Re: Multiples

1

Come on, people! Twins are way more interesting than soccer!

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2

Remember that great beer commercial with the twins? And that great song about burritos and being a guy and everything? What was it for, Coors? Now that was a commercial.

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3

You know, I've never actually seen that commercial, although I've heard a lot about it.

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4

like most New York articles, they managed to take an intriguing topic and just kind of wander around the page for a few hundred words without really coming up with a coherent thesis.

s/hundred/thousand and that's not a bad description of many of my papers.

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5

Teofilo has to be nice to me because my little brother is currently competing in a tae kwon do tournament in the town where he lives. If Teo crosses me, I can dispatch my brother to kick his ass.

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6

Twins are way more interesting than soccer!
What's the matter with soccer, ya ignorant Merickun?

All right, I'll bite. From the Department of Off the Top of My Head:

Wonder what this means for municipal services? Twins are more likely to be low-birthweight, and low-birthweight children are (IIRC) more likely to have developmental challenges. Wonder if there will be an anti-twin backlash in 10 or 15 years if people perceive that their local tax dollars are being used for for "too much" special education?

How about career implications? Hollywood loves twins, especially for children's roles where strict laws govern how many hours a single child can work. Will we see a flood of (ugh) Mary-Kate and Ashleys?

And what is about twins that brings out the overly-cute naming instinct?

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7

And what is about twins that brings out the overly-cute naming instinct?

Their twininess. Duh.

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8

I've never been tempted to name twine anything at all, much less anything cute.

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9

That's okay ben. I won't hold it against you. I bet Michael never named any twine ever either.

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10

Lies!

Seriously, though, I'll be nice. And congratulations to your brother.

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11

I won't hold it against you

ATM.

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12

For a quasi-serious answer to 6, I'll venture:

Because so many of the twins are being born to people who can afford IVF, the possibility that twins will incur developmental problems will result in better legislative protection for developmentally disabled children; when the parents are comparatively wealthy and already have some familiarity with the health bureaucracy, they are going to find a way to get what they think their families need.

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13

And I finally got a kitten happy fun page.

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14

Kitties! Hooray!

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15

Here is a discussion of the effects of eating meat and dairy products on natural twinning. Apparently it has to do with the insulin-like growth factor (IGF). Vegan moms are much less likely to have natural twins.

Asians have natural twins less often than whites who have natural twins less often than blacks. This could be because of the IGF levels.

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16

I have to wonder if the decrease in twin births in vegans is simply due to malnutrition. Vegans often have 4.5 lb, 35-36 week singletons due to lack of protein in the diet. Maybe they just don't manage to carry twins long enough to have shown up in this study?

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17

5/10: Nice job. Now he's fled.

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18

Kitten!

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19

17: Becks look more or less like I imagined.

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20

Weird, I hadn't imagined her as looking like that at all.

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21

re: 5

Taekwondo is teh lame, btw. :)

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