Learning from boredom: Lesson 1

Today was a great day. I got off work early and I came home thinking I’d take a nice nap before dinner at this place called Kathmandu Chullo.

Hey, maybe I should check my e-mail that I already checked on my phone before I got home. So I sat down at my laptop and opened up Firefox. Hmm, CNN has an article on the Hubble (Hubble repair mission OK’d). Wow, the telescope was launched in 1990 when I was only 9 years old and since then it has taken over 750,000 pictures. After looking at a few of the pictures Hubble has acquired, I started feeling mighty small and insensible.

The galaxies pictured each had billions of stars and each galaxy looked like a sprinkle of pixie dust. At this time, I began to feel even smaller. Next was a picture of a galaxy over 100 million light years away meaing the light that was imaged was over 100 million years old! The little description said the exposure time had to be one million seconds. WTF!? I can just picture Dr. Evil asking for the picture. So I wanted to know how long one million seconds was and because I was too lazy to calculate it, I Googled it. It was interesting to note that my query returned over 23 million results.

I got to the third link and I finally found my answer in the FAQ: one million seconds equals 11 days, 13 hours, 46 minutes, and 40 seconds. Even more amazing, the telescope can capture images “without deviating more than the width of a strand of human hair from a mile away.”

Since I was on a roll, I Googled the number of stars in the universe. I got almost 44 million results this time but the first link gave me my answer. I should have just clicked the “I’m feeling lucky” button instead but even more importantly, there are 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in the universe. How many atoms are in the universe? The first result out of almost 5 million had a good enough answer. To give a little perspective to those who still use pencils, but without specifying what kind, it is written that there are 25,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms in just the lead. Anywho, a scant 4×10^79 is a conservative estimate of the number of atoms in the universe. That’s 4,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms!

Since my finger is tired from typing all those zeros, I will conclude today’s lesson in boredom. But not before talking about Kathmandu Chullo. It is supposed to be a Nepalese restaurant. I’m expecting it to be good simply because Kathmandu (kat-man-doo) is home to roughly 800,000 people and the capital of Nepal which is, in turn, home to 8 of the ten tallest mountains on our tiny Earth.

I’m going to take a nap now to forget I even exist. Happy Halloween!