When I was 14 or so, I had this inherent belief that I should be allowed to take part in adult activities. I had a major urge to vote. I had a political perspective.
As I age, I have grown a very different thought process. Democracy doesn’t really excite me anymore. Neither do I have any urge to partake in adult activities.
Now smaller things interest me. For instance, when SpaceX lands two boosters at the same time, I keep on wondering what kind of maths goes behind the different flight-paths they chart in order to compensate for earth’s curvature. Space doesn’t excite me. The guys brilliant enough to send something to space excite me.
Yesterday I saw a machine that can scan books at a rate of 250 pages per minute. I have been thinking about it’s mechanism for hours now.
A couple of weeks ago, I started wondering how a book binder knows which page to print beside another. If you have ever seen the printing process, you will notice how they don’t print in an ascending order. Rather, they print in a very unpredictable order aligned with the folds they will make on the large paper before they cut it. Once they cut it, the pages auto-align. That excites me. Today I learned how to do that.
I know. This is random.
But somehow random things excite me now, and I don’t wish to be 14 again.