The things I know I didn't know...

I've been struggling to think of something to blog about for a couple of days, I thought about this or that, but ultimately always wound up thinking "yeah, I'd get to the end of the first paragraph and then be done", so I was racking my brains trying to think of something substantive, and then, whilst watching a documentary about the Liquid Bomb Plot, I realised that I had absolutely no idea how explosives worked. I know what they do, I know they go bang and in the wrong place it can be fairly terminal, but I didn't know why they went bang - why is nitroglycerine so explosive but rubber, for example, not. I had no idea. I figured it was something to do with chemistry (I was right, and I quote from Wikipedia:

An explosion is a type of spontaneous chemical reaction (once initiated) that is driven by both a large negative enthalpy change (great release of heat) and a large positive entropy change (great quantities of gases are released) in going from reactants to products, thereby constituting a very thermodynamically favorable process in addition to one that propagates very rapidly. Thus, explosives are substances that contain a large amount of energy stored in chemical bonds. The energetic stability of the gaseous products and, hence, their generation comes from the formation of strongly bonded species like carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and (di)nitrogen, which contain strong double and triple bonds having bond strengths of nearly 1,000 kJ/mole. Consequently, most commercial explosives are organic compounds containing -NO₂, -ONO₂ and -NHNO₂ groups that when detonated release gases like the aforementioned ones (e.g., nitroglycerin, TNT, HMX, PETN, nitrocellulose).

That almost makes sense to me! It made me think, however, what else don't I know, that I probably should (I should point out at this point that I'm not actually interested in explosives themselves, purely what made them 'bang', so of anyone in SIS or it's equivalent is reading this thinking 'Hmmm' I'm not interested in making bombs!!).

I should probably have a better understanding of how pickups in guitars work (I know it's something to do with magnetic resonance in an induction coil. I think anyway!), I'd like to have a better understanding of fluid dynamics (just because I think 'fluid dynamicist' would be a cool job title), I really wish I had a better understanding of the human mind, particularly as it applies to women, but then I don't think anyone really understands them!

One of the particular 'joys' of being me is the way in which my mind can flit from one thing to another, totally unconnected in any way other than that my warped mind can find some sort of tenuous connection. I can be thinking about something, let's say... ocelots. For anyone who doesn't know, an ocelot is a wildcat.  I happened to be reading the Wikipedia article on ocelots, when that made me want to read Dilbert comics. As I was reading Dilbert, I wondered who the world's richest man was (turns out it's a Mexican called Carlos Slim - I know, I was as surprised as anyone, he's apparently worth $74 Billion. I wouldn't mind a loan of his credit card for a couple of days!).  That in turn made me wonder how much the Pope got paid.  It turns out, the Pope doesn't get paid anything (although he can apparently keep the royalties from books, although in practice Popes tend to divest themselves of that income to. and use it for charitable purposes).  So there you go, from ocelots to the Pope in 4 easy moves.

The whole fractured though process is constantly going on in my head. I'm writing this, but thinking "I remembered reading years ago that a dog's habit of going round in circles before lying down somewhere is thought to be some sort of genetic code, hard-wired into them from the days of old when wild dogs would lie down in rushes, going in circles to flatten some of the rushes into a comfy bed". Why am I thinking that? I have no idea. I'm also straying very far off topic, which is something else I do all the time.

When I was on the BT project at work, I usually did 3 of the training modules for gradbay.  I enjoyed doing them, those who know me will know that I quite liked doing a presentation here and there, or a training group. Had I just started at the beginning, and went through to the end (which I was more than capable of, after all, I wrote the modules!) then even with questions, I could probably have done them in 45 mins to 1 hour each. But no, as I was explaining something, it would trigger something in my head, so I would segue off on a tangent for a while, before working my way back on track (for example, talking about ESPN usually prompted me to tell the story of my accidentally farting in the face of a small child at a baseball game).  If I was able to complete a session in under 90 minutes, I thought I was doing well!

Why have I typed all this out. Well, I guess what I hoped initially was to have an interesting article about some topics which interest me, but that I didn't know a lot about. It turned out to be a trip into how my mind works. Well, for a certain definition of 'works'!

I will leave you with this, tonight's 'Springer Moment'. Don't be afraid to admit you don't know something. I do it all the time - accepting that there will be things you don't know isn't a weakness, it's an opportunity. Not knowing something doesn't mean you have failed.  Not taking the opportunity to learn, however, that could be quite different!

Until next time...