Obvious things

(shortpost)

One of the better XKCDs is this one:

…and there’s a sort of analogous dynamic in making connections.

The fact that “barbie” in “throw another shrimp on the barbie” means “barbecue” is stunningly obvious in retrospect, such that it wouldn’t even require comment, except that it’s worth pointing out that, like, 0.217 seconds of actual attentive conscious mental processing was required for me to make the connection.

I could’ve made said connection at any time in my life, but I happen to have only made it on February 16th, 2025 (I know because I posted about it at the time).

Something like this happens roughly a couple of times a week. Some very very simple thing becomes clear, in microrevelation.

It’s important to consider how many such obviousnesses your brain has not connected the dots on (because there are simply billions of them, and you do not have all that many billions of seconds in your life; even if you spent every waking moment engaged in the act of revelation you wouldn’t catch ‘em all).

It’s also important to recognize that there are many such simple, single intuitive leaps that no one on Earth has found the time for.

It’s also important to note that there are simple, single intuitive leaps that are themselves downstream of other leaps, i.e. you get A+B=C and separately X+Y=Z and only once both of those have occurred do you even have the opportunity to connect C to Z and get ?

And somewhere way, way down the line, it’s as-obvious-as-barbie-meaning-barbecue that Ƃ+ƕ=Ƣ, but even someone in possession of Ƃ and ƕ

(as the result of making many, many mental connections)

might still just ... not ever happen to put those two thoughts together in the right way, out of all the other nigh-infinite puzzle pieces they’re holding onto.

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