23 June

The implosion of the Titan sub reminded me of air pressure. There’s a column of air 100km high resting on your body every day. If you hold your palm out as in the drawing, you have air from that column pressing down on your palm that weighs the same as 10 bowling balls. You don’t feel that weight because the air also presses up under your palm, with the same force. You can actually take that air under your palm away to some degree, using a good vacuum cleaner. Then you’ll start to feel the weight of that column of air. And if you’ve ever used a suction cup, you’ll have experienced that huge weight directly. There’s no budging those things unless you break the seal. Also why your vacuum cleaner works, they don’t ‘suck’, they remove air inside which makes the atmosphere *push* the dirt into the machine. The equivalent thing happens with gravity, which I post about sometimes. Standing or sitting on the Earth’s surface, you should actually feel no weight at all. The Earth pushes UP into you to exactly match the gravitational pull down. If you feel weight, it means you’re out of balance, that’s all. A lot of bodywork traditions play tricks with what they think is muscle tension to make people feel lighter. It’s not muscles, it’s gravity.