Perspectives

Dear friends,

Since this is my first letter to “Three Windows to the World”, I will talk about perspectives. “Three Windows to the World” is just a fancy way to say that us three are like windows in a house, and we each have a completely different view of the world from one another. Same world, different perspective. It’s funny how different the world can look when you gaze at things from a different angle. I will share some of my ideas of different views with you here. The three ideas I want to share with you guys in this entry is scale of vision, water and time.

So, scale of vision in relation to perspectives…what am I talking about?? WELL, I will tell you guys! Our eyes are adjusted to see things a certain way, we only have a particular field of vision that we can not change. However, if you guys have ever looked inside a telescope, microscope or any of that sort, you know things look A LOT different than what they are like to your naked eye. Things behave in a completely different way on a molecular level, it’s like if each time you zoom into a view, you get a whole new world!! So an example of this would be DNA. In biology club the other week, we had to extract some DNA from strawberries. Our main ingredient that got everything to work was alcohol, but the main part is that once we added the alcohol, you can see this white silky substance separating from the rest of the strawberry mush. Few moments later, there’s this cloud of white silk on the top of the liquid floating around, IT WAS DNA!!! SO COOL, I thought I would never see DNA in my life, but there I saw it just a few bits of strawberry. We saw the white cloud, but in reality, DNA looks very different than what we saw that day. It is actually a twisted double helix that encompasses the bases, making the code for any living organism. It’s so intricate, and in the white cloud we saw was just a big blob of tangled DNA.

Another addition to scale of vision would be on the bigger scale of things, outer space. Whenever I go to the mall (if I ever), I think about how absorbed into the displayed material products people can be. It just scares me, and then I just let my mind wander and look at the situation as if I am in space, or just floating right about the mall. It looks very different up there, you see the whole grand picture of things. You can see planets forming, stars rebirthing, galaxies colliding, and there is a mall on earth, the lonely planet earth. There are many people in it, and they have no idea what is going on outside of them but how much that “cute shirt” is. How miniscule is that, when there is so much craziness going on in the rest of the world. This also happens during class time…especially during a test…I think about this. That we are here, so absorbed into the current moment, that we are pretty much closing off the rest of the world….perspectives. God sees the world from the big picture as well…

The next entity I want to talk about is water. Water is a beautiful thing, it covers about 70% of our earth…the rest is land? Do you guys ever wonder what is underneath all that water? Yes, water may look flat wherever you go, but what if all that water was gone from earth? What if we drain the oceans, drain the lakes…..Ok, let’s start from something we are all familiar with Lake Ontario…have you ever wondered what lies behind the blanket of water? I was watching a documentary recently, and it was called “Drain the Great Lakes.” It was talking about the discoveries made by undersea mapping technologies. They can now drive a boat with a device attached to the end of it that literally “maps” the sea floor by elevation. It is absolutely amazing, you just take the boat around the whole lake and VOILA, you get a map of the whole lake! And they discovered something AMAZING about Lake Ontario that most people do not know. Close to the shores of Toronto, there is actually a crater at the bottom of LAKE ONTARIO!!! The size of this crater is about the same diameter as Barringer Crater in Arizona, so they can predict that an asteroid of about the same size and velocity struck Earth at some point in the past causing that massive preserved undersea crater! It’s just so shocking to know because when you look out at a body of water, you probably would not be thinking about some crater or volcano at the ocean floor. I recommend you guys to watch the documentary called “Drain the Oceans” because it talks about the same thing, but for the oceans of the world. It mentions mountain ridges, valleys and a whole other world underneath all the oceans. (Link is at the end of this letter. )

The final stem I want to talk about is time…theeee coolest one…well…at this moment!!! SO, I was watching these videos on YouTube from The Slow Mo Guys. They are REALLY COOL. They film themselves smashing things, etc. and replay it in super super slow motion. All the videos are just shocking because you never realize how much your eye misses because things just happened…well…TOO FAST. For example, whenever you perform an eye saccade (a fast movement of your eye from one destination to another), your iris actually kind of jiggles when you stop because it is like some jelly substance and even when your eye stops, it still wants to move. Or how about when glass shatters?? It’s so fast but those lines cut through the glass and really, in real life, you blink and the next second, the glass is not standing up, but on the floor in pieces, with a high speed camera, total different story. So guys, I hope you will take some time to check out their channel! (Link bottom of letter)

Just a bonus thing about saccades, is the “Stopped Clock Illusion.” I learned this like a couple of months ago, but I just did some more research on it today in English class (during presentations ;P) because I was just so bored. So have you guys ever looked at the second hand of an analog clock (or the seconds of a digital clock), and it seems like if the first second once you look at it is actually longer than all the rest? WELLLLL, that is because whenever you perform an eye saccade, your vision is actually blurred, and in those moments, whatever comes into your eye is actually not being processed by your brain. Then once your vision is clear again (when you look at the clock), the brain fills up the missing information during the shift in vision with the first new image of the time. That’s why the first second seems longer, because it also accounts for the time that it took for your eye to go from your previous vision area to the new one. Your brain does such a good job at this saccadic masking that you pretty much do not notice unless you look at something that keeps time. During the whole day, you lose approximately 40 minutes of vision due to your eye moving from one spot to another. WOW!!! (more information about this, check bottom)

So that was my crazy weekish….sort of…what was going on in my brain at least….just a little bit of a teaser if I ever talk about this topic again…. I will probably elaborate more on what I said as well as talk about other ideas dealing with perspectives, lliiike…space, angle, situation, experience, culture, knowledge, etc.

I will leave you guys with this super cool quote by Margaret Atwood. I have never read The Handmaid’s Tale but, I hope I will one day:

“What I need is perspective. The illusion of depth, created by a frame, the arrangement of shapes on a flat surface. Perspective is necessary. Otherwise there are only two dimensions. Otherwise you live with your face squashed up against a wall, everything a huge foreground, of details, close-ups, hairs, the weave of the bedsheet, the molecules of the face. Your own skin like a map, a diagram of futility, criscrossed with tiny roads that lead nowhere. Otherwise you live in the moment. Which is not where I want to be”

- Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

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Drain the Oceans: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPeISaBoiLY&list=WL8352617C3399CDF2&index=11&feature=plpp_video

The Slow Mo Guys: http://www.youtube.com/user/theslowmoguys

Saccadic Masking: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccadic_masking

Yours dearly,

Wingless Aura

P.S. Margaret Atwood apparently taught at university one of the teachers in my school before!