What is this place?
This is a place where you can read about all kinds of interesting things and find answers to questions you didn’t even know you had. I started this blog to satisfy both my curiosity and my need for a creative outlet. I write a lot for work, and even though I take pleasure in crafting the perfectly structured and logically argued piece of scientific writing, academic texts need to follow certain rules and consequently are not very conducive to releasing one’s creativity. Thus, Serendipity Loop was born!
What does ‘Serendipity Loop’ even mean, I hear you ask. Well, I’m glad you asked. I only knew the word ‘serendipity’ beforehand from an old movie with John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale (God, now I feel old referring to a movie that came out in 2001 as ‘old’, but really, think about the fact that 2001 was 23 years ago… It’s basically the same as 1978 to 2001!). Anyway, I liked the word; it’s a good, strong word. Like ‘Endeavour’, or ‘Enterprise’, or ‘Discovery’. And now I’m wondering whether there ever was a ship called Serendipity because it feels like the perfect name for a ship, either a spaceship or the regular kind that you would use to circumnavigate the world. But I digress… According to Dictionary.com, ‘serendipity’ means a ‘desirable accidental discovery’. So a serendipity loop is essentially a series of fortunate discoveries, which is hopefully something you, my dear reader, will experience when you peruse this blog.
Serendipity – noun,
1. an aptitude for making desirable discoveries by accident,
2. accidental discovery
Millennial problems
Millennials are the last generation that grew up without the Internet. My childhood was full of playing outside until sunset, ballgames with all the random kids of the neighborhood, playing hide and seek across four blocks of concrete jungle, and building rafts to sail in old quarries filled with water. But it wasn’t all fun and games growing up in the 90s. If you heard a good song on the radio, there was very little you could do about getting to know what song it was, let alone hearing it again somehow, somewhere. You just had to keep listening to the radio in the hopes you would catch it again. Or if you sometimes had a random thought, like, “Hey, can chickens produce eggs without cockerels?” Because I remember my grandma used to have chickens, and she would collect eggs every day from the barn, but I don’t remember ever seeing a cockerel – she only had chickens. So what gives? Unfortunately, growing up in the 90s meant that if you had a thought like that and there was no one around to ask for advice (or no one knew either), you just had to be like, “Oh well, I guess we will never know”, and move on with your day.
The solution
Kids these days have it easy in that regard. You just open up your phone and Google will immediately tell you the answer to any question you may have. I do it too, all the time. I get a random thought in my head, such as, “Huh, I wonder where the word ‘taxi’ comes from and if it is related to ‘taxes’? Is taxi just a car that is taxed??” And then I spend the next 30 minutes reading up on everything related to the origin of the word ‘taxi’. So I figured since I am doing the research anyway, I might as well share my findings with other people who may also have similar questions pop up in their brains.
So there you go. Let’s start this journey of fortunate discoveries together, and I hope you join me in my quest to find out answers to the world’s most intricate mysteries (or just random facts about the shape of rainbows or the color of sheep). Let me know in the comments if you also have questions you have always wanted to know answers to but never bothered to look up.