Things That Simply Amaze You

In My Humble Opinion
81

GPS / Satellite Navigation technology. I have had it for about six months, and I still think the inner workings must consist of magical pixie wishing dust. How does it know where it is? How does it update itself more or less instantly, more or less in real time? How come it’s available without an ongoing subscription? How can it work out routes from A to B, even across hundreds of miles, in a few seconds? I love the way the screen updates itself even if I just hold the device in my hand and turn it around - at the back of my mind, I’m pretty sure this means that somewhere, hundreds of miles above my head, I’m making a satellite twist around to face a new direction (yes, I am famed for my grasp of technology and no, I don’t want any corrections, thank you).

YouTube and similar sites. How much stuff there is out there, free to view at a click. It is not the case that almost every song, movie clip, famous person, TV clip and how-to-do anything you can think of is on YouTube, but it’s pretty darn close. Where is all this stuff stored? How can the retrieval work THAT fast?

Human language. Still one of the greatest mysteries in the universe. How did we evolve these fantastically complicated systems of noises, capable of expressing any possible thought, more or less instantly? It’s amazing to travel the world and listen to different languages, and realise they ALL manage to express ANYTHING the native speakers want to express, and we all do it so easily and effortlessly. The amount of mental processing power required is phenomenal, and yet we just take it for granted.

Waking up. How do I wake up? I don’t TRY to wake up. I just do. How do I know when to (when not using devices such as alarm clocks)? Except in rare and tragic medical cases, people don’t just go to sleep and stay sleeping forever… why not? How did this fantastic system evolve?

Why don’t human brains ever go ‘blue screen, of death’ or crash? How come you can’t ever toss a sentence like ‘This sentence is false?’ into a human brain and cause it to crash? It seems the mind has an infinite number of meta-levels, so any confusion at one level is detected and corrected by a higher level.

Differences in taste. One person loves Wagner and can’t stand rap. Another loves rap but thinks opera is boring. Same human hardware and basic software inside two skulls, experiencing the same sounds, but responding in completely different ways and with totally different verdicts. How does this happen?

How do baby spiders know how to build webs? No-one knows the answer. After all this time, still no-one knows the answer. It’s an immensely complicated feat, involving advanced calculations based on time and spatial relationships. It calls for sophisticated three-dimensional engineering, and the algorithm needs to be adjusted to suit every specific instance. One might even claim it involves advance visualisation (many of the initial stages of building a web seem pointless until later on in the process). Yet spiders cannot learn from their parents or from having seen / encountered a single previous instance. How? No-one knows.

Engineering on a big scale is always impressive and amazing - when you watch documentaries on how they build superstructures, it is truly astounding that we have this knowledge and can create such vast structures that actually stay up!

A cheap modern-day camcorder. Press a button, aim, and you can record your friends, in colour, with sound, and it’s ready for instant playback. Think of all that technology, crammed into something that literally fits into your hand. Think of all the stages we had to learn (as a species) before we could achieve this.

The fact that we went from the Wright Brothers at Kittyhawk to Neil Armstrong walking on the moon in less than 66 years. For thousands of years we didn’t have flight at all, and then inside a single lifetime we figure out how to fly to the moon and back.

A modern supermarket. Think of all the different products on offer (hunderds, thousands to choose from). They all have to be sourced, harvested, processed, packaged, transported (often across continents), distributed, delivered, unloaded, stored again, taken out and put on shelves. Plus someone somewhere has to keep track of it all, work out the payment, and check for legal stuff like hygiene and safety. We wander in, take what we want, and take it for granted. And this happens at a million different supermarkets, every day, all over the world.

A credit card. Think of all the infrastructure that has to be in place in order for something like a credit card transaction to be possible. I can type 16 numbers off a piece of plastic, and someone will send me the book I want. Amazing? I think so.

The Bach cello suites.

I could spend the rest of my life typing this list. The world is amazing, and gets more amazing every day.

82

Life, the Universe, and Everything.

Genetics. A long sentence written in a four-letter alphabet of nucleotide base pairs informs everything about an organism’s development, from the rate at which its hair grows (if it has any), to the development of its brain and ability to think. Of course, an organism’s environment also plays an enormous role in its development, interacting with the organism’s genes to produce the finished organism.

Habituation. Learning to get used to anything, tuning out smells and repetitious noises after enough exposure. Acquiring a taste for a new food, or a new genre of music. Getting used to doing something scary as you do it more and more.

The ability to catch a ball. You can judge the ball’s speed and trajectory so precisely that you can place your hand in its path and catch it.

The ability to learn language. Especially the ability to learn grammar. Super amazing: children not exposed to a language have been known to invent, out of thin air, their own grammatically consistent languages.

Ecology. The interactions between organisms and their environments are absurdly complex, yet at the same time they are incredibly elegant, sensible, and balanced.

Humor. A certain combination of words, or an image or sound, can be intrinsically hilarious. Has anyone smelled anything hilarious? Is tickling tactile comedy?

Thanks, ianzin, for this format. I spent 45 minutes trying to describe my sensation of amazement, but that proved to be beyond my grasp. Listing amazing things is much easier.

83

Mechanical tolerances. At some point somebody made a part by hand that was assembled to another hand-made part. Together, they were used to make another part that had a tolerance beyond what could me achieved by hand. This was done over and over again and now we have microchips and space stations. But it all started with our hands, with people carving crude shapes out of wood and rock.

The tenacity of religion in modern society. That amazes me.

The fact that we don’t really know that we aren’t a cosmic version of the Sentinelese, screaming and yelling and banging rocks together on our cute little blue and green ball.

The size of the Pacific Ocean. Do me a favor: Fire up Google Earth and have a good look at North America. Then, pan over to Asia. Wow! Pretty big, right? Enter these coordinates and zoom out: 19° 6’32.47"S 143°45’23.86"W That’s a lot of agua, my friends.

The Professor’s Cube has 2.8 x 10^74 combinations, or, that is to say, around 2.8 trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion, give or take.

84

Memory. The entirety of our experience in life is through memory. I don’t freak out and wonder how I got here every few minutes, because I remember walking in here and sitting in this chair.

And yet, we just assume that our conscious experience is infallible, but memory has been shown to be malleable. Whole experiences can be forgotten, or fake experiences can be made up. If your mom vividly describes something that happened to you as a kid, you may begin to “remember” it, even if it turns out she completely made it up. We put so much trust in our memories despite how vulnerable they are, but we deal with it, as it’s all we’ve got.

Speaking of remembering things, it’s amazing to think that our entire life’s experiences are stored in this blob of tissue in our heads. Every movie you’ve ever watched, every song you’ve ever heard, every person you’ve ever met, every conversation you’ve ever had, it’s all in there. Of course, we can’t consciously remember it all. Yet somehow, through an old song, a smell, or a set of words, old memories you hadn’t thought of in years can suddenly be unearthed. Where had that memory been all this time, and why couldn’t I remember it before? Why do I remember some things but not others?

85

Alcohol. Such a simple chemical, easily synthesised by basically rotting fruit. And yet it has such profound effects on our consciousness, both for good and ill, that its influence on ourselves, our laws, our arts, our cultures, our societies and our entire history is impossible to understate. Think of that next time you crack open a beer: how different the course of the last 5000 years would have been if fermenting sugars didn’t get us high.

86

The ubiquity of computers today. I was a little computer dork in the mid-70s, and grew up wishing I could have hands-on access to any computer, no matter how low-powered. I’d read books about computers, come across articles about “electronic mail” and such, and I hoped against hope that, someday, other people would see just how neat and helpful computers could be. Eventually, I started getting time on an S-100 machine with a modem and printer, but no monitor, and felt like I was in heaven. Then I made a leap into Atari and Commodore, then Apple and Amiga, and now…

…now it’s so commonplace that it doesn’t feel like magic, but occasionally I’ll have moments where I’m just struck with awe that three decades after wishing for it, computers are in the mainstream, they’re everywhere, and (though the uses they’re put to can be annoying sometimes) their applications are way beyond anything I could have imagined at the time.

87

Writing. Someone can write something thousands of years ago, and someone today can read it. I can write the most boring day of my life down, and someone could read it thousands of years from now.

88

People. We’re both amazingly stupid and amazingly great.

89

Thanks for this thread everyone (well almost :p) probably my favorite read here at the dope so far. I’ll come back and post some stuff if I come up with anything to add–in the meantime I think I’ll just sit here and be amazed.

90

Civil engineering is pretty impressive. Watching a large building, like a new shopping centre, being built is amazing—how on Earth does everybody know what to do?

91

Movies. A group of complete strangers can gather in a large room and not talk to each other at all, and instead stare silently at what amounts to little more than a white sheet. Within minutes, the entire group can be inspired to laugh, cry, scream in horror, fall in love, or throw popcorn. All this from nothing more than a projected image that doesn’t exist in any real sense.

Music. We can instantly, through use of a wooden box, metal tube, stretched animal skin, or technological device, alter vibrations in the immediate atmosphere to change our moods or move various body parts.

Universal language. Many mentions have been made in this thread of verbal and written language. But what about non-verbal language? Only 7% of what humans communicate is verbal. The rest is communicated by subtle things such as narrowing of the eyes, a curl of the lips, a raising of the chest, the fall of a tear, or a slight change in body odor. In many cases, some of these things are communicated across vastly different species. You may not be able to communicate the subtleties of Shakespeare to a shark, but nearly every animal with eyes gets the meaning of a big open mouth lined with razor-sharp teeth.

92

THERE you are. We’ve been worried!

93

I showed myself in another thread a coupe of days ago, dear. I’ve been away.

But on that note, I’ll add one more amazing thing – That I could could be in a blazing hot desert with almost 0% humidity – and get snowed on in mid-day.