Things I Don't Understand - Part 5
Have you ever been walking down the street behind someone who is walking slowly? You want to pass them, but, even though they are not particularly large or doing anything in particular to block the sidewalk, somehow, try as you might, you just can't get around them for some reason. How are they doing that? What is it that is preventing you from walking around them?
Physicists can talk about some really complicated, mind stretching things. They can completely dumbfound some of the most intelligent people. However, in talking about gravitation and what effects what, they will inevitably refer to things as large bodies and small bodies. All matter has gravity, but the significant effects of gravity are only exhibited in large bodies. At what point does a body go from small to large? If it's an either/or situation and not a gradient (nobody ever talks about almost having gravitational effects), that suggests that a single microgram could make the difference between gravity and no gravity. You're floating above an asteroid when a random bit of space dust hits it and suddenly you're plummeting? That can't be right, can it?
I'm on a diet. I was sitting around the house all day the other day. Out of boredom, I weighed myself several times. I watched myself drop a whole pound in the course of a day. In that time, I both ate and pooped. I did not poop excessively--roughly as much as I ate. So where is that mass going? Think about a pound of meat. That's not something that can just evaporate. That's a pound of meat. I don't recall seeing a pound of me lying around my house anywhere. Where'd it go?
Manual transmissions make sense to me. I can picture the gears and what happens to them. Automatic transmissions seem like magic. How does it know what gear it should be in? I can imagine a computer being able to control an automatic transmission, but automatics were invented before computers were small enough to fit under a hood. So how does it know? Hell, sometimes people don't know what gear to be in. How is an inanimate object supposed to know?
How is it possible to work at a perfume counter at a department store for more than an hour or so? Smell is cumulative, meaning that the chemicals that enter your nose, have a finite number of receptors to stimulate. At some point, you will cease to smell anything you are exposed to, unless you stop being exposed to it for a while. So, wouldn't the perfume ladies stop being able to smell their product after a very short time?
Mucus is not water soluble. That's what makes it useful in it's various functions (moisturizing and protecting animal tissue, making slugs icky, etc). Now it's already amazing that we can even produce the stuff at all (a water soluble creature creating a non water soluble substance), but I'm sure that's just some run of the mill chemical process. The baffling part is this : There's not only six billion snot producing humans on this planet, but thousands of other animal species that produce mucus as well, and millions of years of ancestors doing the same thing. Since mucus doesn't really dissolve or degrade like the rest of our biological effluvia does, shouldn't we be knee deep in snot right now?
Physicists can talk about some really complicated, mind stretching things. They can completely dumbfound some of the most intelligent people. However, in talking about gravitation and what effects what, they will inevitably refer to things as large bodies and small bodies. All matter has gravity, but the significant effects of gravity are only exhibited in large bodies. At what point does a body go from small to large? If it's an either/or situation and not a gradient (nobody ever talks about almost having gravitational effects), that suggests that a single microgram could make the difference between gravity and no gravity. You're floating above an asteroid when a random bit of space dust hits it and suddenly you're plummeting? That can't be right, can it?
I'm on a diet. I was sitting around the house all day the other day. Out of boredom, I weighed myself several times. I watched myself drop a whole pound in the course of a day. In that time, I both ate and pooped. I did not poop excessively--roughly as much as I ate. So where is that mass going? Think about a pound of meat. That's not something that can just evaporate. That's a pound of meat. I don't recall seeing a pound of me lying around my house anywhere. Where'd it go?
Manual transmissions make sense to me. I can picture the gears and what happens to them. Automatic transmissions seem like magic. How does it know what gear it should be in? I can imagine a computer being able to control an automatic transmission, but automatics were invented before computers were small enough to fit under a hood. So how does it know? Hell, sometimes people don't know what gear to be in. How is an inanimate object supposed to know?
How is it possible to work at a perfume counter at a department store for more than an hour or so? Smell is cumulative, meaning that the chemicals that enter your nose, have a finite number of receptors to stimulate. At some point, you will cease to smell anything you are exposed to, unless you stop being exposed to it for a while. So, wouldn't the perfume ladies stop being able to smell their product after a very short time?
Mucus is not water soluble. That's what makes it useful in it's various functions (moisturizing and protecting animal tissue, making slugs icky, etc). Now it's already amazing that we can even produce the stuff at all (a water soluble creature creating a non water soluble substance), but I'm sure that's just some run of the mill chemical process. The baffling part is this : There's not only six billion snot producing humans on this planet, but thousands of other animal species that produce mucus as well, and millions of years of ancestors doing the same thing. Since mucus doesn't really dissolve or degrade like the rest of our biological effluvia does, shouldn't we be knee deep in snot right now?
posted by John McKenna at 4:54 PM
4 Comments:
I am the wily bubble-burster.
1. We have an built-in/trained-in sense of politeness and personal space which prevents us from brushing into people as we pass them. This means there's a definite (and large) amount of space needed to pass someone on a sidewalk, and on even a moderately busy sidewalk it can take quite a while before that space (your body width + however many inches of comfort zone) appears.
2. Physicists group things like that because there's an overwhelming preponderance of things which have a lot of gravity (stars, planets), and a huge group of things which have very small gravity (people, asteroids, spaceships). There's not much available in the line of miniscule planets or gravitationally-significant people, yo-mamma-so-fat jokes aside. As an example, Pluto falls into the "middle" category, but there are few things we can observe which fit the bill.
3. Water weighs a fairly shocking 8 lbs per gallon. So if you sweat off 1/8th of a gallon of water (which is *really* easy on a warm day), you just lost a pound.
4. Automatic transmissions kind of baffle me, too. It's something to do with wheel speed (possibly using a descendant of the mechanical speed governor -- those cool whirly-ball-onna-arm thing you see in steam-era movies) and oil pressure. More oil pressure in a certain speed range means shift down. There are a lot of fluids and viscous couplings involved.
5. Perfume gets overpowering quickly. I assume those people in the industry just know what their stuff smells like. Otherwise, yeah, they must have to go take smoke breaks every so often or something to kill the overload.
6. Mucous is actually water soluble. That's how it changes consistency, with the addition or subtraction of water. In any case, when it dries out, it forms a powder (or crust, which can be turned into a powder), and I'm quite sure it's biodegradable. Fer instance, a pocket handkerchief doesn't overflow snot, even though it may be used several times before being washed.
Oh no! Ian has stolen all my wonder!
It's my Gift. The Gift of being a Jerkwad, but only online. You're welcome.
LOLOLOLOLOLO
I was gonna approach #3 by explaining that the pound of fat was converted by the body into energy that his body then used as energy to wander around his very large house with all its many rooms. (Or more likely, he was quietly sitting in a dark corner of that very large house cussing at his computer. That DOES take some amt of energy.) ;)
I love the idea of being covered in mucus...maybe THAT'S where the oil comes from!?! RIP Dinosaurs.
Finally, Ian J as THE online jerkwad - Hilarious!
LUV2LUVU2 acp
Post a Comment
<< Home