We had a conversation at work about some things that are cool, but don’t know how anyone figured it out.

An example I saw demonstrated by an old roommate, Riley:

1. Take a heavy glass tumbler, and flip it upside down (it’s recommended that you start with an empty glass, but at this point it doesn’t really matter)
2. Using a cigarette lighter, heat one of the edges of the tumbler
3. Turn the tumbler on it’s side and press the hot edge against a table or counter top until it cracks.  (just a crack)
4. Turn the glass upright and place it on the table/counter.
5. Wait.

The glass will spontaneously shatter.  I saw it twice.  Once, a chunk of the glass just hopped out of the tumbler, a little surprising, but not really impressive.   Riley wasn’t satisfied, so he repeated steps 1-5.  The glass exploded!  The entire glass shattered and shards slid across the counter-top and onto the floor.  It was really cool.

But I was left wondering, how did he figure that out?  What got it into his head?  How many glasses did it take to perfect the process?  How did he think that up?

Jonathan learned a trick to make a sparkling explosion with a couple of lighters–you’ll have to get the details from him.  But similar questions arose in his head.

The one that always got me… was bread.

Who thought that up.  I can’t imagine the process.  “Let’s see.  This really tall weed has a little chewable seed wrapped in some skin stuff.  Let’s not eat it now, but lets gather up all the little seeds, throw away the rest of the plant, and keep the seeds for a while.”

“Now the seeds are hard, lets see if we can grind them into a powder, but don’t eat it yet, lets mix in some water and make a sticky paste.  Hmm, I still don’t think it’s ready to eat”

“Maybe throw in an egg, or some little bacteria that will make the paste bloat and expand… yeah, that might be good… now let’s stick it in the fire…and….BREAD!”

I was baffled at how the breadmaking process could have ever been conjured up… then I realized–it wasn’t guessed, it was taught.

Bread was a gimme when Adam was kicked out of the garden “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground;” (Genesis 3:19)

So the conversation was more:

“Sorry, you can’t stay here anymore, but I found something cool you can do with that weed…”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 4th, 2007 at 12:49 pm and is filed under Pseudo Semantics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.