Saturday, October 25, 2008

Suboptimal Design

In college I took a class on evolution, it was very enlightening and I really enjoyed it. One of the topics we talked about was suboptimal design; it is related to how suboptimal design is evidence for evolution as it shows suboptimal structures that must be the product of evolution, as no good/intelligent engineer would actually have designed (hence nullifying creationism for some people).

Anyway, I was reminded the other day of my own suboptimally designed structures. In humans, the air-way crosses the food path leading to the possibility that you can choke every time you breathe while you are eating. For most people, this results in mostly just choking; however, for me, it is more common for food to go the other way, and then it gets stuck up my nose. It is terrible, awful. Seriously, terrible.

Other things I think may qualify as suboptimal design (disclaimer, I'm sure many of these have functions which I'm not aware of):
  1. Nerves in teeth. Seriously, root canals, tooth aches, temperature sensitivity, all terrible.

  2. The natural body odor of humans is generally repulsive in scent to other humans. I haven't heard of any other animal which is repulsed by its own scent; generally, it's the opposite, it attracts mates.

  3. The structure of our eyes, as well as many other animal eyes, is such that we have a blind spot.

  4. Appendices which lead to appendicitis. I'm pretty sure the appendix is vestigal, but appendicitis can be pretty risky and painful.

Thursday, October 2, 2008

Exit Music (For a Film)

I love Radiohead, I love Exit Music (For a Film), I've named my blog after it, hopefully there'll be a lot more good music on this blog.

Wednesday, October 1, 2008

So I have a blog

Well, I've been messing around with HTML, and decided to try out my skills first up on a blog. So, for now I'm just trying to get the coding down. hopefully it'll look cool.