100 Million Dollars or Volts

The last time I bought a lottery ticket - and lost - a friend said, "You have a better chance of being hit by lightning."

I checked. The odds of winning the Mega Millions jackpot — matching all five main numbers (1–70) and the Mega Ball (1–25) — are 1 in 302,575,350. The odds of being struck by lightning in America in a given year are one in 1.2 million. You have a much better chance of being hit by lightning. It goes against my limited knowledge of statistics, but the odds are fixed, and the probability is the same regardless of the jackpot size. It only grows if no one wins, but the odds remain unchanged.

And that lightning statistic made me think about what it must feel like to be struck by lightning. How would that experience change a person’s sense of chance, or fate?

The article I found, "What 100 Million Volts Do to the Body and Mind," opens by saying that: 

There is no easy analogue. A defibrillator delivers up to 1,000 volts to a patient’s heart; inmates executed by electric chair typically receive about 2,000. A typical lightning strike, by contrast, transmits 100 million volts or more. But lightning races through the body in milliseconds, and therefore often spares it. Some people black out instantly upon being struck. Others recall the moment vividly, as if in slow motion: the flash of light whiting out all vision; the sound, which many survivors say is the loudest they’ve ever heard. The pain, for some, is excruciating, yet others feel no pain at all. “It felt like adrenaline, but stronger,” one survivor reported. “I felt an incredible pulsing,” another said, “a burning sensation from head to toe.”

I did find some references to people who were hit by lightning and survived, telling their stories. There are some shared changes in their attitudes and beliefs.

For those survivors, events that once felt arbitrary or random now feel patterned, or vice versa. A near‑miss accident can make someone feel the world is full of fragile contingencies; a serendipitous meeting can make randomness feel strangely benevolent. You don't have to get hit with 100 million volts. This might happen if you had a near-miss auto accident that could have killed you.

Any kind of powerful experience can lead people to notice coincidences they previously ignored. The world seems to “speak” to them more often. Chance becomes less abstract and more embodied. It is not so much a statistical numbers idea but a lived one.

Fate is the story we tell about why things unfold the way they do. Some of us believe in Fate. Some do not. A near-miss experience might change that belief, causing someone to reinterpret past events as stepping stones toward the present moment. Fate becomes a retroactive storyline.

The experience may create a sense of direction or purpose, even if none existed before. “This happened so I could…” Call it teleology. That is the idea that things have purposes, goals, or ends toward which they naturally move. You might find yourself explaining something by the outcome. "It was just meant to be" rather than by the mechanism that actually caused it.

Aristotle described nature as full of purposes. The heart exists to pump blood. Rain falls to nourish crops. But modern science accepts only functional explanations. Yes, the heart pumps blood, but no, to seeing the cosmic intention of “rain falls so crops can grow."

This post first appeared on Weekends in Paradelle.

Who Came Up with Clockwise and Why?

If you grew up in the world before digital timepieces, you learned about the time-telling "hands " on an analog clock on the wall. The hands (big, little, even second hands) moved "clockwise.” Did you ever wonder why the hands moved in a particular direction?

Go back before clocks, gears, and pendulums, to ancient civilizations in Egypt and Mesopotamia that tracked time using sundials. All these cultures were in the Northern Hemisphere. That means the sun rose in the east, arched across the southern sky, and set in the west, and that means the shadow cast by a sundial naturally traveled in a loop: west to north to east.

If those ancient civilizations and their sundials had been in the Southern Hemisphere below the equator, the shadow would sweep in the exact opposite direction.

Clocks were invented in Europe during the 13th and 14th centuries, so to make these new machines intuitive, clocks were engineered with mechanical hands that mimicked the familiar, left-to-right sweep of the local sundial shadows.

European clockmaking dominated and became the global standard when clocks were exported to the Southern Hemisphere.

One rare exception to this includes the Old Town Hall in Prague, which runs "backward," mirroring the right-to-left direction of Hebrew script and local vertical sundials. I've seen this beautiful clock in person, and it always gathers a crowd of tourists who marvel at its movements of figures, but most people never notice the conterclockwise of it.

The Cranium Nebula

 

 
NASA’s James Webb Telescope images of the Cranium Nebula 
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)

It looks like a brain, complete with what appear to be left and right hemispheres. It is actually a dying star blowing off a shell of gas, and within that shell, a cloud of various gases. The dark lane that divides the sides of the “brain” may be related to an outflow from the central star.

In near-infrared, the nebula’s outer bubble has a white edge and its inner clouds are orange, with a distinct dark lane cutting vertically through the center. Stars and background galaxies appear around the nebula and through the outer bubble.

What’s next for this star will depend on its mass, which is yet undetermined. If it is a high-mass star, it will explode in a supernova. If it’s less massive and more Sun-like, it’ll keep shedding layers until only its core remains as a dense white dwarf star.

Read more about this nebula at science.nasa.gov...

A Phillumenist's Dream

 
Vintage phillumenist collectibles. Source: www.phillumeny.com

Phillumeny is the hobby of collecting items related to matches—most notably matchbox labels, but also matchbooks, matchboxes, and even the tiny printed wrappers from safety matches. Collecting matchbox labels gives us examples of mid-century commercial graphic design.

The free Matchbox Posters Archive via the Internet Archive is a philatelist's dream. This collection houses nearly 6,500 matchbox posters from as early as the 1920’s.  

People who collected matchboxes were once simply called "matchbox collectors." That changed in 1943 thanks to a British collector named Marjorie S. Evans. She wanted a more distinct, sophisticated name for the hobby, similar to philately (stamp collecting) or numismatics (coin collecting). She combined two linguistic roots: phil- (from the Greek philos, meaning "loving" or "fond of") and lumen (from the Latin lumen, meaning "light"). Purists occasionally point out that combining Greek and Latin roots into a single word is a bit of a linguistic "hybrid" faux pas, but the name stuck beautifully.

The origin story behind the name and the hobby combines Greek and Latin roots into a single word, which is a linguistic "hybrid" faux pas.

By 1945, the British Phillumeny Society was formed, cementing the term into the collector's lexicon.

To understand why people started collecting match labels, you have to look at the rise of the match industry in the 19th century. Before safety matches, the mid-1800s saw the rise of friction matches, often called "Lucifers" or "Congreves." Because early matches could be volatile and chemically unstable, packaging them securely in small wooden or cardboard boxes became essential. Because these boxes were cheap to produce and universally used, manufacturers quickly realized that the top label was prime real estate for eye-catching graphic design. 

Matchboxes became miniature canvases featuring exotic typography and branding to stand out in a competitive market. Commemorative events, royal milestones, and military victories, intricate illustrations of animals, historical figures, folklore, and landscapes were all used. 

By the late Victorian era, collecting these vibrant, pocket-sized pieces of commercial art had become an incredibly popular and inexpensive hobby across Europe, India, and Japan. 

Because matchboxes were meant to be discarded after use, surviving vintage labels offer a remarkably well-preserved glimpse into the social history, advertising trends, and graphic design styles of the past two centuries.

via  flickr user Jim Chambers CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Why are they called "lucifers?" It's not Satanic...