Why is it always more pleasing to hear a favorite song “by accident” than on purpose? I have over a thousand songs on my mp3 player, but it’s never as satisfying as hearing one of them on the radio…
Why does iced coffee or tea taste 10 times better than tea or coffee that went cold on its own?
…
I believe that in the former situation, the product is made fresh, then quick-chilled via ice or refrigeration. This keeps all the various complex aliphatic and aromatic molecules which give these beverages their classic tastes and aromas nicely intact.
When allowed to cool down on their own, often after being left to bake on a heating plate, there’s a lot of decay of these compounds into things which don’t taste so nice.
There, that wasn’t difficult now, was it? 
This is true, but I recently “discovered” shuffle on my iPod and it gives the same “radio feeling”. I haven’t manually picked a song in a long time.
Why do mirrors switch left and right, but not up and down?
Here’s my stupid question with possibly no answer:
How come in the summer we want to be cold- I’m not comfortable unless it’s around 68 inside, and in the winter we want to be warm- I’m not comfortable unless it’s at least 74? Life would be much easier if we were comfortable being warm in the summer and cold in the winter, yet it’s the other way around.
Because it is the lot of mankind to be discontented with life here on earth, and to long for things not of this world?
Because our eyes are in a horizontal line. Suppose you had some mark on your forehead. In order for light to go from the mark to the mirror to either of your eyes, it has to hit the mirror near the top of the image. Yes, there is light from the mark hitting the bottom of the mirror, but the optical laws of reflection don’t allow that light to essentially turn around and go back the way it came to hit your eyes. This works just as well for light from your chin hitting the top of the mirror.
If our eyes formed a vertical line, however, we would see mirrors as reflecting up and down, but not right to left, because light from right side features would have to hit the right side of the mirror in order to go back to either eye. If light from the right side of your face hit the left side of the mirror, it would reflect off past the left side of your face and you’d never see it.
The relevant law is simple: light reflects at the same angle it came in at. It’s easiest to see if you draw some simple diagrams.
One last thought. The law of reflection does not discriminate to horizontally or vertically aligned eyes. The line about which the image reflects is perpendicular to the line connecting the two eyes, no matter what angle the line connecting the two eyes has.
Similarly, if I’m flipping around channels on the set and a favorite movie comes on, I’ll stop to watch it, even if I own the DVD. Sometimes this is true even if the movie is is being interrupted by commercials.
Along these lines, a candy bar from a vending machine always tastes better than a candy bar you might have sitting around at home. Immediate gratification, that’s what it’s all about.
I’m with you. Hearing a favourite song on the radio is great, and hearing it in a club is even better. Here’s my theory: hearing it on the radio means other people think it’s good too, and it makes it seem as if the radio is sharing a common interest with you personally (if that makes any sense). This is all true when it plays in a club but, even better, everyone else has to listen to it too.
Being dropped helps snack food acheive its maximum flavor potential.
You have never eaten some of the stale crap that comes out of the machines at my job.
I would like to why there is an inverse proportion to the amount of work to be done on a certain day and the need to leave early that day. If you want to leave early, there will be more work or something will be messed up. Going to stay all day, everything goes smooth. And you can double the proportion if that day is the last working day before a holiday.
I always see dead bugs in light fixtures on the ceiling. Totally sealed fixtures. They died because there was no way out. How did they get in there?
Insert ‘almost’ before ‘totally’ and you have it.
Perhaps, but it seems that the will to find the “almost” would be greater when the alternative was avoiding death, rather than getting closer to the shiny wonderful bright thingy. Even with an insect brain, isn’t survival the strongest biological force?
Even more, I’ve thought that some songs sounded better on some radio stations than others. I’m thinking here of KLOS and The Arrow in Los Angeles. The Arrow would play “classic rock”, which included stuff like “Dreamweaver” and other drek. So when they played Hendrix, they were lumping him in with that. KLOS playing him meant he was part of a different group, and was liked by cooler people. I could “feel” this.
The insects who can’t figure out how to get into the (almost) totally sealed light fixture in the first place obviously don’t wind up producing little dried-up insect corpses inside light fixtures. (They may wind up producing little dried-up insect corpses elsewhere; say, under the refrigerator.)
The insects who do figure out how to get into the (almost) totally sealed light fixture and who then manage to figure out where the exit is (or blunder back through it without actually “figuring out” anything) also don’t wind up making little dried-up insect corpses inside light fixtures.
Only the insects who blunder into the secret passage into the (almost) totally sealed light fixture AND then can’t find their way back out again wind up making little dried-up insect corpses inside your light fixture. (I don’t think insects really can be said to have a “will”, I suspect it’s pretty much just semi-random blundering around governed by some simple pre-programmed rules.)
Also, insects who drop dead in the middle of the living room get swept up pretty fast (unless you’re a total slob like me), whereas even Martha Stewart probably doesn’t clean out the insides of her light fixtures that often, so crud tends to accumulate in there.
Ok, I can deal with that.
I’ve been very sick for a week. It’s feeling more and more like pneumonia. This morning I called the doctor and got an appointment for this afternoon. Why do I suddenly feel much better? I’ll probably have no symptoms by the time I see the doctor.
They don’t. They switch front and back. However, we don’t have an intuition for that, so when we see the reflection, we tend to mentally figure out how we could “rearrange” our surroundings to get that. Since we are (mostly) symmetrical left to right (and not at all up and down), we feel that left and right are reversed. There’s enough symmetry to overcome small things that would tend to spoil this illusion, like a part one one side of your head, or writing on your shirt.
If you were, for example, lying on the floor and looking sideways at the mirror, you might think it had reversed up and down instead - unless the floor is in the picture, which will spoil that illusion.
When I go into the office, instead of taking along a couple cans of nice, ice-cold soft drinks, I wait until I’m there and buy a 20-oz out of the machine. I like cans better than bottles, and yet I don’t think a canned drink from home tastes as good as one purchased in the machine at work. But the machines use the conveyor belt system, to minimize the amount the drinks are shaken up, so they aren’t dropped.
Here’s mine: why does food made for someone else always taste better than your own?