Random is awesome. As much as I am certainly a creature of habit, crazily so at times, it is crucial to have the unexpected, the surprising, the random. The joy of being able to say “Really?!” or “What the hell was that?” for me is central to the ongoing satisfaction of discovery and wonder that keeps life interesting and fulfilling and, well, fun. It is one of the things I find appealing about gaming. The rolling of dice is so satisfying in its inherent, even required randomness. My favorite game designs all include an element of luck, driven by randomness, that keeps the game from being purely strategic or logical. Take “Settlers of Cataan” for instance. You can get better and better at that game with practice and learning, but you can never completely overcome the damn dice, no matter your mastery. You can even play the percentages – expecting sixes and eights to be rolled more often than tens and fours is an integral part of the game – and have everything aligned to build on those probabilities and still get totally screwed. I have played games where 10 became 7 and you couldn’t buy a six. So cool – except that six was where I had my resources focused. My son kicked my ass that game, but he usually does anyway so I’ll let the dice off the hook. This time.
In a broader context, one of the things I have come to enjoy from my RSS feed is that it puts random stories or news items in front of me that I probably wouldn’t have seen using my previous consumption methods. It is for sure dangerous as a time sink – if you pull on all those interesting threads you might never stop and find yourself tangled in trivia – but it sure is fun to have those “whoa, cool” moments breaking up the monotony and grind of day-to-day life. So.
As is always the case this time of year, there is an abundance of lists to be found summarizing the past year, from best TV to greatest breakthroughs to worst trends. But the one I came across that led to this train of thought was from my favorite magazine, The Atlantic, listing the “55 Facts that Blew Our Minds”. And just as I have come to expect from this great magazine, it was wonderfully random and inspired more searching along the same lines. The following is a sampling both from that piece and my other wanderings.
- The torpedo bat is not nearly as innovative as we thought. Along with some other outlandish ideas, baseball players experimented with square bats as far back as the 19th century. I love when science gets into sports and had a ball reading about all the wild stuff that has been conceived to hit a ball harder. (An aside is that I got a great lesson in physics when I belatedly learned about bat speed. I used a 34 ounce bat for a very long time, because I was buff and macho and a heavier bat meant more power, right? Wrong. Turns out swinging the bat faster is what gives power, not weight. Switched to 26 ounces and started crushing the ball.) And the story about Jason Grimsley pulling a “Mission Impossible” caper to steal an Albert Belle corked bat is crazy.
- Yikes. It is estimated that there are 25,000 “city killer” near-Earth asteroids – those 140 meters or longer – and we have only found about half of them. There is plenty of pop culture toying with this idea, but this kind of brings it home, so to speak. They would kill a city if they stuck one because the force would be equivalent to 300 million tons of TNT. I don’t know if you can get your head around that, but I sure as shit can’t. For reference, that is six times the yield of the largest nuclear bomb ever detonated. Boom. The good news is that JPL and NASA are on the job, having finally gotten clearance to build and launch the Near-Earth Object Surveyor, so we might be able to avoid having Bruce Willis bring “Armageddon” to life. (The movie should never have been in the first place.) Go NASA/JPL – love those space uber-geeks.
- Soap rocks. I have been on a weird kick of late to go back to using soap. You know, a good old fashioned chunk of stuff that you rub all over and make lather and rinse off. This whole body wash and bath gel and whatever has always struck me as mildly unsatisfying, but I am as susceptible to trends as anyone and who can resist Bath and Body Works? But I like soap. Turns out I was onto something. I may be late to this knowledge, but when it comes to sanitizing and preventing transmission of viruses soap is way better than hand sanitizer. The science is fascinating, but the thing I love the most is that one of the reasons soap is superior is because it makes you slippery. Those germs literally slide right off, even if they haven’t been killed. Take that, you little fuckers! And the fact that somebody combined plant fat and alkaline salts 4,000 years ago (!) and it still wins is astonishing to me. It also works as a moisturizer – the opposite of sanitizer – and smells way better. Santa put bars of this stuff in everyone’s stocking this year, and it is delightful. Oatmilk with cloudberry? Pink lychee with pawpaw extract? Yes, please.
- Don’t blame the turkey. There has been a pretty pervasive myth about turkey and tryptophan running around for a lot of years. It is a classic example of not only unsubstantiated info propagating on the internet, but of bullshit science being misunderstood and passed along. I’m looking at you, Reddit. But that is not the random fact that I hooked onto here. What struck me was that there is more tryptophan in cheddar cheese than turkey. Which sure as hell helps explain why my nap time goes through the roof during the holidays. Okay, the increased booze intake probably plays a role, as does nighttime sleep deprivation, but being full of cheese for a week does a lot of explaining. But even this strikes me as a parallel to the blaming of a hangover on one certain drink. You have probably heard some version of this from some suffering friend the morning after: “Man, I knew I shouldn’t have had that shot of tequila.” No, you shouldn’t have played beer pong for two hours and knocked back half a dozen White Claws. But the tequila was the culprit. Uh-huh.
- Speaking of fatty acids, how about crazy strong glue synthesized from used cooking oil? The science on this one is waaaaay over my head – polymers and triglycerides and ester bonds – there are a couple of fun facts. First, this organic glue is strong enough, when used to bond two steel plates together, to tow a car. Yep. Second, we generate 3.7 billion gallons of waste oil a year. That is a lot of fried food. This cool story also has the merit of being about creating alternatives to petroleum based plastics.
- Lastly, you must stop by gail.com. This came up on the amazing 99% Invisible podcast’s end-of year mini-stories episode. If you are like me and a hamfisted typist – or pudgy fingered phone user as the case may be – you probably type in some pretty weird websites on occasion. Now imagine being one letter from gmail.com. Poor Gail. But with great aplomb and style, her response is outstanding. For the random facts piece I give you the tidbits that back in 2020 her site received 5,950,012 hits and her email provider rejects around 1.2 million mis-addressed emails per week. The podcast scratched the surface of domain squatting and other such domain names, but this blew my mind. In a more obscure example, if you are a GitHub user (indispensable while running Linux) you have to head to guthib.com.
I hope you have enjoyed this little meander and are encouraged to keep some randomness in your life. Thanks for reading.