Kyrisch

As long as it stays in motion perpetually

I was just wondering if it was possible to actually create these so called Mag-Lev vehicles and have them behave the way they did in the movie. I know they have been working on monorails and even a magnetic propulsion device that has the capactiy to launch rockets, saving all that costly fuel, but never any cars with this design. Also, the guns used in the scene in the car assembly line, I never figured out if it shot sound blasts or just intensified blasts of air. Thoughts on this?

White Lab Coat: $10 Twenty Volumes of Medical Books: $150 Finding out you just drank your patient's urine sample: Priceless (And yes I did think of this before reading Dak's... I was actually quite disappointed when I saw how similar mine was. I may think of another, more original one later, but for now, this is the best I can do )

"God is no where" five seconds later "God is now here"

I'm sorry for the false info, I studied that too long ago to fish it back up without jumbling a few things ;-). Since nobody was answering, I thought I would just say what I thought I remembered. Thanks for clearing it up, DQW, I learned something today.

Quarks make up protons, electrons and neutrons. Mesons are what stick the quarks together.

Biologists have long since pondered over this very question. If there is life out there, what would it look like? They came to the conclusion that closely grouped sensory organs on the highest point of the body (very much for the same reason radio and walkie talkie reception gets better the higher in a building you go) near the brain was probably the best design for intelligent beings. Of course there may be variations in the placement of the sensory organs on the face, and the question of hair, but there is still a similarity. Also, two strong legs are essential for movement, and, unless our hypothetical beings have discovered telekinesis, some protruding extremeties are key in order to manipulate their environment. Tree-branch type limbs are a good idea because they end with small parts providing great dexterity. Of course there would be variations in the numbers as well.

Really, I assumed that's what you were implying by putting it in your initial list. I was skeptical but I did not know for sure and therefore did not challenge you, but now I am curious. What is the cause of the steadily increasing IQ of our race?

I never said it was more common now. I never said appendicitis is genetic. I did say that having an appendix is genetic. We live longer because our medicine and technology. The same stuff that is ruining the quality of our genes. The same stuff that is ruining the quality of life as well. Would you rather live a full, happy life and die with content, or would you like to die in a hospital that has been your home for twenty years on top of a bed pan where they feed you? I'd take the first one, personally. We are taller, true, but that does not improve quality of life. That is a quantitative characteristic. We are most certainly not stronger. Our ancestors had to hunt everyday and bring their kill home... we have to get up and get in our car to go to work. IQ and intelligence is the only thing that Natural Selection has apparently given us that is useful. In all other aspects, I still say the human race is deteriorating.

The Ju/'Huansi tribe of Africa indeed does use their larynx for various clicks, probably all of them except the dental click, with is equivalent to our "Tsk, tsk, tsk." Their language evolved this way because the sounds of humans scare off the animals that they hunt. The clicks are more natural, and animals tend to ignore them.

I used to think of loads of ideas for perpetual motion machines. All of them used electromagnets, which created some sort of motion, which was connected to a turbine, which powered the electromagnets. The problem with any ideas using the same idea as this is that no matter how many ways you try to recapture the energy created by the motion of whatever metal being affected by the electromagnets and turn it back into electrical energy for the electromagnets, there will always be less energy coming back to the electromagnets than being created by them; you can't capture 100% of the energy given off by the motion/friction caused by the metal being influence by the magnets. This is why I gave up on perpetual motion about a year ago.

But soon everyone in the world will be suffering from appendicitis or wearing glasses five feet thick (Ok, I'm exaggerating there, but you get my point). We're growing in quantity but decreasing in quality. Each generation is born with worse and worse genes. We're tinkering with natural selection itself.

Regarding the claim that without an advantage, left-handedness would vanish due to natural selection and human evolution: Presently, the human race is deteriorating at a frightening rate. We are no longer evolving, thanks to medical “innovations” and inventions that save lives everyday. We are DE-volving. Take the common vestigial organ, the appendix. Appendices are vestigial organs that are not only useless, but in some rare cases, deadly. Appendicitis strikes an average 15 people out of 20,000 in the United States each year. Not a very high number, but, still, one would think the number of people with appendices is decreasing because of natural selection. This is not the case, however, because each year about the same amount of appendices are removed, allowing the individual with the faulty appendix (and faulty genes) to live and reproduce, passing those genes down to his/her kids. Children without appendices have been born in the world today, and five million years ago (if the organ was vestigial then, which it was not), the appendix-free population would immediately flourish while the percentage of people with appendices would plummet until the appendix was abolished forever. Now, in this age of mapping the human genome and other great medical advances, the appendix will never be abolished completely. It is the same with near- and farsightedness. Glasses and contacts repair these problems that would have horribly inhibited the daily function of our ancestors. Not being able to hunt, these individuals inflicted with problems such as this would be forgotten and would die off, natural selection at work once more. So you see, as long as we keep fixing these genetic defects* that manifest themselves in our bodies as physical problems, the human race will continue deteriorating. *This obviously does not include genetic defects that are incurable or untreatable, or are completely devastating such as cystic fibrosis.