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Bad Movie Physics Hurt Scientific Understanding
eldavojohn writes "A paper published by UCF researchers claims that bad movie physics hurt students' understanding of real world physics. From the article, "Some people really do believe a bus traveling 70 mph can clear a 50-foot gap in a freeway, as depicted in the movie Speed." The professors published this paper out of fear that society will pay the price. One of the authors commented on advancements in the past years "All the luxuries we have today, the modern conveniences, are a result of the science research that went on in the '60s during the space race. It didn't just happen. It took people doing hard science to do it." I commented on the physics of the most recent Die Hard having problems detracting from my enjoyment of the movie but is it really the root of a growing problem of poor science & math among students?"
Learning is learning, entertainment is entertainment. Star trek has way more fundamental problems with physics than Speed or Die Hard. People shouldn't get their science from TV.
Is there anything left that someone hasn't claimed is 'hurting the children'?
American students are non-science jobs because that's what our economy rewards. Dentists don't have to contend with global competition. Apparently the envisioned future is that the Chinese and Mexicans will do all the work while we sit back and "manage" them, e.g. continue glutting ourselves by skimming all the profits off their work. Personally I think we're headed for trouble.
It must be the movies. Before movies, everybody had a perfect understanding of physics.
Tags != Comments, and -1 (Troll) != -1 (I Would Respond Angrily To This Poster So They Must Be Trolling)
We just need to ensure that we teach our children critical thinking skills. Never mind movies, in a world with Fox News and entertainment and lifestyle stories that cloak themselves as "news", this is more important than ever if future generations are going to enjoy a standard of living that even approaches what we have now.
Look, if you think that Speed is realistic, that isn't the movie's fault. That's genetics, the education system, and parenting to blame. Movies are not making people ignorant, they're pandering to peoples ignorance. Movies with realistic technology would be boring to most people. Sure, movies might be amplifying an existing problem, but they're not the root cause here.
CC Licensed Serialized Story and Podcast: Ingenioustries
Let me preface this comment with the fact that I am a physicist (astrophysics) and am quite often frustrated by the poor physics shown in movies.
However, I think they're neglecting a very basic fact. Humans have evolved to find Newtonian mechanics intuitive! (especially in translational cases, somewhat less in rotational ones) If someone throws a ball, you can quickly figure out approximately where it is going to land. You have no need to do calculations, because its evolutionarily hardwired into your brain. Watching a movie which doesn't accurately display a free-falling bus is not going to erase that.
It's true that people don't know enough physics to determine the validity of what they see in movies, but they already know enough to get through life. I'd love for everyone to know enough physics to be understand the devices that they use in their lives, but that's probably not a reality in the modern age.
I think what they're encountering is a resistance to learning the formalizations of physics. As soon as you step beyond Newtonian mechanics (really, beyond two-body problems) all that evolutionary intuition is gone. When you get to physics at that stage, you must place it on firm mathematical footing, or you have no hope of understanding: that is hard work.
They are seeing this decline in science understanding, but I think that's an artifact of an overall educational decline, rather than a specific effect of Hollywood movies. Young people are now expecting to be entertained, and while physics is beautiful, at some point it requires you to sit down in a empty room with a pad of paper and a pencil. If anything, it's the "action-packed entertainment" nature of movies, rather than any bad physics that is likely having the detrimental effect. However, if they can entertain these students and have them learn something too, that's fine with me.
We are not only behind in science. We are also illiterate. Most people never read any classic texts. And I will probably make at least one spelling error in this post. The problem is lack of standardized curriculum. Almost every nation that is cited as an example of someone we "really shouldn't be behind but still are" has a standard curriculum in science, math and humanities. We have too much local opposition to it from all-too-powerful teacher's unions. This is not meant to start conservative vs liberal debate (even though I happened to mention teacher's unions). Most of the time in K-12 a program for educating people over a period of 12 years is designed by teachers who can't plan for more than 1 year. They don't have the time or the background to see "the big picture" of where their particular class fits in the overall education. A separate bureaucracy (there, now you can't accuse me of being too conservative) of experts on development could do a much better job of it by designing and tweaking a curriculum for the entire nation. China does it. So does Russia and so does every European country.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Unless you should somehow happen to decelerate during the flight. As if, say, the power transfer surfaces of the vehicle were not in contact with a surface, or if air resistance in front of the bus countered a portion of the bus' kinetic energy.
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Who cares if the burger-flipper at the local fast food joint believes that a bus can jump a 50-foot span?
Agreed. I mean after all, you have to save room for 50% of the population on the OTHER side of the Gauss/normal/bell curve.
Then again, if you look at all the scientific progress made SINCE the 1960's, I'd say the world doesn't have to fear stagnation yet. Also bear in mind that most of this progress has been made by the same generation that was busy smoking pot/other things in the 1960's...
This is just the same old fallacy about "this generation is morally depraved, completely off the rails, etc" that has been around since Plato and Socrates. Old farts never understand the young idiots that are going to replace them. It's the way of the world.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Physics don't matter. In a few years, all fuel will be replaced by Brawndo. (It's got what Buses Crave.)
This is an old debate. Yes, TV and Movies largely rob you of time and money, and take up brain-cycles and memory capacity that could be used more productively for other things. Largely. It's because people choose to watch that kind of movie. We could all be watching intelligent, thought-provoking documentaries and technical films. But we don't. (Exceptions are noted.)
Suspension of disbelief is a wonderful ability. I'm glad I have it, it allows me to be entertained by reading, hearing, and watching works of pure fiction. I'm also glad that I'm smart enough to know the difference between fiction and fact. I got that by asking questions (stimulated in many cases by unrealistic scenes in movies, I'm sure). Not everyone wants to learn, however, and those that don't want to learn are probably irredeemable anyway. And laying the blame for their failures at Hollywood's doorstep is like blaming Goth Music and Violent Video Games for school shootings. It completely misses the point that solid education (or other forms of intervention, usually originating with parents that actually, gasp, pay attention to their children) would obviate the need for babysitting people through basic fact-versus-fancy analyses of obviously unrealistic media.
Some of us are able to handle our mindless entertainment responsibly. Those that can learn, will. Those that can't, will probably massively outnumber us within a generation or two anyway, if they don't already.
Raoul Mitgong: Unhelpful.
Movie and cartoon physics have always been highly suspect. The difference is that until fairly recently, it was blatantly obvious when special effects "cheats" were called into play. This started to fall apart with the advent of the green screen, and ironically went completely to hell with CGI. Why ironically? Because the same computing power used to render can also be used to do the physics properly -- but it generally isn't.
Another irony is that some movies that look cartoonish (Pixar films, for example) have more reasonable physics than movies that are meant to integrate the computer-generated effects seamlessly. Cartoons are one place where suspension of physical law is often accepted in order to support the overall comic effect, though there seems to be a sort of convention of "cartoon physics" as well.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
I can't believe nobody has called anybody on this.
Learning and education should be entertaining. Or at least, you should have the option of having an interesting and educational experience. I understand that there's stuff that one has to learn simply to have a job and function on a day to day basis in society, but if you receive no joy from learning new things in some sphere (i don't care if it's baseball statistics, esoteric poetry, how to make model ferraris or whatever), somewhere, then you probably live a sad static life.
There are lives at stake here!
It is therefore bizarre to expect entertainment to be factually accurate.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
"They don't even really understand how gravity works, and that's the most important force which affects us humans in our daily lives."
Well, not entirely true. I'd say that E&M is actually far more important to our daily experience than gravity, especially in the number of phenomena rooted in it.
"There's now some evidence that there might be other dimensions besides the 4 we're familiar with,"
What evidence? Point to some experiment or observation, please, not theoretical work.
"various particles have been detected (like neutrinos) which previously were only hypothesized."
This is entirely false. Neutrinos have been detected for several decades now, and they've even been used as tools in experiments - just look up some papers on deep inelastic neutrino scattering to see what I mean. No, what's new is that we're pretty sure that they have some mass, though we still only have an upper bound on it. In fact the last new fundamental particle to be discovered was the top quark in the 90s, and that was a couple of decades or so after the last new particle. It's now just down to the Higgs hunt as far as the standard model goes, and every particle physicist is praying that when we do find it there's something about it that doesn't fit in the standard model because otherwise particle physics is likely to die from it's too successful theory.
"150 years ago people thought it was impossible to fly in a machine that was heavier than air."
And those people would have been laymen who didn't know what was going on anyway. All you'd need to do is look at Newton's second law to see that if you could somehow push down on the air with enough force you'd be able to make anything fly. Even Leonardo da Vinci, a couple hundred years earlier than your estimate, knew that.
"There's no telling what other facets about our universe exist which we are unable currently to observe and understand, just like we had no idea how to split or fuse atoms and create enormous amounts of energy 100 years ago."
Actually, we do have a pretty good idea. Just like it turned out that Einstein's relativity was only a small modification of Newton's physics in the known regime, it's a pretty good bet that any new physics will have to reduce to the current theories, approximately, in the areas we have already explored experimentally.
because K-12 science education in the US is a disaster.
That is part of the problem, but it is not the root of it. The real problem is that science and engineering are no longer as valued in society as they were during the space race and among the generation who grew up watching those early successes and failures as the cold war and the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union unfolded upon their television screens and in their imaginations. If you ask the more ambitious youngsters today what they want to be when they grow up then you will hear lawyer, CEO, real estate investor, professional athlete, and the next American Idol long before you will hear scientist or engineer. Combine this with the generally poor treatment that many scientists and engineers have received in the US job market lately, threatened with outsourcing and offshoring, burdened with long and difficult studies for, in many cases, very modest pay given the amount of work required to complete a degree in engineering, and finally low pay and seniority based pay, regardless of skill or merit, for teachers thereby ensuring that what scientists and engineers we do produce will almost never work in our primary and secondary schools. It is not just the United States either, the world today is in more danger of sliding back into the dark ages than at any other time in recent history. The war on terror, the dumbing down of our schools, the glorification of the pop idol, the rise of young earth creationism at the expense of scientific truth, the denial of global warming, and the general deference given to anyone who for whatever reason has something against scientific truth. Is it any wonder that we are falling behind?
Except...
There are dangers of "infotainment". People get used to their education being fun and become unable to concentrate on real learning. There is a big difference between reading a journal on the the big bang and watching a Naked Science episode on the subject. But if your goal is entertainment instead of education, which are you going to choose?
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
It's not just physics. Every area of study has this same problem. Doctors will cringe bullshit medical diagnoses and the like. Psychologists will point out bad/incorrect advice. Business students will laugh at how basic most movie's ideas on the economy are. Computer nerds giggle whenever movies show some guy hacking into the super-secure server in under 10 seconds. All movies bullshit and trivialise, if you can't enjoy a movie because of it, then that's really your own shitty attitude. I imagine most people don't watch House M.D. for medical advice, or Sawfish to learn how to hack, or Trading Places for business advice.
"Learning and education should be entertaining. Or at least, you should have the option of having an interesting and educational experience..."
The truth is what matters in the real world for the most part is boring as watching paint dry. Think of all the people who are inspired to do great things but stop once they realize it's a long boring slow process. In today's instant gratification generation you really need to understand that sometimes you can only be a small part of something bigger. Take game development for instance, back when games were simpler and developer teams smaller it was there was a sweet spot willingness to suck up the hard work for creative control and unified vision. The truth is for the most part unless you are a genius it is unlikely that you add a significant amount to something you want to do, since it requires teams of people nowadays to get things done.
Movies, games, etc, are there to take us away from what is for the most part a pretty harsh and boring reality. Learning can be fun, what is Civilization 4 for instance if not learning the in's and outs of a complex game system? The truth is most people, and even educators today do not have enough of an understanding of how to get people so interested they are willing to get to go down into the trenches in drudgery of work that serious learning requires.
I know that learning in many respects is a very time consuming process and you can't force it. I think there is something to be said about letting people learn what interest them. In our society we 'stuff the ballot' on what we consider acceptable to learn and unacceptable, and also we judge learning whether we like it or not by whether our learning commands commercial value. The truth is many deep and serious things have no market value whatsoever in terms of taking care of yourself but it doesn't make those things any less valuable.
The problem is that the majority of what we need to know for our non-working and working lives is inherently not very interesting to children who would rather be doing something that children consider "fun".
/., it is) -- but it first takes a self-driven *desire* to learn the given material; a certain passion... Without it, education is rote tedium; an obstacle in the way of other, more-entertaining things.
Most kids don't regard writing code as "fun", for example -- and that is the job of a software developer.
Most kids don't regard the determination of chemical bonds as "fun" -- but that's fundamental to the field of chemistry.
Most kids (including me, when I was one, and still to this day) couldn't care less what Shakespeare wrote -- and what he wrote is frankly irrelevant to anybody who does something useful for a living (scientists, engineers, doctors), though still useful for people who "play" for a living (e.g. actors/actresses), and possibly lawyers (when using a Shakespearean story as an digestible analogy that a jury or a judge can understand, anyway).
Most kids don't care about managing their personal finances, because that's not "fun" -- even though they will go into debt and/or broke if they don't learn how.
And so on. Rather than do any of these things, most kids would rather watch TV, run around outdoors (which is at least good for their physical health and socially-stimulative), play video games, smoke/drink/huff cans of pesticide, etc.. Real life can't compete with the entertainment value of delinquincy, and at the age of (for example) 14, the ostensibly more-responsible age of 21 seems almost infinitely far-away ("so who cares, right?")...
The sad reality is that most of life is boring -- and the sooner people recognize this, accept it, move on and learn the necessary material anyway, the better off we'll all be.
As a professional young adult, I know I spend *very* little of my 168 hours/week doing things I consider purely "fun" (playing video/computer games, poker, traveling, getting laid, writing code for a personal project (which is half work-related anyway, since such projects are a vehicle for learning new stuff))... Most of what I do involves working, doing things related to my work, maintaining my physical and/or financial health, and planning for my future.
The life of a responsible, disciplined adult isn't easy, nor does it tend to be fun. But we find ways to make such trivial work interesting...
More power to teachers if they can find ways to make education and learning interesting. It *can* be (and I think for most of us reading
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
Learning and education should be entertaining.
I think you can take this too far and it's exactly where we'll end up in our schools and universities. If we're not careful that is. Certainly in the UK there is a drive to make school and degree level material more 'entertaining' and 'fun'. That's why we end up with some places teaching David Beckham Studies. I'd rather be a bit bored but learn something useful, wouldn't you?
Also you can't make education entertaining to all people. Some students would be fascinated by David Beckham, I would be bored to tears.
Pretty much what I was thinking. ANYONE studying for their physics exam by watching Speed deserves the mark they get.
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If you can read or see a bunch of Shakespeare's works and get nothing relevant or educational out of them, you probably live in a small, opaque metal box with breathing holes and no possibility of human contact. Fictional works in general can be extremely educational, and very much relevant to life. Their value doesn't simply come from the accuracy of the science, that's really not the point. Your life as a 'professional young adult' sounds awfully dull, I wonder at what point you'll have won whatever race you're running and enjoy life. I'm a 32 year old IT professional doing a degree in linguistics & philosophy, I have a partner who's a lecturer and also doing her PhD, and we spend a great deal of time doing things that are purely 'fun'. I have an excellent understanding of basic physics, and I thought Die Hard 4.0 was an very enjoyable stupid movie full of awesome things going BOOM! I mean, physics aside, let's talk about the biology of that kung-fu chick. She took a couple of full-speed hits from an SUV with Bruce Fucking Willis at the wheel, and her hair didn't even frizz up. I imagine anyone with enough brains to pursue a career in science, engineering, medicine, etc would be able to put Die Hard aside when they hit their exams...anyone with a brain knows that John McCain operates outside of normal time and space.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Mmmm... but would a farmer of 100 years ago have a better understanding of levers and pulleys than a farmer today? Perhaps a better parallel to consider. Probably a farmer of a hundred years ago had a better understanding of physics than a shop girl or a newspaper boy of the time... but then all three probably had a poorer understanding of a lot of other things that an average person takes for granted today: the relevant knowledge that means its easier for a person to get by. Could be argued that knowing about levers and pulleys today is less important than understanding how to make a washing machine work, using modern banking facilities, or accessing the internet. Heck, I like messing around with my classic (1965) car but I'd not know what to do with the black box computer that controls my girlfriend's car...no levers or pulleys in there...
OK, disclaimer, I'm a budding English prof. But it seems a real rush to judgement to me to limit the utility of literature the way you do, to just examples or practice for creating further art. Firstly, there's research that shows that the sort of thinking demanded by interpreting art and literature is not only conducive to but necessary for more utilitarian or "rational" thought processes (Damasio's Descartes' Error is a good start). So it's useful developmentally. But there's truth too in the old liberal humanist saw that there are themes which are, if not universal, at least broadly applicapable to our lives. Your uncle may not kill your father for the throne, but you probably will suffer teen angst or find yourself at odds with society in some other way. Your contention that "most of life is boring" is the sort of sad belief or experience that can be altered by learning to appreciation the slower pace of the fine arts. It is not so easy in our society to learn to contemplate a sunset or the slow transformation of a flower or a lawn or patterns of frost on a window. Study of the arts inculcates such skills and predilictions. As a capping disclaimer, yes, I am a budding lit prof, poetry no less, but my bachelor's is in geomorphology, and my initial profession was in photography and computer programming for planetariums. So I didn't necessarily come to my current positions easily. YMMV, but at least be aware that your sweeping generalizations are, well, sweeping generalizations that likely spring from your attitudes and experiences, as well as possibly from your aptitudes. So be careful about laying down universal laws for humanity. Joy and satisfaction is where you LEARN to find it.
The problem is not necessarily educational entertainment, but rather that in an effort to create a plot device, writers need to break the laws of physics. While this is fine for fanciful styles (fantasy, sci-fi, etc) it should be avoided in settings where there is no expectation that the laws of physics will not apply. When talking about the starship Enterprise, I expect that there will be a lot of stuff unsupported by science. But when I am watching a police show, the writer should not break the laws of physics for a plot device. This is, in my opinion, a lack of imagination and a weak style of writing.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
However I can also see the point of the original article and paper. I studied Physics and Space Technology to degree level and I can remember numerous discussions I have had with non-phsycists regarding interesting areas of physics where they actually mentioned popular entertainment as an example of why what I was saying must be incorrect.
The real problem here is that when you get down to the nitty gritty alot of Phsycics is counter-intuitive to the layman. In order to cope with this movies and entertainment can either "dumb down" the ideas to make them sound right to the layman (also known as the majority) or can be true to the real world and make physicists happy (the few). Confronted with this choice anyone will go with angling the product to appeal to the largest market, unless you are already 100% sure the product will have no mass appeal regardless of which path you choose.
It is true that a solution to this problem could be to make movies factually accurate, but where is the fun in that? I am more than capable of watching speed when the bus does a super jump and not be instantly objecting at how inaccurate it is (I do object to the rest of that shit film though). Most of us are able to watch entertainment and suspend our disbelief to a certain level even when we know what we are watching is inaccurate.
I think a better solution is to force people to study Physics to a sufficient level that you gain a basic understanding of the underlying principles. I do not mean a true understanding of every concept, but enough so that you learn that the level of understanding you do have is not the complete picture and is a simplification (or scientific model) of reality.
The thing that frustrated me about studying physics was that every year I would be told that what I learnt the year before was not really what was happening and that you could no longer rely on it to hold true in all situations that would come up over the coming year. With hindsight however this was a very valuable to learn as it teaches you that your understanding of a subject may be a far to simple to apply to the real world. This understanding extends to all things.
I dont read
Its not a question of someone expecting entertainment to be educational, but as much of people's physical understanding is intuitive, it gets affected by things that you see often. People start "expecting" space ships to make whooshing sounds even if they know sound cant travel in vacuum.
I am sorry - I had to respond to this, because people who honor physics and its importance in the world would have to be smarter than to link Hollywood Movies and a thorough understanding of Physics. If they are not, than I am afraid for our future. If their time is wasted picking apart Die Hard, Speed, and every other Sci-Fi action flick, then who knows what other diversions are using up valuable resources. Hey, guess what, TIE Fighters really wouldn't be able to make that "roaring" sound in Space. Gosh, a lot of people are going to be upset when they take their first tour in Space and realize that it's pretty quiet.
And you wonder why we haven't cured Cancer, or found a way to limit our dependency on oil, or found a way to reverse the severe climate changes in our environment?
Obviously, it is easy to divert attention from what is important, no matter what your level of intelligence.
It's not just Shakespeare they're talking about here, it's fictional literature in general. And I agree wholeheartedly with them. Good fictional works are about the fundamental ideas and feelings that make us human.
There are far too many engineer-types that have studied nothing but math and physics for their entire lives and end up wandering the planet as near emotionless automatons (I know because I knew a lot of them in school and work with several of them). These are people who saw no "real world value" in fictional movies or works of literature if they were not grounded in the world of science that they knew.
And thats frankly pretty sad. Because most of these people will end up as the kind of "guy in the pits" scientific or engineering workers who do the hardcore number crunching for the guys that have the more well rounded visions. Very few of them ever rise to become the "go to" guy or the team leader because they don't posses the necessary emotional or social skills to effectively manage those positions. They never become the one that comes up with the idea, only the one that works on the ideas of others. They work to make the things that make other peoples lives a better place without ever really living a life of their own. Most of the guys I work with do 12-14 hour days almost every day! Even on weekends! And I can almost guarantee that the team leader goes home after 10 hours every day and rarely (if ever) do you see his face in the office on the weekends. Because he has something more than work in his (or her) life.
The sciences are truly awesome but like everything else in life you can have too much of a good thing. Balance is key.
And that's the purpose of good fictional stories (whether told through literature or movies), they teach us a lot about how to be human. How to have compassion and empathy for others and how to express our emotional connection to other people. And the danger of discounting Shakespeare or Hemingway or the works of Plato as having "no real world value" is that you ignore a lot of what it is to be a part of humanity.
And some of them are just plain fun!
It isn't the teachers or the schools fault that students aren't learning science... or parents... IT IS HOLLYWOOD'S FAULT!!!!
Can we sue the movie makers for little johnny failing his physics test? Like those fat kids who sued McDonalds?
I'm not sure when this was written, but nowadays we have things like babelfish and google's language tools and Amikai (not a misspelling) that do instant translation fairly well.
Not well enough for Star Trek, and it never will. You don't even hear other people talking in their language -- only what the translation of what they say is. That's improbable enough, but there's another bigger problem -- the complete lack of lag and the ability to interrupt people mid-sentence.
If you interrupt someone in the middle of a sentence in different language, you may get completely different information. For example, in English you want to say something like "That man bought the watch I wore to work every day." Let's say that you were interrupted mid-sentence. Your listener would get the fact that "that man bought the watch..." Your listener would know that the watch was bought but not that you wore it to work every day.
Now let's say you were speaking Japanese instead. Due to a significant difference in word order, the sentence is best rendered as "[Every day] [to work] [wore] [watch] [that man] [bought]." If you were interrupted mid-sentence, your listener would only know that the watch was worn to work everyday and not that it was bought.
This is because Japanese uses Subject-Object-Verb order instead of English's usual Subject-Verb-Object order and places all modifiers (including phrases and clauses) before the word they modify. Other languages present similar difficulties. Spanish places all modifiers after the word they modify (while English places adjectives & adverbs usually before and prepositions and clauses afterwards). Classical Arabic puts the verb first. Latin & Russian can have seemingly almost arbitrary word order.
Another complexity is the necessary context in a language. Many Japanese sentences would be considered sentence fragments in English. It's perfectly acceptable to simply use a verb without a subject or an object and to let the context (hopefully) explain what you're talking about. In English, you might say, "I bought it," but in Japanese you could just say "Bought." The ambiguity of the language can make translation exceptionally difficult, especially when a speaker has knowledge that a listener does not and is making no special effort to clarify. (This is more common in watching movies than in conversation, though.)
A Star Trek-style universal translator would have to be able to look into the future to see the entire context of a sentence to know how to render it properly or be able to read the minds of participants. This is technologically unlikely, and it doesn't seem supported by the other technology used in the setting.
Thus, it's pretty much wand-waving magic-tech meant to make the plots go smoother. Don't expect to see it anytime before we see replicators and the power supply systems required to transmit the energy needed to spontaneously create multiple GRAMS of matter (each of gram of which is roughly equivalent to the energy released in the bomb dropped on Hiroshima) meant to wave away supply problems or before we see magical inertia-canceling technology meant to wave away realistic depictions of acceleration.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Of course, if movie's were realistic, we'd be seeing headlines like:
Good Movie Physics Hurt Movie Enjoyment
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
I agree that students need to learn to find enjoyment in learning, but I want them to enjoy the actual work, not just remember games from school. Is it not worth showing students how to enjoy something even when it's not explicitly entertaining?
I understand that there's stuff that one has to learn simply to have a job and function on a day to day basis in society... I'm not so pessimistic to think that school is about training people to become good little worker bees. I wish fewer people saw it that way. School is an introduction to the world, and to developing empathy for other people and their ideas. You can use the skills learned there to find a job, but that should not be the primary goal.> I saw a couple of kids who couldn't figure out how to get the maximum bounce out of a trampoline.
Possibly they were just having fun, even if it wasn't at maximum efficiency.
Parallel parking is a coordination and depth perception thing. I know plenty of geniuses who suck at it. All you sound like is a crotchety old coot who thinks his generation was the smartest one.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
And people start expecting cars to blow up after accidents, so that bystanders hastily move injured drivers and passengers, sometimes worsening spinal injuries in the process.
"Perhaps learning should be entertaining"
I think interesting would be a better word to use than entertaining. Entertaining implies a start and an end, such as is the case with a movie, a TV show or a video game (even with MMOs its possible to explore all the content). But interesting implies that you can keep learning (for fun!) beyond what is presented to you.
THIS is what is exactly wrong with North America. Why the fuck should education be entertaining? It certainly is a bonus if what you're learning is interesting, but for 95% of everything that you NEED to know, it's boring. SUCK IT UP. Do you think learning about how to fill out an income tax return is entertaining? No, but you need to hunker down and just fucking do it without complaining. So many North Americans don't have what it takes to do the downright dirty work that is both unappealing and boring because "it's not fun, boo hoo!"
The reality is that you need to learn to get ahead, under any circumstances. You need to work your ass off. If you don't, you will work at McDonald's or maybe a comic book store, because hey, that's fun and entertaining, right?
Since when is learning about Fast Fourier Transforms or the internals of Mergesort entertaining? It's not, and the expectation that education should be fun is what is killing kids. Educational video games? Talk about unrealistic expectations that you as parents put into your kids' heads. You need to say, "Yes, I know it's boring, but you need to learn this, so go learn your timestables."
Now get off my lawn you pesky kids!