Funny, mine would be almost the opposite: that nearly every deuterium atom in existence was created in the Big Bang (i.e. on the order of magnitude of %.02 of all hydrogen atoms in the universe,) since no known natural process can create them in that quantity. In all these billions of years they have managed to survive without getting sucked into a star’s core or hit by the stray highly-energetic particle.
There’s only one living WWI veteran. Wow.
I am quoting this from the book “Big Bang” by Simon Singh. I hope that is ok.
“Marcus Chown, author of The Magic Furnace,” described the significance of of stellar alchemy as follows: ‘In order that we might live, stars in their billions, tens of billions, hundreds of billions even, have died. The iron in our blood, the calcium in our bones, the oxygen that fills our lungs each time we take a breath - all were cooked in the furnaces of the stars which expired long before Earth was born.’ Romantics might like to think of themselves as being composed of stardust. Cynics might prefer to think of themselves as nuclear waste."
Bolding mine, because that’s my favorite part.
It’s a completely terrific book, by the way.
love
yams!!
Hey my husband told me he heard that on CNN this evening.
I’ll happily forward that link and prove him wrong.
this surprises you? What do you think we did in most of Central/South America?
Anyway, recently I found this discovery about the magnetic portals between the sun and the earth ( http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008/30oct_ftes.htm ) to be quite amazing
I’m going to throw in a controversial nit-pick and say that there are no living WWI veterans left, as the claimants invariably never saw active service. Doesn’t change the fact they did their duty etc, but I don’t think you can call yourself a war veteran if you never left your home country or deployed operationally.
It was definitely a bit eye-opening after having known of the Dred Scott Decision for many years to actually look into the matter and see that the true extent of it was far more overreaching, horrible, racist, and simply wrong than I’d ever really thought. I’d always had the idea that it was an example of judicial restraint in failing to extend rights not enumerated in the Constitution, rather than Taney deciding that, as best I can tell, the framers of the Constitution were Good Ol’ Boys like him, and must have meant that blacks are, of course, never to be included in any of the freedoms guaranteed therein.
Although, thinking about it now, had he not clearly overstepped the text of the Constitution so egregiously, maybe the Fourteenth Amendment wouldn’t have gone as far as it did.
That everyone, right deep down inside themselves, is flawed or weird or insecure or troubled in some way.
For those discussing the political history of Iran, like to recommend the movie Persepolis, which is an autobiographical account of director Marjana Satrapi’s childhood both before and after Islamic Revolution. It’s quite eye-opening and sad and wonderful all at the same time.
Since the movie is animated, it’s easy to believe that some parts of the story can’t possibly be true… but based on other stories I’ve heard from some of my Persian friends who are roughly the same age as Satrapi, the movie isn’t that far from reality at all.
kinda reminds me of A Grave of Fireflys, which is an anime about the author’s life during Reconstruction-era Japan (post WWII just in case you don’t know). Some of the things in the movie are quite hard to believe as well, but then you read the guy’s memoirs and realize all the terrible, sad crap in the movie is the sugar-coated version of what REALLY happened to the guy. I’ll definitely check out Persepolis
Sampiro, your thing about genealogy reminded me of my own eye-opener.
The first one:
Let’s say my parents had a fight on the night I would have been conceived. It was nasty and Dad ended up sleeping on the couch. It’s okay, though because a few days later they made up and had the requisite make-up sex (Actually, it’s not because I’m now imagining my parents having sex). Or Dad had to work late or Mom took a little longer getting ready for bed. At any rate, in the jumble of life, a different sperm got to the egg. Nine months passed and out I came. Only, it’s highly statistically improbable that this person would have the exact same genetic makeup as me. If just about anything happened differently, it would be someone else walking around instead of me.
And it’s the same for every sexually reproducing organism ever.
As sad as it sounds, that blew my mind the first time I thought about it.
There does seem to be only one verified American World War I combat veteran.
I’ll never forget the day that I as a small child realised that everybody else had thoughts in their heads. I don’t know if I thought they were robots or what before. But the realisation that everyone else had their own worlds going on inside their heads just like me blew my tiny mind.
Similar to that, when I realised that everyone had a family. Every single person has parents, grandparents and knows someone I’ll never know.
That’s when I realised the world is big place!
(I still can’t cope with the size of the universe, though - that’s just too much for my brain)
Can this one be verified? I like it best out of all of the ones in the thread. Is it really true? Best way of trying to cram an idea of the size of the universe into a tiny human brain that I’ve ever seen. :eek:
The day I learned that the vast majority of people in the world were not Christians, it blew my mind. It was the first time it ever occurred to me that I might not be right about my perception of God. Other people, I realized, had come to different conclusions about the nature of the universe.
Another one was the realization that cells are living organisms, and I am composed entirely of cells. This means that my whole existence is really just a swarm of living organisms working together to create this body, this mind, in the best interest of the whole. I am not a being, but rather billions of beings all put together.
I am still amazed by this.
When I was in grade school, I repeatedly blew my own mind by trying to reason out why I was there, as opposed to anywhere else in the world. I couldn’t grasp the immense weight of trivia that somehow added up to my presence in that location at that time. The whole Universe had to have worked out just right.
Here’s another sense of scale meditation: Within the last half-century, we’ve gone from even relatively small computers filling rooms and requiring special power supplies to computers of much greater speed and power being etched into a flake of silicon that could reside comfortably on the top of your thumb.
Due to photolithography, modern integrated circuits are Hieronymus machines: The detailed design of the machine is the machine. Software is even more esoteric: It is the power of logos, the sacred Word, made real, and given direct power over physical entities.
We etch something into rock and control it with words. Golems are real and they give us our daily pornography.
Barack Obama smokes cigarettes?!?!?