Let me tell you something.

 Well...

I've heard it said that someone who truly understands something should be able to explain it to someone in such a way that they too will be able to understand it. Should one be addressing a young child, inquisitive teenager, middle aged dilettante (such as myself) or a seasoned professor - if one understands something properly it should be possible to effectively communicate it regardless of your audience. 

There is no shortage of subjects that fascinate me. To quote someone that Neil Degrasse Tyson quoted, during one his many captivating orations, "As our sphere of knowledge grows so too does our perimeter of ignorance." It is with this sentiment that I look on my curiosities and come to terms with the reality that, no matter how enthusiastically I unravel something, I will eventually come to a point where my amateur approach to learning hits a brick wall. 

One of the subjects I find intriguing above all others is the scientific discipline and the quest to understand the rules and mechanics of a thing with a set of principles that we can all agree on. As my understanding of the primary sciences has grown, so too has my understanding that in all things I marvel at - if I want to penetrate deeply enough I would find myself in the physics of the thing, the chemistry of the thing and indeed the biology of the thing.

Although this seemed to me like a great revelation when I first thought about it, seen through the sobering eyes of logic it's the most obvious thing in the world. The sciences are the tools with which we measure the building blocks of everything and therefore when dissecting such things it makes sense that the smallest descriptors you reduce it to should be spoken of in such terms. 

If it is music that I'm interested in then there is the chemistry in the metals and elements that make up my instrument or the physics of how sound propagates through the air and is received by our ears, at which point biology takes the reigns to navigate me beyond the eardrum and into the depths of the brain. The universe itself, although ruled by cold, disparate physics requires a very biological and impassioned human being to build the tools required to observe the chemical reactions which craft our stars and skies. 

On and on it goes as I sit - mostly happily alone - peeling through pages of the internet, Wikipedia, YouTube, various books and learned people in an attempt to piece together a version of the truth that makes sense to me. Almost always I run into that barrier, beyond which my drive alone cannot take me. 

More often than not somewhere at the edge of physics, where mathematics begins to hold the torch I find myself once again unable to advance. A deeply ingrained (and mild phobic) unease around numbers has had a long term hold in me, one that has a power in direct conflict with my own sense of adventure in knowledge and understanding. 

The nippy thing is that I have a lot of respect for maths, people gifted in numerology and calculus and have this kind of childlike wonder at it's ability to describe everything and anything. It seems to be the language and translator of the universe and sciences that I find so dear and necessary to my grip on reality. 

I am in love with information technology (computers, internet, data, code, computer languages, software, graphics cards and processors) and yet I find that behind the sexy wall of software, hardware and computing potential beyond imagination lies once more an impenetrable fortress of numbers and maths and code and computer science.

I feel increasingly that this is something I must overcome and one day I'm sure I will do. Until then I think that I'd like to spend a little time proving to myself that my understanding of the little marvels I like to observe, have taken root in just such a way that I can write about them such that you reading will understand them.

For now I'm struggling to keep my eyes open. Instead of going to bed as I should to and ought to take the fuckin hint my body is giving me - I'm going to close this page and go stare at one device or another until I either fall asleep and drop it onto my face, waking me up enough to repeat the cycle or sit and watch something else until I fall asleep and eventually drag myself into bed  half conscious. 

Oh choices choices...