Random Thought #7

Talking about Einstein in my last post got me thinking and I remembered an article I read once about a scientist who was fascinated with Einstein and always wondered what made him so smart. The article basically said that this guy was the person who performed the autopsy on Einstein and had kept and preserved his brain. He studied chunks of it trying to identify what made him so much smarter. What they eventually found was that he didn't have any more neurons (brain cells) than that average person and he didn't use any more of his brain than other people. What they found was that he had a much larger count of (i forget the name of it) links between the neurons than the average person. Many scientists have believed that these "links" were simply that. They were just links and didn't have any "processing power" in and of themselves. New research has found that they actually do have "processing power" so the links between the mini brains (neurons) are actually brains themselves. How cool is that!! Its amazing how much we miss because we don't read between the lines and don't ever challenge the status quo. I think that there is so much out there that we are just missing out on and I'm anxious to find out what it is. The more I learn, the more

I wonder...

Random Thought #6

Relativity. Its a fascinating concept. It can be looked at from a variety of angles (haha). When was the last time you looked at a situation and re-evaluated it from someone else's point of view. I know it can be kind of difficult since its hard to walk in someone else's shoes, but perhaps that little catch phrase has more meaning than we usually assign it. I can only imagine how many arguments could be prevented if each party would just sit back and put themselves in the other person's shoes. It would be nice if we could pause things and go look at the video through someone else's eyes and it would also allow us to feel their feelings and think their thoughts. Don't get too creeped out on me. Just think about it.

Now for a slightly different take on relativity.
I was reading an article awhile back on HowStuffWorks.com (shameless plug) about gravity, which of course went through the usual concepts developed initially by Sir Isaac Newton, but then it went in to talk about Einstein's theory on gravity. He actually believed that gravity was nothing more than a bend in the space-time continuum and that we weren't traveling on a flat plane, but rather on a somewhat cylindrical plane and that two objects traveling along two different planes eventually crossed and that drawing closer of each object to the next was what we experience as gravity. Interesting take, but I guess its all relative. Then I was drawn into Einstein's theories on Special Relativity. From our perspective, if we throw a baseball, the baseball is moving away from us but what if we looked at things from the baseball's point of view. It would seem as though we were moving away from it since all motion is viewed from a stationary point. Tons more on that topic for a different day. Next time you come to a routine situation or find yourself in an argument, just stop and think about how the other person (and/or object) is perceiving the same event. It might change the way you react to a situation. The more I think, the more

I wonder...

Random Thought #5

I was laying in bed last night and was thinking about my girls and thought how little time I get to spend with them. I'm gone by 6am and get back at 5pm and then my girls go to bed between 8 and 9pm. That leaves me just 3-4 hours per night to spend with them. If I have something else to do, I get even less time with them. Last night, I had to go and fulfill a church calling. I was home by 5 and out the door at 7 and didn't get back until 9 and by that time, my girls were already asleep. It made me realize how important my time is with them. I used to gripe about doing little things like playing with them because I was busy with other things, or taking my daughter to the toilet to help reinforce potty training. I'm grateful for my girls and even more so for my wife who raises our kids up so well and takes care of all of us. What would life be without them?

I wonder...

Random Thought #4

So I was thinking about how I read an article one time where it said that we, as human beings, only use 10% of our brain. I wonder why that is. What is the other 90% for? Will it ever be used some day? Are there parts of that 90% that controls other parts of our body that we aren't aware of? Is it all just storage space? Would we be able to understand the environment around us? What would it be like to use 11% of our brain? Would life be drastically different? Is 10% an average or an upper limit? How do they measure this stuff?

The brain is pretty cool. There are billions upon billions of neural networks that all work in conjunction to make us work. The neat part is, they all work off of electrical and chemical impulses. I wonder if we could short-circuit. Since our bodies are made up of 67% water, how is it that we don't short-circuit? 2/3 of our body is water and yet we have electrical impulses racing through our body's neural networks and we never short-circuit. Amazing. More questions than answers.

I wonder...

Random Thought #3

In talking about taking things for granted in my last random thought, I started to think more about other things I take for granted and how greatful I really am for certain things. For example, when was the last time you thought about breathing? Its probably been awhile.  How do lungs work? Who designed them that way? I'm encouraged by the fact that some very intelligent scientists have been able to replicate a lung cell with silicon. I don't think we need to go and re-invent the body, but its encouraging that people are trying to understand how things work.

How about the last time you checked your water bill? How many 1000s of gallons did you use? 10? 15? 20? How much water is that? How many gallons of water are there in the world? How does it get replenished? How much snow, when melted, equals 10k gallons of water? How many households are there in the US that could be using 10k gallons of water? 1 million households? That's 10 billion gallons of water!! That's just 1 country!! Kinda makes you stand back and say WHOA!! How many of you will read this and then think about the things you don't normally think about?

I wonder...

Random Thought #2

Why do some people not care about how things work? I've never really understood how people can just go living life without really thinking about how things work and how they came to be. It seems as though we all take things for granted until we don't have them. For example, I live in an area that is prone to hurricanes and severe rainstorms. Our electricity goes out more than we would like it to. Its amazing how many things use electricity. No air conditioner, no fans, no tv, no internet, no dvd player, no garage door opener. There are so many uses for electricity, we don't really think about what goes into getting electricity to our homes. We don't think about the people who service those poles that keeps electricity flowing. We don't think about the electrical engineers who design the power grid. We don't think about transistors and how they actually work and control electricity.

Another good example. I was asking a guy at RIM how BlackBerry Messenger works in light of the recent bans across Middle-Eastern countries. I wanted to know how you could add someone via PIN and yet also via smtp address. Did it use some sort of mail client? Does RIM keep some sort of database that has all of our device PIN and associated email addresses? Unnerving. I didn't get all the answers I wanted but I wonder why more people don't wonder.

I wonder...

Random Thought #1

So I was watching Elmo in Grouchland with my daughters tonight and the villain in the movie was a guy by the name of Huxley who always stole what everyone else had just for the sake of having it, said to the cast of Sesame Street "You guys just like reciting the alphabet and counting to 10 all day?" Zoe (the orange one) responded and said simply "Yes".

That got me thinking. Are there really people out there that just enjoy the simple things in life and don't need to be caught up in the rush of life? Wouldn't life be so much simpler and better if we were all kids or at least thought like kids? Why do people want their kids to watch Sesame Street and Disney Channel? Do they want their kids to grow up with good values and morals? Why do adults change their perspective? Why don't they just keep that same mentality in their own lives?

I wonder...

Intro

So this is the beginning of a blog that I hope to use to document my random thoughts that I have throughout the day. I've seen a lot of random thoughts blogs out there but none of them seem to get past the first post. I hope to break that trend and post a new random thought per day.