I'm a little-stitious

Shooting stars and superstitions!

Luck is all perspective

I got my NYC marathon bib number a week-ish ago and immediately googled it to see if it was ‘lucky.’ This was the search result:

In complete honesty, and with all the awareness that this is absurd, I was pretty bummed when I read that. But then, I put it on my Instagram story and received wonderful messages that really turned it all around for me!

My bib number is 54324… and HERE is how it’s lucky.

As Jenna pointed out, the digits sum to 18, which is a Jewish lucky number! And we all know me and my Judaism!!

Lauren sent me this insanely complicated maybe even linear algebra to reach the lucky number 7!

A supreme cognitive dissonance of mine is that I am so starkly unreligious while being wholly dedicated to all of these random superstitions. If you ask me if I believe in God, I’d say no. But if I don’t believe in any sort of supernatural entity, then why do I religiously wish on 11:11s (I used to stay up until 11:12 just to wish on 11:11 and then fall asleep. That is too late for me now, though. LOL).

In response to my marathon bib # post, Emmie, in all her wisdom, shared that ‘luck is all perspective.’ I think this resolves a lot of that dissonance and describes why I do all of these somewhat strange superstitions. They are kind of like my way of building up hope. And I don’t think of hope as tied to a higher power either; I think of it as a way to get you to your next wish or the next day or through the winter.

Something you should know about me is that I love John and Hank Green. I average at least one hour per day consuming something they put out (between their podcast and many YT channels).

Here is one John Green quote on hope that I like, “I don’t think hope is idealistic or silly; I think it’s the founding emotion of our species.”

Luck and hope and any of the other things that comfort you in some small way are not silly… they are incredibly human. And maybe it isn’t even that I so firmly believe that hope is just about things getting better, but more that all of it is worth it anyway. This is also something that the Green brothers talk about sometimes. In fact, they often reference the Emily Dickinson poem ‘Hope is the thing with feathers.’ I love Emily Dickinson. I took a whole class on her! At the end of this post, I embedded a moving video from John Green on hope. <3

Now onto meteors/ites/oids.

The one guy’s house has been hit by meteorites over FIVE times

I am reading this book, Stuff Matters, by Mark Miodownik, and he describes the material world. It is quite a cool book. He talks about this guy, Radivoje Lajic, who is from Northern Bosnia. Between 2007 and 2008, his house was hit by five meteorites. That is statistically so ridiculously unlikely. TOTALLY CRAZY. SO unlikely that he believes aliens are intentionally targeting his house. Scientists are now studying the magnetic fields around his home to try to explain this.

When I read that, my first thought was how weird and cool and weird that is. And then my second thought was, wow I know nothing about meteorites.

So now I am going to learn a little bit about them and share it with you all!

Meteoroids, Meteors, Meteorites

Who else LOVES shooting stars? Shooting stars are actually tiny bits of interplanetary debris ramming through the Earth’s atmosphere, heated to incandescence (glowing).

Shooting stars are actually not stars. But are they meteors, meteorites, or meteoroids??? I couldn’t answer that five minutes ago, but let’s break it down.

The solid stuff is a meteoroid. The phenomenon of the meteoroid heating up as it rams through the sky is called a meteor. When that thing hits the ground, it is called a meteorite!

Something very very crazy is that a typical meteor you see is due to a meteoroid that is teeny tiny, like smaller than a grain of sand. HOW? How could that be?

It is because of how freaking fast they are flying. When it enters our atmosphere, it is moving crazy fast, sometimes as fast as 70 km/second! The kinetic energy, energy of motion, of an object depends on the mass and the velocity.

So meteoroids are tiny, but they are speedy, so they have a ton of kinetic energy. As they hit our atmosphere, they slow from crazy fast to a standstill. All of that energy has to go somewhere… because ENERGY IS NEITHER CREATED NOR DESTROYED… so it gets converted to light and heat. And THAT is what we see as a meteor!

One last science thing. There have been meteorites found to contain amino acids. This is interesting for a few reasons. Amino acids are the building blocks for proteins… which means that some of the components necessary for life exist beyond Earth. Also, I discussed chirality in my post here but, the gist is that amino acids can have one of two orientations which we can refer to as right or left-handedness. All of the amino acids of life on Earth are left-handed, but we don’t know why that preference exists. The amino acid composition of some of these meteorites has also shown a higher majority of left-handed amino acids than right-handed. This could suggest or support the idea that amino acids from space could have ‘seeded’ Earth’s preference for the left-handed orientation.

Anyway, relevantly, meteors used to be associated with gods or religion, and meteorites were even thought of by some as gifts from angels. I don’t know about all that, but they are certainly dope.

Superstitious goodbye

These are all of the things on my bed, and they must be set up nicely before I leave. That is one of my superstitions. Also, the turtle is a good segue to probably my favorite superstition. Turtles are lucky for me! I have drawn a turtle on every test since middle school. I skipped drawing it a few times when I knew I bombed it (the turtle is lucky not magic…. back to the first part. I guess it was always more of a comforting ritual than a cause of success.)

This looks like a 5 year old’s drawing but it is actually from college…

IM BURNING THROUGH THE SKYYYY YEAH TWO HUNDRED DEGREES THAT’S WHY THEY CALL ME MR FAHRENHEIT!!!!!!!