Giving You Brain

The other day, a couple of things came to me at once. I was doing some reading for my Statics/Strength of Materials class, and at the same time I saw this commercial for the clothing store Big & Tall. During this commercial, they flashed on the screen that they had sizes of up to 10XL!! This caught me a bit offguard. I thought that by the time people exceeded 4 or 5X, they'd start just buying drapes to clothe themselves. Basically, it didn't occur to me that there would be enough demand out there for a company to decide to produce clothing at such ridiculous sizes. But then again, with Barack Obama in charge, American business don't have to worry about failing.

The next thought I had turned out to be kind of weird. The world's population has grown at a tremendous rate over the past 100 years. Being that I was reading a Structures book (which will come into play again later), I wondered how the earth's crust could support such an increasing number and such an obese population at that. You might think the North American continent, at the very least, would be bending, or distorting due to this increased mass. But then I realized that people's mass is only generated from the fruits of the earth, and the total mass of the earth and the people on it would only change when we shoot off a satellite into orbit, or basically while anything is suspended in the air. And it then occurred to me that this meant there are resources being misallocated in fat people that could be used otherwise, and thus obesity is even more of a drain on the economy than I'd thought before. I became very interested in this thought, that the obese body, requires more work and resources to create, and thus is somehow worth MORE than someone that's in-shape. Maybe "worth" is the wrong word, but has more of the public's interest "invested" (that's a quality political word) in it. And not only that, but for most people, these wasted resources used to create these immense bodies rarely gets distributed back to earth properly, as religious people pump their dead full of toxic preservatives to give them a life-like appearance at funerals. Then throw them under the dirt, essentially saying "suck on this" to the earth. The more that people bury the dead in this manner, the less the earth has to offer us in terms of nutrients. I don't know, maybe I'm a bit disturbed.

And now for my last thought:

If I ruled the world, I would carry out a test on the earth's crust on the grandest scale. Of course, there are a few fallacies with this proposal, but we're just going to have to assume every person is an able bodied human, capable of standing and jumping, and also that the pressure of people is evenly distributed across the planet. Alright, so I'm interested to see the weight capacity of the earth's crust before something cracks, or worse (the Structures book mostly influenced this thought being that it's all about determining the load bearing capacities of buildings and such). So, I would have everyone in the world, at the exact same time, jump and also land all together. What type of effect would this have? Would volcanoes erupt? Or, how about if we threw all the people to stand together in Australia and do this, could they shift the continent? I mean, I think we're talking at least one trillion pounds of human, if I gauged the average weight properly. I wonder if we could move the tectonic plates manually? I don't think it would do too terribly much damage. It's just a shame we'll never find out, since I don't think I'll ever rule the world.



Anyways, those were my thoughts, thank you if you made it this far.

How Hard Is It?

One thing that aggravates me about where I work is that we get tons of tourist customers. Not only do they get frustrated easily because the products they're often looking for do not exist, or we don't have it at the store, but they also ALWAYS seem to forget their toothbrush at home. So they'll be in New York for a week or more, without thinking, "hmm, my breath stinks, maybe I should sacrifice $3 and get a new one, and some toothpaste." And what's more, is tourists, depending on their culture, also tend to be very close talkers. So, I'll have this frustrated, short, European man breathing in my face, unaware that I REALLY want to end the conversation and walk away. Sometimes it's so bad that I take a break after getting one of these customers. It's just so infuriating to me, that these people have such little self-awareness. I find bad breath to be extremely rude.