My God, it's full of stars

Ever since I was child, I had a fascination with science. I loved dinosaurs as a toddler and youngster (more than most kids; I learned the names and eras they lived in) and as a tween I watched the entire Cosmos series. One would think my parents would expect me to become a scientist or at the very least, do something useful with my life. Unfortunately, my appallingly average intellect and above-average slothfulness prevented me from entering the sciences.

In fact, it's a bit laughable that science interests me at all. What do you think of when someone says "science"? After I think of that Thomas Dolby song from the eighties, I think of math. Lots of math with indecipherable symbols and abstractions and plenty of square roots canceling out fractional imaginary numbers. Impenetrable math. Truth be told, I was terrible at math. Not just terrible in a average sense -- but terrible in the sense that I was put into a special remedial math program when I was in fourth grade, or so. I don't remember much of it, so it could have been third grade and it might have been fifth.

The point is, I was so damn awful at math that I didn't really get the hang of multiplying and dividing fractions until college -- even though I took algebra I and II in high school. Teachers might be interested to know that my math acumen came about in an epiphany: I realized I could solve these problems any damn way I wanted to, as long as the steps followed the rules of mathematics. This was a mind-blowing revelation for me, even though my father (who made a living at the higher mathematics) gave me a blank stare when I told him. I get the idea that I'm a bit of an idiot, slowly (very slowly) coming to grips with the expanse of my ignorance. I'm hoping to catch up with the rest of humanity by the time I'm eighty or so.

Anyway, watch this video. It's extremely cool and really connected with me in that it captures the wonder I feel when I look up into the night sky. Perhaps if science didn't involve so much calculus, I might have made a decent theoretical physicist or something. Ah, maybe not. That's one of the trappings of being an idiot: never realizing your mental limitations until you run headlong into them.

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