Why is cute?

Babies, bunnies, puppies and kittens. We seem to find them adorable, but why? What is the evolutionary logic behind this?

Lets first start with what we seem to find cute, the traits. Like a relative to the body large round head, a large protruding forehead, big round eyes, puffy cheeks, a rounded small body and a soft skin/fur. And these six traits are exactly what cartoonists copied when drawing cartoon characters. Why? Because cute is addicting. You want to cuddle with cute things and hug them, but why?

The answer is quite simple, because we are programmed to do so. Human babies are unlike a lot of other species very reliable on care from their parents. They must be fed and protected, and therefore require attention. What is a good way to get attention? Yes, by being cute. Not only parents can care for babies, all humans can, so we are all hardwired to respond in the similar fashion. This will help the specie to survive.

So babies are born with the traits that we find cute, or else we've adapted to find cute the traits that babies poses. Eyes don't really grow anymore once a baby is born, therefore they are born with full sized eyes, compared to their bodies they will seem quite large. Babies brains are also already nearly full grown which makes their head enormous in comparison to their bodies. A babies limbs are small and flabby and lack coordination, so there you'll find you small round body. And so on. People outgrow these traits around their tweens, when they don't need this care anymore.

And because of these reasons other animals are also born with traits that we find cute, even though they may not need to be found cute by their own specie.

So there you have it, that’s why things are cute. And now go google some cute animals and pet a puppy because they're just cute.

Why don't any animals have wheels?

Animals have developed loads of different ways to move around, but why never wheels? We humans have mastered the wheel and feel quite technologically advanced, but if wheels are such a no-brainer, why doesn’t any animal use them?

To define the question a bit better, I don’t mean animals that just roll like a tumbleweed that is just shaped like a ball and gets rolled around by the wind. No I mean actual wheels with an axle. And that’s where we get our first problem with finding wheels on animals, because to have a wheel that is separated from the axle takes some skill. How can a living wheel be completely separated from the rest of the animal and still receive nutrients? Alright then maybe make the wheel from dead material like nails or hair? But then how would you get it in the right shape if it would be separated from the body?

Nevertheless for wheels to be useful you would need a flat surface since they are of no use on rough terrain, so you’d need roads. Animals are capable of building quite ingenious structures, think about nests and dams. However these structures are built for personal needs only. Animals put energy and time in building these structures, if they’d build roads other animals would be able to use these as well since there is no way of protecting them. Then other animals would profit from you making the roads and have time left for reproducing while you put your valuable time and effort into making it. Let’s also not forget that you were smart enough to make that road, but because it took so much time you have less time to reproduce and pass those genes on when other just using your road do have the time for reproducing, thus the road-builders will die out. Concluding, building roads is just not selfish enough.

Therefore we must be thankful that humans have learned to work together due to the invention of the wheel. And I mean wheel-y thankful.

Why British English is different from American English.

I noticed a lot of (not native English-speaking) people do not know why there is such a difference between the British and the American spelling. Whereas this is actually very easily explained, since it is mostly because of one person named Noah Webster.

Imagine it is the late eighteenth century. Only a relatively small number of the population were fluent in reading and writing. Literacy was identified as being able to read and write the classic languages such as Greek and Latin, analyze literature, etc. Around this time there was no ‘standard English spelling’ on either side of the Atlantic. It was just somewhat the same everywhere, some words or accents came from all over the world at that time. A guy named Noah Webster was just trying to bring some standards to the situation. He was part of a new wave that wanted to educate the masses, and not from the British textbooks that were used at that time. Webster thought that the Americans should learn from American books. So he began writing a three volume compendium, ‘A Grammatical Institue of the English Language’. It consisted of a speller(1783), a grammar (1784), and a reader(1785).

He tried to simplify the language, to take away the silent letters and thus make the language more consistent and easier to read and write. For example, he changed the –ce from words like defence, offence and pretence to –se; abandoned the second, silent ‘l’ in verbs such as travel and cancel when forming the past tense; dropped the ‘u’ from words such as humour and colour; and dropped the ‘k’ from words such as publick and musick. The ‘publick’ readily accepted many of these changes and just as readily rejected some of the others (some words were even accepted across the Atlantic as official spelling).

So next time you make a spelling mistake just blame it on the language being too complicated and write a new dictionary including your new spelling. Perhaps they will accept it as well on the other side of the Atlantic. 

WEBSTER WON SOME:		...AND LOST SOME:
Before Webster	Webster's Change	Before Webster	Webster's Change
gaol	jail	ache	ake
mould	mold	soup	soop
travelled	traveled	sleigh	sley
honour	honor	sponge	spunge
centre	center	tongue	tung
humour	humor	cloak	cloke
masque	mask	determine	determin
publick	public	women	wimmen

Pink is not a color?

A pink-less rainbow

 Violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red are all the colors from the rainbow we are lucky to see some times. We are learned that these are also the colors from our visible light spectrum, which ranges from  about 360 to 780 nm. Before violet there is ultra violet and after red there is infra-red. So then where is the pink? Indeed, it isn’t there. No single wavelength of light appears pink. It’s such a mystery color because it’s a mixture of violet and red, colors from opposite ends of the visible light spectrum. Which is theoretically impossible right?

The real problem starts when you try to roll up the rainbow to make a color wheel, there will be a gap between red and violet. That’s where all of the rest of the light in the universe is supposed to go, the ultra violet and infra-red. But since we can’t see those colors, and red and violet just don’t really fade into each other, we replace all the hidden colors with pink.

But then, the color wheel is a model of perception, not a map of the spectrum.

But on the other hand, what defines a color? Our mind has learned to see that mix of colors and call it Pink. Just as we call the lack of color black and all visible colors together white. And greens that are tinted red even though their colors aren’t next to each other in the visible light spectrum we can recognize, and more of these colors.  

Thus, let’s not count out pink and just call it a color. Eventhough I think we might need to call it minus green, since pink is really what is left of colors if you make green.

A million seconds?

Numbers are quite interesting. That is because we can't really understand them. You know what 'two' is, it's just something twice. But two million of something? It's just too big! For example, you know how long a second is. And you know how much a million is, because its just a thousand thousands, and a thousand is just ten hundreds. So therefore you should be able to know how much a million seconds is right? Just think about it for a second, how long was a million seconds ago? I wouldn't have been able to imagine how long ago it was without doing the math. It could be a day ago, it could be a week ago, it could be a month ago for whatever i know it could be a whole year ago!

It turns out, a million seconds is in fact, 12 days.
Then, a billion is an unimaginable big number as well right? A billion is just a thousand millions. So when was it a billion seconds ago? It was not last week, it was not last month, neither was it last year. It was in fact 1982! Or 31 years ago if you are not reading this in 2013.

So from a million to a billion is a difference of years! From almost two weeks to almost double my age!
And then you've also got the very very small numbers, you have probably heard of the nanosecond before. Well a billion nanoseconds ago is by definition one second ago. Crazy to imagine right? It's amazing to me because nobody realy realizes this. And all this math has allowed us to make satellites which told us that there are between fifteen and tirthy billion earth-like planets in our galaxy, and there are more than a hundred billion galaxies in our observable universe, which is just a fraction of the entire universe which might even be infinite(No edge! I might make a post about that later).

Which just shows us how huge everything actually is and how we tiny tiny humans are not designed to understand and comprehend all this, but we are designed to want to understand it. And that might just be one of the many beautiful little qualities of human beings.

[Note, in this blog I am using the short scale in which a billion is thousand millions which is used in the US more often instead of the short scale in which a billion is a million millions which is used in Europe more often]