There was totally a tea thing, sarameg. I remember, because it wasn't coffee.

Dinner on Wednesday with exotic, sexy, bright French/Moroccan guy.

Must be gay, right?

Doubtful, since I've been searching for someone who fits that description for quite some time and have yet to find suitable candidates. If that turns out to be the case, send him East and I'll wire you a finder's fee.

Who would ever want to spend time with Allyson? Must be a loser.

I talked to ex-Boss and ex-Project Leader and they both are gratifyingly sorry/dismayed/disconsolate that I am gone. They also want me to end up someplace good so that when they end up looking for work, they'll have an 'in'.

Good!

I am tired of trying to tell New Person everything in the world, and also I should be doing my own current work! Oh well.

Grrrrrrrrrrr. We have this policy, which is that only managers can contact clients. I understand the point of the policy, but it is absolutely infuriating at times. Like now. I can't do my job without having certain questions answered by clients. But my boss is as stressed out as the rest of us, plus his sanity is quite literally hanging by a thread right now due to some personal issues. He's been absolutely dropping the ball and its making my work life hell. I thought about calling one of the other managers, but that's like tattling on him, and I don't expect that's going to help in the grand scheme of things. Besides, the rest of the managers are just as busy and unresponsive as he is. This is why I hate my job.

Dinner on Wednesday with exotic, sexy, bright French/Moroccan guy.

Must be gay, right?

Nope, not necessarily. I dated an exotic, sexy, bright Moroccan guy for awhile a few years back and he was definitely not gay.

Never had this happen to me before: as I was carrying Chinese take-out to my office, my pants fell down. Which is embarrassing yet encouraging at the same time. Apparently though my weight has plateaued, at least some of the excess waistline flab seems to have been converted to leg muscle instead, as I'm pretty sure this wouldn't have occurred if my waist were still 38".

JZ, you have a beautiful, alert daughter, but huge, she is not. She is dainty, one might say.

Signed, parent of kids who are closer to huge (but still not really there, although the Dillo's fat knees certainly qualify right now.)

I can't imagine people thinking that Matilda is a boy. Everything about her screams girl to me.

Well, compared to the 5 lbs. 10 oz. she'd dwindled down to by the time we brought her home at 4 days, she seems huge to us. But the "Two months?" questions are still baffling -- she's tiny, but at going on 13 surely not as tiny as your average 2-monther?

I can't imagine people thinking that Matilda is a boy. Everything about her screams girl to me.

You'd think, and yet... Apparently it's the bald that throws people off. Because all baby girls everywhere are born with long lustrous locks, and the ones who aren't have the good sense to go around with little frilly headbands on their bald little heads. Any unadorned bald head must belong to a boy (apparently, even if said head is wearing a pink cap with little tulips all over it -- after all, it's a cap, not a bonnet).

In short, grown-ups who are not themselves either current parents of infants or pediatricians are generally horrible baby-assessors.

Lucky us.

Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker has written a slew of fascinating books about evolutionary psychology and cognitive science, including How The Mind Works, The Language Instinct, andThe Blank Slate. At the recent TED Conference, Pinker shifted his sights to the evolution of violence. Forget the romantic notion of the noble savage, he says. A deep look at the history of violence seems to reveal that modern culture may be making us less violent over time, not more. "Today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species' time on earth," Pinker says. The latest edition of the fantasticEdgenewsletter includes an essay Pinker wrote based on his talk. It originally appeared in the New Republic. From the essay:

The decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon, visible at the scale of millennia, centuries, decades, and years. It applies over several orders of magnitude of violence, from genocide to war to rioting to homicide to the treatment of children and animals. And it appears to be a worldwide trend, though not a homogeneous one. The leading edge has been in Western societies, especially England and Holland, and there seems to have been a tipping point at the onset of the Age of Reason in the early seventeenth century.

At the widest-angle view, one can see a whopping difference across the millennia that separate us from our pre-state ancestors. Contra leftist anthropologists who celebrate the noble savage, quantitative body-counts—such as the proportion of prehistoric skeletons with axemarks and embedded arrowheads or the proportion of men in a contemporary foraging tribe who die at the hands of other men—suggest that pre-state societies were far more violent than our own. It is true that raids and battles killed a tiny percentage of the numbers that die in modern warfare. But, in tribal violence, the clashes are more frequent, the percentage of men in the population who fight is greater, and the rates of death per battle are higher. According to anthropologists like Lawrence Keeley, Stephen LeBlanc, Phillip Walker, and Bruce Knauft, these factors combine to yield population-wide rates of death in tribal warfare that dwarf those of modern times. If the wars of the twentieth century had killed the same proportion of the population that die in the wars of a typical tribal society, there would have been two billion deaths, not 100 million.

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