Microwave ovens. I have a cursory understanding of how bombarding food with microwaves will heat it up, but I have no idea of how the oven generates these waves.
…
A quick wiki search indicates that the waves are generated with a device called a cavity magnetron. I’ll take their word for it.
Obligatory Supermarket Picture
I’ll take the obvious: The Internet. I’m planning a trip to DC this spring and wondered about what time would be good to take a stroll to see some sights at night. So I did a simple search and figured out the sun will set at 7:32PM in Washington DC on April 2nd, 2011.
Then I sat back and thought, HOLY SHIT! :eek: How would the layman even GET that information pre-internet? And I just checked the time of sunset…of a location on the other side of the continent…next year…on a specific date…to the accuracy of a minute…in my BOXERS…at 2:30 in the fricking morning…FROM MY GOD DAMN TELEPHONE!
That is UNREAL. :eek:
I live in the flight path of the airport, and planes fly overhead all the time.
I am amazed by the sheer scale of a jumbo jet that can transport passengers across the world in hours. Something impossible to imagine only 120 years ago, is now a basic standard for all the people of the world.
I’ve heard similar stories about seminar students coming to First World countries from villages in the Third. “Not only was there paper to wipe your ass with, but many kinds of it!”
I had a coworker whose degree was in Marketing; he enjoyed visiting supermarkets and seeing different techniques being used, that some brands would change from country to country while others stayed the same, the different distribution of the aisles…
I recently scanned the pictures in three of my mother’s albums; while I do need to edit them, I did give her a DVD with the “raw” images. She held up the disc and said “to think all that fits inside this!”
Hand-held GPS receivers. To be able to know exactly where you are, anywhere on earth, to within 2m using a device that fits in the palm of the hand and can be powered by sunlight.
I could get in a boat on the Welsh coast here in the UK, and navigate 1000s of miles directly to the Statue of Liberty, knowing my speed, course and position the whole way.
Can you imagine what any of the early seafaring explorers would have given for even a basic Garmin GPS?
Skin is amazing to me.
I’ve had horses for most of my life, and mostly kept them at home. I also like gardening. Put those two things together and you come up with a lot of manual labor that will wear out gloves in short order.
I hate wearing gloves unless I must (moving 200 hay bales from field to truck and then truck to barn, f’rinstance) and yet my hands aren’t full of holes. There are a few calluses, scrapes, scars, but no matter how I abuse them, they just quietly go on repairing the damage I do to them.
Amazing stuff, skin.
Booze baby, man found the perfect use for ethanol.
I still can’t believe they’re selling tiny devices that can store a hundred times as much data as my first computer at all, let alone at the cash register at Staples as an impulse buy item. To say nothing of the somewhat more expensive models that can store a thousand or ten thousand times as much and cost one-tenth as much, even without adjusting for inflation.
This XKCD comic is related to that: xkcd: MicroSD
It is mind-boggling that for £30 you can buy a storage card that will contain the equivalent of 10 miles of book shelves.
Or that an entire academic research library will fit onto a £150 2TB drive.
It is a modern marvel. Let’s just hope the electricity never goes out, though. I has backup: all my books are still lined up on shelves in the basement. With enough batteries for my little lantern and a thrift store radio, I can (and have) pass the weary hours of a power outage without access to the internets.
Has air conditioning been mentioned? How would life be bearable without it! How would anyone live in Texas, Arizona, Nevada…
The idea that before anything and everything existed, it was an idea in someone’s mind. That just blows my mind.
I agree with both of these. The interstate system in particular is incredible, and automobiles in and of themselves are a wonder.
Thanks for the responses everyone! Interesting to hear. 
Yeah, that’s a big part of what awes me as well, that interconnectedness. And the roads are part of what makes grocery stores work. Particularly fresh foods like certain veggies and fruits. And people mostly take the whole thing for granted. It works so well and so reliably, that people rarely give it so much as a passing thought.
Just a comment, for those who actually are into grocery stores, here’s a website called Groceteria that’s dedicated to the history of grocery stores
The fact that we can fly at all is kind of profound to me, but yes, when you realize the scale of flight that we’re capable of, it’s mind-blowing.
I used to have daydreams in which someone from the mid-1800’s is transported to the modern world to be introduced to manned flight. Standing on the tarmac at a small airport, what would he think as he watched a Cessna take to the air? What would run through his mind, riding as a passenger in that Cessna, as they accelerate down the runway and take to the air for the first time in his life?
After that, you show him a performance by the Blue Angels. Insanely fast and maneuverable, to our eye, since we’re used to seeing the Cessnas and commercial airliners flying in straight lines at modest speeds every day, but maybe not so incredibly amazing to him? Afterall, the planes themselves are of a size not too different from the Cessna he just rode in.
And then, imagine you could somehow get him into O’Hare airport without him seeing any of the air traffic in the area, and in the terminal you walk by a 747 at the gate. A clear view of it, he can see the flight crew through the cockpit windows, and he can see the ground crew walking around underneath, so the scale of this machine is unmistakeable. A few minutes later he watches it depart from the terminal and lumber off to the end of the runway, but how could this thing possibly fly? It’s shaped a bit like that Cessna we rode in, but it’s too fucking big, there’s no way this could possibly leave the ground. Then the 747 powers up and starts accelerating. Where’s it gonna go, the carriage-way dead-ends in that field over there. Halfway along the runway, the nose picks up off of the ground. Dear God, what’s happening? This beast is gonna flip over! And then the main gear lifts off - and suddenly half a million pounds of aluminum, jet fuel, and humanity is in the air, moving at ten times the speed of his horse-drawn wagon. And then you explain to him that in a few minutes’ time this thing will be flying higher than the highest mountain on earth; 40 times the speed of his horse-drawn wagon; and it won’t touch the ground again for about 13 hours, not until it’s gone halfway around the world.
A friend’s grandfather died recently; he was 100 years old. At the time, I remarked on the profound changes in the world that he must have witnessed during his lifetime. He was an adult trying to provide for a family during the Great Depression; witnessed WW2 from an adult’s perspective; watched aviation progress from a cantankerous, underpowered, canvas-winged biplane up to the aforementioned 747; experienced the advent of B&W television, color television, flatscreens, and finally HDTV; and saw telecommunications progress from “the rich guy down the street might have a telephone” to “everyone and his dog owns a cell phone.” Of all these things he witnessed, my friend said his grandfather was most impressed by the advances in communication: cell phones, satellite phones, [wireless] internet, GPS. How cool is that? Instant two-way audio and video communication between any two points on the globe. The ability to know exactly where you are. The ability to transmit libraries of information in a fraction of a second.
Depending on your perspective, most of our modern world is pretty amazing. Blogger Bill Whittle had a neat essay in which he envisioned a Pharaoh from ancient Egypt visiting a 7-11 store. Click here, and search for the string “the splendors of ancient Egypt” to zip to the beginning of this part fo the essay.
And that he could catch a ride on it for the cost of, oh, a few days’ to a week’s worth of work or so.
The rule of law. (I know it doesn’t always hold, that there are always exception, etc.)
If I get arrested the state will provide an attorney for me. When I call a policeman he’s going to come. That I’ll get a fair trial. If sent to prison, I’ll be fed and reasonably housed.
This never fails to impress me.
The fact that my truck has more computing power in it than Apollo 11 did.
I have always lived in hot climates, and I truly love air conditioning. I know people have lived in this same area for hundreds of years with the same heat, without air conditioning. I am in wonder at how… how miserably hot for so long and never able to get away from it.
But although I grew up in sultry,humid, drooping hot Houston, and now I live in burning, bone dry and blistering Tucson, I can get away from the heat. I can sleep without sweating. I have a sanctuary from the 6 months of 100 degree weather that we are in the middle of.
I love you air conditioning!
Yep, and (in the case of mobile phones) they know exactly where you are, too. It blows my mind that I can be pretty much anywhere here in the UK (or much of the world!), pull my phone out of my pocket, and send a text to my friend in Sydney, in freaking Australia and he can get it and read it in seconds, and have a reply back to me within less than a minute.
(Yes, I know we could actually talk, but I find it more incredible somehow that I can effectively send a short letter to the other side of the planet, and have a reply back in 60 seconds. A century ago, that would have taken, what, two or three months?)
