Whoa

What moves you? For some it's visual art like paintings and drawings, for some it's the written word in a book or poem. Others stop and gawk at amazing feats of engineering. For my nerdy self it's things like physics, evolution, and psychology.

Focus: What makes you say 'whoa' and why?

 

One post. You people are dead inside.

As much as I love literature, they're just stories, albeit ones with a deep emotional connection. Some will make you question your beliefs, but not exactly the same thing as knowledge of how the world works. There have been a few science books that blew my mind. Sperm Wars by Robin Baker and The Agile Gene by Matt Ridley are intense evolutionary theory reads. In a way they queered my opinions on human behavior (when I read them 10 years ago). But the two that made me absolutely lose my shit were Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time and its follow-up, The Grand Design. Perpetuation of energy, endlessly changing forms. Newtonian and Einstein theory. Meta physics, astrophysics, string theory. Space time. Elementary particles. Blackholes. All of that and their associations to create time, space, life systems. To even try and sum the works up would take a page. What Hawking did was make a palatable crash course in physics for the sort of layman (they are not casual reads). He completely turned me on my head. The absolute enormity of the universe and its secrets, the mathematical machinations of exactly how it all works is painful. The reality is we are Small. Pessimistically, nothing but a dust spec in a never ending, eternal vacuum.

Cosmos on FOX continues that feeling for me. What makes that show so beautiful, not just the gorgeous cinematography, is the value it places on our world, on learning, history, and curiosity. No bullshit, I get misty eyed every episode. It's such a wonderful love letter to human achievement and, likewise, the wonder of the universe. I imagine some kid in a run down area of town channel surfing and the images on the screen make him stop for a moment. Kid continues to look for a few minutes, then they're hooked. Hooked for life.

Look at the best astronomy photos for 2014. Tell me you don't want to get up in that.


Obligatory:

 

Trees blow my mind. It's incredible to me how a living creature can grow to be so old, so huge, and so resilient. The trees themselves can be very pretty, with broad shapes and branches forming intricate fractals. But on top of that, the most amazing thing to me is how ordinary trees can produce such beautiful lumber. Cutting them open can be like unearthing a treasure chest. The variety of colors, grain patterns, and vibrant figure types that can be found in just one tree subspecies seems infinite. We don't even know why and how all of it occurs... between different climates, soil, growing conditions, etc. theres still mysteries. The lumber can also be just as functional as it is attractive, with durability and strength in spades.

To illustrate, this wood came out of relatively ordinary claro walnut trees growing along boulevards in Oregon.

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Granted, that is some very rare stuff but if you saw one of those trees growing you probably wouldn't think much of it at all. It's one of the primary reasons I love woodworking, the fact that I get to use this amazing stuff in my projects and bring it to life again as I turn a wood block into a 3D sculpture.

So if you see me gawking at a huge maple or gnarly old walnut tree, I'm not just looking at the surface of the tree- I'm looking deeper.

 

I love the show for proving how insignificant we are. If you think we are special on Earth, consider this:

- 150 billion galaxies
- Hundreds of millions of stars in each galaxy minimum
- A possible solar system capable of sustaining life for each and every star that exists
- Billions of new stars are born in stellar nurseries every minute

...and here WE are, next to a small star in a mid-sized galaxy, living on a planet we live on a small fraction of.... only some of the time. We are not special compared to what's out there, I refuse to believe we are it.

....and yet, millions believe in a fucking geocentric universe where WE are all that's special, the sun is a magic lamp the spins around us, the moon is an enchanted night light, and stars are 3000 miles away. Too stupid to even contemplate, and these people are allowed to VOTE.

 

Sequoias and Redwoods live thousands of years and have their own mini-Eco systems lofting on their huge branches. The problem is trees are too easy to poach. Hit it with an axe, pour a little poison in the wound and it's done. Asshole who build pot farms in forests do this: they'll poison some trees in the fall and come back in the spring and they'll be as dead as Katherine Heigl's career, either fallen over on their own or easy to cut down.

These things are the reason we can breathe, kids. If you cut one down at least plant a couple babies to replace it.

 

Seems to me Crown that most if not all forms of life are fragile... they all have their weaknesses. Also you don't need any poisions, just strip or cut a ring of bark from around the circumference of the tree at the base and it'll kill it the same.

Trees can get "cancers" per se but not exactly like animals. Plant cells can mutuate and grow abnormally just like animal cells but since the trees lack a central organ system or the like, the mutuations typically don't affect the tree as a whole like animal cancers will. Some infections that trees get from bugs and fungi, or damage to the tree will cause mutations or other crazy things to happen.

Ever seen a tree with a weird growth like this?

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Those burls, or galls, are the mutations (or cancers if you wanna call it that) and result of some infections or damage.

Along the lines of trees being amazing, ultimately those infections can be beneficial in a way because it drastically transforms how the wood looks. If you cut open a burl like on the maple tree above, you may find this:

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Or when various fungi infects a recently dead tree, chemical reactions happen when they meet and can cause crazy staining and colorations like this, show in maple again here:

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Your average maple wood is pretty plain, light-colored stuff, and the fungi reactions can turn it absolutely wild. Same goes for the maple burls. Very high dollar stuff. So when the trees get infected or damaged, yeah it may eventually kill them but trees make lemonade out of lemons and the wood becomes even more beautiful in the process... and it's all natural!

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That made me say "Whoa". Please explain.

 

Which? The life thing or tree bark?

The bark helps move nutrients up/down the tree, so cutting a ring of it would be like chopping your main arteries or veins in half.

 

That explains something from my childhood. We had three ash trees in our backyard that were so tall you could see them from nearly anywhere in the east end of the city. Somebody vandalized the trees when I was young by shaving huge chunks of bark near the base while we were away, my dad quickly painted a black tar-like substance over the wounds and saved them. He was NOT happy, saying they could have fallen and crushed three houses in the right direction. It still damaged them, and the leaves never sprouted nearly as lush after that.

 

Yes. All of those things.

"Most educated people are aware that we're the outcome of nearly 4 billion years of Darwinian selection, but many tend to think that humans are somehow the culmination. Our sun, however, is less than halfway through its lifespan. It will not be humans who watch the sun's demise, 6 billion years from now. Any creatures that then exist will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae.”

-Martin Rees

Can't remember the first time I heard that quote, but I recall it at least once per week, and hope that never changes. These are beings who exist because of us, who in fact were us, at one time, but who couldn't communicate with us in any meaningful way, were such a thing possible. Oh, and they already do or do not exist, looking back at our time the way we look back at our caveman ancestors, provided we hook up enough to create them --is there anything trippier than that? As Christopher Hitchens said about that quote, if it doesn't take your breath away in arresting awe, you don't have the capacity for awe.

Without getting religious-y, THAT is true spirituality. The fact that we even know these things, and can prove them to be true, all because of our own work and study versus some insulting notion of 'revelation', is far more inspiring and humbling than anything I've read in story books.

Unfortunately, it seems the reaction for most people, religious or not, to something like the above or 'all energy can neither be created or destroyed' is: "Neat!"

But not you guys. You guys are cool.