Better Be Good To Me

How about that human genome, eh? What a t'riffic little jobby that bad boy is, explaining everything from hammer toes to serial killer tendencies, plus the really important stuff like male pattern baldness.

My genetic predisposition is like a bad Vuitton knock-off - somewhere in the past lies a quality original. Unfortunately, for successive generations the leather provenance has been on a downward slide, and the stitching...well, let's just say you wouldn't fool anyone at your local pub.

But there is hope. The flip side of the genetic blackjack game is the environmental input we all receive. I like to think of this as the role model side of life, because that's how junior learns how to behave. Parents form the front line, with (in my day, anyway) television as a backstop. You'd be surprised at the extent of Gilligan's Island's influence in my own life. (I'm Team Mary Ann BTW. Ginger was way too high maintenance. Who takes ball gowns to a tropical island?)

If I had to plant a flag in this argument, I'd say that environment - the influence of role models - is more important than genetics. Young'uns start learning and mimicking right from day one. Seems to me that there's almost zero inherited ability in the higher social skills area; finding a decent mate, for instance. Discerning what kind of behaviour divides the good people from the bad, for another, is all observed knowledge.

I'm pretty sure this is why we all have to learn the mating lessons from scratch every time. Our biology is amazing, but not coded for understanding the difference between a Coach bag and a grocery bag.




Bottoms Up, Quality Mavens.

Dating a Boson

Like everyone else, everything changed for me when I read that a bunch of smarties with a few billion dollars worth of kit discovered that the Higgs boson exists. Announced on the otherwise auspicious date of July 4, confirmation that such an animal lives outside mathematical equations is like the dawning of a new era.  

So it was with some disappointment in the following days that I observed little or no difference in the world outside the Large Hadron Collider ie: where you and I live. Drivers on the freeway behaved, as ever, like teenaged children on crack; mainstream media treated us, still, as teenaged children on Xanax; peace and understanding, yet again, failed to break out all over. Men and women sorta did, and sorta didn't, get each other. Everything changed, and it all actually remained the same.

But let's not despair at this, all is not lost. The good news is that TomKat are (is?) divorcing, so there's one more child out of danger, and Suri will be okay too. There is good evidence - from Tom's three exes - that women turning thirty who have children start to see life with more clarity. The gooey love-sauce fame-and-looks obsession of their twenties gives way to the reality of doing the right thing by the children, which in this case amounts to rescuing them from a cult. 

It seems about right to me that no-one should be allowed to marry until their thirtieth birthday. Better still would be if we were helped to understand why not, and chose not to of our own volition. Too many high-school sweethearts marry at twenty-two and find themselves divorced a few years later. How can the children of these unions overcome this model of parenthood?

In that light, I advocate the twenties as the Dating Decade - the more, the better. No marriage, just ten years of figuring out yourself and how you fit with others. It's possible this might have more impact than applied particle physics, as much as atom smashing underground in Switzerland might give you a hard-on.


Bottoms Up, Physicists.