Things you can't get your head around

In My Humble Opinion
101

Wrongo, Dr. Train wheels run not on the ground but on a rail, which is elevated several inches above the ground. Further, it is the tread of the wheel that contacts the rail and, as you said, comes to a momentary complete stop every revolution. Further still, every train wheel has a flange, which is bigger in diameter than the tread, Thus, on every revolution of the wheel, a point on the flange dips below the plane of the rail and thus, necessarily moves backwards in relation to the tread which is stationary.

Picture a 30 inch car wheel with a one-inch tread standing on a rail. Now imagine a line drawn from the axle of the wheel, down 30 inches to the tread contacting the rail, down another inch to the perimeter of the flange, below. Move the axle several inches to the right. See how the axle is now to the right of where it was, the tread, in contact with the rail, has moved very little, and the flange, being below the the tread, has moved a bit to the left – backwards in relation to the direction of the train.

Mind you, this backwards movement is only momentary – another instant and the flange is going to be moving forward even faster than the tread below it – and not very fast. That 30:1 ratio I used above, typical for a modern freight car, means on a train moving forward at sixty MPH, the flanges are going backwards at two MPH.

To get to the OP, I can’t get my brain around way women think the way they do. (Punchline to one of my favorite jokes: “S-s-s-o, you want two lanes or four?”) Like the weather, I’ve given up on understanding, and am working on, simply, prediction.

DD

102

That was the first thing that came to my head when I saw this thread. EnderWay explained it pretty well, but I don’t know if I fully understand the concept.

I think about this all the time, too. I know a lot about the mechanics of sound, but why I like (or dislike) a song is a complete mystery. I think it’s one of those “don’t ask, just enjoy it” kind of things.

My mind is blown by the fact that the Earth, which has been the location of everything to ever happen in human history (with the exception of the moon landings, I guess) is a single, solid object in space. I’ve seen images of the earth so many times in movies, on television, in video games, and cartoons that I sort of see it in my head as a vague conceptual thing that’s blue and green and shaped like a ball, but the earth is…well, really frickin’ huge, for one thing, but it’s a physical object just like anything else, and it can still cast a shadow on the moon. I don’t know, it’s hard to explain.

Big cities trip me out. There are so many cars and so many people it’s kind of overwhelming. I’d say I can’t wrap my head around the concept, because it’s pretty damn complex. In fact, anything involving a lot of people is fascinating and somewhat confusing to me.

I sometimes wonder why we wear clothing, and why we are so embarassed to be naked in public. I mean, logically there was a long period in human history where nobody wore any clothes, so wouldn’t that be the natural state you’d feel comfortable in? Is it just something that we learn from modern society?

Really big numbers, anything over a million, are pretty mind-boggling to me. I attempted to remedy the situation somewhat by making a poster called 1,000,000 Cubes. There are so many of them you can’t even really see them in the monitor-sized image; the one that’s hanging in my room right now is at 4000x2000 resolution and that’s the only way to really see all of the cubes. Even though I wake up every day and see the poster on my wall, I am always bewildered by the fact that, for instance, Sony has sold over 90 million Playstation 2 consoles. (Anybody ever read the book “How Much is a Million?” If I ever have kids, that one’s gotta be on the bookshelf. Heck, I should get it for myself.)

103

When I was 21 and very much saturated in hormones, I lived for a couple months on a clothing-optional vegetarian commune outside of Los Angeles. It doesn’t take long before lascivious attitudes towards the absence of clothing seem really really silly. I remember sitting in the sauna and one of the girls coming in, saying ‘hi’, removing her clothes and sitting next to me. For all that I was obsessed with getting laid, her being naked wasn’t sexual. It pretty obviously didn’t have any sexual connotations for her either.

When I left there, I passed through Las Vegas on the way to New Mexico, and the prolific advertisements for “TOPLESS BOTTOMLESS GIRLS! NUDE DANCERS!”, etc., just made me shake my head and giggle.

Think of the Victorians and how titillated they got about a glimpse of a woman’s ankle. When was the last time you saw a gal’s ankle and got a rush of the erogenous hots?

Context is everything.

104

So many to choose from…

The way one’s own mind can be almost ‘at war’ with itself e.g. the habitual smoker: one part of his mind knows he should quit and all the health risks and nasty stuff like cancer and he wants and wants and wants to quit… but then another part of his mind says ‘Go on, you really, really, really have to have a ciggie now’. One mind or two? There are countless other examples, familiar to anyone who has ever fought any kind of unhealthy / unwanted habit or addiction. The only book I’ve seen that muses at length on how this sort of internal rift happens is by Arthur Koestler… not sure but I think it was either ‘Ghost In The Machine’ or ‘Janus ASU’.

One that really astounds me is the way some kinds of information are stored in the brain. So far as I know, everything we can remember and recall is stored by the growth of neurones and neuronal connections. These are thin, linear pieces of physical matter organised somehow in my brain. So how is it that I can recall, say, the shape of a chair or an architectural structure, and even mentally ‘rotate’ shapes in my mind’s eye? Remember, you could prod around in my brain forever and you would never find any 3D structure or representation that corresponds to a 3D shape… only lots of microscopically thin fibres called neurones. How can I mentally recall colours, or mentally ‘re-paint’ a white 3D shape in red, or blue? Thse colours don’t exist anywhere in my brain either. It’s just grey-ish pink linear fibres. And we really only have the vaguest of understanding about how memory works.

Another thing I just don’t get is the extent of widespread public and social apathy and the way people can get away with things. I live in London. We have a special tax, a ‘congestion charge’, which means that at busy times you have to pay five pounds just to drive into London. The Mayor of London recently said he was thinking of putting this up to eight pounds, but he promised to hold a public consultation about it. So he used a lot of London taxpayer’s money to hold this consultation exercise, and a very large percentage of people were against the idea of putting the charge up. But then the Mayor said he’s going to do it anyway, and he is. And nobody’s doing anything about it. There’s just a collective shrug, the Mayor can go ahead. We should be absolutely freaking livid at this! I’m sure there are similar examples wherever you live, and possibly ones that are even more startling.

Also, really, really brilliant musicians. The kind who can play so fast, so effortlessly, at the very limits of physical and musical technique… every time I see a really good example I fail to see how it’s possible… even with years of training and practise etc.

105

How you can throw a ball to me unexpectedly and I can catch it.