Adam and Eve on a Raft and Wreck ‘em
This week’s weird idea
You sit down at a diner. The waitress comes to take your order. You want a very specific breakfast, so you order a la carte: "I’d like some eggs. Uh, scrambled. You have bacon? Good, some bacon with that. And toast. Oh, and coffee."
“Sure,” the waitress says. Then she turns to the kitchen and yells:
Draw one! Adam and Eve on a raft and wreck ‘em!
Here’s what she said:
- Draw one: a cup of coffee
- Adam and Eve: bacon and eggs
- On a raft: with toast
- And wreck ‘em: scramble the eggs
And you realize that your unique, customized order isn’t that unique after all. It’s just a selection from a known menu. So well known it can be encapsulated into compressed slang.
Go to a Denny’s and you get still more options. It’s all still on a fixed menu, but now you can combine even more stuff. Want hot fudge on those eggs? I bet you could make it happen.
It doesn’t take much to have these “limited" options create tremendous diversity. Consider this: if you could perfectly shuffle a deck of cards, you would never in your life see the exact same order of cards twice. Scientific American published an article about what a problem this is for online poker, since no computer can replicate that complexity. The article includes this hair-raising statistic:
If you do the multiplication and round the answer, you will get a number with 67 zeros. That’s more than a quadrillion times as many ways to arrange these cards as there are atoms on Earth.
And speaking of atoms, let’s talk about DNA, the menu you and I were built from. DNA uses only 4 chemicals (cytosine, guanine, adenine, and thymine) to describe everything that we are. And each of those chemicals will bond with only one of the others to create what are called base pairs. So that’s our menu: just 4 chemicals, with limited combinations.
And there’s a metric butt-load of them. A standard model of the human genome used by geneticists contains over 3 billion base pairs. With that many base pairs, the simple code isn’t so simple any more.
And again: just 4 chemicals make up those base pairs.
So you, me, all living things, we’re all built out of the same chemicals using the same 4-element code, just with a ludicrous amount of options. Which means we are all special snowflakes—and we are all nothing special. We are all different. We are all the same.
We are all tasty, tasty options from the near-infinite Denny’s menu of life.
Oh, and can I get that toast on sourdough?
Have a listen
I mentioned these guys last week. Here’s a peek into their secret code they use to talk to each other while playing. Don’t worry about the length of the video. You can get the gist from the first 5-10 minutes. The music is great, and the “secret musical language” is mind-blowing:
Go see
Boy, this site sucked me in. Be sure to scroll all the way down to see the series choices (Bond, Reacher, etc.).
And keep breathing
Had an MRI this week. The whole deal: had to take my nose piercing out (😜), get in big white tube, have a cage put over my face, and listen loud atonal techno music (actually I think that may have been the machine). And yet, the whole process was a breeze, and it seemed to go by pretty fast.
One reason it was so easy was that I was consciously breathing the whole time. I did a 4-count in/8-count out pattern throughout the procedure. Not only did the breathing itself keep me calm, but the counting gave me something to concentrate on. Thanks, lungs!
Until we talk again, I remain,
Your pal,
Jamie