Thursday, September 01, 2005

Booking tickets, couillonade, family trees

Booking tickets for a holiday on the internet.

A useful french word is couillonade, which can be translated as bullshit.

I wake up thinking about family trees. Why is it that they are usually in the shape of a triangle with one or two ancestors, back in time, at the apex, and their progeny seeming to poliferate beneath them? When you think about it, it should be the other way round, with just one person at the base, and a growing heap of people above broadening out into hundreds of thousands of ancestors. Do the sums: 2 grandparents, 4 great gandparents, 8 great, great grandparents, 16 great, great, great, grandparents, and so on. Given that it takes two to create a baby, you will find that, if you go back 20 generations, you will have 1,048,576 ancestors.

1 comment:

Lucas said...

Hey - this is amazing. Maybe that's why one can feel kinship with total strangers.