Are you pondering what I'm pondering?
How did you come up with the name for your blog? What other names did you consider? Are you sorry that you chose it? What name would you pick if you could change it now?
And if you don't have a blog, what would you name it if you decided to start one?
My main regret is that a certain percentage of the people clicking on a blog called Dead Baby Jokes are actually looking for dead baby jokes. Imagine that.
Niobium-containing compounds are relatively rarely encountered by most people, but many are highly toxic and should be treated with care.
Schrödinger's Cat is the name of a well-known illustration of the role of indeterminacy of the theory of quantum mechanics. Or something like that.
Important note for animal advocates: it's all purely hypothetical. No actual cats were harmed in the construction of this thought experiment.
Anyway, it goes like this (and, please, anyone who actually understands this stuff, correct me if I've got it wrong) A theoretical cat is placed in a theoretical box with a tiny amount of a theoretical radioactive substance. If even one atom of the substance decays, the cat will die.
However, the point is that we don't know if the substance will decay. We can calculate the probability, which, as time goes on, becomes closer and closer to 100%. But we can't be sure whether the cat is alive or dead until we end the experiment by opening the box.
I leave any potential further application as an exercise for the reader.
Synestheia is a melding of senses. For example, you perceive musical notes as having shapes or certain words as having tastes. The most famous expression of the phenomemon (I think) is a poem called Vowels by Rimbaud in which he assigns colors and personalities to each of the vowels: Black A; white E, red I, green U, blue O.
I didn't have that, exactly, but when I was little, numbers -- in which I otherwise had no interest whatsoever -- had, not precisely personalities, but definite genders. Most of the even numbers were girls and most of the odd numbers were boys. But there were exceptions. Three and eleven were clearly girls. So was twenty-three.
Over time, my strong feeling of which numbers are which has faded. But it used to be so intense that I was amazed to learn other people lacked it and that not everyone saw the world exactly the way that I did.
