What made the Trump, Cruz, or Carson game interesting is that they're all completely unacceptable in their own way. Ted Cruz edition.

Lay some odds: Kasich as Hillary's veep pick.

I debated making the ballet and Texas tax break thread also the new primary thread, but ultimately decided not to mix them all together.

We went to a ballet tonight (this one) which is in fact the exact same performance I saw a few times growing up. I loathed the ballet growing up, half out of general defiance and half out of boredom. (I recognized one of the leads when I was growing up is still in the corp, at age 62. Holy shit.) Anyway, tonight's performance was really fun. I can't believe how much shorter it seemed.

Also Texas is stupid.

1. Everyone in my FB feed (not you all) is linking that some babies are easier than others article.

2. Not really anyone in my FB feed is linking that some NY rats are bigger than others. But none are 3 lbs big. Manhattan huffsplanation.

McConnell continues, citing framers' original intent that African American POTUS serve 3/5 of a term https://t.co/RXsh9ZJTmR

— Eric Rauchway (@rauchway) March 16, 2016

1. Super weird:

Prime numbers, it seems, have decided preferences about the final digits of the primes that immediately follow them. Among the first billion prime numbers, for instance, a prime ending in 9 is almost 65 percent more likely to be followed by a prime ending in 1 than another prime ending in 9. In a paper posted online today, Kannan Soundararajan and Robert Lemke Oliver of Stanford University present both numerical and theoretical evidence that prime numbers repel other would-be primes that end in the same digit, and have varied predilections for being followed by primes ending in the other possible final digits.

Also I haven't got a handle on this yet:

Soundararajan was drawn to study consecutive primes after hearing a lecture at Stanford by the mathematician Tadashi Tokieda, of the University of Cambridge, in which he mentioned a counterintuitive property of coin-tossing: If Alice tosses a coin until she sees a head followed by a tail, and Bob tosses a coin until he sees two heads in a row, then on average, Alice will require four tosses while Bob will require six tosses (try this at home!), even though head-tail and head-head have an equal chance of appearing after two coin tosses.

2. E. Messily wrote: This is a long, interesting, stressful, article with a happy ending.

My least favorite sentence is "We were now about two months into our crisis and this was the first full recounting of my daughter's illness that any health professional had been willing to hear."

I really wish med school didn't turn people into such arrogant, formulaic jackasses (present company's family members excluded).

Also the pharmaceutical industry is evil.

Heebie's take: Wow.

Having a sick child is never easy. But if your child has to be sick, hope for something mechanical: a broken bone, a gash that needs stitches--something that can be physically mended. Failing that, wish for something commonplace. Chickenpox, a bladder infection, bronchitis. Doctors can manage these things with their eyes closed. If pushed, consider the merits of illnesses that are at least well understood--illnesses that can be definitively diagnosed and have generally agreed-upon courses of treatment. What you least want is something obscure, something not yet well characterized--and least of all, something both obscure and pertaining to the mind.

1. Gifs that reddit users submitted to represent their first sexual experience.

Via RHC.

2. Clinton's campaign manager is a horrible education reform guy. Oh Hil, you're so crazy. I guess public school reform won't be turning a corner nationally any time soon.

Trivers writes: I figure if we're going to have a primary thread every few days we may as well sprinkle in some human interest fluff.

As I'm sure is obvious, I've been kind of fixated on Ted Cruz since the primary season began. Reading this article helped me to understand why:

When people ask me about Ted Cruz, I tell them at first I didn't like him at all, but as I've gotten to know him better, I find myself constantly vacillating. While following him in Iowa, my wife and I had identified a tick of Cruz's--when we saw him in person, especially when there were few or no TV cameras around, he followed a routine when he spoke. He made a point he felt passionate about while poking his finger. Then he nodded sternly, making eye contact with people in the room. Then he smiled, and then he looked at a new member of the crowd, and he laughed. Cruz has an unusual and kind of endearing laugh. He pokes his teeth out and sort of seems to retract his neck into his chest like a frightened turtle. His head bounces a little, almost imperceptibly, and then he puts the teeth away.

I'm describing it like it's a bad thing. But it was curiously disarming. "He's actually kind of cute," my wife said. Cruz looks like a kid when he does it--a sweet, lonely kid, whose only friends are adults. He looks like the kind of kid who hangs out with the mom in the kitchen while all the other kids are playing games in the yard during a birthday party; the kid who was abandoned by his alcoholic father when he was just a toddler, only to be reunited with him two years later; the kind of kid who impresses his parents with a recitation of the Constitution. He looks like a lonely misfit.

I suppose, in some ways (and I'm probably not alone in this, especially on Unfogged) I kind of actually relate to the guy. Maybe one reason I'm at once so repulsed and so intrigued by him is that I feel like, had a few (pretty major) things gone differently, I could have wound up just like him.

Heebie's take:
1. We're at my parents' house for Spring Break, so I may switch to night-before daily posting instead of in-the-morning.

2. Trivers is a weirdo who relates to Cruz!! For my money, Cruz is a shithead that I can't relate to.

(Is there a conservative for whom I could say, "That's how I could have turned out, had some major crossroads broke differently"? I'm not sure. There must be.)