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Parents Baffled By Science Questions
Pickens writes "The BBC reports that four out of five parents living in the UK have been stumped by a science question posed by their children with the top three most-asked questions: 'Where do babies come from?', 'What makes a rainbow?' and 'Why is the sky blue?'. The survey was carried out to mark the launch of a new website by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills called Science: So what? So everything."
fail
Is the question "Where do babies come from?" really a science question?
In the UK?!
Why, I'll bet we Americans could get stumped even easier!! take that, britian!
I always was interested in science, and when I was younger, it drove me to learn things on my own. While I was in high school, I substituted for a teacher a few times...
But I was always amazed at how some people were so baffled by the simplest things that are very easy to learn about.
The everyday person needs to know more science. Unfortunately, many people who do know a lot of science act religious. They treat people who don't know it as inferior, and I believe that turns a lot of people away from learning about it. Not because they think science is less valid, but in a sense, because they don't want to be like the jackass that just got done making them feel worthless.
Honestly... I think people who know a lot of science are probably the biggest problem with science education.
FanFictionRecs.net
I knew the masses were ignorant... but to be that ignorant is just off the charts. I really upsets me that so many of the unwashed masses benefit so greatly from the fruits of scientific labors yet go through life 'blissfully' unaware as to the nature of the world, or will readily rally around any politician or talk show host that so often vehemently oppose all stances of logic and enlightenment.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
Given just the subheadline, 'Four in five UK parents have been stumped by a science question posed by their children' is this really that surprising? Heck, I'm surprised it isn't higher. All the children I know have a keen penchant for asking 'why?' incessantly. I can probably answer, more or less, the key questions outlined above but I would falter (as would many who do not hold multiple Ph.Ds in the physical sciences) after a couple questions of 'why?'
Example, http://www.scq.ubc.ca/a-dialogue-with-sarah-aged-3-in-which-it-is-shown-that-if-your-dad-is-a-chemistry-professor-asking-%E2%80%9Cwhy%E2%80%9D-can-be-dangerous-4/
She blinded me with SCIENCE!
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
How is babby formed? how girl get pragnent?
The ocean parts and the meteors come down
Laid out in amber, baby.
Wait what ? Parents are stumped by that question ? How did they become parents in the first place ?
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
Everyone knows the stork drops them off. Duh.
Obviously many parents parents need to be more like Calvin's Dad. He was never stumped by Calvin's science questions.
(More)
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
/)
I have a book called How to Solve It: Modern Heuristics. (This is not the classic problem-solving book "How to Solve It"). The book is about machine learning, statistics, genetic algorithms, and describes how coming up with approximate solutions to the right problem is often times much easier and faster than the exact solution.
At any rate, the book starts off with a study done where random questions from a 5th grade math text book that were given a group of people, but not in the context of the chapter, just by themselves. The book gives the problems and then says "If you can solve these in less than an hour(!), you will belong to the elite one percent of the people we tested who managed to get the right answer in that time. What's more, everyone we tested had at least an undergraduate degree in mathematics, engineering, or computer science." The point? When questions are given out of context, e.g., not at the end of a chapter about the quadratic equation, they can be hard to solve, even for qualified people. You have to THINK!
Also, wasn't there a study that found 20% of Americans think Joan of Arc was Noah's wife? And what percent of USians can't find the Pacific Ocean on a map? 21!
http://machinist.salon.com/blog/2007/08/30/upton/
I'd like to see a study not just on being stumped, but the most incorrectly answered questions.
"How old is the universe?"
"600 years old."
A friend of mine is actually the first test tube baby born in the UK. "Your dad's a turkey baster" kinda demands more of an explaination
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4u2ZsoYWwJA
Billy Brown rides on. Yolanda Green bypasses Gary White.
I expect Yahoo Answers can help out with the first question, at least... http://encyclopediadramatica.com/How_is_babby_formed%3F
Shouldn't parents of all people know where babies come from?! Sheesh, is humanity getting dumber or what!
There is no way that children in Britain think blue is the colour of the sky.
Clifford Stoll's astronomy PhD orals seemed to be going swimmingly.
Just as everybody was about to gather their papers, shake hands and head home, his rather sadistic PhD supervisor asked him to explain why the sky is blue.
The sharks sensed blood in the water and began circling for the kill.
Don't assume a question is easily answered just because it seems simple and innocuous at first glance.
This type of news item is sort of a cheap shot by journalists. It's an old trick that probably dates back to antiquity--look how stupid these people are, they can't answer simple questions! And the consumer rolls their eyes, feels superior, etc. Look on youtube [below], there are some hilarious videos about Americans, British, Germans being "stupid". The vids were done as an exercise in psychological manipulation. One example.
To be fair, rainbows and the blue sky are somewhat difficult problems. It's not like Rayleigh and Mie scattering are a core part of the curriculum for people who aren't going into engineering or physics. As far as "Where do babies come from?"... that can be difficult for other reasons. The parents almost certainly *know*, it's just that there's a societal stigma against discussing sexual matters with children.
Honestly... I think people who know a lot of science are probably the biggest problem with science education.
The problem is not that science people are arrogant, the problem is that they come way too late in education (to properly explain the science method) at a point where all people did for the previous year was swallow factoid and regurgitate them (lower school science lesson is usually just that), and combined with the fact science is seen as nerdy/geeky and thus only for contempt. Later those same people which admire jocks and despite nerd become parents and are baffled by science question.Add to that the fact that science is sometimes seen as attacking/going against their own religious belief (in reality science as a method do not care for religion (except social science) what cannot be falsified is ignored)...
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Sorry, forgot, above is NSFW.
vf
"Well honey, would you like to see a live demonstration?" would be unwise to say to a child.
Next Question!
You can have your god back when you are old enough to handle the responsibility.
At least the first one the parents need to be able to answer, it they halfway have a memory left. As to the technicialities of the issue, if they really cannot talk about sex, they should be aware that they are putting their children at high risk of messing it up later (unwanted pregnancy, STDs) and fix this disgrace immediately. There are books that help and that deal specifically with how to explain this to your children. Go to your local bookstore and ask! Grossing the children out is a minor and acceptable possible side effect. But they need to be told!
As to 2. and 3., I can understand that. These are actually advanced wave-physics questions.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Sorry, but this stinks of an government "spin" survey. You know, one of those surveys where the result is decided before it's even comissioned.
They've have rigged the questions, asking parents how hard they rated things such as:
Counting to three.
Breathing.
Explaining the facts of life to your children.
Explaning how to draw something.
The desired outcome will, of course, be that most parents would have difficulty explaning sex to their kids.
The rating options were probably:
Easy ..with only "easy" counting as a positive result.
Not easy
Hard
Very Hard
Extremely hard
There's also a good chance that the parents questioned where from a poor inner city area, where their parents would have been poorly educated when compared to the norm, and there would be an higher prevelence of people of below average intelligence....
My recent trip to the zoo, while somewhat entertaining and good exercise, reminded me just how much I hate little children and idiots. I swear, if I hear ANYONE say, "LOOK, A MONKEY!" again and point to an orangutan or gorilla I'm going to kill someone.
i'm surprised these people don't need help using toilet paper
Everyone alive right now is going to seem dumb to any generation that follows as they discover new science.
You just have the added bonus of being a douchebag as well as an idiot.
If this happens to you, the best thing to do is say that you don't know and go find out together with your child. This not only gives you something fun to do, it can help teach them to explore the internet, a bookstore, or a library. Most importantly it teaches them how to learn things.
The cool thing is, most of these basic questions have many levels beneath them. For example, most of you know why grass is green, but why is chlorophyll green? Why is green a really odd color for plants to use? Would "orange-phyll" (if it existed) work too? This leads to an exploration of chemistry and physics as well as biology.
Another good thing to teach is how people know this stuff - the idea that the natural world is knowable through discovery and testing, and that we decide as a community what "the truth" is, based on what we observe and what makes sense. Kids can certainly learn the idea of what science is at a pretty young age, even if complex logic isn't possible until, I don't know, early teens? Hmm, something to look up!
Between the "crutch of knowledge" position the internet has taken up in our brains combined with the constant barrage of messages from various sources that science is "evil" (ie, the scientific community agenda to kill religion, science geeks are potential terrorists, etc...), we're getting dumber by the minute. God forbid we ever get hit by some event that takes electricity away from us... we'll be lucky if we can figure out how to feed ourselves.
8==8 Bones 8==8
After all, when asked about the color of the sky, a parent could answer like this.
Let us give thanks that some people have the sense and honesty to say "I don't know," and try not to look down our noses at them. Bad parenting is darned hard to unlearn.
--
Toro
Next person to reference that idiotic "babby" meme in full gets my Righteous Fists O' Graft down their damn throat.
Your culture is doomed, unless yours out breeds the others.
Such as "how to explain where babies come from, without mentioning sex or genitalia..." to their school-age kids (not toddlers).
Someone I know actually wanted this information. A parent, yes, but not clearly qualified for the job. Idiocracy, here we come!
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
The connection between Rayleigh scattering and refraction is very fundamental. Both are due (from the point of view of electromagnetic theory) to the electrical polarization of the scatterers by the incident electromagnetic wave. The waves re-radiated by the dipoles induced in the scatterers by the incident field are incoherent, as seen by an observer located to the side of the incident beam of light. But, in the forward direction, the re-radiated waves are completely coherent with the incident waves, but retarded in phase. These retarded waves make the incident wave train propagate more slowly in the scattering medium than in a vacuum; the ratio of the speed of propagation in vacuo to the speed in the medium is just the refractive index of the medium. Thus refraction and Rayleigh scattering are two aspects of a single phenomenon.
http://mintaka.sdsu.edu/GF/explain/extinction/extintro.html
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
In the USA, African-American parents tend to know substantially less (about science and mathematics) than parents of either European ancestry or Asian ancestry. Not surprisingly, the average IQ of African-Americans is about 20 points less than the average IQ of Asian-Americans or European-Americans.
To be fair, some of those questions are hard. I doubt many people could give a proper answer on why the sky is blue, particularly if you want a more in-depth answer than "blue light is scattered more" (see here for more details). There have even been incorrect answers on this thread.
They'd try WolframAlpha.
That's it!
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
instain your mother!
the UK is now officially stupider than the US. Yep, because growing up not only could my parents answer these, but I could.
It turns out that parents don't answer their kids correctly, because when you type in "how to" into a Google search field, you get some pretty interesting (albeit sad) suggestions for search results. And to be honest, if children don't know where babies come from, then how do you expect them to NOT have kids at a young age?
I didn't learn why the sky was blue until university (college for USians) level science. Are we suddenly expecting university level physics from parents? Give me a break!
My wife and entire family (5 other people) are is more qualified (in terms of tertiary qualifications) and they couldn't answer why the sky is blue. And just to add, my wife has a BSc (Hons).
meh
Young kid : "it is very complicated, so I will give you only a partial explanation. If you want we can later check the complete explanation. Light is composed of small particle (think them as very very small balls which we cannot see individually, but when an extremly lot of them come together we see "light"). Those small particle have different color. The blue color, the red color etc.... Normally when those small particle/bullter of light are in space, there is no air in space so they go on at the same speed together. Red and blue together. So when you look at them all the color put together make "white" light. But when they enter air they get scattered/collided and instead of going straight the4y go into every direction. But the thigns is, the "bluer" the light is, the more it is scattered in every direction, whereas the "redder" it is the less it is scattered it goes straight. Which is why the sky looks blue, because poor blue light get scattered everywhere".
Not the best one but comprehensible enough. As the kid grow you can add / make a more correct explanation. Works marvel if you can have a few balls of different color to represent the light "balls".
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
From this point of view, all that is needed is to be able to explain light from the sun is made up of all colors (no need to explain wavelengths) - which you can demonstrate with a bit of broken glass, no need for an official prism - and are then most of the way to the rainbow explanation - and that the blue light from the sun is spread out more by the atmosphere. You can demonstrate scattering simply by putting a little milk in a glass of water and shining a flashlight through it. This is a level of explanation suitable for a child under, say, 13, and already introduces a number of ideas about optics.
As for where babies come from, even quite small children are quite safe with the idea that babies grow inside their mothers. Rural children can hardly avoid knowing this by the age of 3 or so. They need reassurance that it won't happen to them, yet, and they need a gradual increase of detail until they reach puberty. But they don't need to know about DNA, cell fission, fertilisation and so on in order to understand what causes pregnancy and how to avoid it until it's actually wanted.
Personally, I blame not so much the dumbing down as the increasing formalism of science teaching. The criticism of science teaching in Brazil made by Richard Feynmann is now valid in much of the West today. We actually need to teach ideas with simpler, more familiar equipment rather than the special manufactured experiments in school labs, otherwise how can people see the relevance? The example above, of someone suddenly realising that mayonnaise is an emulsion, is a good one.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
I think I just found out what I am looking for after spending a lot time surfing the net. I am very happy to post my comment in this blog. I gathered lot of information from this site. Nice blog.
Barbara
Accident Attorneys
You might not know the reason, so I'll leave this here to demonstrate the articles. It's one of the things thats extremely obvious and accepted, but you should know the reason. Very much why the sky and ocean is blue.
Not every question is worth answering though, check out this video of C.K. Louis.
And remember, the next time you hear someone say that the sky is blue because it reflects the ocean - shove a soldering iron up their rectum and threaten to turn on the heat until they get their answer right.
I can see this turning in a tv show where kids answer the same questions. It can then be asked if the older person is smarter than the child. Catching name would be something like: Are you smarter than a 4-6th grader.
That said, I do not think it is strange. It is not information that is used by them on a day to day basis. It could very well be that they learned it in school just like their kids are doing now. However they did not learn it to pass the knowledge, they learned it to pass the exams.
Obviously many people here will think this is very strange that those questions can not be answered, because to people here it is basic knowledge. Hate to burst your bubble, but it isn't for the generic public.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Crikey, what a good show that was. Every single thing was personified in the cartoon - from corpuscles to neuro-electric transmissions to individual nucleotides producing proteins - and I learned more about human biology from that show than I did from 5 years of GCSE Biology (and the show was only on at about 6.30am every Sunday in the UK, about 20 years ago).
Unfortunately I don't think it's been on TV for some time now, and I can't find it on DVD anywhere. If any of you out there are parents who want your kids to understand a little bit of biology, you can't do better than to show them this.
Meta will eat itself
It is available, but not in the UK (or US): here
Meta will eat itself
Schools must provide sex education lessons by law. Parents can opt their kids out but its rare. The lessons don't include the half answers above (which I could not find on the website) and are pretty accurate.
That's a bit harsh. What kind of math are we talking about? I only ever studied math as far as algebra and geometry, so am I a subhuman?
Depends. Do you need a calculator or a cash register to tell you how much change you should get back when you pay for a total of $9.78 with a $10 bill? Do you need a calculator to figure out how many pennies you should add to that $10 bill so that you get a single quarter ($0.25 for those not accustomed to American coins) back as change? Are you amazed when a customer gives you the $10 bill and pennies and ends up with a single quarter and you don't understand how they could do that without the register telling them their change?
If your answer to any or all of those questions is "yes", then probably fall under Heinlein's definition of "subhuman".
Seriously, I've had cashiers look at me like I'm some sort of magician because I can hand them a certain amount of bills and coins to ensure that I get the least number of coins back as change. No, I don't think they are subhuman, but their inability to do simple math without a calculator boggles my mind just as much as my ability to do so boggles theirs. YMMV. :-/
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
. . . but where should they go . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
She asked me what PH meant.
I said (remembering my chemistry) "percentage hydrogen"
"OK", she said, "why does it go from 0 to 14, and what hydrogen? like hydrogen in water?"
Uhm... lets ring Grandad (my dad was a research chemist).
A bit later...
"He says its the inverse natural logarithm or "cologarithm" of the number of active hydrogen ions"
Me "Uh.... that's great".
Later that week
"Did you get a good mark for your homework?"
"Yes. Only the teacher said that for GCSE If I am asked what PH is just to put 'a measure of acidity and alkalinity', or the marker might not know and mark it incorrect'".
I've done a more extensive post below, but basically the broad brush explanation of why the sky is blue is not university level and can be explained with a piece of broken glass, a flashlight, a glass of water and a few drops of milk. It can be explained to someone with a reading age of 10 (I did an experimental practical-based class in basic science back in the early 70s, with test subjects aged 8-10, so I think I know something about this.) The mistake many people make on these threads is to assume that explanation stops at a certain level, and that is the "why". It does not. Explanation goes down many levels, and needs to be parked at a level suitable for the person being explained to. The ignorance of your wife's family is a criticism of poor science curriculum development.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
One of the favorite times with my son was the constant question asking phase, what I didn't know we would make a computer adventure of it and he got to use the mouse to click on what I pointed at, and later what he could read himself. Sadly most other people I know either answer with 'Because', 'God did it', or 'I don't know' and discourage all the followup questions.
*DrugCheese rants*
I still can't explain why two magnets attracts each other?
Where these energy comes from? Please teach me why.
Obviously many people here will think this is very strange that those questions can not be answered, because to people here it is basic knowledge. Hate to burst your bubble, but it isn't for the generic public.
Yes. That's the problem.
First, there's a point at which that three-year-old brat has asked "Why?" too many times today.
Then, there's the point at which the parent doesn't feel comfortable explaining topics like sex to a child within certain age ranges.
Then, there's parents that aren't really interested in helping their child learn - just to be quiet and let the parent be a person in their own right again.
Then, there's parents who know the answer but can't express it in a child-friendly way (MUCH harder than it looks when it's off-the-cuff and out-of-the-blue... this is why good teachers are so rare).
Then, there's the parents who don't know.
I think it's safe to say that there are a lot of all of those categories, but to say they are all part of the last one is totally untrue.
However, more worrying is that in my work with schools, I've come across all of the above categories of TEACHER. That's a lot more scary. I regularly see kids told off for daring to ask "Why?" or "Why not?" and, yes, some of them are just deliberately being annoying but I've witnessed no end of kids that are shut out of learning because the teacher "needs" to have a chat, text their husband, fill in paperwork, go to lunch, etc.
If a kid has a genuine question, answer the damn question, or they will give up asking anything at all. That just breeds zombies, not brains. And you know that zombies can't survive without an adequate quota of brains around.
At my university we had a small orientation before we were let lose supervising undergraduate students in labs. One of the topics discussed was the difficulty in teaching someone with preconceived ideas, and how many people have the wrong idea on very 'fundamental' issues. We did a simple test, get into groups of three or four, and produce a little presentation about why we have seasons and why the moon has different phases. This seems like a simple ask, also keep in mind that we are all either final year or postgraduate science (physics and chemistry) majors. Most groups got it wrong. Some fundamentally (the earth creates a shadow on the moon) but most had the basic ideas and failed in the reasoning (such as the tilted axis causing seasons, but fail to realise it is due to flux and related it instead to distance). It's easy to scoff at people who got this wrong, but this wasn't Joe public; this was a large group of scientists, each beginning to specialise in a very technical field. The teaching of basic scientific principals has been left for dead, and the current climate of students is that if something is not assessed, it is not important. Gone are the days that students would look for these answers on their own. Something to ponder, could you imagine the headlines if a reporter was in the room?
Back inside? Into a deep hole? The soylent green ranch?
No seriously, what are you suggesting?
Well I'm guessing that most people don't actually know why the sky is blue or why rainbows appear.
But there's also another reasony why someone could be baffled by such a question from a kid. I've majored in computer science, so I know a thing or two about physics and still (or maybe due to that) I have no clue how could I possibly explain those things to a kid? I mean he wouldn't get it anyway. I guess the simplest way would be to:
1) say that our beloved Lord made it like that
2) simplify it as much as I could (not a good idea imho)
3) start from the top and start explaining the most trivial thing, after some time, if he didn't get bored, I could explain it all properly as he would have got the necessary knowledge by then.
What makes the grass green "Blood, Blood, blood makes the grass green Drill Sgt" What makes the Grass grow "Guts, Guts, Guts makes the Grass grow Drill Sgt" at least that is what I was told..
The sky is *not* blue! First of all, depending which way you are looking, what part of the world you are in, altitude, and what time of day it is, amongst other things, the sky can vary from almost green to almost violet. That's leaving out the obvious exceptions for sunrise and sunset, etcetera. Secondly, as a painter I see many colours in almost any sky. Clouds are not white or grey, either... except in some parts of the cloud. Even on a sunny day at noon you can see subtle pinks, and yes, greens in clouds...
Yes, yes, I know that the consensus is that the sky is "blue" - what intrigues me is how unobservant a lot of scientific people can apparently be, and how unsubtle in their pronouncements.
If you want to generalise, it is probably more accurate to describe the sky on a sunny day as 'cyan' in many parts of the world... at least nearer to the horizon. As you look more upwards, it grades towards what us arty, useless, non-geeks would call a "cobalt blue" ;-)
Suggestion: Instead of agreeing when a child asks the leading question "Why is the sky blue?", take said child outside and say "Let's look and see if it is all the same colour, then see if we can work out why afterwards."
The sense of wonder is more important than factual explanations, and the latter should follow the former in importance.
Gees, Slashdotters, get some paints out and start looking !!
(Add !! ad libitum)
Boston drivers seem to think it's ok to drive without knowing how to use the turn indicator. And my wife doesn't seem to know about where the gas goes. But she knows how to get gas in the car ... honey, why don't you drive my car tonight (when the tank is near empty).
I see many colours in almost any sky. Clouds are not white or grey, either... except in some parts of the cloud. Even on a sunny day at noon you can see subtle pinks, and yes, greens in clouds...
Gees, Slashdotters, get some paints out and start looking !!
I believe you misspelled "LSD".
The sky is blue because if it was green, we wouldn't know when to stop mowing the lawn.
So exactly what is this organization going to do to rectify the situation of 80% (their measure) of adults age 20-50 (my estimate) being deficient in education regarding reproductive biology and optics/physics?
Put up a web site? That's all? There way more than plenty out there, and books, and other sources. The events and web sites you link to were there before too. How are you going to get the message to these people you've specified where others have failed by simply 'making available' and 'raising awareness'?
By singling out those people and humiliating them in the press? Smooth move.
Are you going to stick with your assumption that they don't know despite the fact that your data collection method (word of mouth reports of recollections of past events, asked with leading questions in order to set your context but which they'll tend to answer in such a way as to satisfy your implied preferred response) is fatally flawed? That was just a few of the errors among the many listed in places such as http://www.don-lindsay-archive.org/skeptic/arguments.html that you fall prey to. That's a pretty good example of bad scientific reasoning, hardly the PR you'd want.
You're doing nothing other than this website and publicity? That's pretty irresponsible when all those people are so deficient, by their admission and your conclusion. Who's going to save them from this sad state you've discovered they're stuck in?
You're doing nothing else? So then maybe things aren't so bad for them. So you've done them a disservice, insulted them, and presented yourself under false pretense. That would seem to beg apologies as well as discrediting yourself in exactly the field you seek to promote. That reflects on the entire field, especially those sites and events you link to on your site. More apologies.
Your presentation, creating an artificial problem in order to justify your existence and intentions, is just one sort of the things we science educators who seek to promote science solely by its own value and benefits, have to constantly strive to overcome. Thanks, we appreciate that. We could use you as a bad example in our work if we were to use your tactics and so redeem you a bit by making our job a bit easier. But I for one don't intend to stoop to it. Science education doesn't need that.
Public awareness, however, is a gateway to education, and it requires cleaning from time to time. It's the venue you've chosen to promote yourself, and I'm glad to be able to help you call attention to you in this context as you are, ask Shakespear said, hoist by your own petard. An apt analogy here, and one that could lead to consideration of the actual force needed to hoist you and whether your petard carried enough power in order to do so, as well as how far and on what ballistic trajectory. But the 'laws' (including calculations of F = ma), the calculus (for the ballistics) as well as the force your petard had to work to overcome (F = G * (m1 * m2 / r^2)) were to come from a man born a quarter century after Shakespear died. So we'll leave this as a history lesson, a criticism from a science educator of your presentation and its effects offered sincerely if emphatically, and my own effort to compartmentalize these while letting the science lesson take care of itself without needing all this to validate or promote itself.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
really? This is sad. 1. Storks 2. Irish midgets 3. Because it would look silly if it were red Geez.
Life==Jeopardy. All the answers are right in front us - the hard part is coming up with the correct question.
People who can't explain to their kids why the sky is blue or what makes a rainbow shouldn't be allowed to have children.
no, I don't have a sig
Getting other people to do things for you, and not knowing how everything works is positive, it's called civilisation. Possibly people could live on this planet as complete autonomous islands, being completely self sufficient, but working together and sharing tasks is more efficient for everybody, frees up time, and allows for redundancy.
You may be able to manage to maintain a 21st (or even 19th) century lifestyle all on your own but most people just wouldn't have the time to plant their own crops, grow cotton, weave their clothes, find metal ores, mine them, smelt them to produce metal goods, build petrol driven machines from the raw ores, learn enough medical science to undertake complex medical operations when accidents and illness occurred, raise children, find the time to teach them, still keep this going after you've had an accident and are laid up in bed for six months, etc.
"First, there's a point at which that three-year-old brat has asked "Why?" too many times today."
Step 1) Teach your kid how to read and do math.
Step 2) Teach them how to use an encyclopedia, science texts, and other references (dead tree or online, either way) to lookup the answers to their questions.
Parenting isn't necessarily about providing answers to every question your child asks (although some answering is appropriate), but teaching them how to find answers.
As for where babies come from, even quite small children are quite safe with the idea that babies grow inside their mothers.
At this point, I'll repeat the comment I posted to the Firehose story:
Parents are baffled at how to reconcile the fact that babies grow inside adult women with the fact that children can be more familiar with cartoon anatomy than live-action anatomy. A lot of western animated television series use super-deformed proportions. An SD character's head is often two to three times the size of a real person's head relative to the rest of the body, and an SD baby's head wouldn't fit out of an SD mother's birth canal. Look at the Pop-Tarts "dancer" commercial, and estimate how small the boy's head must have been from the size of the mother's pelvis. Then consider that a child's head typically grows more slowly than the rest of him, and imagine how small the boy would have to have been at birth. It'd be more like the growth of a baby roo than that of a baby primate.
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isn't factual knowledge. Although that could be better, it won't ever be adequate in a world of expanding scientific knowledge. What is really deficient is the ability to reason and draw inferences from scientific facts when encountered.
I'd identify two key areas of reasoning as deficient: numerical reasoning and reasoning about causation.
One common and pernicious numerical fallacy is the base rate fallacy. Suppose you have a drug screening test that has a 5% false positive rate. How certain are you that somebody who fails the test uses drugs? Most people would say 95%; the truth is you don't have enough information without knowing the base rate of drug use in the population being tested and to a lesser degree the false positive rate. Ignoring the false negative rate as negligible, suppose only 1/100 of the population uses drugs. After testing 100 people, you'd expect to get one genuine positive and five false positives, which means you're only 16% sure, not 95%. If on the other hand 50% of the population uses drugs, then you get 50 genuine positives and five false positives, so you are 91% sure.
That shows an important fact about evidence: it must be evaluated in context. Screening tests have their place, but only in a more comprehensive program of evidence gathering. Any single datum is a strand in a web of evidence.
Another group of numerical fallacies is projecting trends from inadequate data or badly chosen baselines, e.g. projecting stock market trends from daily data or citing economic figures from a point in time chosen to carry a certain political message.
Which leads us to causation.
One of the most popular things to do on this site when a science story comes up is to complain that "correlation is not causation", and that is an important point. It's just incomplete unless the poster specifies his criteria of establishing causation. I sometimes feel like there's supposedly some Big Book of Scientific Truth which is being alluded to.
This gets back to the "web of evidence" metaphor. The philosophical truth is that correlation is *all* we have to go on. We have to weigh an individual correlation against all the correlations we have ever observed. For that we need something to represent the most parsimonious explanation for all the past observation, taking into account that probability and methodology ensure that those data are inconsistent.
When we want to establish causation, we need to use a theory. We assume the opposite of the hypothesis (the null hypothesis) and show that accepting the null hypothesis would require us to throw out the theory, and that means throwing out the vast majority of observations we've ever made.
That's why creationism is so pernicious. Without the theories of evolution and natural selection, scientific reasoning about biology is crippled. The creationist hypothesis wasn't concocted to provide the most parsimonious explanation of observed correlations, it is was conceived to patch the difference between observations in some conception of what The Big Book of Scientific Truth ought to contain. Since it is not parsimonious, it is *lenient*. That makes creationism unsuited to testing hypotheses. That is the job of a theory, to break hypotheses. Creationism can't, because the ground rules it assumes allows preconceived ideas to override data. Furthermore, the contest between theory and hypothesis has to be fair: if the theory can break a hypothesis, a hypothesis, supported by data, can revise a theory. The ground rules of creationism don't allow for the creation hypothesis to be modified.
It'd be nice if people could, let's say, give the correct definition of what a "molecule" is. But even if they could, it wouldn't make much difference if they still can't draw valid inferences about chemistry.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
We keep hearing about how dumb American kids are, but the big issue isn't whether they know the answers to easy questions - it's whether they're going to bother to give the right answers.
"Well, I can spend the next half hour answering all of the questions on this stupid standardized test that's not going to impact my grade and that will do me no good whatsoever, or I can fill in all of the bubbles in thirty seconds and spend the rest of the time thinking about what I'm going to do after school. Yeah, tough choice." The smart, competitive kids will work hard, the not-as-smart but dutiful kids will do what they can, and the rest of them will blow it off because it really doesn't matter to anyone except the person giving the test.
This is the way I remember it:
Tell me why the stars do shine,
Tell me why the ivy twines,
Tell me why the sky's so blue,
And I will tell you just why I love you.
Nuclear fusion makes stars to shine,
Phototropism makes ivy twine,
Rayleigh scattering makes sky so blue,
Sexual hormones are why I love you.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
'Where do babies come from?', 'What makes a rainbow?' and 'Why is the sky blue?'
Easy: Storks; Leprechauns; Smurfs.
It has been more fun than usual to read through these comments. A few observations:
Why? is a placeholder for all other questions. In some formal sense, a why question is always badly formed. Imagine sitting on the witness stand and a lawyer tossing such a question of motivation at you. Often the only correct answer is "I don't understand the question". If one is asked, "Did you stab him?", the answer will be one of fact. If asked, "Why did you stab him?", the question is either fallacious - assuming facts not in evidence - or is superfluous.
Why is the sky blue? Ask rather, "Is the sky blue?"
More generally, such a line of questioning reveals a rush to a solution before the problem has been properly posed. "Look at the monkey!" (when pointing at an ape) is not an opportunity for derision, but for refining the problem into a more appropriate form. One might ask in return, "Is that a monkey?" or "What is a monkey?" These questions can then lead to an exploration of taxonomy or semantics or evolution or reading recommendations. (See J. Diamond's "Third Ape" or R. Dawkins' "Ancestor's Tale")
Someone suggested the uselessness of knowledge about cirrus clouds. Cirrus clouds are high altitude ice clouds. Weather fronts arrive as a high altitude wedge of air, forming cirrus. The ability to recognize cirrus clouds is the ability to predict tomorrow's weather.
Someone was wondering about where the "energy" comes from for magnets. Magnets are rather held together (or pushed apart) by electromagnetic forces. Magnets are indeed weird and wonderful, but the more basic issue is distinguishing between the concepts of force (pushing and pushing back), energy (the ability to perform work) and power (the rate that work is being accomplished). A refrigerator magnet will hold up little Johnie's third grade artwork for years without ever expending any energy.
"Where do babies come from?" has been beaten to death, but the underlying facts of sexual reproduction haven't been mentioned at all. Sex is only one form of reproduction - it has been reinvented many times throughout the history of life on earth. Only in mammals and some other species does sex determination have anything to do with X and Y chromosomes. Consider a species that reproduces asexually. What does it mean to call this a species? Species are often delimited by the question of interbreeding. If two amoebas never "do it", what does it mean to assert they belong to the same classification?
Rainbows form when light is refracted through raindrops (http://www.rebeccapaton.net/rainbows/rnbwbmp.gif). Which color is on top? Real rainbows are often doubled (http://billi-jean.com/images/lj/0607/rainbow2.jpg). The secondary rainbow has inverted colors. Rainbows aren't just a sequence of colors in any event - interference fringes form on the indigo side (inside in one case and outside in the other). And the region between the two rainbows is darkened since those are the light rays that were refracted to create the rainbows.
Science is a state of mind. (To borrow a line from Jerzy Kosinski.)
Hey, you're derailing this discussion with your reality-based interjections. We were talking about how all the other races are stupider than our own. Get with the program, you dummy!
how is babby formed
how is babby formed
how girl get pragnent
I mean the understand of science is so bad that I've read stuff from science journalists where it was obvious the idiot that wrote it didn't get things like conservation of matter, light contains energy, and catalysts. (I mean really basic stuff from idiots on MSN and other major news sources.) Hell I still get annoyed by morons that talk about a "belief" in evolution. (It's science, it's not supposed to be about belief.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=%22Where+do+babies+come+from%3F%22
The problem today is the quality of teachers. When I was in High school the teachers made science fun . Physics teacher would do things like explode a pickle via electricity to show resistors, we would have music playing during tests , and things like that . My earth science teacher got us learning by doing things like jeopardy to learn for the regents. Now teachers just read from a book and expect you to learn everything. IF the teachers were better more people would love science. When i have kids (hopefully about a year or two) i will make sure that they learn science even if its from me (i am a science nut, it helps that i live a half hour away from brookhaven national labs) .
A friend of mine used to ask counter questions whenever his kid asked a question he couldn't / didn't want to answer. It didn't help the kid learn new facts, but it did build up his reasoning and imagination. I remember a conversation that went something like:
"Daddy how do planes fly?"
"Well what else should they do ?"
"They could swim"
"How would they do that?"
"Like duckies"
"But planes are big, where would the duckies go?"
"They could live in our bath with my duckies"
http://www.somethingawful.com/flash/shmorky/babby.swf
Just proves the theory that dumb people should not be allowed to become parents!
how is babby formed?
how girl get pragnent?
Babby is formed when you accidentally in her base.
Do you feel you've been rewarded when you determine that your child has just been creative with their answers? Is telling lies to a child teaching them it's ok to lie?
Funny, not because its true (it isn't) but because you posted as AC. Gee, what is it you're afraid of? If you can't speak your mind in Slashdot, where can you speak your mind?
What I want to know is: How many Scientists are baffled by stupid parenting questions?
Google it.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
Go ask Google.
1) Vaginas.
2) When God has gay sex.
3) Rayleigh scattering.