No need for cites, specifics, or even a good reason, just tell us about something you’ve run across that seems out of this world.
On the Discovery Channel they were running a segment on a man who had been completely blind for some time. He had an experimental surgery that wired a camera into his freaking brain. There was literally a hole in his skull with a plastic gasket and wires running to a pair of glasses. It look liked the plastic hole they put in computer desks to pass through the cables from the monitor, keyboard, and mouse.
After his operation he could see objects and shades of gray and his vision was steadily improving. He described the experience as the curtains finally being opened after a very long night and the sun streaming in. After I turned the TV off I just couldn’t get the image of his head and the wires out of my mind… it was too incredible to comprehend that medical science can do such a thing.
That the space that the universe is in is included within the universe itself. The universe is expanding, but the distribution of matter is not going outward within an already extant space; instead, the space itself is expanding. Just after the big bang, when the universe was the size of a basket ball, one could not stand and look at it because there was no where to stand. All space was included within that basket ball sized universe.
That, and the fact that doughnuts don’t have holes.
I think those two points are actually strongly related, js.
I’d say that computer-generated simulations of the universe blow my mind like few other things. Getting out into the country and seeing the night sky will do in a pinch.
I can’t help but be blown away by the sheer amount and variety of food available to me, anytime I want it. A trip to the grocery store sometimes blows my mind - twenty kinds of yogurt! Strawberries in January! Every continent is represented with some kind of food (well, not Antarctica. But I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see “penguin in a can” or something someday).
And this is all available to me. I’m not some queen who send ships out to far and foreign lands for exotic spices and novel foods. I’m just some student with a temp job, fer cryin’ out loud.
The vast abundance here just blows my mind. When I think that I was born into this life by the luck of the draw, it gives me a little shiver. I have definitely won the lottery of life just by being born in a well-off, safe, stable country. Amazing.
And I thought I was the only one. I second Miss Gretchen’s opinion. I think my friends are tired of me marveling at the wonder that is the supermarket (or even better Super Walmart) every time we go grocery shopping.
The other day I was adjusting an overhead projector in order to focus the image. My eyes do that constantly, automatically, and quite well.
Google.
Everytime I hop in the car and take a trip I realize I am travelling further than probably 90% of the people who lived in the 1700s did in their entire lives. As a bonus I can travel at speeds of over a mile a minute.
I’ve mentioned this as something I like about America, but it fits here too. I love the fact that I can have ice whenever I want it. Emperors of Rome enjoyed it as a delicacy and I OCly count out seven cubes per 12oz drink.
I live like a king on a graduate assistant’s stipend and take time to be grateful every day.
That aside from my best friend, all the people I most enjoy talking to live a minimum of a thousand miles away from me… one of which is literally on the other side of the world in the Phillipines.
Quantum physics - a photon can be in two places in once.
I don’t mean one photon, split into two photons - I mean a single particle, in multiple places at once.
Really have trouble getting my head around that one.
Women - Sometimes I’m walking out and I’ll see just a stunning woman and then I can’t help but just ponder how amazing it is that just the was a person looks can trigger such amazingly strong feelings. It’s just so weird how programmed we are to respond to things like that.
I still continue to be amazed that when I turn the telly on, all these little pictures scurry through space to manifest on my screen.
And just yesterday when I emailed myself an article out of a journal…it arrived just milliseconds after I pressed the ‘send’ button.
And how fridges keep things cold…with electricity, that makes things hot.
And yeah, the expanding universe thingy. Paul Davies in one of his books likened it to a ‘star’ shaped entity that increased the number of spikes, thus increasing the volume infinitely without ever expanding past the ‘boundaries’. I sort of got that, but I somehow don’t think the edge of the universe is made up of a series of right-angles. But it was a nice analogy.
Oh, and how dogs can lick their balls for hours on end. THAT blows my mind completely.
I’m constantly amazed that even the poorest people in this country have access to luxuries that kings and emperors could have never dreamed of a few hundred years ago.
I once saw a homeless dude with a cellphone.
And my friend’s cousin who lives on disability and Captain Morgan’s still manages to have cable television.
The fact that my 7 year old son can play The legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker with out needing my help (requires a ton of reading) when just a few short years ago he couldn’t read hs own name.
When that Mars expedition was going on back in 1999 (I could be off a year here), I literally stood in front of my TV, slackjawed, watching how some dude in Houston (or wherever) was guiding this nifty little cart by frickin’ remote control across the surface of the Red Planet, a full nine months of flight away.
I am always amazed (and disturbed) by how little the average person around me seems to know or care what goes on outside their bailiwick. In the small rural town I live in, I get the very strong impression that people really believe someone with tattoos is tough, ninjas are real, astrology works, and you can always believe what you see on television, “because if it wasn’t true how could they put it on there?”
Meanwhile, people don’t really believe me when I tell them grocery stores arrange their product to force customers to walk around the store more, the President has no power of his own to raise or lower taxes, or influence the economy in any major way, and that no one is under any obligation to let a cop search their car just because he asks to.
It blows my mind (incredibly apt) that billions of cells all squooshed together to form grey matter and neurons and synapses and electrical impulses all work together to create the structure and function of our ability to think, rationalize, imagine, and generally be who we are.
I’m no medical student, but I’ve done my fair bit of studying the anatomy of the brain as well as psychology, but I just can’t get over how all these different biological mechanisms can create consciousness. It’s bloody amazing.
