A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. A showerthought should offer a unique perspective on an ordinary part of life.
I hate that everybody's like, it's not that big a deal.
We only started doing it 124 years ago! Prior to that it was a very big deal indeed.
Everyone's so fucking smart these days, there's no room for a sense of wonder. It's like being blasé and knowledgeable is cool. It's really not.
You keep flying with your beautiful sense of wonder, Buttflapper!
I don't need ignorance to feel wonder. I think things are cooler when I can marvel at the complex mechanics behind it all.
True. But I wasn't arguing that.
Wait until you find out about electricity! 🤯
Computers is teachibg rocks to think
We grow flawless crystals, slice them into perfect disks, engrave billions of arcane runes onto them with magical potions and rays of light, animate them with lightning, and make them do our bidding.
And then we give them an "intelligence" that can't even count the Rs in strawberry...
By filling them with lightning
And telephones! Even en old-school analogue phone is pretty amazing how sound becomes an electrical signal and then is converted back to sound at the other end.
Modern digital phones are just pure magic compared to analogue phones.
Considering how we use it. It is absolutely fascinating. Same for magnetism
tomato tomato =P
Dafuq is this!? Stress testing?
Basically. The wings have to be able to bend that much so they don’t break off in strong winds or hard maneuvers.
I'm a mechanical engineer and have a general understanding of how wings work. I've flown many times. That shit still feels like magic to me.
I was most impressed by the sheer amount of power those engines put out when you finally take off. The acceleration gave me a boost of adrenaline when I flew for the first time (it was a Southwest Boeing 737)
And I can only imagine how they feel when empty.
Don't forget how high you get.
Last time I flew I didn't get high at all. I must be doing something wrong.
ARE. OP is clearly very high right now.
If you get high enough, the idea of heavier-than-air objects not inevitably succumbing to gravity may fill you with wonder as well.
The wings are crazy ! They look way too flimsy for what they do.
Next time you see an airplane, imagine a crane picking it up by the wings, around the middle of the wing length, and then start shaking it up.
It does not look like the wing will be able to hold that much weight.
It's simple. You just need 60 tons of lift and thrust. Aerodynamics help but you can make a brick fly.
it's crazy that you can just jump, and you go up for a bit.
that and about 223,378 pounds of jet fuel then it flies
https://www.globalair.com/aircraft-for-sale/specifications?specid=1699
My first experience in an airplane was quite different actually. In my mind as a child an airplane was this amazing thing that just flew, I had seen pictures of how it looked and thought it was a static thing that people sat in as it flew around.
The reality was quite different, the thing was a bit scoffed up and looked used. I kept thinking how the seats look like the seats on a bus. Not dirty exactly, but used looking and the kind of material you don't see stains too well and cleans easily. The noise was a lot to handle, not just the roar of the engines and the sound of the air going past, but all of the groins and creaks. And it wasn't static at all, everything was shaking and moving around, panel gaps showing. I saw the wings go from hanging down to pointing up as the weight of the aircraft hung from the wings. In my mind metal was hard and shouldn't move as much as it did. Getting on and off was just a ramp that was shoved near the plane from the gate, with a gap in between a flap was laid over. It looked nothing like the high-tech environment I imagined. And flying through the air wasn't as I imagined, at those speeds it's more like being under water than going through nothing as I imagined. The plane reacts to currents in the air, getting pushed to the sides and up and down, not the perfectly straight and stable ride I imagined.
So in the end I decided a plane is very much like a bus and that makes sense as it does pretty much the same thing, carry a bunch people from a to b all of the time.
The only thing that surprised me was at take off how much power the thing has. In a bus the engine is usually very underpowered, just enough to get up to speed in the most efficient way. With an airplane the power to weight ratio is crazy, it's more like driving a really fast car than a bus. But other than at take off, it's pretty much a bus.
In the air shows around here, they used to have a semi truck with some rockets strapped to the back that they'd race against a fighter jet.
The jet would come in low and when it crossed the starting line, the truck would take off from it.
The truck usually won.
Air shows might be big oil and military propaganda (that truck was owned and sponsored by Shell, iirc)...but damn if it wasn't cool as hell.
I went to my second monster truck show a couple years ago. Took my nephew with me. The first time I was a kid and we had to leave because the noise made my bitch ass little brother cry.
They've come so far! They're doing front flips now in those trucks! Highly recommend it for anyone. I was 39 at the time and I loved every minute.
boy do I agree.
I fly a lot, and I think about this a lot. it's absolutely nuts.
I saw a diagram once explaining how planes fly, this is a good explanation of that:
"Airplane wings are shaped to make air move faster over the top of the wing. When air moves faster, the pressure of the air decreases. So the pressure on the top of the wing is less than the pressure on the bottom of the wing. The difference in pressure creates a force on the wing that lifts the wing up into the air."
so that's floating around the back of my mind while I sit in my air chair and think:
"and there we are.
We are climbing into the air again in the big flexible metal tube.
The wings have flex and they almost look like they are flapping in the wind right there.
well, this is crazy again"
approximates my thought process each time I fly.
Due to the nature of my work I've flown hundreds of passenger flights of all sizes and I still find myself in awe.
What a privilege to be able to actually see down from such a range of heights too. Where there is still lots of detail to be found, but you can also get an appreciation of scale. It's honestly really amazing.