h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I went to see "Uncaged Monkeys" at the Manchester Apollo, a show with Robin Ince, Ben Goldacre, Brian Cox and Simon Singh, among others. At the end there was a Twitter-driven Q&A session. I tweeted the above question, but possibly because I have no idea how Twitter works and possibly because there were better questions, it didn't get asked. So, I'm asking it here and now, to you lot.

What is the weirdest, most unusual, most "wtf?"-generating thing you know, for a fact, to be true?

For me, it's the fact that I'm the remnant of a supernova explosion, and so is my mum, and everyone else, and pretty much everything I can see. It boggles my mind whenever I remember it.

The fact that every cell in your body is replaced at some point, so that you're literally not the same person you were X years ago.

The fact that white light is composed of all the colors of the visible rainbow.

If I look out of this window here I can see trees and plants and hedges; a greenhouse, a shed, other houses, a church tower; soil, a bird-bath, birds - and everything that I can see, even the sky itself, is the way that it is because of life. And everything that is alive is essentially the same, we are all related, bugs birds and businessmen alike.

That matter has become conscious of itself.

Gotta admit that Effers makes a good point about self-awareness.

But I came here to say 'OSMOSIS', the miracle of anti-gravity and
a denial of basic fluid dynamics.

It flies in face of the known facts that water flows downhill and
that water finds its own level.

Osmosis, a wondrously counter-intuitive phenomenon that is perhaps
best observed as rising damp.


~jwf~

I think going against instinct, avalanche go sideways, rip, go with flow or if you can go sideways, not that I have been caught in either situation but as examples

same with braking, spitting cliffs, steering, those situations that command an instinctual response but demand with one of best practise

you get better at it

I don't think this counts as most, but it still seems a bit weird knowing the rocks beneath our feet is made up largely of oxygen. You're so used to thinking of it as a gas.

that matter is a function of speed rather than mass

Rising damp isn't osmosis, it's capillary action.

Perhaps not on the scale of the other things mentioned, but I love how difficult it is for the human brain to deal with probabilities. The Monty Hall problem, the 23 people-birthday paradox, even games of Crown and Anchor. I love them all. And I understand them too.

But I love how even simple probability problems still trip me up. I was playing a game the other day where I was rolling three dice and had to roll a 1 or a 5 for a win. I thought 'rolling a 1 or 5 on one die is a 1/3 chance, therefore 1/3 + 1/3 + 1/3 makes this a certainty'. Until I rolled two 4s and a 2, anyway. Sometimes it's not enough simply to do the easy maths...

B

Waves are actually water moving up and down, not in a lateral direction.

Fluffy: What do you mean exactly?

That there is a huge amount of water on Earth but in fact in relation to the rest of the planet there is little.

http://asterisk.apod.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=28555

Xanatic: what do i mean by "that matter is a function of speed rather than mass"?

sorry, i looked at that after posting it an thought maybe it wasnt so clear

i meant:

that our physical universe, including this computer keypad and my hands typing on it, is comprised more of space between stuff than of the stuff itself...

specifically, an atom
which is comprised of tiny things moving very fast around another tiny thing

picture an airplane propeller in motion
or a spoked wheel

I think I know what you mean. However if the electrons stopped moving around the nucleus, they would still repel each other and those of other atoms. Matter is defined more by this repulsion than by speed.

oh

(goes off to think about that)

oh, btw mubeta

no matter what, it always boils down to one thing
it's always a 50/50 chance
either it happens or it doesn't

ON the topic of rolling dice.

I love the way it is possible to roll a dice millions of times, every time get a 1...

And unless someone cheated, it is still considered "random"


1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1... ad infinum ... still random!

That we're hurtling through space at a phenomenally high speed - and that everything else in the sky we can see is, too.

I even find it staggeringly counter-intuitive that the things we see in the sky are actually massive bodies hanging in nothingness. There are certain stages of a lunar eclipse that, because of the colour and the nature of the light, you can see that the moon is really three-dimensional. And no matter how much I already know that, it's always breath-taking when you can actually *see* it with the naked eye.

>> Rising damp isn't osmosis, it's capillary action. <<

Good point. Thanks for the correction.

I have looked up both terms in Wiki and only now realise
that I was never able to get my ahead around either back
in my high school days, probably because both phenomena
are beyond normal human perception and as such are very
counter-intuitive.

And I learned a new word: meniscus.


~jwf~