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Here are some things that are like magic to me, in that I can see them happening but they don’t make sense. You can explain and I can follow the explanation but it still is a mystery.

• How a knot makes a rope weaker. You have a rope. It can hold so much weight. You tie a knot in the rope. Now it can hold only half the weight. But the rope is still all there.
• How British people sound American when they sing. I have heard some new song by some new singer and not thought much about it. Sounded fine. Sounded normal. Then later I heard an interview with this person and realized at that point they were British or Australian or whatever. Only rarely (e.g. “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)” by The Proclaimers) do singers have such thick accents that it comes through in their singing.
• Where dirt from a pothole goes. I have a dirt driveway. It gets potholes. I want to fill in the potholes. Ideally the dirt that came out of the pothole should go back in the pothole, but there is no pile of dirt anywhere. Matter has been destroyed.
• How a grain bag stitch holds. Grab a bushel bag of grain from a feed store. Pick it up and toss it in your car’s trunk (or pickup bed). Take it out and toss it in your wheelbarrow. Do just about anything normal with it and it stays together. Then pull the string and the whole end unravels and opens up and you can dump the grain out. It’s like the Prince Rupert’s Drop of bulk storage.
• How a baby starts to breathe. This one I’ve seen in person a few times. Baby is surrounded by fluid. Lungs not using air. Baby is born and then the lungs just start working. It’s even more amazing if you can see a video of an en caul birth.

The Refrigeration Cycle was going to be on this list, but I found an explanation that made sense to me. For those interested in that, here it is. Phase change is not affected by only temperature, but also pressure. If you have a fluid in a closed system, you can make the phase change by adding or removing heat. If you add or remove heat, you’re also affecting the pressure as the fluid expands or contracts. The Refrigeration Cycle is just that equation but from the other direction, like in math you can flip the equation around and it still works (because energy must be conserved). So the cycle works by adding or removing pressure to a fluid to change the phase and that has the result of adding or removing heat. Because if it didn’t add or remove heat then energy would not be conserved.

I was hanging streamers the other week for someone’s birthday and I wondered why we always twist streamers when stringing them up.

So I ran one straight, with no twist. And it looked very sad.

That got me thinking about other things that are generally known as bad if unvarying. I came up with three:

• Streamers (the crepe paper party things, not people online)
• Singing a music note
• Long hair

People seem to agree that in each of those, an overlaying frequency is good – a twisting or a vibrato or some curls or waves.

I thought of those three items, then I wondered if I could think of any more. I saw I got two from the sense of sight and one from the sense of hearing. Maybe there could be examples from the other senses?

Sense of smell? No, no examples of a varying scent being more interesting than a straightforward scent. Scents themselves are interesting enough, I suppose.

Sense of taste? Same thing as smell, for this exercise. Too much of one smell or taste would cause it to wane, but generally you switch scents or flavors not make them wavy. I don’t even know how you could make a flavor wavy.

Sense of touch? I do see this happening here. Some examples are a back massage or foot rub doesn’t just press in one place (queue video of Bugs Bunny head massage). Also it is not unusual for people to pat backs when hugging. Why do they do that? In the interesting of promoting this theory, I’d say the answer is because unvarying hugs are not as interesting.

I don’t know what else to do with this realization – sharing it here is about the extent of its usefulness.

Here are a couple thoughts I jotted down that aren’t quite sufficient for their own individual blog posts. If you’re the type of person who likes Twitter, pretend each of these is a tweet.

• Here in Michigan, it is well info the fall season. We notice it mostly with the leaves changing, but also migrations. Specifically, I notice the migration of boxes of clothes. My wife has boxes that make their way from the basement up to our room, where they shed their winter clothes and gain their summer clothes instead. It’s backwards from how animals work, but such is the nature of the boxes of winter/summer clothes.
  And animals migrate themselves, but the boxes are immobile so I have to carry them for their migration.
• Here in Michigan, the weather has turned cool. It is the weather I like, in that I get to wear long-sleeve shirts but keep wearing shorts. Our one teenage son wears that style all year long – a hoodie and shorts. And now that it is appropriate for the weather, that reminds me of the old saying that even a stopped clock is right twice a day. In the same way, a teenage boy’s outfit is right twice a year: a hoodie and shorts are good to wear in the fall and the spring.

My son had a school award night thingy and the email that went out beforehand with instructions and expectations said something along the lines of wear your Sunday clothes.

My guess is the people who worded that email either haven’t been to church in a while, or maybe only go on special occasions, or maybe they’ve only seen it in movies. Because my son wore a polo shirt and nice shorts, like he usually does for church. Maybe that wasn’t his Sunday best, but it was his church clothes.

Anyway, he was the only one wearing shorts.

I felt out of place for him, but he didn’t seem to be socially uncomfortable with it, so the award ceremony went well.

I just found it interesting the various gaps between the older generation and the younger, and between the formal church crowd and informal church crowd and the non-church crowd.

Some longtime readers of this blog may remember I wrote something about why Jesus lived for only 33 years and what was significant about the number 33.

I still like my answer, but I did find another meaning to the number 33, and I think it fits in quite nicely.

One of the many Old Testament laws had to do with impurity and cleanness after childbirth. If a woman gave birth to a male child she was unclean for 33 days and if she gave birth to a female child she was unclean for 66 days.

What does Mary giving birth to Jesus have to do with this?

Nothing.

But if we consider that Jesus was born of this world, then the earth would be unclean for 33 units of time. I haven’t worked out how to make the jump from days to years, I’m just concentrating on the number 33.

I also don’t want to take the comparison too far lest anyone think that the earth was Jesus’ mother.

Back to the numbers now. So the earth would be unclean for 33 years after Jesus’ birth. Hmm… It was also unclean for the 3756 years before Jesus was born. We’re just going to ignore that part for now too.

Anway, the earth would be unclean for 33 years after the birth of Jesus. Then how did the mother become clean after 33 days? She had to sacrifice a lamb, of course.

Jesus is both the child and the lamb in this analogy. He was sacrificed 33 years after his birth and that purified the earth. Hmm… Maybe that’s not the best way of phrasing it either, because that hints at universal salvation. Maybe “allowed inhabitants of earth to be purified” would be better.

Maybe I’m stretching it a bit, but I thought there was a decent connection between the 33 years that Jesus lived and the 33 days of uncleanness.

Now I realize that it could also imply the earth was only unclean while Jesus was on the earth. I’ll leave that topic alone also.

That’s all – just something to think about.

One of the more fascinating things about today’s modern world is the naming of medicines. There are a lot of medicines, and there are a lot of new names needed for new medicines, and I’m always impressed on how someone can invent a new word that’s not like another existing word.

I mean, some of the names do sound ridiculous, but they are unique and memorable. It seems I would mispronounce half of them if I didn’t hear it pronounced in the ad.

I did look it up, and there are agencies that the drug manufacturers use to come up with the names. It sounds like a lot of work, and a lot of regulations for drug names. It would be a lot easier to name a product without legal constraints. But on the other hand I think that is how you get these uniquely memorable names.

I just know if I tried to come up with a name for a new medicine I’d probably do best by typing a bunch of clumps of random letters and picking one of those that sounded right. It’s hard to think of a new name that doesn’t sound like anything else, because trying to think of things brings to mind the words that already do exist.

Perhaps those million monkeys are actually at the naming agencies, having not gotten close to writing Shakespeare.

Here are some thoughts I jotted down that aren’t quite sufficient for their own individual blog posts. If you’re the type of person who likes Twitter, pretend each of these is a tweet.

• Mom has a couple of dictionaries she won back in school for being first place in the spelling bee. I think that’s backwards – the spelling bee loser should get the dictionary.
• Someone asked me “If Cinderella’s glass slipper was a perfect fit, how did it fall off?” And the answer is that it was a slipper not a sticker.
• The person who coined the phrase “when one door closes, another door opens” must have had a refrigerator like our old one. The top freezer door kept popping open when the main fridge door is shut vigorously. This one was compliments of Delta – I don’t know if he made it up or heard it somewhere.
• The mosquitoes here are pretty bad, but the other day no matter how many I swatted I kept seeing more. It turns out I just had a bunch of eye floaters, no wonder I couldn’t hit them.
• What if I want further ado?