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What are some common things that you find to be amazing?
Personally I think stoves are badass. It's this big metal box with multiple spouts, which shoots up the refined corpse of dinosaurs and other beasts with just a turn of a knob, with a spark that shoots out to create a never-ending flame if you so choose. All in a matter of three seconds.
Life. It's absolutely mind-boggling. A single-celled organism is so complex that we do not even remotely understand it. Each cell contains organelles made up of molecules that interact through overlapping biological systems that can be regulated on so many levels. Once you get to the multicellular level, it becomes even more insane. I am a neuroscientist--when I think about how each neuron in your brain is doing all sorts of homeostatic processes that we don't understand fully, it really scares me. How are we going to be able to understand information storage (memory) on top of that? The answer is to use reductionist systems, but you lose so much detail in that. Anyway, life is amazing.
F, dude. F.
I was going to say, the placebo effect. I think people under rate it so much! And this goes to your point. The body is so incredible and amazing, we don't give it as much credit as it deserves!
I was watching One Strange Rock the other day, and they were talking about all the bacteria in/on the body and how we have to consider that for space travel. The mental defined boundaries that we've created really don't exist. We're so connected to everything around us.
https://twitter.com/daisyowl/status/841802094361235456?lang=en
I'd like to pessimistically add in that if all you can say about your code is "it works" then you've reached level 0.
Don't forget, we had to flatten it and put lightning inside first.
The way a computer works. Shifting a bunch of electrical charges in such an impossibly precise way that we taught a flat sheet of sand and metal how to think. Blows my mind.
My car never ceases to amaze me. I can walk outside, start a series of timed explosions in a metal box on wheels, and then get across town at speeds that would have made my ancestors weep in fear and envy.
I feel similarly, except it also translates into fear. Those metal boxes kill and do it all the time, and we're expected to tame them in order to be a member of society in most places. Horrifying.
That right there is why the idea of self-driving cars both excites and saddens me. I'd love to see us living in a world in which car accidents are a thing of the past, but I'd really miss the act of driving.
Bubble wrap. Entertainment for hours for people like me who are easily amused.
Any kind of weather, but snow in particular: A soft blanket that mutes the world, makes everything look beautiful, and it invites creativity (snowmen, igloos) and leisure activities. It even makes walking more fun by the sound your footsteps make.
"mutes the world"
I like that.
Blood transfusions! The fact that we can take blood out of one person with a tube, put it in a bag, and then cart it somewhere else to put it into somebody else with another tube? And it WORKS? We can fix people like this? Brilliant.
Fortunately I have never needed a transfusion but I have given quite a few. It blows my mind every. time.
The even crazier thing is that there might be molecules in young animals' blood that restore function in older animals--literally a scientific justification for vampirism haha.
I haven't heard of this, but it sounds cool! Though I imagine you'd have to process the blood a lot if you were going to drink it vampire-style. I think the iron would make you sick.
Yeah, the preferred method is definitely transfusion. There are some clinical trials going on right now to reverse age-related cognitive decline in elderly patients using young adult, human blood.
Fascinating! Thank you for sharing.
Here's an article (https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2017/11/clinical-trial-finds-blood-plasma-infusions-for-alzheimers-safe.html) describing some of the early progress in case you want to read more!
P.S. Does any know where to find formatting tips?
The fact that there is an ASTONISHING number of stars in the Milky Way that we can't see, because it's all blocked by a massive dust cloud. If the center of the Milky Way were a light bulb, the dust surrounding it is like a lamp shade, and we're on the other side of the lamp shade.
Fermentation is my big amazement currently, especially with wild yeasts - it's so nuts these little guys are just floating around in the air or living in the ground, waiting to eat your sugars and turn them into alcohol.
I recently had a batch of kombucha turn "sick" and get slimy and viscous, which is just from a type of wild yeast that got in! You can age it out of beer but I just chucked the kombucha.
Have you tried Belgian Lambic beer? It's spontaneously fermented with naturally-occurring, local, airborne yeast. I once visited a tower a wide flattish tray in the top of it open to the air. You pour in your (I guess "mash"?) and it ferments from the air. The cherry one is great.
Rain, it has the power to make people happy , sad or a weird mix of both (melancholic)
Small flying insects.
They have incredibly small yet complex brains capable of navigating three dimensional space while identifying food vs foe vs fuck. Ounce for ounce, their brains must be 1000 times smarter than ours.
Also, how they are able to power wings for flight in such a small body also blows my mind.
Watching a bumblebee turns me into a humblebee.
I recently watched a video explaining what life is like on such small scales. I remember them describing how moving through air for the must be like swimming. I forget the source. Perhaps I saw it on sci show? It discussed why small animals don't die from long falls and why larger animals aren't imprisoned by bodies of water.
Edit: kurzgesagt! link here https://youtu.be/f7KSfjv4Oq0
I am a huge, huge fan of geeking out about well-insulated containers. I really enjoyed thermodynamics and feel that I have a pretty good grasp of it, but I still feel a huge sense of child-like joy every time I open my insulated cup and there's still ice in it after x hours in the sun.
I don't think it's refined dinosaur juice, read the second paragraph here.
I find a lot of things amazing, but one of the things I find the most amazing is thinking about how men figured out how to do things in the past and how they keep figuring out things in the present. For example, think about how a man figured out that cooked meat tasted better than raw meat. Cooked meat is very common nowadays, but someone had to realize that putting it over the fire for a short period of time, and not more than that, made it taste much better.
The internet. I think it's fascinating how I could communicate with someone on the other side of the world with a click of a button, get information on basically anything I want, and have an endless stream of entertainment if I need it. It's amazing how this one thing can bring the whole world together to collaborate.
Alright OP I'm gonna have to add on to your stove comment because I honestly think ovens are both amazing and terrifying. It's this box that goes up to a few HUNDRED degrees C and you put food in there to cook it!? Opening an oven always feels so dangerous with the blast of heat and leaning over the door, and we put them in every house!
The sheer size of the universe amazes me to no end. We rationalize it, mostly, I think by just ignoring it, but our solar system is utterly gigantic on a human scale. And our solar system is sooo small compared to sooo many other objects and systems out there.
The vast scales and energies involved in cosmic events will never cease to amaze me.
This is actually an idea for a project I have – creating an online repository of media that depict the scale of things in the universe. There are so many cool infographics, videos, and novelty websites out there that explore scale in different physical contexts, and I wish there were a single place to explore them all.
Out of all of them, this is still my favorite depiction of scale in the universe.
That video is definitely one of the better depictions I've seen. It would definitely be cool to have a single repository of media like that; there are so many awesome bits and pieces scattered around the internet.
The fact that the smartphone I’m typing this on is more powerful than the computers that took men to the moon. And that it’s considered slow. Tech advances really fast.
Everytime I hop in a plane that is thousands of pounds and it takes off and somehow managed not to fall despite harsh conditions.
Always one wrong turn from an untimely tumble and yet it stays up.