It seemed like a simple question. One any Australian dentist should be able to answer: How many teeth does a platypus have? As it turns out, adults don’t really have any teeth in that duck-billed mouth of theirs (the infant platypus has milk teeth that are shed before adulthood). This egg-laying oddity does share its toothless status with the blue whale. Not bad company if you’re a fan of gorging yourself on krill (I am). Another oddity that inhabits the waters north of Alaska is the Narwhal. The males grow a 10 foot tusk from their jaw which is often classified as a single, very impressive tooth.

Once you move to more solid land, things start to look more familiar. Sumatran rhinos have 28 teeth, four more teeth than their endangered African cousins the White Rhino. Northern White Rhinos may have more teeth in their huge mouths than there are survivors in the wild. Wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo have reduced their numbers to fewer than ten.

Size is no guide on land when it comes to guessing how many teeth it has. Rabbits have more teeth than African elephants. And don’t count on carnivores needing more teeth. Cats and koalas each have 30 teeth, but no self-respecting koala would trade his eucalyptus leaves to bat around a half-dead mouse.

Coming in at 32 teeth are humans and chimps. Apparently, Darwin also had 32 teeth. But giraffes, too? Indeed, they have 32 pearly whites surrounding an enormous, blue tongue. Such intelligent design might provide fodder to the 46% of Americans who believe that “God created man in his present form sometime in the past 10,000 years.”

Pandas and possums also share the same number of teeth: 50. This is hardly surprising. They are both adorable creatures that attract visitors from all over the world, inspire stuffed animals, adorn t-shirts, and evoke squeals of delight from children. The new possum cam at the DC Zoo is something of a national phenomenon.

Closing out the list are the 60-toothers. Say, have you heard the one about the dentist, the crocodile and the sperm whale?
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While you’re straining your tongue trying to count the number of teeth in your mouth, be sure that Unrest’s album Perfect Teeth is playing in the background. It’s a dose of high-BPM sugary sweet alt pop courtesy of DC’s own Mark Robinson. It may not match Unrest’s sublime 1992 album, Imperial, but for today Perfect Teeth fits the bill.
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One week ago Ethiopian troops moved into the Somali capital of Mogadishu to quell the unrest. According to a U.S. State Department spokesman, the Ethiopian military did so at the request of the secular Somali government which has been battling Islamic fundamentalists in Mogadishu.

The invasion bears some striking similarities to the U.S. invasion of Iraq - perhaps even more so to the Muslim world. Ethiopia is a U.S. ally and a largely Christian nation with a history of enmity toward Muslim Somalia. Ethiopia seemed poised for a rapid military victory, yet completely unprepared for maintaining security in Mogadishu.

As we saw in Iraq, a power vacuum is fertile ground for extremists. Somalia’s secular interior minister ominously said, “We have a symbolic government. Ministries we don’t have, a military we don’t have.” Recent statements by Al Qaida spokesman Ayman al-Zawahri identify that Somalia and Iraq as prime Islamic battlegrounds in their war on the West.

The security picture in Mogadishu bears striking resemblance to that in Baghdad:

Six days after the transitional government took hold, very little security was evident beyond that which Somalis have grown accustomed to providing for themselves: roving pickup trucks filled with armed teenagers, and AK-47-toting militiamen who guard the city block by block, and clan by clan.

Despite similar conditions on the ground, there are important differences. For one, Al Qaeda was active in Somalia before the Ethiopian invasion. And unlike the United States, Ethiopia is appealing to the international community for assistance. With any luck the outcome in Somalia three years hence will also be starkly different from that in Iraq today.

Source: Wikipedia, statastic research

Given the choice, Statastico would rather read expertise than opinion. Recent polls concentrate on the latter. More interesting, however, is the wide gap between the public’s opinion and the opinion of experts. So why the obsession with public opinion polling?

The media use polling data not only to guide their own stories and advertising, but often as the basis for stories. So reporting what people think to the people who are thinking it becomes a self-reinforcing cycle.

And then there are the politicians. They guide their district gerrymandering, their campaign messages and financing with public opinion polls. And of course politicians themselves also guide public opinion. Just look at how many times the phrase “addicted to oil” has appeared in the media, and you’ll understand why the public suddenly has a passion for energy independence.

But experts are polled less often. The Atlantic Monthly often polls its foreign policy experts, and Foreign Policy recently released polling data highlighting the divide between the experts and the public. These types of polls are crucial to moving debates forward.

So what informs public opinion? The average American is not devouring policy blogs, obsessing over exit strategies in Iraq, evaluating the efficiency of turning corn into ethanol; they’re not even reading newspapers. They’re thinking about what to have for dinner, searching for low airfares, and keeping up with the latest news about Brangelina.

The public is also increasingly fragmented. The Internet facilitates specialization of interests and opinion, so Americans who do pay attention to the news are more likely to get it from a partisan source. Public opinion polls supposedly help us understand the political climate, but politics are shaping that opinion. Polling the public on important issues is no more than politicians’ PR departments checking to see whether their messaging sticks.

So please poll the experts. Statastico doesn’t care what the American public thinks about pulling out of Iraq. We should care about what Iraqis think. We should care about what experts in the State Department think. Instead of obscuring scientific consensus as the Bush administration has done with global warming, help us understand possible solutions. Scientists and experts are not always right, of course. But politicians’ job is to listen to the experts and help the public understand real options for hard problems.

Sources:

1: http://www.religioustolerance.org/ev_publi.htm#earth

2: http://web1.foreignpolicy.com/issue_julyaug_2006/TI-index/thepopularfront.html

3: http://abcnews.go.com/images/Politics/1009a1GlobalWarming.pdf

4: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/5702/1686

The polling data about scientific consensus and global warming is based on a scientific review of 928 scientific papers related to global warming. None of the papers reviewed, “disagreed with the consensus position.” Several scientists do disagree with different aspects of global warming. Here is a list of scientists who disagree with the global warming consensus.