Wonder

Excerpts and quotes from "Everyday Wonders"
by Barry Evans

The premise is that we need to keep our sense of childlike wonder, and that aging often alienates us from what gives us our strength, as we become bored, disenchanted, and preocuppied with things that are artificial.

How high is up? Is the sea alive? What shape is red? When will I grow up? Where is heaven? What are the birds singing? Why does ice cream taste happy?

That was then. This is now.

Other perspectives
-Gary Larson's cow monk advice: "As you travel life's highways, don't forget to stop and eat the roses."
-"The fish is the last to see the water." -Ruth Benedict

WATER
Water is a supermolecule. In fact, the author says the entire ocean is one big molecule, connected also through pipes to lakes and such. This is because each individual water molecule, with hydrogen atoms at a 105 degree angle with their oxygen atom, has relatively strong hydrogen bonds with its neighbors. About 2/3 of a man's weight is water (less for women -a 3 day old fetus is 97% water). Water-ice comes in 9 forms. No, ice 9 will not solidify the ocean.

BREATH
Meditate on your breath:
(Some call it vipassana, or mindfulness meditation, where you simply count breaths) Every breath links us with everyone who died more than 100 years ago. The Earth's atmosphere contains 1.6x10^44 atoms; each breath contains 8x10^22 atoms. Get this: if each of these atoms was a grain of sand, you could cover the entire U.S. up to 8 stories with each breath exhaled. So, about 40 atoms, or say 20 molecules, of breath from any particular member from the past 100years ago dead, passes through our lips. In 80 years, a human breathes 200m breaths. On average, each of us breathes 15m cubic feet of air in our lifetime, equivalent to that enclosed by the Houston Astrodome. The earth's atmosphere weighs 5000 trillion tons. One ounce of air contains 1kBT atoms.

What is breathing? When co2 builds up in our bloodstream to a critical level every few seconds, we inhale. The underwater record for holding your breath is x, by y.

For peace, happiness, harmony, love, understanding, beauty, truth, and goodness, make each breath signify and remind you of nonjudgmental comforting relaxation, like a childhood teddy bear. That way you can access at any given moment your inner calm, when the moment requires.

HEMICENTRISM
The world is Hemicentric.
Maps can just as easily have south on top, as north, (and some do, in the southern hemisphere).
Clockwise is the direction of the sundial, which goes the other direction down south.
Compass needles would have the distinctive red color on the south pointing end instead.
Constellations would connect the dots differently so that everything wouldn't be upside down.
The seasons are opposite down south, so Winter would be Summer, and vice versa.
Of course, the earth's magnetic field reverses every 100,000 years. Those poor magnetotactic bacteria! (they don't have brains, but they swim down because they have magnetized cells in their bodies that orient them safely downward).
The book says the art of navigation would have been different, not arisen as fast as it did, if the world were upside down, as there is no South Star, like there is Polaris, the North Star.
The author even says the 90% predilection for right-handedness may have been reversed if civilization had arisen south of the equator, although he's just getting a bit nuts, perhaps.

TIME
In different countries and cultures, a "week" is anything from 4-19 days. Our lives last 2-3 billion seconds. The universe is 15 billion years old. A fly has a reaction time of 1/100th of a second. In any average second,
-a man's testicles manufacture over 2k sperm.
The human genome, of which each sperm carries (half?) is equivalent to 6 billion bits, or 750 megabytes of information. (A Harvard molecular biologist sees a future in which we all carry our genome, on disk, with us to the dr.'s office).
-Eight million blood cells in a normal, healthy, human body die every second.
-A quartz crystal in a digital wristwatch vibrates 32,768x.
-What is the amount spent every second by the world for it's militaries? ($32k in '93)
-How much interest is accrued on the national debt? ($7k in '93)

-The 15B y.o. Universe is, more accurately, half a million trillion seconds old (or young, if you want to see the glass as half empty). -For life and mind, scientists think you only need hydrogen to make helium to make the heavier elements of carbon, oxygen, silicon, and iron. This simply requires time for stars to whip these elements up. -The human brain has x neurons. (1/100th of a trillion). 10B, I guess.-If all of time since the Big Bang were a timeline the size of the Washington Monument (555 feet and 5 and 1/8 inches) all of recorded history (the last 10k years) would only be the thickness of a postage stamp.

Our eyes process images at about 10 images per second at night (50 during the day). A bee processes 300. Almost all mammals have a natural lifespan of between 600-1200 million heartbeats, averaging out at nearly a billion (consider that an elephant weighs as much as 25 million times as much as some shrews). Mammals take about 1 breath for every 4 heartbeats. Humans, therefore, live about 3 times as long as we "should." We have what is called an eternal youth, a long adolescence. A cat's heart beats 200 beats per minute.

Odds of us (and some of us are pretty odd)
-Normally, only 1 out of 5,000,000 spermatozoa penetrates an egg during conception (which makes you wonder about the scientists doing the counting). -None of us would be here if evolution hadn't taken the turn it did upon the KT (Cretaceous-Tertiary) impact of the Manhattan Island sized asteroid that hit our planet 65 million years ago, wiping out dinosaurs and opening up niches for the mammals that evolved into us. Scientists, however, say dinosaurs were dwindling with or without the impact: 61 species 6 million years before the impact and 18 species 2 million years before, the book says. (I thought there were alot more types of dinosaurs). It was a 6 mile diameter asteroid/meteorite that left a 150 mile diameter crater. The resulting extinction event eliminated 2/3 of the earth's species, including all land animals over 50 pounds, and, in the ocean, 90% of marine invertebrates. Madonna sings about lucky star.

Creativity
-Linus Pauling, the only person to have received two unshared Nobel prizes, one in chemistry and the other (more appreciated, he says) in peace, (the guy who recommends up to 300x the US RDA of vitamin C, for health and longevity) said that there are 10m chemical substances described in the literature, with only about 1500 chemical nuclei. On good ideas, he said "If you want to get a good idea, you've got to have a lot of ideas, and throw away the bad ones." Sometimes you might work on a single idea for 30 years.

The Earth
The central core is hotter than the sun's surface. The entire core is about 5000 miles across, compared to a total diameter of about 8000 miles.

Quotes
-Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves? -Friedrich Nietzsche
-"In modern industrialized society the pace of our lives is determined largely by economic considerations rather than by the rhythms of human life or natural growing things...The average human being seems to move from task to task with almost no time." -Patricia Carrington
-Do you know on what day of the week you were born? -Barry Evans
-Answer this question with a "yes" or "no". Will your next word be "no"?
-"Hey out there- is that you reading me, or is it someone else?"
-The creative process cannot be summoned at will. It occurs (most readily) when relaxed and the imagination/mind can wander freely.
-The larger the island of knowledge, the larger the shoreline of wonder. -Ralph Stockman
-They are ill discoverers that think there is no land when they can see nothing but sea. -Francis Bacon
-There is a distance incomparable between the things men imagine by natural reason and those which illuminated men behole by contemplation. -Thomas a Kempis
-A pile of rocks ceases to be a pile of rocks when somebody contemplates it with the idea of a cathedral in mind. -Antoine de Saint-Exupery
-What is called understanding is often no more than a state where one has become familiar with what one does not understand.-Edward Teller
-If the eye could see the demons that people the universe, existence would be impossible. -Talmud
-We are born princes and the civilizing process makes us all frogs. -Eric Bern
-We all agree your theory is crazy; what divides us is whether it is crazy enough to be correct. -Niels Bohr (commenting on a proposal regarding the ultimate nature of matter).
-The brain is a 3 lb mass you can hold in your hand that can conceive of a universe a hundred billion light years across. -Marion Diamond
-Live this life as if you live eternally, and live this life as if you die tomorrow -Prophet Mohammed
-If you are not happy here and now, you never will be. -Taisen Deshimaru
-In order to be utterly happy the only thing necessary is to refrain comparing this moment with other moments in the past. -Andre Gide
-The happiest person is the one who thinks the most interesting thoughts. -Timothy Dwight
-Pain will come, just like pleasure. Hate will come, just like love. And when both are accepted, unaffected by the mind, then there will be peace. -Baba Hari Das
-The bible contains more than 400 references to the number 7.
-Get a job you love and you'll never have to work again
-Mere existence is so much better than nothing, that one would rather exist even in pain than not exist. -Samuel Johnson
-The question to ask is not whether you are a success or a failure, but whether you are a learner or a non-learner. -Benjamin Barber
-Doing science is like growing a garden. You sow seeds, you have to water them, you've got to tend them, and when you bring in the harvest, you have to think of next year. And not everybody gets magnificent flowers and fruits. -Phillip Morrison
-The universe is simply one of those things that happen from time to time. -Edward Tyron
-Man errs so long as he is striving. -Goethe
-Doubt that which you would most believe. -Robert Scott Root-Bernstein