The Black Hole We Call YouTube

I start my day sometime between 4 and 6 am, whenever it becomes obvious that no more sleep is going to happen on this particular morning. I do the bathroom bit, get dressed and make my bed. Walking into my living room/kitchen/dining room and office, I get my first good view of the mountains and Kachemak Bay through the sliding glass doors.

This morning the visibility was about 50 feet in a light rain so I fixed my coffee and toast and began the day at my laptop, like most every other day. After checking emails, I began my morning routine on Chrome. My first stop is always APOD which this morning featured two nighttime time lapse sequences taken from the ISS in 2017. Great stuff!

Anyway, I was clicking on the Y0uTube link to drone footage of the collapse of the Arecibo telescope and must have grazed the accretion disk because I fell into the YouTube black hole and the tidal forces scrambled my brain.

I was initially drawn in by the stunning beauty of the wing nuts. There is something about perfectly polished stainless steel, machined to ridiculously fine tolerances that touches my innermost sole.

The visual effect of the polish job forces me to assume that the piece must be so machined. Something that beautiful with such distortion free reflections just has to be perfect. Then I watched the video and that was what scrambled my brain.

It is a 15 minute video that attempts to provide an intuitive explanation of “The bizarre behavior of rotating bodies”. As we get to see in the video, the narrator felt challenged because an esteemed mathematician ( Richard Feynman ) once stated that such an intuitive explanation was not possible. I think he succeeds but somewhere along the way I fell off the wagon. At the end I felt as if I would never again intuitively understand anything. I felt like curling into a ball and hiding in a closet; for the rest of time. Maybe it was the part of the video that discussed a possible Russian plot and the end of the world. No kidding, it is part of the story.

I’m sure many of you will be able to follow his explanation. A few might even be able to follow the math (I’m thinking Vic and Ryan) but it showed me that my mind has changed as I age. The scariest part was realizing that I would have been completely comfortable with his explanation just a few years ago. Now, when when I think too hard it feels like standing on the pedals when going uphill on your bike and the loose chain starts to jump a link or two, or twelve.

I know that our brains are flexible and information processing can change over time, but this sucks.

Now it is afternoon and the sky is almost completely clear, there is only a gentle breeze and the Sandhill cranes are circling overhead. I’m going for a walk on the docks and drool over the amazing new boats that I’ve seen coming out of the Bay Weld yard. One, the Double Eagle, is a new catamaran with two 450 HP V8 outboards with counter rotating stainless props. He has more in one engine than most cars in town.

The weather is perfect for it!