1) Every time I doze off in class, I snap to with the distinct impression that I’m about to exclaim something that immediately no longer makes any sense to me. Eyes roll, head bounces, “But aren’t they on the same team?!” Wha?
2) Apparently last week’s lesson in basic addition went over everyone’s heads. So while speaking of a discrete random variable which takes only integer values (ignore that part for a second) the professor pointed out that there are, in fact, no numbers between 1 and 2. He was specifically referring to integers. It was ground breaking for me, because I’ve been trying to shove the number 8 in there for years. I was wondering where I was going wrong.
3) Along those some lines, my new book is forthcoming, “The Education of Eric Furst”, riding the coattails of the highly esteemed “The Education of Henry Adams”. Only mine will be in short itemized list format, and will be ideal for reading in bathroom situations.
4) Before I go to class, I get mildly excited because I start chewing gum. Being hyperactive and absent minded, I’m sure I make myself look ridiculous with it, but it is very much the highlight of my class. We marinate for the full 3 hours (my gum and I), and then I swallow it. I’ve yet to figure out why people think swallowing gum is disgusting. It doesn’t actually stay in your stomach for 7 years you know.
5) This week, there is a three way tie for the Word of the Week (WotW): uxorious, predilection, and termagant. I had uxorious kind of backwards; it is for the man who gets abused by his wife, not for the abusive wife herself. Mr. Eisenhardt taught us that word. For the record, my Word of the Year (WotY) is bifurcation. If I ever went insane, I’d scribble it over and over again on the wall. I swear it constantly rattles around in my head, bifurcation, bifurcation, everything is always bifurcating. It comes up most often when I think about traffic, and how the guy that was 3 seconds ahead of me made the light that I had to stop at, making him all the sudden 2 full minutes ahead of me. Our driving destinies bifurcated.
Words 
5) Have you seen Monsoon Wedding? Uxorious is featured in that movie. Also, I haven’t pointed this out before but I have something to say about bifurcated. I used to only think of chaotic systems when I heard that word until my friend got a sort of flying squirrel type creature. It had (presumably, as a natural result of flying squirrel genes) what is medically termed a bifurcated penis. I never studied Roo (the dude with the BP) in great detail, but I often ruminated about the uses (evolutionary and recreational) of such an organ.
I’m almost positive that we thought about the same things in high school. Only not just two, but 4, 6, 12, etc. Also, when I didn’t sleep 7 feet from a bathroom, I’d often awake and have an urgent desire to pee which I would inevitably ignore. I’d then often dream that I was peeing, occasionally from several penises. Luckily I never went through with it.
I can think of no advantage to such a system. The technical term for it is “diphallic terata”, by the way. I learned that from a trivial pursuits card several years ago.
Certainly someone with diphallic terata and two functioning organs might have an advantage of preservation – in that, if he lost one (in a fishing boat accident, for example), he’s still got another to work with.
I imagine that any advantage that might confer would be overshadowed by difficulty in finding sexual partners willing to reproduce with what literally amounts to a freak of nature.
Strict bifurcation though, hard to think of any advantages, since it seems each ends fate would be more closely connected with the other’s.
(…I swear we’ve had this conversation here before…)
You can find every kind of deviant, I’m sure reproducing with a male with two penises is someone’s pinnacle. I’d be more concerned about the mechanical difficulties, what happens to the one while the other is in use? Where does it go? Forget I asked.
Furthermore, I would have to guess that one or both of them are non-functional. The human body is made a certain way, and variations from that way rarely work. Even from an evolutionary standpoint, something like 99% of all mutations are disadvantageous, and I’d have to lump two penises into that category.
My other question is, where is the second penis in relation to the first? Do they share the same set of testicles (I would have to assume)? At what point do they bifurcate?
Matt, we definitely had this discussion ad naseum in high school. Those were the days.
http://www.worldwideschool.org/library/books/tech/medicine/AnomaliesandCuriositiesofMedicine/chap5.html
Scroll down about 2/3 of the page to “Class X”. Some documented cases.
You’re right, I would imagine that either bifurcated or separate cases would have mostly non-functional parts. Something like that (which is pretty complicated when it’s NOT mutated) seems pretty unlikely to work well with such a blunder.
Just a quick note. The creature I was referring to was apparantly a sugar glider (http://www.isga.org/informationcenter/HealthIssues/anatomicalbreakdown1.htm). His member supposedly works something like a plug in the female’s electrical outlet. Diphallic terata is something toally different. The sugar glider’s owner is here now, and she recommends one other interesting site:
http://www.sexwork.com/family/dolphins1.html