On Good Omens: I read Good Omens a couple of years ago on a business trip. It was hysterically funny, but I was also just a wee bit scared by parts of it while reading it alone in a darkened cabin near Colonial Williamsburg in January...whoosh, hear those end-of-the-world winds howl. (Yes, I am a wimp.)
On anthropology: PBS has this show that they run occasionally, “Secrets of the Dead,” and in one episode they tracked down the modern-day descendants of the Amazon women warriors. It seems that they married into/merged with today’s Mongolians, so every so often you will get a little blond-haired kid born to a family in one of the Mongolian yurts. They confirmed this by using DNA from a bone from an Amazon’s grave near Rome, and comparing it to the DNA of one of those blond-haired Mongolian girls, who was about 11 and very pigtailed and cute. They had to find a girl to do the test because the matrilineal DNA matches are so much stronger -- in part because every little girl is born with all the eggs she will ever have already inside her when she comes out of her mama. I find all this fascinating.
On science-y stuff: I have admiration for science (I am married to a chemist), but I find my best understanding of it has actually come from science fiction. (I got a H.S. question right because I had seen the answer on “Star Trek,” LOL).
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Date: 2006-04-05 02:48 pm (UTC)(Yes, I am a wimp.)
On anthropology: PBS has this show that they run occasionally, “Secrets of the Dead,” and in one episode they tracked down the modern-day descendants of the Amazon women warriors. It seems that they married into/merged with today’s Mongolians, so every so often you will get a little blond-haired kid born to a family in one of the Mongolian yurts. They confirmed this by using DNA from a bone from an Amazon’s grave near Rome, and comparing it to the DNA of one of those blond-haired Mongolian girls, who was about 11 and very pigtailed and cute. They had to find a girl to do the test because the matrilineal DNA matches are so much stronger -- in part because every little girl is born with all the eggs she will ever have already inside her when she comes out of her mama. I find all this fascinating.
On science-y stuff: I have admiration for science (I am married to a chemist), but I find my best understanding of it has actually come from science fiction. (I got a H.S. question right because I had seen the answer on “Star Trek,” LOL).