I am probably easily amazed; I hold many things in wonder that everyone else seems to be pretty unimpressed by. But after a weird and meandering journey through Wikipedia today*, I ended up at the entry for Voyager 1. And I must say, this little thing (which I can’t help but fondly think of as “V’ger”) amazes the living crap out of me. Something designed, built and launched over 30 years ago is still tooling around the cosmos, at the very edges of our solar system. It’s taking pictures, collecting data, and… transmitting! That just astounds me. Way to go NASA of 30 years ago.
Of course, I’m still amazed by things like the Slinky, so maybe I’m just easy to wow, but really… Go V’ger!
*I have this tendency to go to Wikipedia for one thing, like Bedknobs and Broomsticks, and end up fifty pages deep at something seemingly unrelated, like Voyager 1, merely by following related links and such.
The every-day, simple little thing that amazes me is much more down-to-earth.
I’m completely fascinated by that little trick women do where they take off their bra under their shirt. Intellectually, I know there’s no magic to it. Instinctively, though, I know that I have enough trouble getting a bra off of a woman even when she’s topless.
I find the ability babies have to acquire language to be totally amazing. Once you have a few words under your belt you can ask the all important question “what does that mean?” (or point “whazat?”) but how does the process even get started before that point? How come they can figure out these noises mean something specific, the same thing to everyone even, but other noises like laughing or animal noises or the sounds the car makes aren’t words?
Cities (specifically Toronto only because that’s where I am). Every once and a while I’ll be driving (alright…parked on) the gardener expressway and I’ll look over at downtown Toronto and just marvel at the whole thing.
It’s built from essentially nothing. I realize that it’s evolution and it doesn’t happen all at once but when you consider that a few hundred years ago the area was essentially trees…good or bad, that’s impressive. The other aspect that goes along with it is that virtually every little thing that exists here or helped build the city was invented by someone.
I don’t know, is this too broad? If so, audio recording devices amaze me as well.
I’m often amazed by little confluences of events that happened in history that ended up bringing us something that is now commonplace - not accidents like the creation of Tungsten Carbide (if that story is true) - that would probably have been figured out by materials scientists eventually anyway - stuff like the invention of solid chocolate bar confectionery - it was more or less the work of a single person - and might simply never have happened at all - and we’d all be eating fudge or something.
Think about it - go 10 generations back, patrilineally, to the man whose decendants would eventually include me. Any number of times he could have lost his life, or been rendered unable to father children, or whatever. He didn’t, and neither did any of his male descendants (at least, those who lead directly to me).
Don’t stop there - go all the way back, from the earliest microbe swimming in the primordial soup. At every step of the way there was a million to one chance the progenitor would live and reproduce successfully. And yet - here I am - and here you are. A-mazing!
Wikipedia, in fact, amazes me. It’s open source. Any jackass with a computer can post anything on it at any time, and yet - it’s full of magic and wonder.
The amount of data that is in the air around us at any given moment. And machines can collect that data and display it to us and respond to a specific person thousands of miles away.
A woman’s hip and ass movement, my God. This is why I know that I’m not gay. I’m pretty sure that this is the reason why there is no lack of sex in this world.
I am amazed by “the click.” You know the one. You go out on date after date after date and sit there wondering what to get at the grocery store or who the hell cuts this guy’s hair and then you meet someone and WHAM! The intense, immediate desire to be with him and nobody else but him practically knocks you on your ass.
The internet. I sit here typing, send it, and it’s out there. Some time ago there was discussion of the greatest invention ever, and a bunch of experts picked the printing press. Suddenly books could be mass-produced and a researcher in Germany could learn from someone else doing research in another part of the world.
This is the logical extension of that. Build enough computers etc. and the entire human race could communicate instantaneously.
We can pee on the 106th floor of the Empire State building and then, just like the elevators, that pee has to travel through various pipes through the building and down into the sewer. Amazing.
Also, elevators (especially in those tall buildings). Think of the tolerances that have to engineered into those things so they don’t just rattle around in the shafts.