It's one of my favorite sayings. I don't know where I got it from, but I'll gladly take credit for it.
The main rotor of a helicopter produces torque which, according to Newton's Third Law of Motion, means that the fuselage will rotate in the opposite direction of the rotor system. So if the rotor spins clockwise, the fuselage spins counterclockwise. This makes a helicopter pretty unusable, so we put a tail rotor some distance away to counteract that spin, producing the creatively named anti-torque. That'll hold the nose in the desired direction as the rotor continues torquing the fuck out of the gearbox. However, that sideward force, plus the rotational force that's still there, are both aiming in the same direction. There's an imbalance, and while the nose is pointed where you want it to be, the whole thing is slowly sliding sideways, to the left in this instance. It's called a translating tendency. So, to counteract that, you tilt the main rotor system, which caused all this nonsense to begin with, slightly to the right. That changes the direction of lift ever so slightly, still largely vertical but just barely enough to the right to nullify the leftward translating tendency. You now have a helicopter in a stable hover. Several thousand pounds, floating some distance above the ground, for as long as you want, limited only by the amount of fuel to feed the controlled explosions that make it all possible.
All those controlled explosions, plus the controlled explosions of millions and millions of other vehicles, power plants, cow farts, and chimneys, produce waste byproducts in the form of heat, water vapor, and carbon dioxide. Even in the most efficient engines, only about 30% of the energy that is produced is usable. The rest goes to waste. And that's the efficient ones. The CO2 enters the atmosphere at a rate far faster than anything is capable of removing it, throwing a delicate system out of whack and accelerating a warming process that's supposed to take thousands and thousands of years and compressing it into roughly two hundred. It causes ice to melt at alarming rates, produces smog and harmful pollution, plus other environmental changes that would be totally normal were they happening at a normal rate but they're not. So life can't adapt. We humans can, sure, but not necessarily anything else. It is causing irreversible damage to the planet, most likely with dire consequences.
Nobody really knows why a football spirals the way it does. Something so simple, yet nobody really knows why. Same goes with ice skating. Nobody has yet figured out why skating works as it does. The movement of a pitcher's arm in baseball is the fastest, most violent motion a human being can make, placing a shocking amount of torque into an amazingly elastic set of muscles and tendons (and yet people still insist that baseball is boring). It's a motion unique to the human species...chimpanzees, gorillas, and the like can't do it. They can't muster more than twenty or so miles per hour on a throw, yet Aroldis Chapman can fling a baseball close to 110 miles per hour (has he thrown it faster? I'm not sure). Scientists think it's because humans, during the early days when we hunted all the time, would throw spears and rocks and stuff to bring down their prey. They did this while chasing this prey down over long distances, much farther than any other species can move in one burst on land. We aren't fast, but we were built specifically to run. Our feet, our legs, our ass muscles (we have surprisingly large ass muscles), our sweat glands, were all designed to keep us motoring for long stretches.
Why did we ever leave Africa? What caused our distant ancestors to decide "yeah, let's go that way" and then walk for the next few thousands of years? Why did we start hating each other?
Why do we like music so much?
Outer space? Just, literally, anything involving outer space?
Shit's interesting.
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