You don't need to be an 'investor' to invest in Singletrack: 6 days left: 95% of target - Find out more
Give me three things you find amazing:
For me this includes,
1. How we can recognise hundreds, perhaps thousands of people just from their voice
2. How I can recognise hundreds, perhaps thousands of people from behind just from their shape and gait
3. That light from the Sun spreads out in all directions, a small fraction of this lands on the moon and reflects off in ‘all’ directions 250 000 miles and I can see the moon from the tiny amount that passes into my eye.
That we can communicate through a palm sized device.
That my daughters are both asleep.
That I'm still riding and enjoying MTBs 30 years after starting.
That (most) humans can stand on two legs, run, jump, spin etc without falling over. Mega zillions of computing power and two legged robots are still clumsy things and we do it without actually thinking about it all by feedback and reflexes.
With the blink of an eye, you finally see the light
That, of all the available space within the atmosphere around the earth, flies still want to occupy that same, tiny space my eyeballs occupy.
A 1:1 scale of a 5 Earth-mass back hole.
https://twitter.com/jaredhead/status/1177737536040390657?s=09
About 100 trillion neutrinos pass through our bodies every second.
😳
Dont need three amazing things, just the one is enough
Plants germinating. Fossils. To me, absolutely wonderfully awesome.
And I'll add; a child's ability to learn.
I'm a science teacher. Some days are really good.
Everything is basically just empty space.
Quantum entanglement.
Art.
"It's not called That's Amazing, it's called That's Incredible"
-every Australian who watched the Fast Show
we do it without actually thinking about it all by feedback and reflexes.
Also amazing is that the signals from a single nerve fiber are too variable to allow any kind of precise muscle control - throwing a ball and hitting a target for example requires much more precise timing than our nerves provide. However, when multiple nerves are used and the signals averaged, the averaged signal is precise enough for fine muscular control. Remember that this evolved basically through trial and error over tens of millions of years, it wasn't designed in any deliberate way.
“It’s not called That’s Amazing, it’s called That’s Incredible”
-every Australian who watched the Fast Show
Things I find amazing
1. That someone should try to be a smartarse and mess up like that^. Get off my show, mate.
2. That's Amazing, with me Carl Hooper
3. Earthquakes
Similar to others, the scale of space. Voyager 1 will pass by a star in 40,000 years, and voyager 2 will pass by Sirius in around 300,000 years, and these are our near neighbours in the universe.
That we probably all get the earliest stages of cancer every week, but our immune systems kill it off.
Ref ‘That I’m still riding and enjoying MTBs 30 years after starting.‘
I find it amazing that after 36 years of riding MTBs I still can’t bunny hop or jump properly!
Proper list is so so big!
What people have done and can do, Man on the moon (And that was a while ago), technology, modern bikes, medical progress, lack of progress in politics, people, the world, our Latest understanding of the universe
1) That stuff you stand on at the beach can be turned into windows
2) The sky at night is dark (it shouldn't be, really)
3) The smell behind dog's ears
That humans can sense on the quantum level ( physicist please correct me if I am wrong here on the science bit)
A single photon can act either as a wave or a particle ( so is in that magical physics bit of quantum uncertainty). The eye can detect a single photon.
That for me to be sitting here reading everything above every single thing that has happened since the beginning of the universe had to happen exactly as it did when it did. Any variation in that and something about this thread would be different.
that what I have just typed has changed the entire future of the universe
that Stw is so concerned for my privacy
Amazing but slightly scary in that we just might be the only example of intelligent life in the universe. Given that the earth is 4.6 billion years old, the earliest forms of life first appeared around 3.5 billion years, but yet intelligent life in the form of humans only appeared 200,000 years ago. So it probably takes, on average 3.5 billion years for intelligent life to evolve, which makes the chances of it happening at all extremely slim given how violent the universe is and the chances of life having all the right conditions and their planet being stable enough over all that time to allow the evolutionary process to work.
We very well might be all alone in this universe after all. In fact probably are. Life is precious.
There are more bacteria in your gut than cells in your body.
Roughly half of the nitrogen in the protein in your body has got there via an industrial process invented by Fritz Harber in 1908.
1: Close to me there are the remains of a 12th century church. I was always impressed that anything could last that long, until a friend pointed out that the nearby oak is at least 200 years older. A living thing! It was mature when the church was first built.
2: That we can ride on two wheels. Think about it - surely it's impossible?
3: I have a device in my bag. It contains a huge library of books, music and movies. With a few small accessories I travel everywhere with a sound system and tv that would have seemed very respectable a generation ago. It delivers my newspaper to me everyday, and I can use it to watch live football beamed from the other side of the world. It can do video conferencing for work, and lets me show my mum how things are in my part of the world. When I'm lost it tells me where I am and how to get home - even when I'm in the jungle ...
... ah, you know all this. I could go on for hours. We take these things for granted, but they are mini-miracles.
Hand to hand coordination, throwing stuff up in the air and being able to catch them without looking (so many calculations being done, but not even thought about)
Cheese
The sky at night is dark (it shouldn’t be, really)
Actually, it isn't. There are so many stars out there that the sky is completely covered in them. It's just that some are so far away that their light hasn't reached us yet, and by the time it does some of the ones we see now will have gone out.
MTB unicyclists.
Cannie believe that no-one has mentioned why bicycles stay upright 😉
That we can ride on two wheels. Think about it – surely it’s impossible?
Cannie believe that no-one has mentioned why bicycles stay upright
Yep, nothing to do with how clever we are, the bike can do it on its own.
TJ if I remember right it's 6photons to trigger the cis-retinal switch switch but a quick search can't find it.
So that the whole process from sight to cognition through physical dexterity to searching the internet. Is all astounding and that's such a little thing.
If yuo stripped all the blood vessels out of a human body they would stretch halfway to the moon when put end to end
Every 7 years all the cells in your body have been replaced by new ones ( except ova???)
A woman is born with all the ova ( eggs) she will ever have
edit - thats probably gonna get picked up by somone as well 🙂
I'm often more amazed by the stuff that seems relativley simple for such a clever species but we can't seem to manage it.
e.g. We have the technology to send people to other planets but not to paint outside when it's raining.
an industrial process invented by Fritz Harber
Sorry to be “that guy”, but Fritz Haber made the breakthrough in a lab; some credit should go to Carl Bosch for making it n industrial-scale process.
Back on topic - Magnets & magnetism. Plus the background noise of the universe (as per Klunk’s post).
the top end mac pro has more processing power than our entire studio (25) had 10 years ago.
That (most) humans can stand on two legs, run, jump, spin etc without falling over. Mega zillions of computing power and two legged robots are still clumsy things
The latest video of the Boston Dynamics humanoid robot is pretty impressive though, I'd say it's less clumsy than me at what it's doing :p
Amazing but slightly scary in that we just might be the only example of intelligent life in the universe. Given that the earth is 4.6 billion years old, the earliest forms of life first appeared around 3.5 billion years, but yet intelligent life in the form of humans only appeared 200,000 years ago. So it probably takes, on average 3.5 billion years for intelligent life to evolve, which makes the chances of it happening at all extremely slim given how violent the universe is and the chances of life having all the right conditions and their planet being stable enough over all that time to allow the evolutionary process to work.
We very well might be all alone in this universe after all. In fact probably are. Life is precious.
I was always fascinated with Aliens as a Kid, I still am.
I read a few books and tried to get my young mind around just how many solar systems there are in our galaxy and how many galaxies there are in the Universe and how, in theory there could be more universes outsides of ours than grains of sand on our planet. If I think hard about it, I get a nose bleed and faint.
At that point I was amazed we'd never been contacted by life outside our own planet. Any day now surely?
As I got older I began to understand the scale though, we look for planets that could support life, which I always think is a bit short sighted as we're looking for places that could support life as we understand it, but hey, you've got to start somewhere I guess. We don't know if you can travel faster than light, but it's a bit of thing to over come and some of the distances mean that if we were contacted some way today, I'd be long dead before the sender would get a reply, unless they transmitted a way to do it, even then it could take decades to understand it. It seemed less likely.
Finally though, it's not the size, or the distances that explain why we've not had 'first contact' yet. It's the time.
As you say the earth is 4.5 billions years old, Humans have only been around for 200k years (I think the term 'Intelligent' is open for debate. So Humans have only existed for 0.004% of the Earth's History (I may have missed a decimal place). Human's first managed to leave the Earth's atmosphere 58 years ago. So in all of Human history, only in the last 0.02% of it.
More importantly we first transmitted information via radio waves, probably the only way we could have theoretically received a signal from another planet in about 1900, that represents 0.000002% of the history of Earth.
We don't share a timeline with other planets, there could have been the greatest species to exist just 0.000001% of the existence of Earth ago, they could have travelled past earth bombarding us with radio signals looking for a reply and we'd have never known, just 1% of Earth's time from now (45 million years) a completely different species could be excavating Afan for fossilised pedal reflectors.
I still dream that I might live long enough to witness proof of life on other planets, even if it's a Bacteria a light year away.
I also hope I see Humans on Mars, I know it's only 10 years away, but it's been 10 years away since Apollo, the last credible plan I heard about was looking at Manned Mission orbiting Mars in 2030, I'm expecting to check-out sometime in the 60s (the 2060s) but I'm not massively confident I'll see it, the Apollo mission really did take the combined will of a Super Power to pull off, the world is different now, those who care about knowledge know all too well the environmental costs of such a mission, those who don't, are too busy caring about what's right in front of them at that very moment, to get excited about something that might happen decades from now.
How many ancestors we have:
Parents - 2
Grandparents - 4
Great Grandparents - 8
2nd Grandparents - 16
3rd Grandparents - 32
.
.
.
18th Grandparents - 1,048,576
Etc. Etc.
Hand to hand coordination, throwing stuff up in the air and being able to catch them without looking (so many calculations being done, but not even thought about)
That's kinda the one that has always amazed me - we can walk along a beach and pick up a random object - a large stone, a small stone, a ball, a frisbee, a piece of driftwood, a crab, a piece of seaweed etc and we can calculate what effort and trajectory would be required to throw each individual item a certain distance.
@P-Jay - I think it was Brian Cox that tried to liken the chance of us finding intelligent life would be like two people throwing a ball and expecting them to collide - not attempting to throw them *at* each other or even throw them at the same time - just simply two people throwing balls.
How many ancestors we have:
How many ancestors we share with each other, is perhaps a bit more accurate.
Amazing but slightly scary in that we just might be the only example of intelligent life in the universe. Given that the earth is 4.6 billion years old, the earliest forms of life first appeared around 3.5 billion years, but yet intelligent life in the form of humans only appeared 200,000 years ago. So it probably takes, on average 3.5 billion years for intelligent life to evolve, which makes the chances of it happening at all extremely slim given how violent the universe is and the chances of life having all the right conditions and their planet being stable enough over all that time to allow the evolutionary process to work.
We very well might be all alone in this universe after all. In fact probably are. Life is precious.
I've always thought given the sheer scale of the observable universe - some 10 billion galaxies containing 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (1 billion trillion) stars, then the chances of life arising don't have to be very high at all to still see a significant number of intelligent civilisations. In reality life is probably inevitable in many places. It would actually be even more amazing if there wasn't any other life given this number of chances.
What is very highly unlikely though are two intelligent civilisations arising within a reasonable contact distance of each other. There is a LOT of empty space out there with vast distances between stars and galaxies. So they will all be pondering the same question as we do. Are we alone?
Yes, The Infinite Monkey Cage podcast is good for stuff like this.
Re the number of shared ancestors we have ISTR that in one epsisode they said that if you are in a room with a reasonable sized audience, say 75+ and you ask everyone to shake hands with the person next to them then everyone has just been introduced to their 5th cousin*
*numbers based on my memory, exact numbers may be slightly different but i'm not too far off.
if you have 30 people in a room its highly likely 2 of them share a birthday. Probability and statistics confuse me
Re the number of shared ancestors we have ISTR that in one epsisode they said that if you are in a room with a reasonable sized audience, say 75+ and you ask everyone to shake hands with the person next to them then everyone has just been introduced to their 5th cousin*
Unless you're in the home end at an Ayr United game in which case it's 2nd cousin maximum.
What is very highly unlikely though are two intelligent civilisations arising within a reasonable contact distance of each other
Our universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding,
In all of the directions it can whiz;
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth;
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere out in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth!
Well, Stoner has blown my mind today.
I'm amazed by biological diversity - all the thousands of different types of bird that have ever evolved from thumb-sized hummingbirds to ostriches (not to mention extinct giants). All different shapes, sizes, colours. If we are the only place in our galaxy with life, it has at least taken the opportunity to go crazy. It makes me sad that the planet is becoming less diverse and wonderful year by year.
That we are made of elements created in the hearts of exploding stars.
Every time one of us takes a drink of water it is that very same water that has been on earth since it's first days, endlessly regurgitated.
So I could have drunk Hitler's piss.
How many ancestors we have:
Parents – 2
Grandparents – 4
Great Grandparents – 8
2nd Grandparents – 16
3rd Grandparents – 32
.
.
.
18th Grandparents – 1,048,576
Etc. Etc.
That does assume they're all unique and well, I've been to Blackpool, I think it's safe to assume that number is smaller for some people 😉
Global Population though, madness isn't it? We worry about a million things when it comes to climate change, cars, ships, fossil fuels, renewables etc, but those things pale in comparison to population growth.
The old "Pub Fact" that there are more people alive now than dead is nonsense (in 2012 there were 7bn people on earth and about 107bn deaths) but Population growth is still staggering. When Cleopatra was alive there were about 180 million People on the planet, By the time Victoria was on the Throne and Lincoln was in the White House the global population was about 1bn and most people ate food that was produced within walking distance of where they lived and life expectancy was about 60 (well if you survived birth).
By the time of the Great War we'd doubled to 2Bn.
By the time I was born in 77 we'd doubled again to 4Bn.
By the end of the Millennium we'd added another 2Bn to 6.
7Bn 8 years ago, we'll reach 8 in a few years, double what it was when I was born.
If you look at it on a Graph from the year 1AD it's a short ramp that quickly becomes a near vertical line.