Still Amazed, ...never grow up. Options

[Hobbes]

I can claim the benefits of education, partake in my own eagerness to learn independently about 'stuff', and have a seemingly-endless wealth of knowledge at my keyboard-tapping finger-tips...

BUT...

there are still some things that, despite a full (or at least, reasonably substantial) understanding of, continue to amaze me in a rather childish way; almost like I am still assuming magic must be involved as opposed to, say, physics.

For me, these things include:

~ Aeroplanes. Yes yes yes... I know how they manage to lift off into the sky, but when I'm walking along the street and look up to the clouds to see the winged tonnage soaring amongst them, the six-year-old within me expresses his disbelief: "They are HUGE! They don't seem to be flying THAT fast! Surely the only thing keeping it in the sky is sheer willpower?!"

~ Magnets. These things can move. They can MOVE without being actually TOUCHED. If that isn't magic, I don't know what is. And yep, even now, as I quickly approach my 28th ... 27th and 12 months ... next birthday, I can still occasionally be found running a magnet underneath a thin tabletop in order to make its partner appear to move on the surface: As.If.By.Thought.Alone! Or manipulating iron filings! Or seeing how strong a magnet is by creating strings of attracted paper clips to dangle from it. Or running a magnet over a CRT screen to make pretty colours, and then getting in a panic when the effect suddenly seems to have become permanent (and then remember the degauss button to make it all alright again).

~ Bubbles. Blah blah. Surface Tension. Blah blah. Surfactants. Blah blah. Elasticity. Pft, whatever. They are bubbbbbbles!! Having a niece means having an excuse to buy/make mixture and spend a summer's day blowing bubbles, catching them, attaching them to one another, enlarging them, popping them, getting mixture in your eye and blinding yourself briefly. Bubbles are great

So. What do you still marvel at, even though you really should know better?

[Mata]

Laura has got a spookily good sense of taste and smell, whereas I have slightly abnormally good hearing in the higher pitch ranges (I can often hear bats or the whine of a television being turned on through several walls). Beyond all of the freakish coincidences that make up who we are when we were born, we then get all the weird quirks of our senses that then twist us into even stranger shapes.

Dogs are pretty amazing - they're the species with the most diverse physical characteristics that we know of. One dog can be perfectly healthy and something like six times taller than a dog of another breed... And those two dogs could still have puppies (technically, although stepladders would probably need to be involved somewhere).

Speaking of such things, killer whales and dolphins can have babies - they are different species! The point of being a species is that you can't breed with other species. That's like saying that Captain Kirk has got strangely coloured children spread across the universe. It's just crazy, but it's true. Also, I've got a lot of respect for the dedication of the dolphins who try this...

Locks - they're bloody amazing. We've worked out a way to make machines that can tell one nearly-identical jagged piece of metal from another! Incredible! I have sometimes thought that if I were born in medieval times I would have been a locksmith - I'm not sure why, but that makes sense in my head.

NOW - the world around us in Western society is flipping amazing! Sure, we've not got jet boots and flying cars, but have you seen what your phone can do? I first got online about 17 or 18 years ago and the web was almost entirely text. Now people are recording moments of their lives and streaming straight out to the whole world.

Cameras - !!!

I think I need to stop for the moment before I go ahead and list everything in existence.