h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Ach - simulpost!

New title restored...

CR

White noise, now that's interesting.

Ever noticed how hard it is to clean garlic crushers?

No. I always leave the washing up for my other 'arf . Now there's an example of excellent design...

Why are we restricting ourselves to inanimate objects? What about animals? Cats are designed well. Apart from the fact that they can't open their own tins of food. Whereas giant pandas are badly designed: they're only fertile for two days a year and you can't get tins of bamboo shoots down the local cornershop. No wonder they're dying out.

I've got a phone, it's got loads of great games on it. You can use it to store people's names and addresses. It makes several funny noises. It's got a calculator, calendar and a clock and to top it all, apparently, you can use it for telephone conversations – but I haven’t worked out how to do that bit yet.

I've got a phone, it's got loads of great games on it. You can use it to store people's names and addresses. It makes several funny noises. It's got a calculator, calendar and a clock and to top it all, apparently, you can use it for telephone conversations – but I haven't worked out how to do that bit yet.

Flightless birds is another example of a fairly serious design flaw. Here are animals that mother nature gives a tremendous evolutionary advantage to, and what do they do but say "thanks but no".

In the case of the dodo, and kapako etc, this has proved to be a career limiting move . Sorry, I should not be smiling

Also - what about farm animals. Now for us, they are great. They help to keep us alive, but for them - what a bummer! Here are animals that grow quickly, are not aggressive by half, don't need much space within which to live, need nothing more than grass to keep them alive, and do not have enough wit to have poisonous meat. An accident waiting to happen, if you ask me. Now you will say - hey but they were not always like this - we bred them like this, and immediately I will retort that you can't turn a polar bear into a chicken - they had a lot of design flaws to begin with.

Wow. Chickens - flightless AND farmed animals. What a real evolutionary mistake

CR

I've always questioned the evolutionary plan behind Guinea pigs (of which we have loads). Most animals in the wild have size, strength, aggression or some other devious characteristic to enable them to evade capture. But in the case of this animal they seem to be a meal waiting to happen.

A Peruvian friend of a friend used to eat them (guinea pigs, not phones) and he said you could get quite a decent meal out of two of them, and they taste nice. They are, apparently, incredibly shy and self-effacing animals. Rather like the kakapo, which has neither wings not the wit to run away from predators. But it does smell bad, by all reports, rather like sour milk.