Shower thoughts are those miniature epiphanies you have when you discover an oddity in the familiar. Here are a selection of my own:
- There may well a parallel universe in which, by chance, bogosort has and always will be correct first time, baffling computer scientists.
- Drinking alcohol admits much of the same “double-or-nothing” dynamics of gamblers ruin just with your reputation rather than wealth.
- A large part of school exams is not demonstrating an aptitude for the subject, but a willingness to jump through arbitrary hoops, which is arguably a more employable characteristic.
- DNA was the original RAID 1 implementation.
- Companies that offer a better price after you cancel are just admitting that they were drastically overcharging you (I’m looking at you Adobe).
- Whilst Europe uses litres per kilometre as their measure of a car’s efficiency, the UK/US use miles per gallon; this arguably says a lot about the different mindsets of the regions—“I need to go X distance, how much will it cost me?” vs “I have Y money, how far can I go?”.
- One of the biggest forms a peer pressure many teenagers face isn’t drugs, sex, or alcohol, but during exams when the silence is broken by everyone turning to the second page of the assessment whilst you’re still working on the first question.
- The morse code for “k” is “-.-“, which provides the same passive-aggressive tone.
- The opposite of a subliminal message would be a superliminal message: rather than subtly inserting a single frame picturing Coca Cola into the film trailers to subconsciously create a desire to buy the product before the film starts, you interrupt the trailers abruptly to brashly shout “buy Coca Cola you idiots!”.
- When in a corporate meeting the phrase “it’s all about finding the balance” will be appropriate—and perhaps even insightful—in almost all contexts.
- The bass is (as far as I know) the only instrument that has an significiant asymmetry in the difficultly of playing ascending and descending scales. Specifically, when playing fingerstyle, you can rake (use the same motion to play two strings) when descending, but not when ascending. The closest equivalent for other instruments is in Gypsy jazz guitar (though only that specific sub-genre), where it is idiomatic to strike a new string with a downstroke, disallowing rakes when descending a scale.