1. First, a post from the past: 10 questions for Jim Crow

2. Weird search query of the week: “black mormons in utah”. They exist. One of my friends from college ended up marrying one and they live in Utah (he is Mormon as well, though not black).

3. Comment of the week, in response to Facebook & Dunbar’s number:

My personal hypothesis (henceforth to be known as Sandgroper’s First Hypothesis and kicked along for the next 25 years by a bunch of pseudo-intellectual airheads, since it seems OK with a lot of ’scientists’ to establish long-lived hypotheses based on slim anecdotal data) is that Dunbar’s number is shrinking. We no longer live in villages, but impersonal mega-cities. I have known of people who literally wound up not knowing anyone on any real personal level and died totally alone and friendless, some by suicide, and some sleeping and pissing on the streets despite being financially wealthy. People we converse with online we don’t really know in any true sense.

Yeah, sometimes I wish I was a meerkat. Or at least that all of my family lived or could stay in one continent, the ones I care about at least.

I never signed up for Facebook or Twitter, and would rather walk miles to talk to someone face to face than call them on the phone. This is eccentric of me and is going to have to change real soon.

Now if you will excuse me, I have to go back to watching the progressing rescue of 33 Chilean miners who have become very dear friends of mine (no they haven’t), plus of course the 4 rescue crew who have been lowered down the hole. What I want to know is how the last guy out is going to fasten the door on the Fenix 2 capsule so that they can winch him to the surface, given that the catches are on the outside of the door. Unless they have a duplicate set inside – I hope that’s the case, but I don’t know how smart Chilean engineers are – that contraption looks worryingly Heath-Robinson to me, and this is a field I know about.

The last thing you want at the site of an emergency rescue operation, apart from a ravening press mob, is a slimy grandstanding politician, and here we have two. I’ve been at sites where there were dozens of the bastards, posing grinning in front of locations where corpses of victims had very recently been extracted. (In fairness, in those cases, the press were pretty good, they kept their distance and didn’t get in the way.) If you ever need anything to destroy your faith in human nature, that will do it. But that’s getting pretty far from the point. Sorry Zeeb, my brain seems to wander. Can’t imagine why.

4) From last week: “Will the average human be wealthier 25 years from now?” 60% of you said yes, 20% said no, and 20% said uncertain.

View Survey

5) And finally, your weekly fluff fix: