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Monday, August 12, 2013

Genetics And Personal Safety


Are you accident-prone?

Try this simple test. Stretch your arms out. Make a fist with each hand and bring them quickly together. If your head got in the way, you are accident-prone. No, don't try it again, stop it. We are going to discuss safety. I said stop it! Look at figure 1.

Figure 1 is a specimen of Modern Man. Norma found it in our yard. She took a picture of it. She made it carry out a little bag of garbage. There is an old banana in there, some bones, paper --organic things-- in a plastic bag. Plastics are organic polymers derived from oil. Oil comes from geologically compressed zooplankton and algae. If anything was to cause something to fall off of (or out of) the bag or out of the Modern Man in figure 1, a close examination would reveal this:
Of course, you'll need a really good microscope with lots of brass knobs like mine:
And what does this tell us? Man shares 40% to 70% of genetic code with the banana --the same old flaccid banana that fell --accidentally?-- young and yellow off a tree and got shipped here to obscurity, forgotten behind Tupperware (with which we share 55% of  DNA). It could not have happened on purpose. Paper? More organic matter, more DNA --born to be scribbled on or pressed into currency of uncertain fungibility. Bones? I won't even get into that. Point is, none of these relatives of Man could have intended to end up the way they did, in the garbage. Nor could primordial plankton and algae calculate their participation in the ubiquity of automobiles.

This brings us to thoroughfares.  Our specimen of Modern Man must cross a lane to throw garbage in a can. This is asking for trouble. Lanes, freeways, doesn't matter --they are all roads. We have seen what happens to skunks when they try to cross roads. Modern Man shares 99% of DNA with Mephitidae and that constitutes certainty in all rational disciplines. If skunks can't reliably cross roads, free from accident, neither can Man. Barring genetic engineering away from accident-proneness, there is only one solution. We must redesign our environment so that everything --workplaces, residences, churches, tallow works, skyscrapers, farms, markets, missile silos and liquor stores-- everything we need in life, is on one side of the road --all roads, all over the world.

I can't imagine what would be on the other side of the road then, can you?

14 comments:

  1. All roads must hence be in circles starting and ending in the same place....you will never get lost no matter where you start from and you will always be 'in the loop'.

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  2. I learn so much from you, Geo.

    Taking out garbage........,who would have thunk????

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  3. If everything was on one side of the road...then we wouldn't need a road. Because you can't think of one road with one side, and then have different roads coming off of the one side, because all of those roads would have to have only one side too. So then we're talking about multiple roads and multiple sides.

    Best not to have roads at all, I think. Safer that way altogether.

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  4. Or we could turn the roads into mobius strips. We wouldn't be sure if we were coming or going, but at least we wouldn't be as likely to get lost.

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  5. I still have a pounding headache from taking your accident-prone test, but that's beside the point.

    There are many times when I wonder if you've been pulling our collective legs by saying that you were a gardener.
    I strongly suspect that you were a professor somewhere along the way but simply forgot (absent-minded?).

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  6. You have made my accident prone self's brain hurt. Without doing the test.
    Sadly, I think there is too much of the chicken in us all for us to give up attempting to cross the road...

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  7. The solution to the one sided road problem is blindingly obvious. All roads should be built on edge. They could then have a double purpose because they would also be walls. Thinking about it there could be a track along the top of each road/wall along which vehicles could run. Having doorways in the road/wall would make it much easier to cross safely. I am going now to find some aspirin, I have a headache.

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  8. As a left-handed blonde, I am VERY clumsy. I refrain from crossing roads whenever possible.

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  9. For some reason, the brass knobs bit was my fave.

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  10. Your brain makes me happy.

    And now I have to go run that accident-prone test on some of my coworkers.

    Pearl

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  11. This is too hard for me to visualize, or to comprehend – I need to translate it in French, or you need to write it in Canadian…from Quebec.

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  12. Mmmh - I just read somewhere that UPS (I think it is a firm of your country) found out, that it is safer for their drivers only to bend off at a road ONLY to the right side (I'm not making this up). Thus the way might be longer, they say, but nevertheless its safer. I was just wondering about that strategy - now you come with your roads... Maybe you should send your 'improvement proposal' to UPS? (In my agency I got some money for some i.ps - but never thought up such a tricky one as yours. Mine were often payed for and then they hurried to hide it... maybe on the forbidden side of the road...)

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  13. "I can't imagine what would be on the other side of the road then, can you?"

    Well... a chicken. Obviously.

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