Those Violet Crystals

The New Assistant – a 100 word story

Plutonium Trifluoride is not to be trifled with. Those violet crystals are investigated as a source of nuclear energy in some well-known laboratories by respected scientists, but that’s not their real power. Mixed with the right ingredients using the right combinations of words whispered in exactly the right intonations, great things could be achieved, sinister things too. Structures can be changed, tissue morphed into shapes. You see that little yellow monkey over there? That was my last assistant. You better excel in your tasks here. I’ve got many of those violet crystals left, and I know how to use them.

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Hi there and thanks for stopping by. I’m Guy, and you’re listening to my surreal sketchbook of reality.

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Episode 17, Those Violet Crystals

Science is the tool for finding out the truth about how everything works. It has a method for finding that out, and that method is called the scientific method. This episode Is a semi-philosophical look at the scientific method. I’m not a professional philosopher by any means and my approach can be quite absurd, illogical and not at all that serious, so – you’ve been warned. Do not take this podcast too seriously. If you tend to take things too seriously, this might not be the podcast for you. Seriously. I mean it. Find another podcast to listen to.

You’re still here? Good. Let’s talk about the scientific method. Curiosity is one of the base pillars human existence stands upon. It makes life interesting and meaningful. Curiosity compels us to find out how the world around us works. In ancient times, that has often led to false assumptions and misconceptions about how things actually work. People invented gods and mythologies to explain the workings of everything from the changing of seasons to the movement of the ocean waves. That is because observation is masked by our senses and our beliefs, and those tend to distort things quite a bit. This is why the scientific method was invented, to discover the truth in a relatively unbiased way.

We begin our journey to the truth with the question of “how does this work?” That, in essence,  is the whole purpose of science. It is there to give the answer to that singular question. Science attempts to bypass our senses and biases by using skepticism, by repeating experiments again and again and by using control groups. The heart of the scientific method is doubt. It looks at the evidence, examins it again and again until it finds out beyond reasonable doubt if things are true or false and even then if evidence comes that disprove something that was thought to be true, science changes it’s mind and marks it as false. I have new evidence that suggests that this is where I take a break. I’ll be right back.

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Monkey See – a 100 word story

I named my monkey Gandhi because of his habit of turning the other cheek. Other monkeys would charge at him, attack him but he would just stand there smiling his little monkey smile, holding his hand out to them. Eventually, they just tore him to pieces. I still miss the little fellow. Sometimes, when things go crazy at work, I think to myself, “What would my little Gandhi do?”, then I remember how he ended up and I just obliterate my fellow hairless white monkeys. I use presentations and flow charts, but it amounts to the same. No one survives.

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Welcome back. The scientific method starts with observation. You want to know how something works, you observe it, you come up with a theory of how it works. Your theory is not the truth. It’s just you saying “I think it works that way.” The next stage is experimenting to see if things actually work the way you think they do. In fact, trying to disprove it is as important as trying to prove it. You always have to keep in mind that things might work in a completely different way from the way you think they do. That is why one experiment is not enough. You have to repeat the experiment, again and again, enough times until you are absolutely sure things work the way you think they do, and even that is not enough. Your data might be biased. That is why you have to let other people check you up, repeat the experiment on their own terms and see if it works the same for them.

After different people do an experiment enough times to come up to the conclusion something works in a certain way, someone might come and say “I don’t think it actually works that way. I think it works in a different way. Here is how I think it works.” In short, someone might come up with a completely different theory of how something works, then you have to experiment to see if their theory is the correct one. Science has to be open-minded. It has to be open to changing its mind. If a shred of new evidence comes up that contradicts the previous one, science has to check it out and if it proves to be true, it has to accept the new evidence until a new one comes along.

Using the scientific method to find out how our world works mean our understanding of the world around us is always changing, evolving. One hypothesis after another is discarded for a better one. This means we might never truly understand the world around us, but we are never going to stop trying. This is because we are curious creatures, and curiosity is at the base of our existence. This concludes episode 17 of this podcast. Close the door on your way out and don’t forget – I’m just a figment of your imagination.

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The Closet Started to Spin

The Hungry Forest – a 100 word story

The forest whispered to Anna. She crawled dipper into the closet. The forest creatures were coming for her, and she knew they were going to skin her alive, then tear her apart limb from limb. She was terrified, but she was also prepared. She clutched the little device the strange man from the forest gave her and activated it. The closet started to spin around her, becoming a blur, then it disappeared altogether. She was no longer there. The forest creatures would have to feed on some other poor soul today. She thanked the spirit of human ingenuity for teleports.

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Hi there and thanks for stopping by. I’m Guy, and you’re listening to my surreal sketchbook of reality.

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Episode 16, The Closet Started to Spin

Imagination can be real magic, or it may be the biggest of lies. This episode Is a semi-philosophical look at imagination. I’m not a professional philosopher by any means and my approach can be quite absurd, illogical and not at all that serious, so – you’ve been warned. Do not take this podcast too seriously. If you tend to take things too seriously, this might not be the podcast for you. Seriously. I mean it. Find another podcast to listen to.

You’re still here? Good. Let’s talk about imagination. Imagination is often used to tell a story. To imagine the story, you would often begin with a question, and that question would often begin with “What if…” There are “What if…” questions that are close to our everyday reality like “What if I didn’t have to go to work?” or “What if that next-door neighbor was a foreign spy?”. Those would produce stories that can happen in real life and in fact, those imaginary stories might even be similar to events that actually happened. There are also “what if” questions that create completely separate realities like “What if walking trees and hobbits really existed?” or “What if there was a substance called aether that could be used to control elements, and those, in turn, could be used for magic?”. Those “what if…” questions would produce stories that would require us to suspend our disbelief if we want to enjoy them since they would be very different from what we experience in our everyday reality.

Science and technology also rely on imagination for progress. We wouldn’t have the modern world if we didn’t have questions such as “What if two people on the other sides of the world could instantly talk to each other?” or “What if we could put the phone, the television and the radio into our computer?”. Other imaginative questions are going to shape our future, questions such as “What if your car could drive all by itself?” and “What if we could create objects that can be controlled and shaped by computers?”. Another very imaginative question is “What if I take a break right now?”. I’ll be right back.

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The Egg – a 100 word story

“But… can you do it?” I asked, eyeing him suspiciously “can you make it hatch?”. I never liked those federal types. I always suspect them of being oblivious to the consequences. “Nothing to it,” said the man in the black overcoat. I checked my watch. It was nearly time now. “Just let me inspect it one last time,” I said. “Sure, Just don’t break it” he answered. The Pterospondylus egg lay before me. I examined it gently, then they took it away. As I watched the egg in the incubator, I envisioned a future where flying dinosaurs grace our skies.

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Welcome back. Imagination is used to create fictional stories. You can find those stories on books, in radio plays, in the theater and on video games among other things. Some of those stories are very elaborate and create whole new worlds for us to enjoy. The lore of those worlds can go back to prehistory, inventing anything from mythology to geography. Entering those worlds, you can leave your everyday life for a while, forgetting your everyday troubles. That is the magic of imagination.

Some people can get lost in imagination and start believing imaginary things to be real. They can start believing the earth is flat and stands on an endless pillar made out of turtles, or that evolution is a lie. While imagination can be a good thing, it can also be used to create fake news and conspiracy theories. People can imagine all sorts of things and start believing them. They can imagine we never landed on the moon or that Elvis is alive. This comes from believing the things you imagine to be true without checking them first.

Being skeptical of imaginative statements is healthy. When someone makes a statement that is conspiratory, not in line with what we know or outright illogical, we must look for scientific evidence to disprove that statement. Real scientific proof for anything should follow the scientific method, but this is a topic for another episode. For now, just remember that imagination can be a great vehicle for enriching your life, but you should always know how to distinguish it from reality. This concludes episode 16 of this podcast. Close the door on your way out and don’t forget – I’m just a figment of your imagination.

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A Cloud of Pixels

The Real Rose – a 100 word story

I was standing at the edge of known space. The grid lines were extremely beautiful. That was it. I was going to jump right into reality. I was going to smell a real rose. I made it, half expecting to disappear in a cloud of pixels. The clockwork device I built converted me into a real person and ejected me into the real world. I could feel the real breeze on my face. I found a flower shop. I picked a single rose and smelled it, breathing it in deeply. I wrinkled my nose in disgust. That rose was stinky.

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Hi there and thanks for stopping by. I’m Guy, and you’re listening to my surreal sketchbook of reality.

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Episode 15, A Cloud of Pixels

While our everyday industrialized world tends to be made out of different shades of gray, it’s not the end all be all of color. This episode Is a semi-philosophical look at color. I’m not a professional philosopher by any means and my approach can be quite absurd, illogical and not at all that serious, so – you’ve been warned. Do not take this podcast too seriously. If you tend to take things too seriously, this might not be the podcast for you. Seriously. I mean it. Find another podcast to listen to.

You’re still here? Good. Let’s talk about color. When a light source goes through a prism, it breaks into different colors. The specific colors we get depend on the color of the light source and can be influenced by the composition of the air it goes through. Usually, when we talk about separating color through a prism, the specific color separation that comes from a white color source here on earth is the one we refer to. That is because we happen to live on earth and white color sources are the ones most common here. The colors you get from a white light source also happen to be the ones you get from a rainbow.

Raindrops can sometimes act as prisms, breaking up colors and creating a rainbow in the sky. A rainbow is actually composed of many colors, some of them invisible, but we tend to break it into seven colors, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. That particular choice of colors is actually not natural. It was created by Newton who chose that particular number of colors to coincide with the white notes in a musical octave. Beyond those colors are the ones we can’t see like ultraviolet and infrared. The color composition of a rainbow can be broken down quite differently, but we tend to see those particular colors since we are culturally trained to see them from an early age. We absorbed those as the actual colors of a rainbow from our environment for so long, that we just believe them to be the true colors of a rainbow. I see the color of a break coming up. I’ll be right back.

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Fishing – a 100 word story

The packet of cherry-flavored blow pops was happily floating on the water. Little Linda bent over and tried to pick it up. Apparently, it was stuck. The kid pulled at it. The packet seemed to pull back at her. She pulled harder. The packet also pulled harder until it knocked Linda off her feet and started dragging her right into the water. Linda just wouldn’t let go. She really wanted those colorful yummy looking lollipops. Eventually, she was pulled right into the water where a shark with a fishing rod put her in a basket and walked away with her.

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Welcome back. Color can be a cultural thing and the meaning we give to color can change by where you grew up. For example, red can represent life and sensuality in some places while representing danger and violence in others. Blue can represent peace and tranquillity but can also represent sadness and depression depending on where you are. Many times, the way we perceive a color depends on the meaning we absorbed for it while growing up.

Differences in the way we perceive color can also be embedded in the very language we speak. Take blue and light blue for example. If you are English speaking you would perceive both as blue, different tones of the same color. In Hebrew though, there are different words for them, “Kachol” for blue and “Tchelet” for light blue, so they might be perceived as distinct colors. There are many examples of that and different colors can be perceived as one color in some languages and two colors in some. In some places, for example, red and orange are the same color and have only one word for both of them.

Different people from the same culture can also perceive colors differently. That is because we don’t actually see colors. We see our brain’s interpretation of color. That is most obvious where the boundaries between colors are blurry, for example, the boundary between blue and violet. In effect, Your dark blue can be violet for someone else. It’s hard to tell where your orange ends and where someone’s red begins. Some people can’t distinguish opposite colors. Green and red would seem like the same color to them. This is just one form of color blindness. In more extreme cases, people can’t see color at all. They just see the world in different shades of gray. This is just another one of the problems we have for being separate beings with separate brains who interpret the world in a separate way, but it’s also just part of the magic of what makes us unique and human. This concludes episode 15 of this podcast. Close the door on your way out and don’t forget – I’m just a figment of your imagination.

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