Like, how did I leave Bangkok at 8 AM and arrive in LA at 8 AM the same day, both local time? Time travel.
GPS. I know how it works in principle* - but it’s still magic that I can be in the most remote spot in the world and still get my exact bearings to the nearest square metre.
( * Triangulate from the time offsets in ping messages from four or more satellites with synchronised clocks, right?)
Aluminum foil. Rolls of perfectly smooth, impossibly thin METAL. That you can buy for like $3 and use at-will by the sheet. Wtf.
So many having access to the bulk of human knowledge and so many driving head first into conspiracy theories and magical thinking for comfort seems pretty cursed
In a time of constant attention distractions and exploiting addiction triggers and misinformation some folks choosing to reject corporate media to actually read books and primary sources and get PhDs to do more academics seems pretty blessed
The em field seems like 50 different things but it’s all different frequency ranges of the same thing is pretty mind blowing
hulk hogan said he would wrestle more than 365 days in a year because of how often he went to japan and back
I’m a spongy sack of fatty tissue controlling a vehicle made of meat with electricity.
Don’t forget all the chemistry happening! You’re an ambulatory meat sack-shaped drug lab with feelings.
Driving on the road with humans and highway driving. Humans are remarkably stupid and volatile and yet, by and large, driving is remarkably reliable and safe despit the fact everyone is controlling a 3000+ lb weapon whilr distracted by thoughts and their phones. It blows my mind.
On a related note, the idea that all it takes is a simple line on the ground for a lot of disaster not to happen. Sometimes when another car passes in the opposite direction, I think of how freaking close we are, at the relative speeds we’re going, and I’m amazed/frightened that a line dividing our lanes, an imaginary border, is all that’s keeping us apart.
One tire blowout and everyone’s gone.
Kiss the rain!
I could not come up with some kind of Carpe Diem quote on short notice so this is what you get!
Why are so many of these “seems like magic” posts people taking an opportunity to be super negative
We carve arcane patterns:
into specially prepared pieces of rock:
then apply energy and imbue them with instructions in specific, obscure languages to perform tasks for us. If you make any mistakes while uttering the instructions, the task fails.
Enchanted rocks, inscribed with runes, imbued with lightning.
Magic!
Nah, just tricked a rock into thinking by running current through it
Rocks don’t think.
Not naturally, until humans came along and tricked them into it.
Wireless everything. Its magic. RF magic.
I notice that my wireless internet still works when I move. The signals my device receives are everywhere.
We’re surrounded at all times by invisible porn.
Picture a rock getting thrown into a body of water and its ripples. Now just scale that up to 3 dimensions and all materials and you have RF!
I took graduate courses in RF physics.
It’s magic.
I worked with someone that’s been designing RF circuits close to 4 decades. They reckon it’s only about 50% magic.
They are a wizard and they are lying
They are a wizard, yes. Nobody in their right mind would want to do it for so long.
They also reckon the other 50% is trying to harness the magic by randomly tweaking stuff in the hope it doesn’t blow up in their face…
I studied electronics, and today I work in IT, specializing in networking. I have no fucking idea why RF, let alone wifi, works. I mean understand how it works, but the why-part is magic, trust me.
The “how” part gets murkier the deeper you dig.
The “why” is because we like magic things.
Honestly everything since electricity. The number of people we now support at a level of comfort that was unimaginable to even a king 250 years ago.
Waking up at night in the middle of winter in a warm house instantly lit, getting up to poop on a warm comfortable indoor throne with fresh spring breeze scent in the air. The poop flushes away effortlessly and your hands and bum are quickly fresh & clean with running warm water scented soaps and dry with materials 10x more soft & absorbent than the famed Turkish towels. You decide to eat an orange (despite the fact they don’t grow within 1,000 miles of here) and heat a frozen snack in the microwave before heading back to bed.
And, unlike most households for most of history, neither you nor anyone in your family currently has tapeworms
My mom told me she woke up one night with some worm thing in her mouth and she had to get it out…
Ewwww idk why she told me that story…
Average farmer-villager life lol
They told me there are also blood-sucking worms, that’d hurt like hell if they bite you, in the fields where my grandparents worked and my mom had to help out in the farm… (like from like I think she said 8 year old or something… she’d help grandparents as soon as she got home from school…)
She makes me feel like I’m privilaged to not have to do manual farming work…
I mean… sure… the hardest stuff I did at her age was file taxes for her and help her translate stuff from English… perhap I am “privilaged”?
I’m privilaged to not have to do manual farming work
We all are.
There is a reason people flocked into cities even before we had electricity and civil sewage systems. Subsistence farming is even worse.
There’s a box in my kitchen I can put dirty dishes and tomorrow morning they’re clean
Cooking. Transforming raw ingredients into something tasty always makes me feel like a kitchen witch!
Especially onions. Those fuckers are magic incarnate.
Talking about Onions? Fixed that for you:
Cooking. Transforming very tasty raw ingredients into something also a bit tasty always makes me feel like a kitchen witch!
I also love how versatile onions are. They can be spicy or sweet depending on how you prepare them. You can grow them easily, even from scraps. They’re a very magical plant :)
Existence itself is quite the trip
Computer programming.
We created entire schools of magic (programming language) that all have their unique syntax and rules. Each school of magic has it’s own spells. We type the magic words (commands) into a spell book (software) that was created by magic words to create new software.
Straight up fucking magic.
That slab you use for browsing social media has dotzens of times the computing power of the Cray supercomputer.
slap?
No, typo.
Oh slab I bet
Fucking magnets, how do they work?
And I don’t wanna talk to a scientist
I’m still fucking amazed that I can just put my phone on a fancy circle and it sticks there until I pull it off. I’ve had that thing for like a year and it still feels like magic.
Also:
I mean, I was making an ICP joke:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-agl0pOQfs
But yeah, people freaked the fuck out over “lodestones”.
Some Greek 8,000 years ago found out sometimes a very special rock will always point in one direction if you allow it to spin.
No one had any fucking idea what was happening, but suddenly sailing all over the place exploring wasn’t dangerous. No matter what, you could get back home.
Except there’s insanely rare areas that have magnetic anomlys where it suddenly goes crazy for reasons you have no way to explain.
The man-hours over 8,000 years of various cultures figuring out magnets is probably higher than a lot of “big” discoveries, it took humanity forever to the point we can buy crazy strong temu magnets for $3 just to fuck around.
