Monday, June 21, 2004

stayed at home today...battling my blocked-runny nose...sigh~

lessons learnt from 'the curious incident of the dog in the night-time' by mark haddon

*******CAUTION - SPOILER ALERT***********

FOR THOSE WHO WISH TO DISCOVER THE WONDERS OF THE MIND OF A YOUNG AUTISTIC TEEN ON THEIR OWN, PLEASE SCROLL DOWN OR JUST IGNORE THIS POST
*the number 1 is not a prime number. the smallest prime number is 2.

*prime numbers are useful for writing codes. in the US if u find a prime number 100 digits long, tell the CIA and you get $10,000. not bad eh?

*the milky way is not a long line of stars. our galaxy is a huge disk of stars millions of lightyears across, and the solar system is somewhere near the outside edge of the disk.

*the universe is expanding. the stars are all rushing away from one another after the Big Bang, and the further the stars are away the faster they move, that's why their light never reaches us and hence the sky appears dark.

*people do a lot of talking without using any words. (ie. our facial and emotional expressions)

*metaphors do not make sense at all. and christopher thinks they're all lies. which makes perfect sense.

*a lie is when you say something happened which didn't happen. but there is only ever one thing which happened at a particular time and a particular place. and there are an infinite number of things which didn't happen at that time and that place.

*being clever is when you look at how things are and use the evidence to work out something new.

*if you see someone's name and you give each letter a value from 1-26 accordingly, add them up and find that it adds up to a prime number. (i don't think this is true...cos my name adds to 85...i think..)

*a heart attack is when some of the muscles in the heart stop getting blood and die. there're 2 main types of heart attack. the first is an embolism, where a blood clot blocks one of the blood vessels taking blood to the muscles in the heart. an aneurysm is when a blood vessel breaks and the blood doesn't get to the heart muscles because it's leaking.

*when people give instructions, they don't say how long or how big or how ~ those instructions are for. 'keep quiet'..but they never say for how long. 'keep off the grass' but never say which part of the grass.

*people break rules all the time.

*a black hole is a singularity, which means it is impossible to find out what is on the other side because the gravity of a black hole is so big that even EM waves like light can't get out of it. if heaven was on the other side of a black hole, dead people would have to be fired into space on rockets to get there, and they aren't or people would notice.

*Christopher thinks people believe in heaven because they don't like the idea of dying.

*a white lie is not a lie at all. it is where you tell the truth but you do not tell all of the truth. this means that everything you say is a white lie because when someone says for example, 'what do you want to do today?' you don't say 'i want to have my lunch and i want to go to the toilet etc...'

*intuition can sometimes get things wrong. and intuition is what people use in life to make decisions. but logic can help you work out the right answer. (referring to the monty hall problem.)

*there;s always something new that science can discover, and all the facts that you take for granted can be completely wrong.

*in life you have to take lots of decisions and if you don't take decisions you would never do anything because you would spend all your time choosing between things you could do. so it is good to have a reason why you hate some things and you like others.

*a murder victim is usually killed by someone known to them.

*fairies are made out of paper.

*you can't talk to someone who is dead.

*lots of things are mysteries. but that doesn't mean there isn't an answer to them. it's just that scientists haven't found the answer yet. but some mysteries are not mysteries at all. they can be solved using logic and maths.

*the mind is a complicated machine. when we look at things we think we're just looking out of our eyes. but we're actually looking at a screen inside our heads, like a computer screen.

it's time for Alias! will continue tomorrow...

This girl posted at 10:51 PM