30 Comments
Dec 30, 2023Liked by Andrew Smith

Wow! What a road trip that would be !! My sleep math usually involves counting breaths. Inhale for five, exhale for five - Works great and knocks me out fast. Your sleep thoughts would have me pondering all night long! Now I’m wondering what kind of things you’d pack for such a road trip and how much will realistically fit in the car, and if you added bathroom breaks,how does that change the time, and what about a playlist, can you get Wi-Fi? Now you see why no ‘sleep-math’ for me!

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Counting breaths is a classic technique, one that I've heard the military encourages in some areas (but I've never heard this directly from any ex-military friends). That's a very effective trick to use.

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You know most of us count sheep, right? "Look at me, I'm Andrew, I do everything in a way that's classier than you! Rock, paper, scissors? Never heard of it. I play Einstein, Aristotle, Nero, Flux Capacitor. It just gives me a sense of perspective!"

Now that my mature and reasonable rant is over, it's actually quite cool go realize how close the moon is in those terms.

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Counting sheep is such a weird thing to think about, right?

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Yeah. Counting astronomical distances converted into car mileage is much less strange!

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I think about distance and cars far more than I think about sheep. How about you?

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As a proud sheep-ridin' cowboy, sheep are all I think about. Good baaaay, sir!

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baaaaaaaaaaAaaaaaaaaaAAAaad pun!

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Baaaaaa-that-is-probably-true.

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I do envision travel before sleep, but never to the moon. Even if I do like to wonder about galaxies sometimes, especially with meditation.

This was a fun ride, thanks, Andrew! Within a few minutes, sentences, and well-designed triggers, you guide us within the ride. Brilliant 🎯

Those distances are immense in our minds but in reality, they may be a closer experience. "So far but so close" is what I have in mind when I witness the moon and sun. What a universe ✨️

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"So far but so close" is wonderful, and accurate! Well said.

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Thanks! It pretty much sums up a human experience with its world 🌎

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My "sleep math" is far less exciting. It usually involves thinking something like "okay, if I go to sleep right now, I can get X amount of sleep." or, if I'm feeling fancy, something like, "I can stay up X amount longer and still get 5 hours of sleep."

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I'm also familiar with this sort of sleep math. I think that was a huge part of why I eventually insisted on giving by brain something it could get lost in to chew on.

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Yep that's usually it!

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Yep. Since I was a little kid, I think about infinity and the end of the universe (the geographical end, not the chronological end, which is much less fun because it involves the complete annhiliation of the entire Beatles catalogue. 😢)

If the universe is infinite -- and how could we possibly know if it is -- that's not of course anything one can wrap their mind around. There are no thought experiments to give us scale for infinity. So then I think of if it's not infinite and there is an "edge" of the universe, what's beyond that edge, in the same way that I think of the end of a road and now there's maybe a barricade beyond that and beyond THAT is maybe a field and beyond THAT is... and if the universe is infinite, than these 'beyonds' never stop and...

Since I was a kid and to this day.

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Faith, I wrote this ten or fifteen years ago, and I want to redo it, but I think you'd enjoy it as is: https://hubpages.com/education/Thought-Experiments-to-Help-You-Fall-Asleep-Finite-but-Unbounded-Universe

I LOVE thinking about that stuff.

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Use SI.

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Envision block letters of the word "NO", but with America colors and stars and stuff making up the letters. An eagle is crying in the sky.

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SI is better. And more widely used.

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Irony does not always translate very well across the internet, sadly.

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Nor does deadly dry humor.

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I appreciate the break down with the car. In terms of scale, I think about how strong they say a spider web is or the strength of an ant. Can’t wrap my brain around it, but still appreciate it.

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Those are great examples. In some ways, we have it pretty good with superhero TV shows, movies, and comics... they help us visualize what that sort of scale can look like in the "real world"! Fun stuff to think about.

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I’m always amused when there’s news about an exoplanet thousands of light years away. 1 ly is 24 trillion miles, an unimaginably large number. Oh, wait, that’s what the national debt is.

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Congratulations to us; we are becoming astronomical!

Just not in the good kind of way. :-/

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Dec 31, 2023Liked by Andrew Smith

Perhaps the moon is made of goat's cheese!

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I've been having trouble falling back to sleep after bathroom breaks in the middle of the night. I will have to try this. Meaning, thinking about your old car and your "new"car driving to the moon. What would we listen to? What roadside landmarks might there be?

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I would vote for plenty of Bowie, especially Space Oddity. I mean, that's rather facile and obvious, but it's also a must-have.

Roadside landmarks... that's a good one. We're not stopping, so the signs would probably say stuff like, "Hang in there! You got this", kind of light motivational materials to not go space crazy.

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*singing Driving To The Moon to the tune of Fly Me To The Moon*

I really enjoy how the unrealistic part of driving to the moon is that the car would require maintenance. not the overall absence of ... the road, or gravity, or oxygen.

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