Of horses and young women

[Red One made a comment on the beggar/horse story, and in it she asked me to clarify some other horse-related matters that were troubling her. I started commenting back, but then I decided that it was such an important subject that I should put it out on the regular page, besides it was getting much too long for a comment. This is her comment/question, for those of you who don't bother to read the comments: Wel, first of all I have some terrific pictures of some really great Amazonian lily pads I would be happy to share. Secondly, how do you explain all those young women who are so attracted to horses. How does that fit into this scenerio?]

This is my reply:

First of all, we would all love to see those pads, Red One. Did you ever try sleeping on them?

Secondly, I don't see why I should have to explain about those young women and their horses when I had nothing to do with it, and when there are approximately 6,462,012,538 people on this planet who know more about what attracts young women than I do.

I’m not even convinced that it’s true—this may be just another example of that darned observational bias that’s going around. Perhaps the people who make this claim simply don’t pay much attention to a horse unless it’s got a young woman on it, and then they think “Wow, every time I see a horse there’s a young woman too. What’s with that?” That’s probably how I’d be.

For example, I know from studying the data that there are approximately equal numbers of young men and young women on campus. However, on a typical trip to campus I observe a far greater number of young women. If questioned later, I would probably concede (unless I were feeling particularly feisty that day) that theoretically I must have seen young men but I can rarely recall a specific instance of that happening, unless they were blocking my view of the young women.

It all has to do with the nature of perception. Most people think that they see everything that’s going on around them, but most people are wrong about that, as they are about a lot of other stuff. In fact, the brain doesn’t have the patience to look at everything you point your eyes at, so it picks out those things that in its own opinion are most visually appealing or most important to the survival of the species. Young women are both of these things, in addition to being sugar, spice and everything nice. Young men, on the other hand, are snips and snails and puppy dog tails (not the whole puppy dog, which would be nice, but just the gross disarticulated tail), so it’s a waste of time to bother looking at them.

The brain completely ignores unimportant objects that enter the visual field, so it’s like they’re invisible. I know that on several occasions while observing young women, I have accidentally bumped into young men who were in my way and were invisible at the time. They often react gruffly, as young men commonly lack a proper respect for their elders, which is another strike against them, in my opinion. Once, while simultaneously observing young women and contemplating the difficult quantum mechanical question of why those low-slung pants don’t just fall off*, I walked right into a tree. My brain likes the way trees look, and usually I can see them, but this particular problem required so much neuronal processing power that even such functions as tree-seeing had to be temporarily suspended.

That’s the scientific explanation. It took me a lot of thinking to come up with it, and a lot of writing to try to explain it in simple terms so that it could be understood by people who haven’t much of a scientific background, or who are just plain stupid. I’m getting a bit tired of science, cause it’s so much trouble and doesn’t really impress young women very much. Or horses, for that matter. Horses have very little respect for science, and more often than not if a scientist attempts to mount a horse, it’ll just snort and roll its eyes, and run away. With a young woman, it’s pretty much the same situation.

The more I think about it, I believe I’m going to give up science altogether, and move over into philosophy. The great thing about philosophy is that you just have to make something up and write it down and you’re done, whereas in science after you make something up you have to go out and try to get some data to support it, and sometimes after all that trouble the data you wind up with doesn’t support the thing you made up and you have to start all over and make up something else, which is really a nuisance. Or else you have to make up some different data that fits in better with your hypothesis, which is a lot of extra work in itself, and if you get caught doing it you’ll get in trouble. Obviously, science is a big fat hassle.

So let’s reexamine the question from a more philosophical perspective:

1. God’s ways are mysterious, and impossible to figure out. If God had meant for man to understand why young women are so unusually fond of horses, He would have created man already knowing it. The fact that man doesn’t know it means God doesn’t want him to know it, and when God doesn’t want you to know something you’re better off to just mind your own business before you get in trouble like that guy Adam did.
2. There are no young women or horses. There’s nothing but you, and you’re in a cave, and what seems to be young women and horses is just a bunch of shadows on the wall of the cave.
3. It doesn’t matter why the young women like horses. All that is meaningful is that young women and horses exist, and that we’re not really in that creepy little claustrophobic cave. Actually, the horses don’t matter either.
4. The occasional conjunction of young women and horses is not sufficient to infer causation. All we can state with surety is that young women and horses have been perceived to be frequently in close proximity, and people are starting to talk.
5. All pain and suffering in the world is caused by young women and horses, or more precisely, by the desire to apprehend young women through the various sensory modalities. This suffering can be relieved only by getting really drunk and singing the blues.

See how easy that was? I was able to get five philosophies done in less than half the time it took me to do the one science, and it takes up a lot less space on the page too.

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*The Low-Rider Pants Problem has intrigued and baffled thinkers such as myself for over a year. Simply stated, the problem is that in order to maintain an upright and locked position, pants rely on the basic physiological principle that in humans the hips are usually greater in circumference than the waist. Therefore, if the opening at the top of the pants is matched to the size of the waist, they will remain in place, prevented from sliding down by the greater girth of the hips. Usually there is some form of fastening mechanism which, when disengaged, permits the pants to be drawn up over the hips, but when fastened secures the pants at waist level. (In some cases, this ratio is reversed--when this happens additional support devices such as suspenders are necessary to maintain the pants in the desired position.)

However, the top of a pair of low-rider pants hits around mid-hip, and as the wearer’s body tapers from that point downward, the pants might be expected to move in that direction when acted upon by the force of gravity. The only force opposing gravity in this situation is friction. All the other forces, and most reasonable observers, are pulling for gravity. And yet, despite my extensive field work, I have never observed a single instance in which gravity and its allies and well-wishers prevailed. At this time, there is no known physical law that can explain this phenomenon, other than the Prime Directive.