RoabeArt [he/him]

I still remember the way my science teacher explained a hypothetical warp drive (like how it is in Star Trek). He took a black towel, representing space, and laid it flat on a table. He set down a miniature model of the Enterprise on one end of the towel, then accordion-folded the towel up so that the other end was close to the ship. He moved the Enterprise over to that end of the towel, and unfolded it so that it was flat again. The Enterprise was now on the other end of the table.

An overly simplified visualization, but it really illustrated the idea to my ten year old brain how space-time could hypothetically be bent to make fast interstellar travel a possibility. Also it made me realize that warp speed on the Enterprise wasn’t just a super powerful rocket or something.

Before Louis Pasteur’s disproving of spontaneous generation, most people believed that bacteria and putrefactive organisms like maggots etc. spontaneously poofed into existence, like a video game character spawning. Pasteur suggested that maggots came from flies laying their eggs on rotting meat etc, and that bacteria were everywhere and will multiply quickly under the right conditions. A lot of people at the time thought these were crackpot ideas.

Are we talking first computer in your household, or first computer you ever bought yourself?

Our first family PC was a hand me down from my uncle that we got when I was 12 or 13. 486DX2 66MHz processor, a couple MBs of RAM, 700-ish megabyte hard drive, Windows 3.1 and DOS. AOL install disks didn’t work on it because they needed at least Windows 95, and I was still clueless on how to set up a modem connection in 3.1. So it was entirely for games installed via disc only. We ended up getting a Windows 98 machine a year or two down the line.

First PC I bought for myself was a custom built machine from a computer shop that has long since gone out of business. I think I paid around $200 for it, so it was a fairly basic PC for 2004. Athlon 1.5 GHz CPU (with a loud as fuck cooler fan), 512 MB RAM, a video card that I forgot the make and model of, Windows XP. Lasted me about 3 years until I built one myself.

“Owning a car = freedom”

Unfortunately in a country where the infrastructure is so hostile to public transit or even pedestrian/biking amenities that it’s nearly impossible to live, work or function without a car unless you’re lucky enough to live in a dense urban community, I can see how people might believe this.