Same Names for Different Places

A few years ago, I was in a group of people who went from Jacksonville, FL, to Wallace, NC, to help clean up after Hurricane Florence. When people asked where we were from, we said, "Jacksonville," to which they would say something like, "Oh, I go to church in Jacksonville." We were from the twelfth-largest city in America (population: 949,611), but we had traveled over 400 miles, and were now close enough to Jacksonville, NC (population: 72,723), that to the locals "Jacksonville" meant the smaller city that was only 40 miles away. Similar things happen with other identically-named places: in 2013 these students went to the wrong Fayetteville, and of course who could forget brake-parts scion Tommy Callahan mistaking the Columbus in Georgia for the one in Ohio?

I'm working on an idea of pairing places with the same name and developing an equation that would predict the places where the word means something different to the listeners. I figure it needs to include the population of the place (so the larger city like Las Vegas, NV, will be recognized more widely than the smaller city like Las Vegas, NM) and distance from the listener (someone down the road from Jacksonville, NC, assumes the nearby one, not the larger one). I think it will also need to be based on metro area population, not city population. Some "major" cities in the US are now quite small (Pittsburgh, PA, is now the 68th-largest city in the US, smaller than Aurora, CO). When I get this fleshed out, I'll share some maps showing what I find.

One thing I don't yet know how to account for is cultural weight. For instance, almost everywhere in the US if you said, "My cousin lives in Hollywood," your listener would assume the neighborhood of Los Angeles (population: 146,514), not the city in Florida (population: 152,511). I'll try to figure something out.

Human Fragility and Evolutionary Advantage: A Possible Answer

Last week I wondered why humans are so uniquely fragile. Since then I've read Elizabeth Kolbert's book The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, and she has something to say that might be related. With regard to humans causing the extinction of prehistoric megafauna, she notes that species gain from gigantism by being too large to have a predator. Such animals have longer gestation periods, which makes them more susceptible to extinction. (I'd reference page numbers but I already returned it to the library, so you'll just have to trust me: it was in the last couple chapters.) So humans are threatened by childbirth because we have giant babies so our adults are too big for most predators to eat.

Meh, maybe. But why does every wound get infected and kill us? It's not just childbirth fragility that seems odd. Another explanation from Kolbert's book might be that these viruses and bacteria have emerged too recently for our immune systems to have learned how to fight them, but wouldn't that be true for all animals' immune systems? Why are we alone in dying from wounds at so high a rate?

Human Fragility

How did evolution leave our species so fragile? A lion can grab onto a wildebeest and give it a few bites before losing it, and the wildebeest will be fine. Calvin Coolidge's son stubbed his toe and died.

Seriously, what is the maternal mortality rate in the animal kingdom? A gazelle drops a kid and is, like, "Whoa, I feel a lot better now," and walks away. No one is worried about whether the mother gazelle is going to survive. In fact, I can't get any relevant results when I Google "maternal mortality in the animal kingdom." It's all about human maternal mortality. Are we the only species that is SO threatened by childbirth? What's the evolutionary explanation for that? Thrill-seeking women (you get more babies out of a lady who's more likely to die from childbirth because YOLO)? Motherless children grow up to be sexier?

This isn't a "so evolution isn't true!" post; I just don't understand why something as fundamental as reproduction is so dangerous uniquely for humans.

PS: Remember, "math" is the science label.