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tanarillToday is the thirty-seventh day of the Omer, which is five weeks and two days into the Omer.
My roommates are such enablers. To whit:
Me: And then I will use Lulu's toaster to toast the bread, and I will steal some butter, and I will have buttered toast.
Liz: Here's the butter! [passing it over]
Such. Enablers.
In other news, Science! is hard. This was the message at seminar last week; and although I had not thought about it before, it is very true. Evolution has made us into beings that can unconsciously observe, make incredibly fast decisions based on those observations, and most of the time, not get eaten by the tiger. Science requires that we wait until we have all the data to make decisions - which in turn, requires that we know what 'all the data' even means. Scientific thought is difficult, counter-intuitive, not easily within the realm of human understanding.
And so teachers do students who object to, say, Newton's First Law a huge disservice when they act like it ought to be easy. Anyone can see that if you throw a ball it falls down and then it stops; but the First says that in fact it ought to keep moving in the same direction and at the same speed - except that on earth we have things like gravity and friction to deal with. It took a genius (certifiable, but still a genius) to realize that the natural state is not lazy stillness, but inertia. Because Science! is hard.
The rest of the seminar was about how to teach children science! despite the fact that to our common-sense world, the idea of things like relativity and atoms and even germs are really, really weird. It was a good seminar.
Science!
My roommates are such enablers. To whit:
Me: And then I will use Lulu's toaster to toast the bread, and I will steal some butter, and I will have buttered toast.
Liz: Here's the butter! [passing it over]
Such. Enablers.
In other news, Science! is hard. This was the message at seminar last week; and although I had not thought about it before, it is very true. Evolution has made us into beings that can unconsciously observe, make incredibly fast decisions based on those observations, and most of the time, not get eaten by the tiger. Science requires that we wait until we have all the data to make decisions - which in turn, requires that we know what 'all the data' even means. Scientific thought is difficult, counter-intuitive, not easily within the realm of human understanding.
And so teachers do students who object to, say, Newton's First Law a huge disservice when they act like it ought to be easy. Anyone can see that if you throw a ball it falls down and then it stops; but the First says that in fact it ought to keep moving in the same direction and at the same speed - except that on earth we have things like gravity and friction to deal with. It took a genius (certifiable, but still a genius) to realize that the natural state is not lazy stillness, but inertia. Because Science! is hard.
The rest of the seminar was about how to teach children science! despite the fact that to our common-sense world, the idea of things like relativity and atoms and even germs are really, really weird. It was a good seminar.
Science!
no subject
Date: 2012-06-03 01:32 am (UTC)