February 18, 2004

Big Shit, Little Shit

It seems like forever since I've written anything. In fact, given the trends of the last couple years, it is forever. But it's not anything new either. I'm prone to long bouts of continuous posting followed by drawn out spells of silence. However, this time, my silence has been mitigated not by any lack of thoughts, but rather by an all consuming problem known in most circles as "life." Well not really life, so much as school. That's nothing new either though - school's always a problem too. What's new this semester however, is that a disturbing trend in my academic endeavors that has been growing with every week, has finally reached epidemic levels. The trend I speak of is probably one with which any self-respecting scientist or engineer is familiar with: the paradoxically simultaneous expansion and contraction of everything I am studying. In other words, big shit, little shit. Still don't get it? Let try to me explain.

I guess an integral part of growing up and going to school is that you learn newer, better, and consequently more complicated things. I used to be cool with learning newer and better things, but in recent times, I'm not so sure. Every passing day, I feel like I'm learning something more and more obscure, that has no bearing on anything that is important. Worse, things keep getting bigger and smaller as I go along, making them less and less comprehensible.

Let me start with the big first, because it's less applicable to my situation now. Have you ever taken astronomy? Fascinating subject, really. Until you get to the part about light years. "You know, this star is a million light years away." A MILLION WHAT? What the HELL does that even mean? Are you making sense? How do you know that? YOU DON'T! STOP LYING. You're telling me that this little piece of dust and galaxial SHIT is so far, it would take light, traveling at 3.0 x 10⁸ m/s a million years to get there? I can't even comprehend what a million years is, let alone 3.0 x 10⁸. Seriously? What is that really? No one knows! 300 million meters PER SECOND? You know what that is? That's BULLSHIT! That's what that is! And if the universe is so damn big, how do you know where the hell we are in it? Where do all those pictures of the Milky Way come from? Lies! Conspiracy! Deceit! It doesn't exist! You couldn't possibly calculate that!

Worse than big shit though, like light years and galaxies and the universe "expanding," is small shit. The rapid advancement of technology, especially in the field of electrical and computer engineering, can be represented by one distinctive trend: making small shit smaller and smaller. Let's start with the microprocessors that supposedly contain billions of transistors. Billions! Open up your computer. Look at this "chip." It's just a piece of silicon, about 1'' x 1'' with a metal rectangle in the center. But yet, it contains 10⁹ transistors. How is that possible? How is it made? Most importantly, how does it work? The only conclusion: it's just a lie. Everything is a lie. How about processor speeds? 2.4 GHz. 3.0 GHz. Gigahertz. 2.4 billion cycles per second. O-N-E Mississippi. Your computer just cycled more than a billion times there. Seem unfeasible? It definitely does to me. It's just one big fat lie, perpetuated by the evil that be in this world.

Accept the computer speeds? Think it's completely fine that something is revolving more than a billion times per second on your desk? Fine, let me talk about something completely separate then. How about proteins, atoms, and shit like that? So small, you can't ever hope to see it, because our eyes don't work like that. But yet, somehow, we have all these crystal structures of proteins and know benzene looks like a hexagon and are positive about everyone of the steps of the Wolff-Kischner reaction. One word: horseshit! You bastards (chemists, biologists, scientists in general really) can't SEE any of that? How do you know? YOU DON'T! Or how about those pretty pictures taken by electron microscopes. That's my favorite part of bio lectures. Two pictures that look like the landscape of some alien habitat, and the professor goes - "see the dramatic difference?" What? All I see is two pieces of gray shit. It's almost as implausible as the entire concept of physics. "Magnetism?" Shit, don't even get me started!

Perhaps all this small shit and big shit and just generally shitty shit does exist and isn't a lie. I mean, it seems to work, so that makes sense, right? But the point is, it doesn't make sense and can't make sense in any normal perspective. The only reason we accept it is because it's drilled into our minds from when we are children (atoms as solar systems, etc.) so when we get to really learning about it, we don't stop to question it. And I'm no different I suppose - I accept most of that and hold science to be "true" and don't question it and learn it enough to reproduce it on a test. But sometimes, it just becomes too much when you stop to think about it. Maybe I should have majored in something with only medium shit like history, where things happened 500 years ago. That, I could deal with. But I guess that wasn't meant to be. So here I go, off to learn about Megabits and ethernets. I guess it could be worse - it could be transistors.