Yes, we are all related to some degree. Name is right, there is faulty logic in there.

Great thread. Some of the recent posts have forced me into research mode, and almost immediately I discovered that an observation I made early on was absolutely wrong. I said that there are more people alive today than ever lived. Apparently, this idea comes from some zero population growth people in the 1970's. This article How Many People Have Ever Lived On Earth? seems to make a lot more sense.

As far as the question of ancestry, I went right to The Straight Dope and turned up this page: 2, 4, 8, 16 ... how can you always have MORE ancestors as you go back in time?

This kind of discussion makes my brain happy. :)

Aha! I figured out one bit of flaw in sleepyjeff's breakdown. Each step is about having 4 grandparents so it's a 2 generation jump, not one. So your calculations represent 32 generaions, not 16. So you're talking WAAAAAY back, long enough that it's absolutely a guarantee that generaitonal lines and branches of trees will have corssed several times over. Of course, so distantly as to not matter from a gene-pool perspective, but that's why the numbers seem so out of whack.

Oh, so you meant it that way. I was confused. :)

I'm glad my husband noticed the grandparents jump. Can't believe I didn't notice that.

:blush: .....So we all may have Plantegenet blood running thru our vains ;)

This thread made me think that somewhere out there is the person with more message board posts than anyone else. I wonder if we could find out?

Nigel2

Ah, the "est" of this and that. Brightest. Fastest. Prettiest. Meanest. Kindest. Hungriest.

I do like thinking about these things too.

And then I get depressed thinking about all the people who are "est" than me, and I tell myself one thing:

We can't all be Albert Einstein and we can't all be Helen of Troy.

Then I take a look myself, my outsides and my insides, and I think of a good friend's family motto: Good enough!

There's a loose floorboard. You nail it down. It still kinda sticks up? Will probably come undone again at a later date? Whatever. Good enough!

It's prom. Your hair looks great, your dress is pretty, but you've got a sty and you forgot to shave your pits? Good enough!

You got a 75% on the math quiz, but the one problem that really gave you a headache you got correct, so GOOD ENOUGH!

And whenever I’m jealous of some girl because she’s better looking than me, and I figure the guy I like at the party would prefer to saddle up to her cause she’s so alluring and smells like a rose, and I can be awkward in a crowd and smell like fear, I like to remember a story another friend told me. She was at a party in NYC when she found herself socializing with her date’s friend. She made some comment about all the pretty girls (models mostly) at the party, and he turned to her, smiled and said, “Show me a beautiful woman, and I’ll show you a man tired of fvcking her.”

Maybe the guy was a d*ck, but I found that amusing and comforting. Even the pretty girls aren’t “est” enough for some people.

So, SCREW “est”.

Fast enough. Tall enough. Hungry enough. Pretty enough. Healthy enough. Feisty enough. Smart enough. Talented enough.

Enough is enough for me.

I guess the "est" that I was thinking of was more of the kind you could prove. Like given some mondo computer and spy tools or something I could figure out who the tallest man was. But prettiest, talented, feisty... that's subjective.

I like the 'good enough' mantra though. That works for me. Most of the time.
:)

Oh, I do know what you meant. I just took a further leap into subjective comparisons because things like "craziest Roman Emperor" and "nerdiest Star Wars nerd" tend to interest or amuse me more than the "ests" that can actually be determined/quantified, etc. Heh.

But I do think it would be cool to know wh’s fastest at doing complicated long-division problems. And I'd certainly like to see the tallest person in the world. I went to a freak show during a Santa Sangre festival in NYC. Boasted of having the tiniest woman in the world. She was awfully tiny, all dressed up in a tiny pink ruffled dress and sitting (I’m pretty sure she couldn’t stand on her own) on a tiny pink couch. Didn’t seem to know understand English and I worried that she’d been enslaved. But who do you call? Anyway, I paid a dollar to see her and all I wanted to do was cry, tuck her under my arm, and rescue her, even though I couldn’t be certain that she wasn’t happy, or that her life in the “carnival” wasn’t better than what she had going on at home. I felt guilty for paying that $1, a dollar I wasn’t even sure she’d ever see.

But at least I can boast that I saw the tiniest woman, even if it’s not true.