Consider deep space and the following category of image will be noticeably without representation among the scenes you call to mind: the standing-on-its-surface view of an alphanumeric-labeled planet. A Google image search confirms that the visuals we conjure are largely a reflection of the types of images satellites have dutifully transmitted back to Earth for…
The concept of opposites is described to children as representing the maximum dissimilarity possible between two things that share a relation—hot and cold are opposites sharing a relation in temperature, approaching and receding are opposites sharing a relation in proximity over time, etc. So when some of these children become adults and find themselves contemplating…
If you pour a cup of tomato sauce into a 50 lb bag of chili powder and thoroughly mix, the spiciness of the combination will be very nearly equal to the spiciness of chili powder alone. This exemplifies one of three regimes which, together, I believe, account for all action–>effect pairs. I’ll call these regimes…
Water droplets suspended in the air congregate on the surface of a newly towel-dried body. Taking a shower in a humid environment without using the bathroom fan is asking for sticky clothes or bedsheets, whichever you might be slipping into after the clean. Getting into bed fully clothed, like the main character of my favorite…
If you’re drinking water, it feels like a liquid. Alternately, if you managed to escape through an emergency exit the cabin of a doomed ocean-crossing airplane but forgot to locate an unsupplied parachute, the calm waves feel more like cement when you land. Let’s take it to eleven: a sea otter floating on his back…
Priceless inquiry overheard in the workplace: do coffee, chocolate, and cocaine all come from the same bean? How appropriate that it was a Central America native in an adjacent cubicle who set the sorely misinformed employee straight. Being put on hold after dialing a military base building phone number, the soundtrack is a cross between…
Why is it so satisfying to break the ice layer that forms over puddles during cold nights? It’s like Amélie shoving her hand into a bin of beans. Maybe it’s the fun of breaking molecular bonds with the clean knife precision of cracks. It’s also the rarity of opportunity. The visual, auditory, and tactile senses…
I would like to see an object the size of an uncooked tapioca pearl with so great a density that its weight on earth is 10 tons. If it were placed on the ground, could one watch it sink and disappear as if the soil were quicksand? Catching the speck, as though it were a…
Unfortunately I can’t take credit for this gem of a hypothetical idea, but I was lucky enough to be in the discussion when it came up at a party a couple months ago. Like most hypothetical ideas, this one requires that an assumption be made. However, it’s not a very difficult assumption to make. All…
It’s a little frustrating that mirrors confuse me. I think that the perceived distance between you and your reflection is twice the actual distance between you and the glass, but I’m not sure.
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