Cornball Theories

Why people yawn after someone near them yawns.

Have you ever been driving up a mountain and felt the pressure difference of the altitude on your ears?  As you gain altitude while driving up a mountain, the air pressure drops.  One of the first things you want to do is yawn.  Yawning opens things up and equalizes the pressure in your ears with the air pressure outside your body. 

Now imagine your friend sitting next to you.  While the two of you are talking, your friend yawns.  Odds are you may feel the urge to yawn as well.  I have my theory as to why.

When your friend yawns the first thing he does is take a huge breath of air.  When he does this, there is suddenly less air around him because he is sucking it all into his lungs.  As a result the air pressure around your friend momentarily drops.  This momentary drop in air pressure around your friend affects your ears.  It affects them in the same way driving up a mountain affects your ears, there is a drop in pressure.  Now your ears are telling you there is a pressure difference.  Then you have the urge to yawn in order to equalize that pressure.

Where has all the water from Lake Mead gone?

I live in Las Vegas and the lake near here is Lake Mead.  This is the lake that is made by the Hoover Dam.  It is one of the largest man made lakes in the world.  Ok Las Vegas is in the desert so as you may have guessed we get our water from Lake Mead.

We have been watching the water level of the lake continue to drop to the point where the water authorities are getting worried about a water shortage.  If you take a drive out to the dam you can see a white ring showing where the water level used to be.  If you take the time to notice you will see the ring is over 60 feet tall.  Now looking at the size of the lake you start to get a feel for just how much water is missing. Remember when you drive to the lake and look around, you are seeing only a small portion of it at one time. Seeing the water level is about 60 feet lower than normal and realizing just how large this lake is, it becomes almost unfathomable just how much water we are talking about.

This picture was taken from an insert in the water bill during the summer of 2003.
The man standing on the boat helps put a size reference on the white ring.

People sometimes wonder why the water level has dropped so much. I have my theory as to why.

Concrete placement on Hoover Dam was completed May 29 1935, and the rest of the features were completed March 1 1936.  So now it is 2004, close to 70 years later.  The lake itself has changed very little in volume or area.  Sure the sediment washed in from the Colorado River has filled it somewhat but that does not decrease the level of the lake, it only decreases the volume it can hold.  But since 1936 the city of Las Vegas and the surrounding areas have grown a whole lot.  I have lived here for about 19 years and there are huge areas that were just desert that are very busy very densely populated areas of the city now.  So the amount of people here has grown tremendously. 

Ok some might think the amount of water used by these people has drained the lake.  I think that has had little affect on the level of the lake.  See when I flush my toilet the water goes down the drain, to the water treatment plant and flows back to the lake down a wash (which I have ridden on an inner tube with friends).  So most of the water we use seems to end up right back in the lake. Water that runs into any drain in your house, a business, or on the street works it's way back to the lake. Including urine etc. Think of the water that makes it to the lake that was shipped here from elsewhere. Every bottle of water or soda we consume is eventually deposited in the toilet (via urination) and adds to the lake.

Las Vegas and the surrounding areas take up a very large amount of land and there are houses, businesses, parks etc that all need water supplied to them.  When you turn on your sink you don't want to have to wait for a pump to turn on and pump the water from the lake to your house.  That would take a very long time.  What you want is water as soon as you turn the knob.  Since everyone wants the same thing the pipes have to be full of water at all times.  The amount of piping running under ground throughout this valley has to be staggering to the imagination.  All that pipe displaces a very very large quantity of water and that is where all the water from the lake went. All that water just sitting there in pipes under our city, that is a lot of water.

This is one of the pipes running underground to supply water to the city.
To help with size reference, I am 6 foot.

These huge pipes run all over the city.  Think of just how big Las Vegas, and Henderson are.  There has to be a lot of these pipes.  They must hold all the water we are missing.

Global Warming - Linked to Human Population

I have finally come up with a theory for how global warming is linked to the human population, but in a way not commonly looked at in the scientific community.

We commonly hear of people that die and are somehow miraculously brought back.  A common thread in these accounts, is the person sees a light and is compelled to go to it.  When they turn back and go away from the light they find themselves back among the living.  These stories are fairly common.  When some ones says, “Go to the light.” We instantly know what is meant.

The brightest thing around us on a daily basis is the sun.  It is theorized a person’s soul goes to the sun after they die.  It is concluded that the constant bombardment of souls is what fuels the sun.  The sun gives life to our planet.  Death on our planet supplies the sun with fuel to give that life.  This is just another form of the circle of life. 

Over the centuries human rates of reproduction have outpaced human death rates.  This creates an ever increasing human population.  With this ever growing population, there are more over all births and deaths. 

This increased number of deaths supplies more human souls going to the sun than in years past.  This gives the sun more fuel than it used to have.  With more fuel the sun burns brighter and hotter.  As a side note maybe it is hell on the other side of the light - not heaven.

The now hotter sun creates more heat.  This means the earth receives more heat on a daily basis than it has had in years past.  This extra heat is warming up our entire planet and causing things like melting ice caps and changes in weather patterns.  These are some of the negative impacts of global warming.

The answer to our global warming problem is to stop letting as many people die.  This can be done with better medicine, stopping wars or any other method we can come up with to stop the dying. 

For long term control we also need to slow our reproduction rates to control the overall population.  An overall larger population is not going to effect the warmth of the sun since these are living people.  But the overall population has the potential to drastically alter the temperature of the sun.  A surplus of souls waiting to die could result in mass global warming if a catastrophe were to kill a lot of them at one time.  Controlling the overall population will limit the number of potential deaths on the planet.

If we can accomplish these things, we can slowly turn the global warming problem around and begin to cool our planet.  This cooling process will need to be strictly monitored.  By monitoring it we can prevent ourselves from cooling the sun too much.  Cooling the sun too much would put the earth back in an ice age.  Since global warming is linked to the human population it is not surprising to know the ice ages occurred during primitive times when earth's human population was much lower.

If we find the earth is cooling too rapidly, we may need to begin mass reproduction.  When the newly created people reach an age where they are functioning adults we would then need to start killing off some of the older population.  This would then warm the sun back up.  This would be a way a parent could really give a better world to their offspring.

Human population and global warming have both been shown to have a natural cycle.  With this new understanding we have the rare opportunity to begin controlling that cycle to make the world a more stable and habitable place for many generations to come.

How the Pyramids were Built

The pyramids were not built by moving large rocks.  Instead they were built by moving lots and lots and lots of small rocks.

The area pyramids were built in had to be a mountainous / rocky area.  Rather than build on top of the ground the people carved passageways underground.  They did this by using chisels and breaking the rock up into sand.  The sand was then hauled out of the passageways and spread out on the ground near by.

As the passageways got deeper and more complex the area they covered was quite large.  Soon there were so many passageways there was no longer a need to make more.  The builders then decided to chisel away at the surrounding areas as well.  It would be unwise to dig too close to the passageways they had already made, since it might cause them to cave in.  As they continued to dig away at everything the ground level began to get lower and lower.  The area that contained the passageways stayed high since they did not want to dig too close to them. 

After the ground level got so low the large areas left had the passageways in them.  The builders decided to start chiseling on those as well to make them look better.  They carved these area into pyramid shapes for stability.  A pyramid shape was a lot less likely to fall over and crumble then a rectangular tower. 

After all was said and done the ground level was lowered from all the chiseling.  The only thing left standing were the passageways housed in pyramid shaped rock areas.  All this chiseling left a huge amount of sand.  Over the course of the chiseling they would haul sand away and dump it in the surrounding areas.  There was so much sand scattered around the area looked like desert for many miles in every direction.  They soon found the sand provided a barrier from other cultures that might want to wage war on them.  Other cultures did not venture too far into this area since it appeared to be nothing more tan a huge desert. 

Not only were the pyramids built so was the desert they are in.

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