Nopy's Blog

A while back, I was thinking about what I had accomplished in my life and compared them to the goals I had set in grade 3 and in grade 12. Needless to say, achievements such as “make $1 million by the age of 22″ and “walk on the moon” were destined to lead to disappointment.

I won’t bore you with the details, but I eventually reached a point where I realized that between the time I thought I could take on the world (around 16) and now (8 years later), there were a lot of life lessons that I would not have survived without if I had decided to take on the world at 16. That then got me thinking about all the different places I’ve gained wisdom from, and that eventually led to the question: what have I learned from anime?

Below are just some of the tidbits of wisdom that anime has bestowed upon me over the years and I am now sharing them with you.

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Whether its mecha, moe, fantasy, ecchi, action, or slice-of-life, many of us enjoy watching one type of anime or another. While updating my anime list one day, I noticed that the number of series that I’ve completed probably outnumbers everything that the members of my high school anime club had watched, combined. That got me thinking, what is it about anime that appeals to me and others?

I started watching anime at a young age with series such as Dragonball, Sailor Moon, and Rurouni Kenshin. What caught my interest back then were fanciful ideas of fighting evil and becoming a hero. In my teenage years, I started watching “harem” anime such as To Heart and Love Hina. Now I find myself grasping for series that offer anything new, exciting, or different (Mawaru Penguindrum, for example). What do all of the anime spanning my lifetime have in common? They provided a dream world that had what my world was lacking.

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Despite how much I like anime, I’ve never been a big fan of incredible events with no viable scientific explanation. This includes things like flying through the air with no apparent form of propulsion, creating vast quantities of energy from nothing, and penetrating the armour of a vehicle using a weaker material by using shear willpower. This is one of the reasons why Martian Successor Nadesico was and still is one of my favourite anime: it used the latest theories of quantum mechanics and newest technological advancements of the 90s to explain how things like instant transport and the terraforming of Mars was possible. When there was no way to explain something (like the generation of particles to perform a gravity blast), the topic was simply avoided rather than trying to make up something fake and untrue.

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Anyone who’s been following Natsu no Arashi knows by now that time travel within the show happens on a regular basis, but there’s an important question that Hajime brings up: what happens when you go back in time and change history?

When Hajime and Arashi go back in time to save someone, do the people who are saved just suddenly pop into existence in the present or did they exist even before anyone went back in time?

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Well, after five episodes, Touma finally figured out that there’s no way Index’s brain would explode (or implode?) because she has too much stuff memorized. I admit that I didn’t think anything about Index having too much information, but that was only because this is anime.

So after watching this episode, I started wondering how much information the brain could hold. From my high school days, I learned that we only use about 10% of our brains and that geniuses still only use a maximum of 15%, but this information was for processing power rather than information storage. A search on google for brain capacity turned up results ranging from 100MB (~10^8 bytes) to 10^8432 (that’s a 1 followed by 8432 zeroes). With such a wide range of predictions, it’s obvious that no one knows how much information the brain can hold. (more…)