A Warm Thought for a Cold Winter

It has been absolutely frigid out these past couple of days.  I mean,  holy moly kiddo, this weather seriously hurts!  I wear contacts most of the time and I hate this weather because, when I go outside, I immediately start to leak from all of the holes in my face.  This is the process:

1) My contacts get dried out by the wind which causes my eyes to water.

2) My eyes over-compensate and tears roll down my face and promptly freeze on my cheeks.  This both ruins my make up and hurts to wipe/rip off.

3) Because my eyes are over-compensating and because of the cursed (with 2 syllables for emphasis) existence of the nasolacrimal duct, my nose starts running and I have this watered-down version of snot all over my upper lip.

4) Because it's below freezing, even my watered-down snot freezes and breaks off my nose hairs inside my nostrils causing pain and more pain.

5) I can't breathe through my nose so I breathe through my mouth.

6) The dry air I'm breathing through my mouth dries out my mouth, my throat, and my lungs.

7) To compensate for this dryness in my upper respiratory tract, I start salivating and forming extra mucus which admittedly does coat my throat and lungs and protects it but also makes it much harder to breathe and now I'm coughing and spitting every couple of minutes.

In short, this winter is making me a gross, liquid-y mess.  Thank goodness I really, really, really love anatomy and physiology or I would be miserable...well. More miserable than I already am.

But clearly I digress.  An in-depth discussion of my awkward grossness on my morning trek to class does not, I should think, classify as a "warm thought" to anyone. Ever.  SO!  I present to you for your intellectual pleasure this evening, a fun thought experiment.

You may have heard of it before.  It is a delightful little thought experiment involving infinite probabilities (a quite popular phrase now that The Fault in Our Stars is coming out) and monkeys and typewriters.  The thought experiment goes that, given an infinite amount of monkeys were pressing truly random keys on an infinite amount of typewriters for an infinite amount of time, the monkeys will "almost surely" produce the complete works of Shakespeare.

Think about it.  Think about what you're reading right now.  These markings have no significant meaning except for what we ascribe them.  I could easily type gibberish (asd fapowieghap aejpora qhpaig) but of course you wouldn't understand that because we haven't assigned those gibberish "words" any meaning.  But look inside of the gibberish I typed and you can see actual words with actual meaning that I typed merely through probable chance.  I typed "as" and "fap" and "pow" and "ow" and "hap" and "por" (which admittedly is Spanish, but you take my point). Given an infinite amount of time, math concludes that I would eventually randomly type letters into an order that is the exact same as Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.

I personally am a huge fan of thought experiments.  If you enjoyed this brief introduction to them, I highly suggest you go searching for more.  To aid you in your quest, however, I have linked to a site that lists their top 10 favorite thought experiments here.

Stay warm!