Not only that, but someone figured out how to do the same thing two different ways! You get the same stitch whether you’re knitting English or Contintental. That’s amazing, to me.
Also, I’m amazed that we figured out a way to eat certain foods, like artichokes. I mean, look at how little of it we eat, and it’s all prickly, and you have to cook it! That guy must have been damn near starvation, is all I have to say.
And, yeah, faxes are magic to me. I have no idea how you transfer images over a phone line. For some reasons, computers are less magic, except for digital pictures. How the heck can a bunch of 0s and 1s come out to look like me?
It’s a certain number of dots in a finite number of colors. If you had to write the entire photo down on a piece of paper, you’d probably give each color a number and read off dots left to right, top to bottom and write down the colors as numbers, right? Represent the numbers in binary, and bam! I’m constantly amazed at how many people don’t understand how binary works and lets you store anything.
The availability of pretty much any mass-market book, no matter how old or out-of-print, somewhere online. When I was very small, there was a book I wanted to read (the sequel to a book I had read) that I couldn’t get because it was out of print. I used to haunt used bookstores looking for it, and over time it became my Holy Grail – the thing that I would scour the earth to find. Last year when my sister turned me on to the used & new books on Amazon, it occurred to me to look for it. When I saw that for $2.80 I could have a book I had spent over 30 years looking for, I started to cry. Amazing. Since then I’ve purchased all sorts of books that were on the “out-of-print, unable to find” list I keep in my head.
T.V. shows on DVD. The other thing I’ve wanted since I was a small child, even before VCRs, when you had to just replay the shows you loved in your head. I’ve mentioned in other threads my childhood obsession with MASH. Now I own MASH. I can watch any episode any time I like. That’s magic.
The SDMB. The fact that I can converse with people all over the country and the world, about things I would never in a million years have thought of or known about, and how people everywhere are far more similar than we are different.
I was thinking about this very topic this morning when my sweet car obediently started up in 10 degree weather.
I’m amazed at how reliable my little Suzuki SUV is. When I was a kid in the '70s it seems that our family was always in the garage for some big, expensive repair (they were always enormous American sedans, of course.)
The whole human body as a machine just amazes me. 5 different types of sensory input. Able to reproduce with another one. A central processing unit that fits inside your skull. A complete circulatory system. A complete structural system. A complete digestive system. Able to fight off viruses. Completely mobile over various terrain. Waterproof. It’s own heating and cooling systems. Will search for and fuel itself.
And even more amazing is the fact that even though the human body is so fragile and it’s life can be taken in a split second through illness and accidents, that 6 billion exsist and can survive for decades upon decades.
shudder Thoughts like that make me really really sick to my stomach. I really don’t know why. It’s like inch-deep mildew at the bottom of your tub, except it’s all over earth.
Death. I’ve witnessed the death of both parents and several pets. It’s such a profound experience, to watch life slipping away, and to just evaporate out of a body. My mother died recently, at the age of 92, and I was amazed to experience the end of a life journey that began so long ago.
I’m also amazed at the number of things throughout her life that could have killed her, if it hadn’t been for modern medicine.
