May conducted a study of the effects of maternal exercise on the fetus. Comparing sedentary pregnant women to those who engage in moderate-intensity aerobic exercise for at least thirty minutes three times a week, May found that fetuses show the same beneficial effects of cardiovascular training as do their physically…
I do not know why the Creator unaesthetically put the baby door in this particular location—between the bladder and the rectum. It has necessitated a very unladylike but definitely mother-like position known as squatting to perform the act of giving birth. Whether we like it or not, the act of emptying the baby box is…
We can expect bodies to be well equipped to survive, but this does not mean they should be perfect with respect to any one dimension. An antelope might run faster, and be more likely to escape a leopard, if its legs were a little longer. But a rival antelope with longer legs, although it might be better equipped to…
g. When Shelley pictured science as a modern Prometheus who would wake the world to a wonderful dream of Godwin, he was alas too simple. But it is as pointless to read what has happened since as a nightmare. Dream or nightmare, we have to live our experience as it is, and we have to live it awake. We live in a world…
We stand upright-after a little practice-on a ship that rolls because we possess an array of sensory nerve cells buried in our muscles, skin, and joints. The function of these sensors is to provide a constant flow of information to the brain about the movements and location in space of the various parts of our bodies…
Can you stop thinking? Perhaps you have practiced meditation or some other method of calming the mind. If so you will know that the task is not trivial. If you have not, I suggest you try now to empty your mind for a minute or so (or if you cannot face it now, try it sometime when you have nothing 'better' to do…
A spectacular variant of bogo-sort has been proposed which has the interesting property that, if the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is true, it can sort an arbitrarily large array in linear time. (In the Many-Worlds model, the result of any quantum action is to split the universe-before into a sheaf…
I was thinking about how the I Ching is composed of a total of 384 lines (6x64) Wouldn't it be nice if you could 'interlock' the hexagrams like a jigsaw puzzle? Have a look at the following code: THE CODE 0000001001000101010000110100110010110110001110101110011110111111 The 64 bit code above 'defines' the whole of the…
A very simple but particularly useful technique for finding the cause of a problem is simply to explain it to someone else. the other person should look over your shoulder at the screen, and nod his or her head constantly (like a rubber duck: bobbing up and down in a bathtub). they do not need to say a word; the…
The method is simple. Here is one way to do it. Take a page. Like this page. Now cut down the middle and cross the middle. You have four sections: 1 2 3 4... one two three four. Now rearrange the sections placing section four with section one and section two with section three. And you have a new page. Sometimes it…