malloyd

Oddly that may make it less likely to be non-random, though Dan may or may not know that. In the US anyway scheduled births, or ones that can reasonably be hastened or delayed a day, generally don't happen on holidays, to the extent that January 1 is the second least common birthday, following December 25 and followed by December 24 and July 4. Birth rates for the entire two week period from the end of December to the beginning of January is actually noticeably depressed, as is the week Thanksgiving will fall in in late November.

For the first, pregnancy timing is simply not that tightly constrained - *normal* variation is 5 weeks. For the second, I actually think he's right on the psychology of that for anybody who doesn't actually know Elliot. Counting the indistinguishable "Eliot", it's actually more common as a female name than a male one in US census data (breaks 57/43 for Elliot, Eliot breaks 30/70 and is about as common), so most people would start off assuming girl even in complete isolation. And while it's true we don't know of anybody with the same last name around here, living somewhere in the vicinity of where their families settled is pretty normal. There are lots of people around here with my last name who are probably related somehow but I have no real idea how. For anyone doing a search, Dunkle is more than twice as common as Dunkel, so they may well be starting with both names wrong. The major hole is that a lot of people in this town *do* know Elliot by name already. For anybody outside Moperville, Edward is probably right, but then my impression is most people outside Moperville pretty much dismiss news from it as nonsense anyway.

That seems pretty likely really. Edward has a real point about poor acoustics and background noise. Between that and nobody likely to be standing real close to a fight between a superhero and a monster, and neither Elliot or Dunkel being exactly common names. I wouldn't be too startled if the press were currently all camped out in front of the house of somebody names Leah Duncan, because her Facebook page shows her with pink hair.

I'd have say if anything the other way around, Noriko split from Edward for the same kind of family reasons her sister cares about. Come to think of it, do any of the main characters actually know magic runs in families? We do, and some of the adults clearly do, but has anybody made it clear to any of them? They seem oddly incurious about their relatives experiences with magic and unwilling to talk about their own if they do know.

Given all the population clustered on the coasts, there are mega tsunami scenarios, either from collapsing underwater volcanos or ocean meteor strikes, that could be probably kill more people than New Madrid or a record setting California quake without being in extinction risk category.

It generally wouldn't. People expect a lot more from genetic testing than it can deliver. Places offering to find your relatives from mitochondrial or Y-chromosome samples are exaggerating a lot, or outright scams. Mitochondrial DNA doesn't change that fast. If you aren't a mutant (and you probably aren't) you have the same mitochondria as any other children of your mother (and the children of those of them that are girls). Likewise your mother likely wasn't a mutant either, so you have the same mitochondria as your maternal grandmother and female line aunts, first cousins and first cousins removed descended from her. Repeat for your grandmother and more distant cousins back to whoever was the last mutant. In a matrilocal culture it wouldn't be too astonishing if most of the woman in the village to had the same mitochondrial DNA.

It's not going to change much, it's a physical limit set by molecule size and how much voltage or solvent flow you can apply without destroying anything. Depends on the test though. The sample definitely lacks a particular marker might be something you can do in a day, or a comparison to say these samples aren't from something of the same genus. If you want a subtle test like degree of kinship, 3 or 4 days is about the fastest you can hope for. Incidentally this wouldn't be very definitive among many of the options proposed on this thread. Tests on siblings are going to be somewhat ambiguous. A clear distinction between sisters, half sisters or first cousins is probably something no responsible lab will commit to very strongly. It is after all theoretically possible to have only one chromosomes in common with a full sibling of the same sex, and none at all with one of the other. Sure, not likely but possible. A distinction between full sisters and children whose parents are twins or otherwise clones is outright impossible.

This is why you figure delivery dates as 280 days from the beginning of your last menstrual period, as the closest thing to a hard number you are going to be able to determine. I understand there are studies using blood hormone levels to time implantation that maybe take a day off the average variability, but given that the variation is so high anyway and almost nobody is going to be taking daily blood tests in the first place that's more an interesting factoid than clinically useful information.

I don't think he needs to push either Super-Elliot or Ellen and Nanase girl detectives very hard. Tedd's definitely not the field op type though. I don't really know what motivates Grace, it may well be changing as she catches up on the socialization she missed out on growing up a caged lab experiment, though I suspect she's stuck to Tedd by authorial fiat regardless.

Come to think of it, Pandora is a great name for somebody who goes around granting magical powers - it after all means something like all giver or all gifts.

Looking around a bit, the current accepted figure for "normal" variation seems to be 5 weeks, so plus or minus about 18 days. It might be time to start thinking about intervention at 21, but I'd be surprised if many doctors would do it quite yet absent some other risk factor. You'd think this would be something there was mountains of data on (it's not like having a baby is a rare medical condition!), but there don't seem to be a lot of actual evidence based studies.

The "whale" is clearly one of the whale avatars of Ebisu, the kami Tara expected Nanase to be the hime-miko of, who'd thus naturally be interested in Tedd as part of his priestly family. Well OK, probably not, Dan has moved away from anime and Japanese culture references a bit, but at one time I think that could have been a serious theory here.

You aren't a parent are you? The estimated birth date the doctor gives you is the midpoint of a two week range, and there's probably a 25% chance the birth will be outside that window. Being born on the same day doesn't guarantee you were conceived in the same *month* let alone the same day.

Really "half" isn't worth mentioning. People get into really odd arguments about kinship terms. They're not usually technical vocabulary. Most languages are perfectly willing to let you use "sister" for any female relative or close friend of about your generation. Even in English there are plenty of people who use it for women belonging to my church, or even of the same race.

Third option, their pregnant mother was cursed and touched the diamond. For added plot convolution, the "other woman" is the separated cursed form or vice versa.

Clearly we need to get some mad scientists at work on breeding mosquitos that are pack hunters. And surely by now some villain in literature somewhere has used throwing the hero into a box with half a million starving mosquitos as a death trap.

It's more logical than magic is a hipster anyway. Strategically though, what it ought to do is let people find out all about magic, but change the rules just enough that it's difficult for anybody to pull in enough energy to do anything. Then wait for somebody to develop necronium fission NEMA reactors or a process for turning sunlight into liquid magic fuel so they can do something useful with it, and expand the energy available for you too. Hm, maybe worlds that have built entire technologies around magic are the ones where the local Magic God figured that out.

You haven't heard the joke about what happens to physicists when they die? The get the job of changing the laws of the universe whenever someone successfully understands one to make them more complex, but without contradicting the results of any previous experiments.

Another possibility is that "Magic Itself" doesn't actually exist, Disco Wizard is being led on by somebody else, and the reason the rules of magic changed in the past is unrelated. Seriously given that there are entire species, alien worlds, the "other side" of this one, and entire alternate universes where magic is apparently common knowledge, "Magic Itself" clearly has no such issues. "Magic of Terran Humans On This Side of the World", maybe.

I'm inclined to think Pandora is exaggerating a bit too. This is basically a clairvoyance spell with some limitations. Given that it isn't unique, is fairly useful even with its limitations, and wizards can learn spells from watching them cast, there are presumably quite a few people with it, unless there is a better version with fewer limits. Edward may be able to cast it himself. Since wizards apparently can keep secrets from each other anyway, there are presumably also defenses. It's a security risk in a way, but hardly the only, or the worst, one magic opens up.

If she were, which of the EGS cast should ParisDan award her to? And what are they offering as bribes?

Are there teenagers in the First World who *don't* have a smart phone? Elementary kids do their homework on tablets around here - the online assignments are required, I'm told by the nearby kid that they're 35% of her grade this year (for 3rd grade). We dinosaurs who lived before PCs and cell phones were invented and still consider them luxuries and not necessities are behind the curve.

Maybe not quite. The XMP advertising brags about 400 million floating point operations per second, which the iPad doesn't unambiguously beat until the iPad4, and IIRC later versions were available with additional cores, which would raise that some. Did you have the accelerator for the TRS-80 cassettes? 1800 bits per second, wow, 16 times the speed of a teletype line.

I don't know why. How many of them do you think volunteered for extensive tests to see if something will successfully kill them? And they've had the name a long time, so even that wouldn't be all that conclusive. Things change. "No weapon forged can stop me! What's that do?"

If so I bet Raven's. With family. It strikes me as potentially significant that in the discussion of disguising Grace as his niece she immediately jumped to asking about his possible children, without determining if he actually has a niece. He might well have one who looks just like the disguise, know it, and been more than happy to introduce Grace to her if she'd asked.