Day: February 26, 2006

Ebony and Ivory, as the song goes…

D'Arque Bishop

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/…_a_source=&ct=5

When Kylie Hodgson gave birth to twin daughters by caesarean section, she was just relieved that they had arrived safely.

It was only when the midwife handed them over for her to hold that she noticed the difference between them.

Remee, who weighed 5lb 15oz, was blonde and fair skinned. Her sister Kian, born a minute later weighing 6lb, was black.

‘Our two gorgeous little girls’

“It was a shock when I realised that my twins were two different colours,” said Kylie, 19. “But it doesn’t matter to us – they are just our two gorgeous little girls.”

The amazing conception happened after two eggs were fertilised at the same time in the womb.

Both Kylie and her partner Remi Horder, 17, are of mixed race. Their mothers are both white and their fathers are black.

According to the Multiple Births Foundation, baby Kian must have inherited the black genes from both sides of the family, whilst Remee inherited the white ones.

…

The odds against of a mixed race couple having twins of dramatically different colour are a million to one.

Skin colour is believed to be determined by up to seven different genes working together.

If a woman is of mixed race, her eggs will usually contain a mixture of genes coding for both black and white skin.

Similarly, a man of mixed race will have a variety of different genes in his sperm. When these eggs and sperm come together, they will create a baby of mixed race.

But, very occasionally, the egg or sperm might contain genes coding for one skin colour. If both the egg and sperm contain all white genes, the baby will be white. And if both contain just the versions necessary for black skin, the baby will be black.

For a mixed-race couple, the odds of either of these scenarios is around 100 to one. But both scenarios can occur at the same time if the woman conceives non-identical twins, another 100 to one chance.

This involves two eggs being fertilised by two sperm at the same time, which also has odds of around 100 to one.

If a sperm containing all-white genes fuses with a similar egg and a sperm coding for purely black skin fuses with a similar egg, two babies of dramatically different colours will be born.

The odds of this happening are 100 x 100 x 100 – a million to one.

The end of yet another weekend.

D'Arque Bishop

Well, first off, I must say that I’m glad I added this new spamfilter plugin into my WordPress install. Barely any spam has made it past the filter since I installed it, which has saved me from needing to do occasional maintenance on the comments pages of the site. I HATE seeing false alarms when I get email indicating someone’s left a comment or trackback… heh.

Today was not much of an eventful day. About the most eventful thing I did was go down to the new Best Buy at Cypresswood and I-45 that just opened this past Friday. I wasn’t after anything important, other than a mini-tripod for my camcorder. Of course, seeing as I found one within 45 seconds of entering the store, I took the time to browse around. I must say, it’s a larger store than I would have expected. About the only thing I seriously shopped for and priced other than the mini-tripod was LCD TVs; if I want a new HDTV for my bedroom, it’s going to have to be an LCD as I don’t really have room for anything else in there. Then again, all I’d be getting an HDTV for at this point would be watching DVDs and playing games; I don’t catch the local channels enough and there aren’t enough HD channels through DirecTV to be worth the cost of an HDTV dish and receiver. Oh, well… otherwise, I did some office-type work and played a few games, and that was about it for my day today.

Yesterday was a bit more eventful. After having a quiet morning and afternoon, I went out to meet my friend Tammy at Carrabba’s. Problem was, there was an hour wait for a table, so we sat at the bar, had drinks, and talked. Then Tammy had the good idea of having them serve our meal at the bar itself. So, we ordered food there… and by the time the hostess came by to tell us our table was ready, our entrees had already been served. :-) Afterwards, we left to head over to the Edward’s Cinemas off Weslayan, and we saw Firewall. It was a very good movie, though at the beginning I felt a bit TOO geeky when I saw Harrison Ford’s character do some programming, and realized it was Cisco IOS commands (for routers and firewalls)… and that it was accurately done. *sigh* After the movie, I headed home and went straight to bed.

As for this week… bah. Tomorrow won’t be too fun as I’ll have a number of things that need doing before I go on vacation. Tuesday and Wednesday will be spent on vacation (more details soon, I promise!). Then on Thursday, I’ll have to make the drive up to Buffalo, TX to put the new company location there onto the company network. Fun fun. I just dislike long-haul drives. I can handle across Houston without too much problem. Hell, I’m used to it by now. I just don’t like intercity travel. In fact, if I drive is longer than four hours or so, I’ll just break down and fly to my destination. :-)

Anyway, I’ve got a few things here that need dealing with, so I’ll go take care of those now. Oh, joy…