Silly childhood thoughts
DragonKing
Member Posts: 1,979
in Off-Topic
So I'm back home for the holidays, a country boy back in the country with no computer, no internet, and it's been storming all day so no six mile walk to get to town for me.
So as I sketch and listen to the water fall on the trailer ceiling my mind began to drift back to a younger time where my imagination was less controlled chaos and just pure chaos.
I remembered a time where I use to stand at the window and watch the water fall from the sky and wonder what was causing it. Some how, don't ask how, but I came to the conclusion that the rain and thunder were a result of two skyscraper sized mech clashing in explosive combat. Needless to say I kept running from window to window trying to find them... I still haven't succeeded...those freaking mechs are fast but I'll catch them just you wait!
So what are some silly thoughts from you're preadolescence days.
So as I sketch and listen to the water fall on the trailer ceiling my mind began to drift back to a younger time where my imagination was less controlled chaos and just pure chaos.
I remembered a time where I use to stand at the window and watch the water fall from the sky and wonder what was causing it. Some how, don't ask how, but I came to the conclusion that the rain and thunder were a result of two skyscraper sized mech clashing in explosive combat. Needless to say I kept running from window to window trying to find them... I still haven't succeeded...those freaking mechs are fast but I'll catch them just you wait!
So what are some silly thoughts from you're preadolescence days.
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It also turned out you can't make amber by putting tree resin in the freezer.
...I want to try that last one now...
It took me only one time of leaping off the house roof with an open golf umbrella to realize they didn't work that way. I was lucky I didn't get hurt more than I did. Still, it makes me laugh a little when I think about it.
Once my mother was going to a party, and I asked her if they were going to serve "whore's de-vores". She cracked up, and I had never seen my mother laugh so hard.
That is exactly how I used to pronounce them until my English teacher in high school corrected me. XD
The T-Rex ate all of them and then starved to death, obviously!
but what came next i had no clue, so i thought the "next number" was one thousand million, and then when i heard about one billion i thought ( 1 000 000 000 000 ) was a billion ( my logic was, after the thousand million you can't have million million, so you must have billion ) and then of coarse after that you would get thousand billion, then million billion then thousand million billion, then.... no idea, ah good times, but then grade 4 came by and i learned that i was terribly wrong, and that every 3 groups of zeros has a different name, usually going by numerical prefixes
another one;
i was told "infinity" was the biggest number, and you can't go bigger ( although i don't think infinity is actually a number ) but anyhow, that was the rule on the play ground in grade 3, and then someone came up with this "number" called aduplex? lol ( pretty sure they meant to say googolplex, but hey, this is elementary school ) so anyways, i asked what an "aduplex" is and i was told it was a number bigger than infinity ( lol what? ) they said that infinity starts at 1 and goes on forever, while "aduplex" starts at 9 and then just produces "infinite" 9s afterwards ( hmmm ) although somewhat ironic because there are "numbers" that are bigger than infinite based on.... calculus i believe, but this was no calculus math, this was "warped didn't get all the info but wanted to sound cool on the play ground math"
i remember in grade 1, even my teacher told me that the reason why the sky was blue, was because 70% of the earth is water and the sky "reflects" off of the water ( looooooooolz, that couldn't be more backwards
but anyway, when you are 6, and a teacher says something of that calibre, good enough, it wasn't until years later when i became more scientifically minded that i learned it was because of the ozone in our atmosphere spreading the blue shift light from the sun, to make our sky blue, and the reason why the oceans are blue is because they are reflecting from the sky not the other way around, good stuff
ah, another time when i was around 7 or 8;
so i had some money of my own around this time ( which was incredibly rare ) and i wanted to get some ice cream from the ice cream truck, so i went outside ( and the road in front of our house was a busy road that ALWAYS had traffic on it ) and i didn't understand the "hitch hiker thumb out to get picked up motion" i thought that motion just meant you wanted vehicles to go by because you are waiting for someone else, now luckily haha, no one stopped to pick me up, because they probably thought; why is this 8 year old trying to hitch hike? but anyways, the worse part was, the ice cream truck finally came by, but i guess it was pass hours? and it wasn't driving slow and just zoomed right pass me like i didn't even exist, good times, even more silly, it wasn't until probably my 20s that i didn't realize that putting your thumb out meant that you were trying to hitch a ride, i was always confused in my younger years in movies when characters would do that, and somehow would get picked up, just blew me away haha
streets and aves;
this one also took a while, i think i was around 20/21 when i was actually told how they work, so before that time, i had no idea how street avenues and street numbers worked, now i got streets and aves in terms that aves go one way, streets go the other and the further up you go the aves get higher and the further you go that way the streets get higher, but what i never understood was the building numbers, so for example if your address was 1704 24th ave, i had no idea what the 1704 meant, when i was super young i actually thought it was based on what number of house was built, so if your address number was 1704 it meant that was the 1704th house built in that town, and it almost seemed to make sense because the higher the aves got, the higher the numbers would get, and the higher aves were usually in the newer part of town, so anywho, here we are in my mid 20s and im getting lost because i was supposed to find some address like 3001 whatever street or ave or so, and im finding like six 3001s and im getting confused as hell, so i call up my boss, and i said what gives? and then he enlightened me; those numbers aren't arbitrary, they tell you how far down the road or street they are, so for example; 1704 24th ave means that its on 24th avenues but its "4 lots" up from 17th street, which just completely blew my mind, and with that knowledge i was able to find places that i've never been before just based off of that, almost as if the address system was made to be easy like that hmm......
so after all of these ( im sure there are more, but i just can't remember ) i have come to a realization; just because its sounds plausible, or "makes sense" - why the sky is blue for example - doesnt actually mean that is the right answer, and especially if you are told something from a stranger that you don't even know, that THEY know something you don't and they have no proof or evidence for their claim - the deal about "aduplex" for example - , then they are probably wrong themselves, as the saying goes; extraordinary claims requires extraordinary evidence, and anything that someone says that sounds outlandish always take it with a grain of salt
To be fair I'm a adult and even I don't know how big effing numbers work, what comes after a trillion? I don't know! Should I care? I don't see why not seeing how I've never even entered the ten thousands on my paycheck.
#foreverpoor
It's quadrillion, on the off-chance you were genuinely curious.
well unless we want to start counting small things like bacteria, molecules or even atoms, i believe there is around sextillion amount of atoms in 1 grain of sand ( sextillion = 1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 )
and even in the average human body you have trillions of cells
Turns out we're using two different systems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales
Good answer! As I said though, no PRACTICAL reason. XD
Same in German. Always baffled me that the American government or some business guy would invest *that* much money.