Cheese. It was originally invented by calf stomach enzymes. Who the hell thought that was a good thing to eat? It’s amazing that’s so yummytasty mmm m mmmm!!!
And on that note, why does it take humans a year to learn how to walk, but most ungulates can start walking within hours of birth? How fair is that?
One of the coolest things about working as a consultant is that you find out, through working with different clients and hearing war stories from coworkers, about “how things that you never ever pondered how do they work work.”
And about how you can get two or three companies that are in the same business and work in completely different ways, and all of them manage to get the work done.
Alan, when I worked in Costa Rica, people asked us to describe sheep (often referenced in the Bible, but never seen in Costa Rica) and snow (which they’d seen in movies and faked in Nativities). Yes, snow is cold, but doesn’t feel as cold as touching a piece of metal in the same temperature; it’s not wet until it starts melting; it can be fluffy or hard or pellety…
Air. It is kind of strange isn’t it? Clear and invisible but yet so very visible in so many ways.
I’m unsure what you mean by this distinction, or even if it is a distinction. Surely the brain is performing some kind of calculation in order to drive the muscles that move the arm and the hand appropriately?
I often marvel at the skills that people can develop. Just to take one example, think of top-level professional tennis, and the speed at which players serve. The receiving player’s brain has to assess what is happening, process incoming signals from the eyes about the motion through 3D space of a small object travelling very quickly, anticipate the precise path of the ball, choose a response, send out the correct nerve impulses to ‘steer’ a complex set of muscles governing the feet, legs, torso and arms so as to achieve the very difficult act of playing the correct stroke with the racquet, within a tolerance of about 1/16th of an inch in any direction, and deliver the exact stroke required (in terms of angle, force, contact and other fine details I am probably not aware of) so as to land the ball at a desired spot at the other end of the court with accuracy that often needs to be within about half an inch. The human brain can do all this in about one second.
Related to flying:
Sometimes I’ll be on an airplane and imagine that the airplane isn’t there; I’m sitting calmly five miles in the air flying nearly the speed of sound, supported by NOTHING!
Same thing occurs to me when I’m in tall buildings and bridges: How are we so calm in these situations?
Music constantly amazes me; why do we respond to it?
The thing that I do (software development), that pays me money and puts a roof over my head (and funds my ability to sit calmly five miiles in the sky), relies on math not well-understood a hundred years ago, physics developed only 50 years ago, and produces nothing physical. Yet people pay me for it! The only physical thing I’ve produced in the last 24 years is a bookcase, and I didn’t get paid for that. Yikes! Put me back a thousand years, and I’d be the the (starving) village idiot.
One that really floors me is dreams. How we can create absolutely convincing virtual reality, complete with visuals, characters, conversations, and plots, in real time, while we’re asleep. I mean, WTF!!??!!??
Oh yes. I am frequently amazed by that. sometimes I’ll stand looking at the rain and just laugh in amazement. I’m sure people think me mad.
Related to driving is the comfort humanity has with a simple line. Picture yourself driving down a road with one lane of traffic on each side, 45 MPH speed limit. Thanks to the line down middle, you pass a car going the same speed in the opposite direction thousands of times without much of a care in the world that as you pass there maybe less than 5 feet between you and a horribly bloody death.
Now, go down that same road without a line down the middle and see just how comfortable you feel as each car goes driving past.
I was thinking about this in terms of driving, but this is a good example, too. We didn’t evolve to do these things, and yet everyone can learn to do them. It’s amazing.
This. Earlier this winter we had to keep the heat down at home because of the cost, and I spent hours or (on weekends) days at a time never feeling warm or comfortable. I was at least a little chilly all the time, and it got me thinking. Before we had warm, draft-free houses and reliable heating, people must have felt cold for months at a time. How miserable! It made me realize what a luxury it is to be physically comfortable almost all the time.
I’d also like to nominate hearing, and to marvel at the brain’s ability to separate environmental sounds into multiple meaningful streams of information, to focus on individual sounds or conversations, and to tune out meaningless (at the moment) sounds.
Last night I went to a restaurant for dinner with some friends. The restaurant is crowded and oddly laid out, and there’s lots of noise from the other diners, the kitchen, the waitstaff bustling around, from the TV over the bar, and so on. Despite all the ambient noise, the four of us were able to carry on a conversation. That, to me, is pretty darned marvelous.
Computers, and more specifically how they’ve advanced. I have a cell phone in my pocket which has a thousand times the processing power of the room-sized computers my parents were using when they were roughly my age. On one hand it’s in no way remarkable that I can use my 5-pound laptop to download and watch movies, stream music, take and edit photos, and chat with people literally on the other side of the world. On the other hand…I can sit here and chat - video chat, if I so desire - with someone anywhere with broadband, on a five-pound portable device. Wow.
Also, something less concrete than a heating unit is body heat. I’ve also spent time in places with the heat turned down (me, at home, this past winter) to save money. I get into a cold bed under several blankets and within minutes I’m warm as toast, not just because of the blankets, but mainly through my body heat. You can save someone’s life with body heat.
I’m amazed at the number of everyday things that can kill us, but don’t. We are constantly surrounded by electricity, but very few people are ever electrocuted. We handle sharp objects and eat questionable food and walk on ice and drive cars and fly in airplanes . . . and most of us live to be fairly old without being killed by these things.
A thread similar to this was done years ago… I still think of the one response here and there that I remember best.
The ability of musicians to come up with new music.
I mean, really? There’s only so many notes and combined randomly they’d come together like crap, combined into patterns and they’d sound boring after a bit, but combined into patterns with some spark… and they become extremely unique musical hits.
How?
Who knows… its one of those weird mysteries of the mind.
Somewhat of a conglomeration of many things said already, but modern life in general is pretty marvelous. I frequently sit and wonder about how truely advanced we are. And how much more sits just around the corner.
For example, something totally mundane to me is snowboarding in the backcountry. But the last time I went, I was struck by how complex it all really is. Firstly, we had to advance as a civilization to the point where I can be paid and provide for myself and my family while only working 40 hours out of a week. Not a thousand years ago, I would have had to spend almost all of my time merely scraping out an existence, so I wouldn’t have had the time to pursue any leisure activities. Next we had to put such value on our leisure time to devote countless hours to improving our understanding of how to make our leisure better and better.
The amount of accumulated information alone is astounding: knowledge of snow conditions and avalanch dangers, what shape a snowboard should be to be most effective, how to best wax and tune said snowboard, what the weather should be like at 10:00 AM, ect. Any one of these topics I’ve learned about via books, the internet, person to person instruction and years of experience. Each single topic could easily take a lifetime to teach yourself, but I’ve picked up the vast majority of it in a dozen years or so.
Then comes the technology: Someone figured out how to make goretex- a plastic/fabric that lets water go one way and not the other, I’m wearing a directional radio transmitter so I could be found if I got buried under 20 feet of snow, I have a wax on my snowboard that’s designed to do its job best when the temp is 10-20 degrees outside, I have a helmet on that has wireless headphones that can tell when I’m talking on my radio to my friends hundreds of yards away and then change back to music when I’m riding (choosing from the roughly 5,000 songs that fit on a device smaller than a candy bar). My watch has sensors on it to tell me how high I am in elevation, what the barometric pressure is (and how it has been trending over the past 24 hours, so I don’t have to bother remembering anything), and gives me a compass heading. All of that and I haven’t even changed the battery, even though it’s been running for years. I’m wearing a camera the size of a roll of quarters and it can record almost six hours of video on a stable portable media the size of a thick postage stamp.
To say nothing of the physical aspects: My body was first able to climb to a high elevation- my lungs knew to work just a little bit harder, my marrow started cranking out more red blood cells to cover the slack, my kidneys somehow got a signal to pull a little extra plasma out of the blood stream to concentrate my blood a little and increase my hematocrit a bit. My muscle cells stared to talk to all of the rest of my body, letting them know when they needed some more glucose to keep doing there jobs. Which after all, is rearranging some molecules between two proteins over and over and over. Billions of years ago they decided to make a team with some other types of cells and agree to contract forever if the other cells would share some food with them. Add a few billion other specialized cells and you start to have highly functional (for the time being) organism. All of the specialized parts interact with each other, via tiny electrical shocks and combinations of excreted chemicals.
My mind could look at a map of the mountain we were on and turn my observations into a corresponding position. I could visualize what the lines on the map represented in the real world, and I was able to plan my ascent and maintain a concentration on a long term goal, continually making choices regarding my surroundings and I didn’t even have to think about it. I had the muscle memory to turn and adjust the snowboard to make it move where I wanted it to go. I was able to visually assess the mountain ahead of me, plot a physics intense trajectory through dangerous obstacles, while still reacting to unseen troubles all without even thinking about it, any more than “That looks like where I would like to go…” and heading there. I can do all of while singing along to the music if I feel like it. Or while pondering the whole meaning of ‘life’.
And then to think about all of this and to realize that all of the work and planning and billions of years of evolution, thousands of different patents, the guy that put the cream cheese in the package that’s on the bagel I’m eating, my mitochondria working their asses off, the doctor that fixed my broken leg when I was twelve; how it all comes together to put me in that one moment…
And for no more reason for doing it than simply because it is pleasing to me. Not 500 years ago it would have bordered on impossible to have done any of it in a lifetime and today I haven’t even made it to lunch yet. Whoa- Sometimes it can blow your mind.
I work at a preschool/daycare, and we’re once again just a few months away from sending our rising six-year-olds out into the world. Have you ever thought about how much a child learns in the first six years of life? Without any special instruction, they work out how to sit, crawl, walk, run, jump, catch, throw, and put things in their mouths; they learn the names of thousands of things and actions in their environment, and how to put this information together into sentences others can understand, sometimes in two or three different languages; they memorize hundreds of songs and the rules of dozens of games. On top of this we teach them the rules for toileting in our culture (the actual muscle control is something the children must learn themselves), basic manners and customs, and the use of many unnatural tools like forks, crayons, and scissors - and not a few manage to find the time and brain capacity on top of this to learn to read, write, and do simple arithmetic. Each and every one of us did this. In six short years. We will never learn so much so quickly again.
I regularly sit in my car, or take the train, and see other people doing their thing. These people woke up that morning, brushed their teeth, did all sorts of things that I’ll never be a part of. I pass them, never meeting them, never seeing them again, and they have just as a complex life as I do. There is some kid in the Fillipines, right now, who plays soccer with some of his friends, and I’ll never know.
Terry Pratchett opened my eyes in how boredom is actually really amazing. We are surrounded by wonders, the fact that we are conscious is a miracle on its own. We drive cars, fly planes, go into space. We get bombarded with thousands of stimuli per second. And two days ago I sat at home, nothing on TV, and I was bored for a while.
The fact that millions of years ago, the atoms from my body were part of a star. A hundred years from now, this little carbon atom in my left pinky will be part of a tree and the water molecule that just passed my ear drum will split and sends it oxygen atom to Ms. Holly Winkelman, 23 Parkton Plc, London while its two hydrogen atoms will be used to power the space shuttle on March 4, 2014, leaving the atmosphere for ever.
These posts, of course, should have been made by Baker.
Automatic Doors amaze me.