Commuter School

Now that Daniel is attending a charter school in a different town, my humble Corolla is become his school bus, and I am his trusty bus driver. One of the good things about this arrangement is that we can discuss all kinds of things in the morning.  Today's dialog was about demographics.

Daniel asked me if most people in the world live in America.  Sometimes it feels that way, but no, I told him that most people don't live in America.  But I got the sense that what he really wanted to know is whether our nation is the most populous in the world - not necessarily whether more than 50 percent of the world population actually lives in the U.S.  So I started doing my mental Wikipedia, and came up with China as the most populous, India as second, Brazil as third, and probably the U.S. as fourth.  I don't know whether that's accurate - there are a lot of Indonesians, for example - but that was my guess.

Daniel wanted to know why countries like China had larger populations than the U.S.  I didn't mince words:  my best guess is that our indigenous population was so greatly reduced with the arrival of the Euros and their diseases, that it set the Americas back, vis-a-vis the Chinese or India, for example, in the race to generate the most progeny.  Not to mention first world "technology" in that area, but of course we didn't discuss that...

But Daniel took a few guesses of his own as to which countries had the most people, before I churned out my own virtual statistics.  Italy came first.  This probably has something to do with Luigi from "Cars."  Not Italy.  Next:  Ireland.  This is an excellent guess if you happen to live in Eastern New England.  But I broke the unfortunate news:  the Emerald Island is about the size of a few northeastern states (if that) has a population that reflects that reality.  Then Daniel took a shot at the population of Ireland:

"A hundred?"

No, actually there are even more!  In spite of the potato famine, there are still lots of Irishmen in Ireland.

We learn a lot every day.  Daniel learns whatever's in Daddy's Mental Almanac, for better or worse, and Daddy learns what's in Daniel's mind.

The latter subject is much more interesting.

(August 29, 2013)