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Random memory: cause and effect
Saturday, August 15th, 2009 04:29 pm(Triggered, tangentially, by IRC conversation)
When I was seven or eight, during my first trip to the US, which was also the first trip overseas that I can remember, I took a cold can of rootbeer from the back of the van. It was spring. The rootbeer had been warm when we put it in, but was cold now, and I remember standing there, stunned, and thinking, "wow, the air is cold enough to chill drinks".
See, here temperatures usually hover around 25-32 degrees Celsius, which is enough to make hot things lukewarm, and make cold things lukewarm, but not enough to make hot things cold or cold things hot. So the fact that the temperature could affect things physically was new and very exciting.
Whenever I go back to that memory, I still feel that rush of discovery: "The x is y enough to do z". The x can do y to z, I didn't realize that was possible. And then I have to grin a bit at my naivete.
But you know, even now when I stumble across some new idea, I still feel that rush.
Magic.
When I was seven or eight, during my first trip to the US, which was also the first trip overseas that I can remember, I took a cold can of rootbeer from the back of the van. It was spring. The rootbeer had been warm when we put it in, but was cold now, and I remember standing there, stunned, and thinking, "wow, the air is cold enough to chill drinks".
See, here temperatures usually hover around 25-32 degrees Celsius, which is enough to make hot things lukewarm, and make cold things lukewarm, but not enough to make hot things cold or cold things hot. So the fact that the temperature could affect things physically was new and very exciting.
Whenever I go back to that memory, I still feel that rush of discovery: "The x is y enough to do z". The x can do y to z, I didn't realize that was possible. And then I have to grin a bit at my naivete.
But you know, even now when I stumble across some new idea, I still feel that rush.
Magic.
