Relevant Facts

I just read the 100 facts of the previous note. I report here the ones that stayed in my mind:

The speed of light 299792458 m/s

A squid can produce a shock of 650 V

There are more living organisms on our skin than human beings on the surface of the Earth

75 million people died from the Black Death

It will take an hour to get out in space in our cars going up

That is enough for now to make a point.

I remember the speed of light because in 1983 a committee chose that value. I factored it the other day, and I memorized the biggest prime number in its factorization, 293339, the other factors are easy to remember, 73, 7, and 2.

The squid voltage may be off a few volts, but I remembered that it was in the hundreds of volts. The skin fact, is a comparison, a bit unexpected, and therefore interesting. That is why it stuck. I remember that the number of Mexican deaths from the germs the Spanish brought was 20 millions. So the order of magnitude may be OK.The space trip in your car was just, memorable, at least as an order of magnitude.

My point is that there is already an ecology of ideas in which new ideas come in. If I was not preparing a lecture on Relativity, I would've not known about the speed of light factorization. There is not a pattern here, besides what my mind chooses to be working on at this moment. At the end I believe, if a set of ideas goes together nicely to explain something nobody can understand yet, that will make my day, and I will remember it, and maybe other people will remember also, and I would have contributed my meme to human culture.