Congrats, Stephanie! Welcome, Ellie!

Snerk. I'm looking at the Class Matters graphics and stuff on the NY Times site, and from one of those graphs, it looks like I've chosen to get my Ph. D. in one of the only fields where people with Bachelor degrees tend to earn more than people with more advanced degrees. I'd kind of known that, but hadn't actually seen it broken down like that before.

t edit: well, sort of. Looking at it some more, it's a little more complicated than that.

Ellie! You rocket baby! Good job!

Oh my goodness! Welcome, Ellie, you crazy little speed demon! And much joy in a job well done, Stephanie, and may your DH arrive soon and safe to rejoin his family.

Welcome, Ellie, and congratulations Stephanie and DH.

Welcome to the world, Ellie. What a wonderful surprise you'll be for your dad when he gets home. Congrats to Stephanie and DH.

Wow! It seems like just a few hours ago Stephanie was posting. Wait! That's 'cause she was!

Emily and I send our congratulations. Welcome to the world, little Ellie! We can't wait to see pictures and hear all about you.

Congratulations Stephanie, DH and Ellie!

I've got a question for people who know something about gambling. I'm looking at the rules for how to play craps. Is there anything in the game that requires more than just memorizing the odds? Like, is there any time when, based on how the game is going, a particular bet is a better or worse move, or is it just the same odds every time? (All of the sets of rules I can find make it seem like it's just knowing the odds, but these rules are pretty confusingly written.)

Yay Stephanie and Ellie!

ION, it really is the world's oldest profession:

The essential idea was to give a monkey a dollar and see what it did with it. The currency Chen settled on was a silver disc, one inch in diameter, with a hole in the middle -- ''kind of like Chinese money,'' he says. It took several months of rudimentary repetition to teach the monkeys that these tokens were valuable as a means of exchange for a treat and would be similarly valuable the next day. Having gained that understanding, a capuchin would then be presented with 12 tokens on a tray and have to decide how many to surrender for, say, Jell-O cubes versus grapes. This first step allowed each capuchin to reveal its preferences and to grasp the concept of budgeting.

...

Santos has observed that the monkeys never deliberately save any money, but they do sometimes purloin a token or two during an experiment. All seven monkeys live in a communal main chamber of about 750 cubic feet. For experiments, one capuchin at a time is let into a smaller testing chamber next door. Once, a capuchin in the testing chamber picked up an entire tray of tokens, flung them into the main chamber and then scurried in after them -- a combination jailbreak and bank heist -- which led to a chaotic scene in which the human researchers had to rush into the main chamber and offer food bribes for the tokens, a reinforcement that in effect encouraged more stealing.

Something else happened during that chaotic scene, something that convinced Chen of the monkeys' true grasp of money. Perhaps the most distinguishing characteristic of money, after all, is its fungibility, the fact that it can be used to buy not just food but anything. During the chaos in the monkey cage, Chen saw something out of the corner of his eye that he would later try to play down but in his heart of hearts he knew to be true. What he witnessed was probably the first observed exchange of money for sex in the history of monkeykind. (Further proof that the monkeys truly understood money: the monkey who was paid for sex immediately traded the token in for a grape.)