Palm Trees

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Happy New Year!

Let us hope that this blog session will be more successful - at least formatally - than the last. My few notes read: Tsunami - CNN - Animals - Palm Trees - FS 04 - 150,000 - C-III - Patriotism.

The first refers of course to the disaster in South Asia. I have been almost glued to the tv set the last several days watching the tragedy unfold. CNN had, by far, the most comprehensive coverage of the event. As usual, I was not only watching tv, but my own thoughts (tap) about what I was watching on tv (by the way, the madd tapper has been on vacation recently, as you may have noticed, but seems to have suddenly reappeared). My emotional brain was totally involved with the events just as you would expect, but I was a bit surprised by what my rational brain was doing: Palm Trees! I was thinking about how palm trees must have been enduring tsunamis for millions of years and that this fact must have been influential in their current physical structure. I was thinking that in terms of geologic time a tsunami comes along every few seconds and that this fact must have had an input on the ridiculous shape of palm trees: long trunk culminating in a spray of vegitation at the top. Now that I think about it, it seems to me you could calculate the size of the average tsunami over the last several million years by measuring the average height of palm trees. If that is true, there might also be a correlation in the difference in height between palm trees in various parts of the world and the associated 'local' seismic activity. You could pose the question: Are Pacific palm trees higher, on average, than Atlantic palm trees?'