>
> Summary:
> Fast forward another few weeks, and Maia is landing in Lanargh.
Hey, can I go back a chapter for a minute? I noticed
the ratio of male births to all non-clone births was given as
"1 in 4". I'm not sure of the significance of this, but it does
sound like one of those ratios that might have a biological basis.
(Then again, the ratio of var births to clone births is also
given as "1 in 4" somewhere else, and there is unlikely to be
a biological mechanism to produce this exact ratio.)
Anyway, I got to thinking that this was similar to one
child in four of heterozygotic parents having a recessive trait,
and started speculating how one could produce a genetic mechanism
to produce this ratio. No luck...
Maybe this is just a case where Brin throws in numbers
which sound good, without anything behind them. (I keep wondering
if the 18 letters of the liturgical alphabet used in one of the
Books of Lysos have anything to do with the 18 particles produced
by considering the 6 families of quarks (u,d,c,s,t,b) and the 3
particles in each kind (quark, muon and neutrino)....)
---David
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
