Chad's spot for various thoughts, musings, poetry, ideas and whatnot

Monday, April 21, 2008

I thought I'd give you a little bit of a break from the almost daily litany of bike geek stuff on this fine Monday. In place of that, I thought I'd write down a few of the things that I find just really amazing. This is not a "Top Ten" list but just some things that have occurred to me that are really cool.

Glass: I think that's it's so amazing that we figured out how to turn sand into glass using heat. What's just as amazing is what we've done with that technology. I mean windows are cool but I'm thinking of all of the artistic expression that comes out of working with glass. The one I was particularly taken with this weekend was stemware. Simple in function but supremely varied in form (unless you look at stemware from the point of view of topology and then it's all the same). Everyone has their favorite type of stemware. My tastes tend towards slim, elegant curves that fit comfortably into the hand and do little more than show off the color of the beverage inside.

Guns: I think it's rather amazing that our main weapon systems basically are little more than fancy ways of either throwing spears and shooting arrows. While I know that much warfare is now conducted with explosives, which are a pretty radical departure from the spear/arrow thing, it just seems like we'd have done better than this now. Maybe if we did better, we wouldn't need them. I wonder what would be so bad about going back to spears and arrows.

Spectral Analysis: I am continually blown away by the fact that we can learn so much about light and then learn about something that produces it. To me it is one of the crowning triumphs of the human intellect that we can understand the size, mass, temperature, rotation, composition and structure of a huge ball of self-luminescent hydrogen that is farther away than we can imagine just by looking at the light that object gives off.

Arches: As old as humans have been building things (well, almost) and still so cool. Strong, stable, beautiful, elegant, functional. Why don't we build on a human scale with these things anymore? Arches remind us of tree branches over our heads, reconnecting us from the natural world from whence we came. They remain modern and yet timeless. The Romans built with them and so do engineers when the project is big enough. There should be more arches in more places (well, fewer Golden Arches maybe).

There are more. I'll write them up when I think of them. Enjoy a Monday of wonder.

Thanks for Reading.

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