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Tim and I have this on-going discussion that I find totally fascinating. There's a certain class of knowledge that totally changes your outlook on your existence. There are just some facts that, once you  learn them, you're kind of never the same person again. I remember growing up and finding out different things and just thinking, "holy crap--I don't know anything about anything."

There are a few I remember in specific, but I'm reminded of others from time to time.  Here are my current top-ten favorites (each one of which deserves more consideration than I've given them here).

Too smart for our own good.

1. People are Animals.
When you're little, it's fairly plain to see that there are people, and there are animals. Two different categories. Two different groups. I remember learning that people were mammals, that we actually belonged to the same classification, and having my mind explode. I also remember repeating this fact to anyone who would listen at any given moment.

The fact that people are animals completely changes our whole relationship with everything around us, and the nature of our existence.


2. The Fibonacci Sequence.
The Fibonacci Sequence is a simple series of integers where each number equals the sum of the two previous numbers, e.g.:

1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144....etc.

When expressed as a spiral, the sequence looks like this. A golden spiral.

It's a lovely image, ok. But the reason it's so mind boggling is because it appears EVERYWHERE in nature and art. Flowers, nebulas, shells, storms, and some of the most famous art and architecture in the world, all follow the same mathematical principle, which is closely tied to what is called the Golden Ratio, also known as the most beautiful ratio.

Why is this so mind blowing? Because it's universal, it's simple, and it suggests order throughout the universe all through a simple pattern that you can draw on any piece of graph paper. I'm in LOVE with the Fibonacci sequence.

Great taste! Less filing!

3. We're drinking dinosaur pee.
For real. I remember learning about the water cycle and being vaguely horrified--water falls, plants and animals use it, it goes into the atmosphere, it falls again. But then I learned that every single molecule on this planet except those that come from space debris, has been on this planet since it formed. The water in the water cycle has been doing its thing since water formed on the surface of the planet--hence, we drink the same water (and breath the same air) that was in the lungs and guts of dinosaurs (and Jesus and Einstein). On top of that, all of those molecules originally came from outer-space. Outer-space!

What if your cells are slowly turning you into a cat?

4. The human body regenerates its cells once every seven years.
Every seven years you are a completely new and different person from the person you used to be. Even your scars are made of different cells than they were when you scraped your knew or fell off your bike. If this is the case, why don't they go away? Why don't we grow new limbs if we lose them? How do our brains contain any of the same information if all of the cells that made up ourselves died long ago and were replaced by new ones? MORE QUESTIONS THAN ANSWERS!


5. The human body is made in distinct proportions
This is something you begin to learn in basic drawing classes. Your eyes are located in the precise middle of your face, directly between the crown of your head and your chin. Your hand, from the base of the wrist to the tip of the fingers, is the exact length of your face from chin to hairline (uh, if you've got a hairline). The length of the bottom of your foot is equal to the length of your forearm from inner elbow to wrist. Most human bodies are eight times the height of the head, while the shoulders are twice the height of the head. This is math at its most functional. Does it have any mystical significance? Probably not. But it's fun to be reminded that our bodies are awesome.


6. Futility, or The Wreck of the Titan
This book, written in 1893, is about the largest ship in the whole world, the Titan, which strikes an iceberg in the North Atlantic and sinks one day in April. It's written 13-years before the sinking of the Titanic. I remember learning about this--I was looking through another book in Crossroads Mall in Boulder, when I was about 11--and getting goosebumps all over my body. By no means do I believe that the author predicted the sinking of the Titanic, or that there is any sort of occult explanation. But I LOVE how bizarre and unpredictable the world is. I remember thinking, "if something this amazing could exist, anything could exist."

Forward thrusters, ENGAGE!

7. When you look at stars, you're watching the past.
A light-year is defined as, "a unit of astronomical distance equivalent to the distance that light travels in one year, which is 9.4607 × 1012 km (nearly 6 trillion miles)." If the nearest star to earth is 4.5 light years away, it has taken 4.5 years for the light we see to leave the star and travel to our eyes, where it dead-ends in our retinas. Watching the night sky is like watching a film of events that happened in the past. For the most distant stars, it is wholly possible that the star has long-since exploded or died out and that the image we see is of an object in space that no longer exists.

FOR REAL.

8. "The War of Northern Aggression"
I'm from Colorado. We studied the Civil War, but let's be honest here: Colorado wasn't even a STATE until a decade after the war had ended. We study a lot of other things in our elementary history classes... like dinosaurs... and the American Indians... and... the water cycle. I didn't know, until moving to the South for college, that many Southerners consider any non-southern person a "yankee" and that the Civil War is referred to as "The War of Northern Aggression." America seemed like a fairly homogenous entity for me, until that moment. This is when I really realized how it's possible to live in one place and have utterly different perspectives of "the truth."

NSFW in GB

 9. Sometimes a nod means "no."
There are some countries where nodding your head means "no" and shaking it means "yes" (or some other gesture is used). This gesture seems completely innate--we never think about it--but it's actually learned and culturally agreed-upon. Learning that some cultures wink, or bobble, or jerk their heads emphasizes the feeling that we all live on one planet, but in some ways we're totally alien to one another.


10. The interstate system is not organic
What I mean by this is, the Interstates in the US aren't just more-developed versions of roads that were already there. I always just sort functioned under the assumption that most roads were paved over older roads and paths that people and animals had been using for eons to get around. The nature of the Interstate system might seem completely obvious to people who live in any city that's laid out like a grid--city's don't just spring up that way, they're usually planned. But I was astonished to discover that the interstates we depend on every day were part of a defense initiative by Dwight Eisenhower. He argued that we needed a way to transport army equipment and troops in the event of a war. The interstates didn't really exist until after our grandparents were born, but it is almost impossible to imagine our country without them.

Maybe this all just demonstrates that I wasn't/am not currently the brightest crayon on the tree. But being amazed is more fun than being bored all the time.