Re: Electric bicycles: Viable or not?


me@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
"(PeteCresswell)" <x@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Buddy of mine from my surfing days on Oahu did something like that a long time
ago. Went back to visit him and see how his life came out a couple years ago.
He had maybe six teeth left....

Point taken

But did he do drugs, eat poorly, drink, not take care
of himself

The woman in link I gave you was VERY health conscious

Dear Me,

I expect that Pete is thinking along the same lines as Thomas Hobbes:

'No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual
fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor,
nasty, brutish, and short."

Consider the average lifespan before massive improvements in medicine,
sanitation, and growing enough food to avoid famine. The typical RBT
poster would have been dead for years instead of hunting and pecking at
a keyboard.

As an amusing sidelight, I glanced at an anti-Darwinian book on the
library shelves yesterday and saw that the author argued that Darwin
must be wrong because his theory involved high infant mortality, "but
do you know anyone whose children died in infancy?" (The author
probably also scoffed at the notion that anyone could starve to death.)

In the well-developed, non-Hobbesian world, our young do quite well and
we eat too much, but in the third world, the children still die like
flies, while their parents starve and die of illnesses and accidents
that we no longer even think about. All the while, they lose teeth,
eyesight, and all sorts of other things that we take for granted.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average_life_span

If you want a literary sidelight on the tooth issue, here's H. Rider
Haggard's "King Solomon's Mines":

"I ascertained that the dark man /was/ a naval officer, a lieutenant of
thirty-one . . .

"The officer's name I found out--by referring to the passengers' lists
--was Good--Captain John Good. He was broad, of medium height, dark,
stout, and rather a curious man to look at. He was so very neat and so
very clean-shaved, and he always wore an eye-glass in his right eye.It
seemed to grow there, for it had no string, and he never took it
out except to wipe it. At first I thought he used to sleep in it, but
afterwards I found that this was a mistake. He put it in his trousers
pocket when he went to bed, together with his false teeth, of which he
had two beautiful sets that, my own being none of the best, have often
caused me to break the tenth commandment."

http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext00/8kslm10.txt

Note that both Haggard's hero Quartermain and the 31-year-old Royal
Navy captain (carelessly promoted from lieutenant in a paragraph) have
false teeth and that this dental disaster is perfectly normal in 1898.
Later in the novel, Good's false teeth startle the natives.

In the comfortable modern world of RBT, 31-year-old fellows do not
normally have two beautiful sets of false teeth (hockey players
excepted). But in the more Hobbesian world that most of us only visit
briefly, the false teeth would be prized as a luxury.

Cheers,

Carl Fogel

.

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