Bizarre thoughts on the macroscopic

While reading the December National Geographic issue, I came across the map of our own Milky Way galaxy. Our solar system is this little miniscule dot in it all. As if that sort of scale isn't enough to make you feel insignificant, it turns out that there are probably 100,000,000,000 galaxies in the "observable" universe. That immediately made me wonder how you determine what an "observable" universe is, and how many more billions of galaxies there are in the unobservable universe if such a thing exists.

Unfortunately, my thinking has progressed little since childhood when I made myself dizzy to nearly the point of nausea trying to fathom the fact that on the one hand the universe must have an edge, while on the other hand it would be impossible for it to. This makes me no less dizzy now when I read that the diameter of the universe is 156 billion light years. It instantly begs the question, "what lies just at the edge of our universe that is 156 billion light years in diameter?"

So anyway, in thinking about this all, I realized that on the microscopic level, we have seen life forms at ever diminishing scales. We discovered mulitcellular microscopic organisms, eventually discovered unicellular bacteria, and then discovered non-cellular semi life forms like viruses and prions. What if there are whole sets of life forms on ever increasing macroscopic scales that are too big for us to discern, just as if we were a bacteria living in the GI tract of some creature huge beyond our imagination.

I suppose I ought to shut this ramble down and go to bed before the thought police analyze this and send me to the loony bin all sugared up with lithium.

I'm freezing

Today when I walked outside, I knew immediately that it was the end of November. It is cold. In fact, it was very cold. It brought back memories of my childhood in Northern Ontario when there were several feet of snow on the ground. The van that took us to school every morning had these horrible vinyls seats that were hard and freezing when cold. You knew not to sit in a spot where you would have to scoot over when the next kid was picked up and freeze your poor backside all over again. Yes, this morning it was cold, and I wished that I had worn a long sleeve shirt instead of a short sleeve one as I braved the frigid 50 F weather. I might have to actually turn the heat on in my apartment!!