i was just using my compass to pull a piece of lint out of my lighter (it's the worst when that happens...), when i started to realize that the ancient greeks probably used compasses for pretty much everything. if you can imagine this bearded greek old man, using this giant compass as a claw in his daily tasks - holding pita bread sandwiches, swapping away flies, getting that itch in that hard to reach spot. it's almost like that edward scissor-hands, isn't it?

i'm now fully convinced that all greeks lived like this, with compass as primary general utensil.

what we understand in the universe is largely restricted to concepts of motion. unfortunately, a fairly good understanding of motion may have led us to a false conclusion that we understand the universe well because we understand it's motions well.

most objects in the universe still perplex us at the most basic levels - we don't really know what they do, and if we do know then we don't know why, and if we don't know then we propose mathematical theories about them.

take the sun. we can measure how the sun moves fairly well. and, we know it shines. but, we don't really have any predictive theory to explain how the fluctuations in the sun's strength vary. this is a total mystery.

we may in the end find out that the laws of motion are actually not particularly useful in understanding the universe at all.