Mild Manners

So, I saw a really good episode of Scientific American Frontiers last night.  Alan Alda is slowly becoming my hero.  Anyways, it was about stress and its physiological effect on the body.  Turns out that stress is strongly related to our innate fight-or-flight response.  The whole deal with that is that when your body says 'fight-or-flight now!' it turns off non-essential functions to devote more energy towards fighting or running away crying like a school-girl.  So, people with less stress have their 'non-essential' functions functioning and the rest of the people sorta don't...or at least to full capacity.   For some reason this made me think of Superman because by day he was 'mild-mannered' Clark Kent...and I assumed that by 'mild-mannered' he was probably less stressed.  But when something went wrong, he would probably stress out and fight and flight.  That's a stress double-whammy.  Then I started thinking about how stupid it was that he could fly at all.  I mean, I do a lot of mental experiments based on Newtonian laws of physics and I just don't think that they would allow him to fly.  Seems to me like he just sticks his hands up in the air and away he goes.  Where is the action that caused such a tremendous reaction to make him fly?  Maybe I could see if he was really strong and could jump super high.  Not fly though...at least not by outstretching his arms.  Then I wondered if everybody on Krypton could fly or was it just the Earth atmosphere that he was able to fly in.  Another thing I was curious about was why he looks so much like a terrestrial human.  I don't really think that if life evolved on a distant planet that it would turn out looking so much like us that a pair of glasses is all that's needed to fit in.  God, Superman is such a scam.  Batman is for real though.