How Things Work
Alright. Here’s the deal. As I’ve become a more educated person, and developed mentally, being able to comprehend more things, I’ve been able to understand how more and more things work, to the point where there are few everyday things where I’m just like “uhh, I have no idea how that happens.” I mean, if I don’t know, I’ll probably be able to give a pretty good guess. Now, I’m not just saying this to act full of myself, here’s the point:
Everything is awesome
Like take the sun for example. For the most part, everyone takes it for granted. “Oh, it’s that big hot glowy bright thing in the sky.” Now, I mean, I know most people know this, but think about it for a second: It’s a giant ball of nuclear explosion, burning with so much brightness, that, 8 light-minutes away, here on earth, we can’t look at it without screwing up our eyes, and with so much heat that it causes our 110-degrees-on-the-blacktop band camp days. And THEN, the only reason it even stays together is because its SO MASSIVE, 1.3 MILLION times bigger than our already-too-big-to-comprehend earth, that the gravity of it all counteracts the giant fusion reaction going on. Maybe I’m *really* weird, but whenever I’m just sitting there, with a bright sun over my head, and I see it, that’s what goes through my head, and I’m just filled with an incredible sense of awe at how amazingly cool it is.
Oh, and then about clouds and sunsets. When they happen, like when the clouds are in between me and the sun, and I can see that part of them lit up, I like, in my head, go fly out and rotate the whole thing in my mind, and how the sun lights up only one side of the clouds, and it gives it all depth, and I just think it looks so cool. Sorry, I just ad libbed that paragraph, it probably doesn’t make any sense.
And then about the sun again, but with all the other stars. Most of them are EVEN BIGGER. Some MILLIONS OF TIMES bigger. And we can see them hundreds of light-years away (don’t take that measure of distance lightly either, think about how HUGE it is) because there is so much energy being outputted.
Okay, now we’re going to move away from huge giant things, and talk about math for a second. There are just so many cool things out there with math. I mean, none of them you learn in math class, normally, but if you look a little yourself, there is just so much awesomeness there. Take Benford’s Law for a second. It states that, in any naturally occurring set of numbers (census data, birth rates, death rates = yes; UPC codes, zip codes = no), the digit “1″ will be first in the any given number around 30% of the time. Number 2 is about 18%, 3 is around 13%, and it goes down logarithmically from there. It’s so cool because it goes against exactly what you’d think, you’d think it’d be like 11% each, or something like that. Even that, though, wouldn’t make it particularly noteworthy. What does is its applications in detecting fraud. Like, in fake withdrawals, 8 and 9 would appear first more often because they want to do it high, without going over a set power of 10, for fear of setting off some kind of fraud-detection mechanism. There’s some youtube video and firefox add-on that you can download to test it out on certain graphs on the internet. I did it a little (census.gov, for instance), and it works so amazingly.
The last thing I’m going to talk about is music. Ever since becoming a half-competent musician, I’ve been able to pick apart popular music (rock, pop, rap even), and it just makes it so much more enjoyable. Like, to just pick out the bass, guitar, drum parts, and kind of analyze generally how they play it (I don’t play any of that, so I don’t know exactly how, but I know enough to approximate). I mean, gahh, it’s just so cool.
There’re also superfluids. When you cool down helium to like 1-2 degrees kelvin, it turns back into a fluid with ZERO VISCOSITY, which allows it to basically defy gravity, climbing the walls of the container.
Anyways, that finishes my rant on how cool stuff is. There’s more, but I’ve lost the will at this point to type them all out.
Here’s a discovery channel commercial that summarizes all of my feelings, in song.
Nihilism
WHICH REMINDS ME!!!! GAHH! Understanding how computers work is ALSO AWESOME. I mean, just think about how everything you see is made out of little dots, and how every bit of information, no matter how small, is ones and zeros. Even just letters are no less than EIGHT of those “bits” each! Then, those letters make code like C, Basic, or HTML, or whatever fancy stuff computer people do, and so on and so forth. And then, BELOW THAT, it’s all just electrical impulses that go through the circuits of your computers.
And the same things with your brain! But no circuits, just synapses!
And then to think how quantum computing (on, off, and BOTH) will revolutionize everything… *head explodes*
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