So here I am, sitting in my doctor's waiting room and thumbing through a magazine dedicated to high-end electronics and the platinum credit card holders who love them. Personally, I believe the doctors deliberately offer these selections so that we patients will understand what cool and exciting hobbies our diseases help finance.
I found an article on DVD players that absolutely changed my entire world view. Apparently these little black boxes are walking miracles of cutting-edge technology and we plebeians have the nerve to take them for granted. A typical DVD player has to make 3 billion calculations every second, and do it consistently for the entire run of the selected disk. One false move and it's time for our least favorite movie, Endless Loop. To put it in practical terms, trillions of precise calculations must be performed every time you want to enjoy a movie on DVD. Are you absolutely sure you want to see Ernest save Christmas?
That perfect cup of coffee you enjoy every morning is also a miracle, all things considered. Only the ripest beans can be selected for processing, which requires tremendous amounts of labor-intensive work. Coffee brokers must travel to warehouses in exotic and occasionally dangerous locations, bringing back only the beans that meet their employers' particular needs. Any professional coffee roaster will tell you how thin the margin can be between a successful roasting and unspeakable charcoal. If you grind your own beans, the subtle differences in sizes can easily turn your automatic drip masterpiece into a disastrous Warholian espresso.
Coffeemakers alone are a miracle of technology- water is held at just below boiling long enough for the filters to precisely control the flow through the grounds. If the water reaches boiling temperature, you could be left with coffee soup. Those paper filters have precisely enough permeability to allow coffee to flow through, but enough strength to hold back the unwanted solids. The result of all this precision is a delicious cup of gourmet coffee, any time you want one.
Sometimes the best miracles are right in front of us and we don't even know it.
