was 12 years old, then nothing, zilch, zero until 13 years ago. I had no interest in Biology at all until this started.

Civil engineer here. I have read just about everything Razib has written on genetics from the outset, and there is a hell of a lot to learn, not helped by the fact that the science is rapidly expanding away from us while we are still trying to nail the basics.

Basically, it’s a very big ask – I understand enough to know that it is not easily reducible to lay language, and Razib has two small children and a PhD to get finished, and there is no return for him from performing this service, even if it were possible, which I doubt it is.

I shouldn’t answer for Razib, but from my perspective as a learner, I am afraid I think the only answer is to do one’s own homework, at least to the point where you know what questions to ask.

I think I’d shave the sideburns and get the mole surgically removed. Otherwise – perfect.

One thing worth watching concerning Singapore: it has a population of 5.5 million, but a resident population of transient overseas workers of 1 million. That is a scary number, and one that is already making a lot of Singaporean locals very unhappy. People I talk to shrug and say that it is the price of progress, but if the locals do not feel themselves to be the beneficiaries of that progress, it sounds terribly like a recipe for trouble.

You might just have solved a very difficult problem for me.

I’ve been on a date with a leper – it wasn’t *that* bad.

I just want to add my voice to the long list of people who think what happened absolutely sucked.

Total lack of principle by NYT, AFAICS. Do they want diversity (of thought/opinion/view/knowledge) or don’t they?

It’s a bit stupid saying they want diversity, and then not wanting it when they get the sort of diversity of thought they weren’t planning on getting.

They have just deprived themselves of one of the best read, best educated and best thinking people around.

It’s a hatchet job, and it stinks.

I could go on about it for quite a while, but I’ll shut up now.

Honolulu, actually.

He’s back!!!

Allegedly looking pale – but then, he’s always pale.

Robert, friend, you flatter me. Almost everything I know about genetics, I have learned at the feet of my teacher Razib, metaphorically speaking.

But I can tell you that my daughter is CC (not surprising). On occasion she has suffered from quite bad anxiety attacks. Not often, but pretty bad. I have never experienced anything like that, although I tend to be a bit of a worrier.

AC, me.

Thanks, I nearly missed that. Classic Hong Kong – I miss Lily Wong a lot.

My childhood was full of those.

I did it early enough to get the medical information, but have tried subsequently running my data file through different software available free online, and it is really very simple to do.

Sorry, yes – I was unfamiliar with the term, but “code switching” is what it is that I have observed among groups of bilingual kids.

I know a lot of Cantonese speakers who use a lot of English loan words, particularly when discussing technical subjects. My daughter and her bilingual friends eschew that wherever possible because they regard it as laziness and lack of education. But sometimes people can’t help it if they are discussing something very technical for which there are no appropriate or sufficiently accurate Cantonese expressions. I’m no linguist, but I don’t see that as hybridisation; not in any genetic sense.

Yes, when fully bilingual speakers are talking to each other, they will often switch rapidly from one language to the other and back again. When my daughter was a kid talking with a group of school friends, it seemed to me that they were like a school of fish, swimming one way then suddenly all simultaneously switching direction. But they didn’t mix the two languages together, they just frequently switched from one to the other and then back again.

Our adult Chinese friends labelled my daughter “The NICAM Kid” (Wikipedia: “Hong Kong: commonly used for dual language for programming containing both Cantonese and English/Mandarin/Japanese/Korean soundtracks”) because of her ability to switch seamlessly between languages like flipping a switch, without ever mixing the two languages together – she would just flip from ‘good English’ to ‘good Cantonese’ and back again. She still does as an adult.

I see Chinglish as just badly spoken or written English by someone whose mother tongue is Chinese. But educated Chinese friends tell me that Chinglish speakers also speak and write badly in Chinese as well as English, e.g. they will write in Chinese but with English grammar construction.

I don’t know, Karl, but she seemed to my uninformed eye to be very anxious and neurotic, compared to other 6 year old mixed-race girls I had been acquainted with. There is another factor – older father. Her father was in his late 50s when she was born. Her parents didn’t play with her much compared to the amount of time I spent playing with my daughter, taking her swimming and on outings, etc. There could be any number of things that were going on with that kid. I felt very sorry for her. What you describe sounds a possible match to what I saw, with her frantically searching around trying to get the words right.

Just quietly, I think Huawei might have just scored one over Apple:

http://shanghaiist.com/2015/03/04/huawei-reveals-sleek-new-smart-watch.php

Tom, it was covered some time back when people were discussing the EDAR variant.

Plus I am quoting my daughter, who has done some lab research on human milk, who said she had to segregate data from samples donated by Europid and Chinese donors, because of the known compositional differences. She didn’t give me any refs, but was in a position to opine because she was in the game, so to speak.

She’s now no longer in the human milk business, she’s opted to become a mouse killer instead.

I have only ever known one child who hybridised language – her father was French, mother Chinese, they communicated with each other at home in English, but both worked full time, so the child was cared for during the day by two Filipina domestic maids. The father communicated to the child in French, the mother in Cantonese, and the Filipinas would talk to each other and the child in Tagalog. At the age of 6, when the child spoke, her speech was a jumble of English, French, Cantonese and Tagalog words and phrases, all interspersed.

In the case of my own daughter growing up in a bilingual household, she never once mixed the languages together – she would switch fluidly from one language to the other, depending on who she was speaking to, but never got the languages confused, even when she was very young. That accords with my observation of other children growing up in bilingual households, and also of French children with whom I was friendly as a kid – they always spoke to me and my parents and sibling in English, their own parents in French, and never mixed the two. Likewise some Croat kids with whom I was friendly – never mixed or confused the languages.

Second thought – when I catch the train, to pass the time, I snoop on what other commuters are using their phones for. The large majority are using them to play simple games, just to pass the time of the commute. I see the occasional person reading an e-book or something, but it’s pretty rare.

So if the question is specifically about new tech with mass market appeal, as in aiming for high penetration of whole populations, in order to make money from mass sales of personal objects, then maybe there is insufficient incentive to innovate further. It’s too hard to keep thinking of ‘must have’ new toys, in order to bring higher tech for an affordable price to the minority who will use its fuller capabilities.

It’s a tough question. A lot of new technology is developed which most people don’t know about, because they are not working in occupations where they need to know about it/use it. Much of it is game-changing, but in specialist fields that laymen are not interested in, although it may well beneficially impact their lives, if they only knew it.

If I can take that frame of reference, I say your friend is wrong, and has already been proven wrong.

It’s true though.

It’s well known to human breast milk researchers that there are quite big differences between European and East Asian milk.

I never had more than the occasional pimple. My daughter is the same. My wife – I don’t think she ever had a single pimple.

Then choose any basis for comparison you like. Choose lower body strength and running. Girls run. Pre-puberty, the fastest girls run faster than all or most of the boys. Post puberty – no contest.

The way I explained it to my daughter – she said “Who are those people who, when they get in the elevator, their smell hits you like a brick wall?” ‘They’re the CC people.”

Pancreatic cancer is notoriously difficult to treat, with a low success rate. It is far from certain that Steve Jobs could have been treated successfully with conventional treatment, and so he opted to put his faith in “alternative treatment” which was basically a waste of time.

He would have been better advised to accept the conventional treatment, but there’s still a high chance he would have been a goner. I don’t think people should make too much of his decision, because it might well not have materially affected the outcome.

Thanks for this. I tested as TT. Curiously, I also have dry ear wax. Nothing particular has shown up in my ancestry to explain why. I also have very sparse body hair. I recall being acutely embarrassed when I went through puberty and did not turn out to be hairy, unlike all the other guys. I have since had cause to be grateful for my relatively hairless condition, however, as when my Chinese mother-in-law said “Oh well, at least he’s not one of those hairy foreigners. And he doesn’t smell either.” (What luck – a foreign son-in-law who doesn’t stink.)

As a self-conscious teenager, I started using underarm deodorant when I started dating girls at 16, just on the assumption that I would need it like everyone else, but stopped again when I realised there was no point and I was just wasting money on something I didn’t need.

My daughter also tested TT (not surprising, as my wife is Chinese), tried using deodorant twice and then scrapped it because she couldn’t see any point. My wife never got tested, but I can guess in her case, because she never smells, and never uses deodorant because she never needs it. She instructed our daughter to use it, assuming she would need it as a half-foreigner, but as it turns out, she doesn’t, because her father is a foreigner of the rare stinkless variety.

It’s OK, I see Consumerlab have done a report on some that I have used, so I’ll join and get the report.

N.S., for some time now on and off I have been using GNC protein powders, under the impression it was a reputable/trustworthy American brand. What are the chances I have been getting what I have been paying for?

FWIW, I don’t live in America, and would have difficulty shipping samples to somewhere like Consumerlab for testing.

I guess this just underlines what hardcore body builders have always told me – it’s better to get your protein from natural sources (i.e. food) than from supplements.

I no longer have the relevant graph conveniently to hand (typical – I usually trim and discard my more useful references just shortly before I need them – I think it was something Stephan Guyenet posted on his Whole Health Source blog, but I now can’t find it quickly), but what happened in America (and I expect similarly in Australia, from personal observation) over the 80s/90s was that a major drop in consumption of butter, cream and full fat milk and a big switch to low fat dairy was more than compensated by an increase in consumption of cheese, in terms of annual per capita consumption by weight.

(Pondering, it seems possible people found it harder to make the connection and thought cheese might be a lower fat and therefore ‘healthier’ choice – I mean, who actually gets out the calculator and does the comparative calculations? But being cynical, bland low quality cheese is a low cost ‘stealth’ filler – it seems to me now that every damn thing available to order for lunch by way of a sandwich, burger, baked potato, hot dog, etc. is packed full of tasteless melted cheese, which is there as a low cost ‘filler’ to make the customer think he’s getting value for money in terms of feeling full enough per dollar spent. Don’t get me wrong, I adore cheese, but I don’t want it in every single damn thing, and I want cheese I can taste, where much less mass of tastier cheese is more rather than less, a bit like how highly flavoursome spiced food is more satiating, as in the recent discussion of chilli peppers and hot sauces. For me, good roquefort is the queen of cheeses and costs a bomb, but you don’t need much of it to get a good taste of it – as long as I can beat my daughter to the refrigerator. It’s pretty safe with my Chinese wife though – just the thought of veined cheese made from ewe’s milk is almost enough to make her hurl.)

Setting aside the obvious differences in upper and lower body strength, my daughter’s suggestion is to look up “carrying angle”, i.e. a girl throws like a girl because she’s a girl.

So I did, and Wikipedia suggests there may even be “racial influences which add to the variability of this parameter”. I understand zero about American football, but for people who like to debate why most top quarterbacks are white, while most top running backs are black (or whatever it is – don’t crucify me, I know nothing), maybe it’s another variable to toss into the pot, just to add to the mayhem.

Long term fan/beneficiary of Razib’s Science and History writing, and hugely entertained by the slap-downs. Civil/Geotechnical Engineer now working for one of the world’s largest consulting companies. Born at the furthest south-west tip of Western Australia, spent early childhood playing with Noongars, now normally resident in East Asia. [Cylindrachetidae are bizarre tunneling insects known popularly as Sandgropers – 5 species are endemic only to Western Australia; hence other Australians refer to Western Australians as Sandgropers, given that much of WA is just sand, sand and more sand – the particular joke in my case being that I do actually spend some of my time digging tunnels.] Conservative. Ex-Anglican (Episcopalian) atheist, non-believer in multiculturalism except within some narrow confines, lifelong feminist (born that way) in the true original meaning of gender equality, while obviously knowing that there are group differences between males and females. Active supporter/practitioner of interracial marriage as being a generally good idea and socially constructive thing to do, while worrying about the conundrum of how to genetically preserve Australian Aboriginal people and whether anyone should even try, given that it requires some form of Apartheid/extreme isolation and seems socially unjust. Keen tennis player (competitive) and cyclist (for transport).

That might explain why Buffy Sainte-Marie chooses to live on Kauai. Mind you, if I had a choice, I might choose to live there too.

Not Cree then. Flatheads?

Not that I have delved much into Canadian First Nations, but I see some parallels with Australian Aboriginal people living in remote communities. Not to over-generalise, though, because this is comparing people on the cusp of the Neolithic revolution with people who were still living in the Pleistocene, with possibly a bit of imported and adopted culture within the past 5,000 years along with a bit of admixture and some dogs. But as you were listing the issues, I was ticking the boxes, and in Australia we are talking about people with a mean IQ of 65.

I’m very curious to know who the most successful group are. I’m guessing Cree, but it’s just a guess. But that would have to be some sub-group of the Cree, no?

Hoping everything is resolved, or at least stabilised.

I’m just about done with medical stuff, myself, but if I just slip away, the people I love most will never forgive me, and I can’t go that way.

“Cartoonists tend to be white men” made me laugh so hard I nearly ruptured myself.

Some great stuff there.

Here is some footage to illustrate genetic/behavioural differences between northern and southern Han. This is not concocted humour. This is real. This is why I married a northern girl. But it’s not for the faint-hearted, man. If you take a northern wife, you’d better mean it.

It was transparent to me, and while I’m not a total moron, I’m not always the sharpest knife in the drawer – the deal was I agreed they could use my data for research on condition that they would keep me anonymous unless I agreed otherwise – same deal with linking up with people to whom I am related. I should very much hope that they are making deals with people like Pfizer and whoever – that is exactly what I hoped for and expected. That’s what ‘research’ means – they are not a charity. For US$99, it was a hell of a deal, and I still think so.

I don’t have any disappointment with 23andMe over that. My disappointment, such as it is, and this has happened for obvious reasons and it’s not their fault, is that, of the 1,000 people they have flagged up as related to me, almost all are resident in North America (the USA or Canada), and I can pretty much infer from the info they have made available that they are middle-aged or older and white.

It is not that I have anything against middle aged white Americans and Canadians, but none of my direct ancestors had any links with America or Canada, so these are all moderately distant side-branch people who are uninteresting to me and with whom I would have little to nothing in common.

My concerns are trivial and of no relevance to anyone, but it points to how biased their database is – they have excellent coverage now of some groups, but…well, I am willing to bet that the analysis they have given my daughter of her ‘Asian’ half is based pretty much on samples from people of Asian ancestry living in North America, and it is frustrating in that it is lacking in sufficiently fine grained detail.

It would be great if they could sample the world. But they can’t. We could futilely enumerate the reasons, but the fact is they can’t.

On 23andMe it would show as something like half identical on x, but ‘not enough information’ to show anything on y, which is reflecting the true difference between men and women.

One of my daughter’s ambitions is to have her own squadron of trained attack ducks – not to kill anyone, just to overfly them in formation and mass-crap on them.

Rob – the appalling thing was the awful callous stupidity of the leadership.

I’m not dissing Omaha Beach, Saipan, or any of the other awfulness, but on a sheer scale of wanton human slaughter, the Somme takes some beating.

I once made the awful but unpredictable error of sitting next to an initially very friendly American guy on a plane – we got to talking about the nicest places we had been, and without thinking I said that the single nicest place I had ever been was Saipan. I was being genuine – the island is still littered with WWII military wreckage, but as a place to chill out for a week, I couldn’t think of anywhere better – my wife and I had spent a week there once, and didn’t want to leave.

He responded that his father, who he never got to meet, was a US Marine who had died on the beach there. From then on, it was a very uncomfortable journey. Nothing I said from that point helped.

Cassowaries are pretty scary. I’m not sure they need any modification to make them more scary, or even more dinosaur-like. Ambush attackers.

Emus are pretty harmless/timid by comparison, unless one of them craps on you as it runs past. That’s not too funny.

I honestly wish I had not read most of those comments.