Why is it that there are things you do every day without any trouble but if you had to them the rest of your life you would kill yoiurself?
Like correct spelling?
Birds fly. They actually have a mechanism to propel themselves through the air. They must perceive the world in full 3-D, rather than the enhanced 2-D that we live our lives in. How cool is that?
I just thought I’d share, that despite the fact that I’ve seen this thread topic before, I caught it out of the corner of my eye and I could’ve sworn it said “Share your deepthroats”
back to your regularly scheduled thread…
In the last year, I have gained 20 lbs. If these trends continue, I’ll weigh 1,138 lbs. by the age of 80.
I’ve had either a sore neck or a tension headache more or less constantly for four months and I’m scared it’ll never go away. I don’t know what to do.
It’s amazing how many people go through life in some form of denial. The human mind seeks out beliefs that are comforting and reassuring first – empirical truth is usually a distant second. Once we’ve attached ourselves to a certain belief set, our brains will do amazing acrobatics in order to defend that belief to ourselves. We’re all fundamentally logical – even if we believe weird things, and we will find a way to rationalize those beliefs, even if we have to invent our own kind of logic. What’s amazing about creationists, to pick an example, is the fact that most of them actually beleive in it. It’s easy to dismiss the idea as a calculated, transparent attempt to introduce proselytizing to the public schools, but it’s more complicated than that, which just goes to show how gullible and creative the human mind can be if it latches onto an idea that it wants desperately to be true.
It is incomprehensible to me that someday I’ll die and be no more. No more thoughts. No more feelings. No more body. No more anything.
It’s probably the most chilling thought that has ever come into my head.
and then your body will decompose, and all of your atoms will go off and become part of something else.
it blows my mind to think that atoms are not alive (not in any way we can recognize, anyway), but if you combine different atoms together in different combinations, you get everything, from granite to the sun to spinach to people. and if you had a really, really, really tiny pair of tweezers and could tweeze yourself into a pile of single atoms, it would just be a pile. but somehow when those atoms combine to make up everything that makes up a person, somehow all of these little tiny dots result in something that produces emotions and thoughts and feelings.
how do they do that? it’s amazing in and of itself that atoms combine to form everything in existance, but to think that they can combine to form something tangible, which then goes on to create something nontangible - it’s like they’re bridging different dimensions.
god, i love science.
love
yams!!
42
It’s even crazier to think that those atoms are 99.99%+ empty space . You’re basically made up of nothing. Just a whole bunch of electric fields interacting with each other.
Also, atomic-scale “tweezers” have been invented:
Stuff from Stanford
Shameless plug for my department
A couple of nights ago I dreamed I went for a job interview at a school. I flirted a bit with the interviewer, but ended up going to the amusement park with another teacher who worked for this school. It was fun but I ended up having to carry around all three of my hooded sweatshirts.
When I work up I was sort of bummed because they were nice guys but don’t really exist. Or what if they do? What if out there somewhere there are two guys who had the same stupid dream from their own points of view? Maybe dreams are a where, not a what like we’ve always thought. I keep trying to write stories about there being no heaven or hell, just the place where we dream - the terra somnium. One of these days I’ll get it right.
When my father was dying of cancer he became interested again in religion because of the hope it offers for an afterlife. He fell in with some fundamentalists who (for some unknown reason) decided he needed his confused and grasping mind filled with a lot of creationist nonsense. He was an extremely intelligent man, but in his vulnerable state he absorbed a lot of it.
I didn’t want to take away from him a comforting thought that he seemed to need, but I can’t stand willful ignorance. I told him that there is no reason to take the bible as an all-or-nothing package deal. Even if Genesis is a myth, Jesus could still be waiting for him in Heaven–if that was what he wanted to believe.
He mentioned that some of their arguments seemed to have something to them. He was particularly hung up on the claim that Evolution is impossible because “Two dogs don’t give birth to a duck.” In other words–how can two animals of one species (say eohippus) have a different species (horse) as their offspring?
I asked him “What is species?”
He started to answer but I answered for him (paraphrasing from memory);
Species is a word. Someone made it up to express a thought–just like every word in every language. But coming up with a word for something doesn’t make the thing real. Someone also made up the word Unicorn.
No one has ever seen a species. You can point to a chair, but not to a species. Scientists don’t argue whether two populations of animals are the same species but rather whether they should be classified as the same. It is a term of convenience, used simply because discussions of certain topics would be difficult without it. What defines a certain species is whatever criteria the person talking about it cares to use that day. In reality every individual animal is different–a species is just a somewhat arbitrary grouping of some individuals who aren’t as different from each other as they are from some others. The (viable) offspring of two individuals is considered to be of the same species as the parents, but the overall makeup of the species changes with every individual that is born or that dies.
Consider i, the square root of -1. It can’t exist and yet it is used in many mathematical equations. A concept doesn’t have to be real to be useful.
He really perked up when I got to that last part. Not only did he have a thorough grounding in mathematics, but the concept comes up in electronics (his profession) a lot.
After this discussion he dropped his crazy fundie ‘friends’ and started talking to some truly caring people instead.
Up goes up until it becomes down.
Sometimes at night I’ll go and stand in the back yard, looking up at the stars. Somewhere up above my head is a planet that may possibly support life. Perhaps one of those life forms is standing in their back yard, looking up at the stars. We’re both looking up from trillions of billions of miles away, but looking at each other. I’m looking up, to me they’re looking down. They’re looking up, to them I’m looking down.
We’re both hanging by our feet from a very precarious ceiling.
I’ve finally come to accept that life doesn’t need a “meaning” and that I have enough value as a person that my day-to-day goals are not insignificant, despite the difference in scale when compared to everything else in this world.
The concepts of “finding yourself” and “discovering meaning in life” are very complex ways to express what we all do naturally anyway if we’d stop struggling.
Even if there’s a religon out there that does follow the right course to reach our God, it was taken over by exploitive people like ago.
Hey, that’s pretty good! Definitely something new I hadn’t considered. A lot of this stuff we take for granted because it’s what we’re taught, but the category or group is just a human construct and doesn’t actually exist.
I find the concept that every thing we do can have far-reaching implications interesting. I’m not sure it’s just the human mind trying to attach more importance to itself than it deserves, but I could see a real-life “butterfly effect.”
For instance, your toddler accidentally knocks the eggs you were going to fix for breakfast off the counter. So you go to the store to get more. On the way you accidentally run a red light and hit another car. The other person in the accident was a terrorist that was on his way to bomb <insert high-profile target>. So the bombing was effectively thwarted by your 2 year old kid.
There are various creatures on this planet that can do one or more of the following:
-fly
-light up
-see in infrared
-hear an enormous scale of sound
-can blend in perfectly with their surroundings, no matter what the background is
-can navigate by the earth’s magnetic field
-can live for 8 months without eating
-can regrow limbs and organs
-produce electric fields
-navigate by sonar
-detect smells from miles away
-reproduce themselves
and even more crazy stuff that I can’t think if. The potential of RNA, the building blocks of all carbon-based lifeforms, is virtually limitless. We’ve got the stuff to do any of these, we just have to put it together in the right way.
An excellent post, especially when viewed in the light of the OP. The OP, of course, was talking about binary with its paltry two character language, where the genetic language boasts a hearty four, but it’s still a little bit interesting the variety and diversity of life built on that language.
Oh, and of the DNA that’s in out 23 chromosomal pairs, only a fraction of it is used in putting our bodies together.
(.PDF)
(.PDF)
What is the rest of tha DNA doing?
Living things have two primary purposes. Survive, replicate.
That’s really all they need do. And all living things do this. It’s the one thing that ties us all together. It’s our common goal.
And yet of the millions of species on this planet, there is only one that uses the internet to download movies of others replicating.