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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Either Pluto got a demotion or Xena got a promotion. Thank goodness the scientists at the International Astronomical Union (IAU) were sensitive to poor Pluto’s feelings. Owen Gingerich of Harvard University, who chaired the IAU panel said that:

“We might be demoting it from the list of eight classical planets, but we’re promoting it by making it the head of its own special class”

Pluto, Xena (aka 2003 UB 313) Charon and Ceres are tiny, distant rocks with wacky orbits. So the IAU decided that these not-quite-planets at the edge of the solar system (where a year lasts 200 or more earth years) will be called plutons. No word yet on whether this new category will rhyme “crouton” or “button,” though we expect President Bush to weigh in on it shortly.

So why all the fuss? Well, because Pluto is far smaller than any of the classic eight planets. Several moons in our solar system - including Earth’s - are larger than Pluto. In fact all of Pluto’s 16.7 million square kilometers of surface area would fit inside Russia. If IAU’s plan is approved, the four additional plutons will be classified as planets increasing our solar systems total to twelve.

Statastico got to wondering, what if the planets were shrunk down to the size of countries on Earth? If we scale all of the planets down to about 1/3600th of their total surface area, we can find a comparably-sized country for all of the planets and plutons.

The results? Jupiter would be revoking democracy in Russia, Saturn would be curling in Canada, Uranus would be trying to figure out how to speak Kalaallisut, Neptune would be desperately looking for water in Saudi Arabia, and Earth would be in Tajikistan searching in vain for Borat.

While the big planets get countries with huge tracts of land, you’re probably more likely to vacation on a Pluton. Zena would be playing World Cup soccer in Trinidad and Tobago while Pluto takes in the sweet sounds of Cesaria Evora in Cape Verde. Meanwhile, Charon would be doing some sunbathing in Martinique, and tiny Ceres would be snorkeling in the Dutch Antilles.

Sources: Statastic research; mean planet radius: Wikipedia; mean pluton radius: USGS

Notes: Surface area was calculated from the mean radius for each planet and assumes (incorrectly, I know) that the planets are all perfect spheres.

Planet images on the map are not to scale, not even close. However, the actual scale of 1:3592 does holds up surprisingly well. If you’re really interested click here for the percentage that each country over or under-represents each planet on the 1:3592 this scale.

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.