⌘ November 21, 2021

7 Things (Which Are My Unanswered Questions) This Week [#36]

A weekly list of things I found interesting, posted on Sundays. Sometimes themed, often not.


1️⃣ Why is it that spiders crawl” but dogs walk” when both creatures use all their legs?

2️⃣ I wonder if Apple Stores have the highest compute power per square foot of any retailer? Just as they’ve topped the chart for most revenue per square foot for many years. It certainly seems that with the power of their ever-progressing processors, and the fact that they put the latest chips into as many products as they can, and that typically only the latest products are out on the floor — it’s got to be up there despite the relatively small footprint of most Apple Stores. (Related: I’d love to see a chart of average processing power per Apple Store over time. It’d be neat to see the inflection points.)

3️⃣ If cats could FaceTime, would they bother to call you? (I like to think that mine would. 😻)

4️⃣ You shine a laser at the moon. The particles shoot there at the speed of light, right? But then you shake the laser back and forth exceptionally quickly. Could you theoretically make the dot on the moon move faster than the speed of light? (Yes, I know that the dot is constantly new particles, so, no, not really. But I like to think that I could break the laws of nature.

5️⃣ Does every sound ever made still exist on earth? Sound waves technically get smaller and smaller, quieter and quieter, the less energy they have, right? But do they ever stop, or just asymptote their way toward nothingness?

6️⃣ Related to 5️⃣: What if the stars aligned, you had a burst of extraordinary brainpower, and you could inexplicably hear one of those ever-diminishing sound waves of someone talking who had long passed on? Might you think you had heard a ghost?

7️⃣ Let’s say we could follow a single molecule of H2O from its inception on Earth to today. Since 97% of Earth’s water is in the oceans, is it likely that any given molecule has lived its entire life undisturbed in the ocean, or that it has gone through an uncountable number of physical changes? Evaporated into a gas, condensed as a cloud, precipitated as rain? And what is the total mileage of that single molecule? Certainly shorter if it has lived only in the ocean, right? (Sorry, I snuck in a couple of extra questions in this one.)


If you got a kick out of these questions, you might also like the Shower Thoughts account on Twitter. And if you have answers to any of these questions, I’m all ears! ⬇️⬇️⬇️


Thanks for reading 7 Things! If you enjoyed these links, or have something else neat to share, please drop me a line on Twitter or shoot me an email!

7 Things


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