Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
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
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Yes. Geography to be specific. Croydon to be precise.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Actually, intercourse is considered uncouth by Britons. Hence, they all adopt, but rarely stop to question where the babies come from in the first place. Curious, isn't it?
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
Regardless of how you categorize it, if a parent can't answer to a child where babies come from it's not for lack of knowledge.
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.
A child asking "Where do babies come from" isn't "Daddy, explain to me what biological processes occur when a man ejaculates in a woman's vagina while she's ovulating." It's the physical "where do babies come from?" i.e. Are they brought by a stork? Are they bought at a store? Is there biology involved anywhere in the process regarding baby making? etc.
So no, "where do babies come from" is NOT a science question when asked by a child.
The question that the child would ask if he wanted to know the biology would be something like "how do babies grow in mommy's tummy?"
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
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
Yes. But it's not ok to drive a car without at least half an idea about where the gas goes, how to use the turn indicator, and so on. The same thing is true about science... people are muddling though life without knowing where the gas pedal is. They can't critically evaluate things because they don't have the basis to do so. Hell, just look at the "young earth" morons. They are so ignorant that they can't even properly evaluate evidence when it's presented to them. That is a failure of education.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Geography to be specific. Croydon to be precise.
Alternatively:
Genealogy. The milkman to be precise.
"Well honey, would you like to see a live demonstration?" would be unwise to say to a child.
how is babby formed?
how girl get pragnent?
This is the UK where kids are becoming parents at 13. They're in the maternity ward before they get sex-education. And those are the good kids, the other ones are knifing each other.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
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.
The answer to "rainbow" and "sky blue" is "refraction", so I'm guessing that's probably where babies come from as well.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
However, surely parents should have a certain amount of... familiarity with the answer to, "where do babies come from?"
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!
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
And yet, you can give a scientifically correct answer omitting unnecessary details:
The trick is to explain things on a level kids can understand.
I can also warmly recommend the TV-series Once Upon a Time... Life, which is biologically very correct yet entertaining to watch.
.: Max Romantschuk
However, surely parents should have a certain amount of... familiarity with the answer to, "where do babies come from?"
Huh? Why would they? Its not like they get to chat with the stork when the baby is dropped off.
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"
The sky is not blue due to refraction. It is blue due to Rayleigh scattering, which increases as the wavelength decreases.
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've also heard penguins being called fish, Bats called birds and just about anything small and furry, mice.
Some people don't need any animal classification beyond "fish - meat - not food".
Actually, when I read about anyone who was educated in 1800-1950, I feel like a complete ignoramus.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
When I asked my mother where I came from, she said, "Cleveland."
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]
It's worse than that. They say 4 out of 5 parents have at *some* time been stomped by some science-question of their child. And also that the top questions are those mentioned.
That doesn't imply that 4 out of 5 parents are stomped by any of *those* questions. I've got a 5 year old, and sure I've had -many- questions I don't know the answer to. I generally respond by some variant of "I don't know, but let's find out together".
Why -does- starch work as a lubricant ? What -is- that insect named ? How much can an elephant weigh ? Sure I can eyeball some of it, but I don't -know- the answer precisely.
Then again, that's not really science. That's just facts. Science is a method, not a set of facts.
No, that doesn't follow. Anyone with even a bit of physics knows more than Newton ever did, that doesn't mean that he is today universally considered an idiot.
And if you don't explain the Rayleigh effect properly (as you did) you actually don't explain why the sky is blue. In other words, your answer isn't explanatory/informative much because you "explained" the explanandum by introducing another one.
Trolls are like broken clocks. They show the truth two times a day. The rest of the day they talk nonsense.
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?
Lose the attitude, dude. There's a bell curve on knowing raw amounts of any subject, and Slashdot just so happens to be much further up on it, especially in science-related fields, than your average person. Just because we're at and near the top doesn't mean we should ridicule them. It means we should help to educate them, so that by the time we're up further in our absolute level of knowledge, so are they.
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."
Citations please.
I know you're just being a racist troll, but...
From the numbers you provided, the sample groups were inadequate. Over the years, I've met many people, and had the opportunity to learn a lot about them. There are stereotypical and astereotypical people in every group. In a sampling of say 10 people, they may all be complete idiots, or rocket scientists. Looks are frequently deceiving.
The IQ scores are almost always skewed. It's not how "smart" you are, but how educated you are. For example, I've known poor farmers who were not well educated, but through what they have been educated in, it's apparent that they are smart. A good farmer can repair his own equipment, sometimes with minimal tools. He can raise crops even in adverse conditions. He can raise cattle from birth to slaughter, and take care of any problem along the way. One in particular who would score miserably on a standardized IQ test, and never completed high school could look at the symptoms of an animal, and treat it properly. He kept his 40 year old truck on the road without ever taking it to a mechanic, and could revive almost any piece of farm equipment. He could solve real world logical problems in a heart beat. He wouldn't have a prayer solving an algebraic equation, could barely spell, and had no clue what to do with a computer though. He was never taught those skills.
Then again, his neighbor would be hard pressed to repair a fence. Was he stupid? I don't know, I didn't know the neighbor well enough. Maybe he had simply never needed to repair a fence, and had never been taught. Could you?
I personally know someone, approximately 30 years old, who usually scored just over 100 on an IQ test. She had never finished high school. She recently started taking GED classes. Now that she has picked up the required skills, she retested and scored 138. She didn't get any smarter in a matter of weeks. She simply gained the skills required to score better on the IQ test. Because I knew her personally, I knew she was smart. With the new score, she now believes it. What is Pi? What is an acute triangle? What does E=MC^2 mean? If you were never taught such things, those would mean absolutely nothing to you.
Someone else I know was convinced she was stupid. She was told so for too many years. She decided to prove them wrong, and is a better programmer than I am now, fluent in several programming languages. I don't know her IQ score, but I'm confident in seeing her ability in fields that she has the skills in that she's brilliant.
I've known people who score very low. I tried to tutor someone who was mentally retarded in reading. I was teaching him letters, which took a while. We then started on words and sounding them out. He could accomplish simple words, but it was difficult at best for him. He was told that he would never read, because he was too stupid. It was more that the extra time wasn't spent with him on it. He'll never be a rocket scientist or a surgeon, so yes, his IQ was low. And he is white of European descent.
To be on topic, if you were never told why the sky was blue, would you know the answer? What if it simply wasn't important to you at the time you were told? You'd likely forget. Grouping "parents" into one general category is insane. Almost everyone can be a parent. Well, I'd say a decent percentage of Slashdot readers won't, because of social ineptness. :) I'm a parent of 3, and father-like figure to more. Sometimes the children are afraid to ask. "Where do babies come from?" may be too mysterious a question. I was asked recently about sex by a friend's son. He was afraid to ask his mother, and his father avoided the question. I answered age appropriately, and then told him it was fine to tell his mother. His reponse? "I can't talk to mom about stuff like that. She's a girl
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
how is babby formed? how girl get pragnent?
They need to do way instain mother who kill there babby!
"...Sleep comes like a drug in God's country Sad eyes, crooked crosses in God's country..."
Rayleigh scattering and refraction are two divergent phenomena based on the same principle, sharing as much similarity as radar and x-ray imaging.
My mum just left a copy of the book Where Did I Come From? on the bottom shelf in the living room. I used to love that book (and the sequel "What's Happening to Me", about puberty) when I was a little kid - the pictures are adorable and it's pitched at a good level.
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
Not to mention, display a good amount of passion in passing on that knowledge and hope some of it rubs off.
(Dangerous mentioning rubbing and passion on /.)
'Thats they exact same thing a banana wrench monkey.'
The problem with this line of thinking is that parents not caring to discuss this topic with a child *are* acting irresponsibly. Consider it as a precursor of sexual education. So, yes, I think marking them up as idiots is 100% correct to do.
You do know that there are books for preschoolers regarding this topic if parents don't want to discuss it with their own words.
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'".
It's not really refraction. There actually is a refraction effect which is why we can see the sun at sunrise before it would be strictly visible over the horizon, and still see it at sunset after it's gone below the horizon. It's really more of a reflection -- think of light being scattered around by glitter except on a much smaller scale.
Rayleigh scattering preferentially scatters shorter (bluer) wavelengths more strongly. When the sun is directly overhead, as in midday, light nearer to the reddish end of the spectrum will reach you directly while only the bluer wavelengths will have been scattered. The blue that you see is light from the sun that has been scattered towards you by the air molecules in the atmosphere. The opposite happens at sunrise and sunset to make it appear red; the light reaching you has a much longer optical path to go through so nearly all of the the blue wavelengths have been scattered away leaving only the reddish light to reach you.
There's also a minor effect due to Mie's scattering off the dust and other particulates in the atmosphere. Mie's scattering deals with scattering by slightly larger particles than Rayleigh scattering.
I fail to see why its less of a science question than "where does dark matter come from?" Surely "Where does X come from?" is always a science question?
GP may be commenting on "growed". It's an irregular verb: the past tense is "grew". I presume this is a case of English being your second language, since you have a Finnish e-mail address. However, my best guess is that GP thought you were deliberately using an incorrect form with your children to simplify things for them.
Did she apologise after that?
If I point out that you are incorrect, making me a foe does not make you any more correct.
They may be idiots in your opinion, but that hardly means that they are UNABLE to answer the question.
Please also consider that there are those that do not subscribe to your method of child rearing.
Care to elaborate? I'm having a hard time coming up with a valid reason why a parent wouldn't want to answer that question from their children. There could be explanations like, for instance, the parents had an unwanted pregnancy, or a scarring sexual experience. But that is not a reason. So I can't see why a parent wouldn't want to give an answer tailored for the child's age yet still true.
+Raider of the lost BBS
You do realize that you actually accuse us for being close minded, but you laud the people close minded enough not to be able to talk about sexuality. How wonderful...
I tip my hat to you for the greatest hypocrisy I have seen in years.
Just take it on faith that in some cultures a child of 5 asking where they came from is likely to be told they were found under a cabbage plant.
(Yes, that is a literal example).
[What culture? Some places in the USA?]
Most young children will be quite happy with "the baby comes out of mummy's tummy" (that's the answer I got when I was very young). Even better if you can follow it up within the next few days with "do you see that woman? Her tummy is big because a baby is growing inside".
("How did the baby get inside mummy's tummy?" "Daddy put it there.")
Really? I didn't see any accusations being made.
But now that you mention it, it sees you are pretty insistent that everyone simply MUST agree with your methods, where as I was suggesting there are other viewpoints.
Now who is open minded?
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
My great-grandparents and grandparents were educated in the 1800-1950. How do you feel now?
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
I suspect there is never such a point, if you're raising your child properly.
Two things here: people shouldn't be having kids if they're uncomfortable with their motivations for sex or uncomfortable teaching a child basic things about life. Secondly, I think most of that discomfort with teaching kids about sex is largely fear of other adults thinking their child knows too much or is talking inappropriately.
Too true.
Uggh. At this point I'm hoping you're some kind of school inspector that has the power to get these people banned from teaching.
Sounds like someone else needs to watch the DVD. :)
how is babby formed?
how girl get pragnent?
How come I don't learn English in school even though it's my country's official language ?
No wonder parents are baffled. They can't understand WTF their children are talking about.
"Honey ? Timmy asked me about those "babby" things again this morning"
"You too ? I tried looking it up but I couldn't find anything."
"It's probably part of this advanced science curriculum they have nowadays, we'll never be able to help our kids with such exotic topics being taught in schools, what were they thinking of !"
"Couldn't they do simple things like human reproduction, particle spin, muons, halting states and how to meet girls ?"
"We're so out of our league... we have to face it, we're old."
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
Is the question "Where do babies come from?" really a science question?
Ever heard of biology? You fuck!
Fixed that for ya!
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
So no, "where do babies come from" is NOT a science question when asked by a child.
The question that the child would ask if he wanted to know the biology would be something like "how do babies grow in mommy's tummy?"
You have to walk before you run, and you have to do a lit review before you can do an in-depth experiment. It most certainly is a science question, albeit a pretty rudimentary one, because it is based on the assumption that there is a consistent, verifiable answer.
My niece (5) asked a series of very probing questions recently while she was holding her new baby cousin. She knew that her mother had a scar from a cesarean section, but, upon inquiry, found out that her aunt does not have such a scar. "How did he get out of your tummy?"
She had put one of her assumptions up to challenge and found it wanting. Zombie Feynman says that she is doing science.
There's a perfect xkcd for my sig but I'm too lazy to look it up. sudo someone go find it.
Silly! The sky is blue because it is daytime. If it were night time, the sky would be black.
Babies come from the hospital and rainbows from the ground (they arch up into the sky, and then come back down to the ground - rainbows, that is, not babies).
I am anarch of all I survey.
Wow... you have no idea how advanced Newton's knowlege was do you?
He practically invented calculus
Leibniz wouldn't have agreed with you -- Newton got the credit for it, but then, he chaired the enquiry to decide who should get the credit.
F = dP/dt is what he wrote down, something that many physics students don't understand.
[citation needed]. Not that Newton said that force is proportional to rate of change of momentum, rather than saying that force is proportional to mass times acceleration (which I assume is what you were getting at), but that most physics students don't understand it. We covered that on the physics module of an electronic engineering course, and I don't think anybody had any problem understanding it (or the implication that relativity had less impact on Newton's laws than is commonly thought).
There's also the slight problem that he seemed to place more emphasis on his pseudoscience than on his science, so talking about his knowledge as "advanced" is -- er -- optimistic. "Anyone with even a bit of physics" knows that there's no point in looking for the Philosopher's Stone, for instance. Maybe "anyone with even a bit of physics" couldn't have derived the science that Newton did, but I think it's fair to say that they know more science than Newton did.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
I think Einstein said it best (and much shorter) with this quote: "The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination."
One would hope so, but the reality is that one does not need to know anything about the biology of reproduction in order to have a baby.
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
The problem is that the IQ test was never meant to reliably grade normal to exceptional people. It was devised as a way to diagnose the mentally handicapped that got blown completely out of proportion because it provide this nice, comparable number.
GP, and I, would agree with you that Newton was brilliant. There's no argument that he wasn't responsible for the things you mention. The point is simply that he was nevertheless ignorant of more modern developments in physics (many of which we now consider "basic"); hence he is a counterexample to the assertion that people who "don't know" certain "basic" things are dumb.
What "basic" concepts? Well for instance, rigid body mechanics including familiar ideas like "torque" and "kinetic energy of rotation" were developed after Newton (Euler is credited with those). Newton studied particles, and spheres -- which he proved behaved like particles for his purposes (celestial mechanics). Rigid bodies, which many freshmen are comfortable with (at least in 2d) were outside his purview.
As Newton himself said, we stand on the shoulders of giants. Luckily for us, Newton is one of them. But standing on a totem pole of Newton, Euler, Hamilton, and Lagrange, we naturally see farther than he could on his own.
How come I don't learn English in school even though it's my country's official language ?
If you are talking about the US, it has no official language.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
I'm with HJED on this one.
Can I work out the answers to those questions? Yes. And actually the specific examples given are quite easy. But give me a restaurant bill and ask me to work out my tax and tip and I'm likely to take quite a bit longer than someone "good at math" "should."
But then, I formulate and solve all kinds of harder math problems on a daily basis. In fact, at a recent conference of control theoreticians -- whose field is heavily mathematical -- you should have seen them trying to work out how to split their restaurant bills.
It's arithmetic that's the issue, and I freely admit I suck at it. I also freely admit that this is entirely my own fault, because I've never has the willpower to sit down and drill myself on it. I know and understand the algorithms. I can execute them. But I don't have the associations built up in my head between certain combinations of numbers (say, numerals and their nines-complement, or multiplication tables) the way other people do. I'm sure I could get quite good at arithmetic. But I find it mind-numbingly boring, and I have a terrible time getting myself to do anything that dull. I'll leave the execution of arithmetic algorithms to the computers.
I think that what's basically at issue here is that we're assuming that anyone who can't do what we think is easy must be stupid. It's not true (a fact I need often to remind myself). They might just be interested in different things. Now, sometimes we might be right (without our belief systems) to dismiss those interests as banal. But at other times I think we just need to accept that different people would like to do different things -- and in fact this is the basis for civilization.
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.
They need to do way instain mother> who kill thier babbys. becuse these babby cant frigth back it was on the news this mroing a mother in ar who had kill her three kids . they are taking the three babby back to new york too lady to rest my pary are with the father who lost his chrilden ; i am truley sorry for your lots
Like seriously? Stumped by the question where babies come from? Maybe these parents should read slashdot because I'm sure 90% of us can answer all of these questions, although maybe that's too optimistic nowadays.
They haven't used storks since 1973 when the Ciconiiformes Rights Protection Act was passed. Nowadays the baby is usually sent by first-class mail.
Well, alright then. The Rayleigh effect is caused by the movement of Lord Rayleigh's argon filled glass bicycle as he rushes through the atmosphere, held aloft by a flight of noisy seagulls. As the Baron passes across the sky, the prism-like spokes of the bicycle absorb the lower wavelengths of light in preference to higher wavelengths, like blue. The shape of the spokes also causes the blue light to scatter and sparkle brilliantly in all directions. This all happens so fast that the sky appears smeared with blue.
When his Lordship retires to his manor for the evening, stowing the bicycle carefully in his garden shed, and letting the seagulls roost in the hayloft, the sky returns to its usual red colour. The sky is also red in the morning because although the Baron rises early, he prefers to take a brisk morning stroll and a swim, and reset his moustache.
In fact, rainbows are also the result of this process. They are caused when the Baron's brightly coloured spoke reflectors become accidentally detached in rain, and continue to rotate an enormous velocities. The rainbow we see is in fact the blur as the reflector circles wildly.
For his services in keeping the sky a pretty shade of blue, His Lordship was knighted by Queen Victoria and given the services of the Royal Navy in order to spread the gift of blue skies throughout the wide breadth of the British Empire, and indeed the world. And that's why the sky is blue now.
May the Maths Be with you!
I am a test designer.
What you are describing is what happens to every test anyone ever writes with the best of intentions. We make a test to, say, place students into the right level of language classes, and the department starts using their gain scores for their grades in those classes, muddling placement and outcome--two different testing situations that would need different methods.
Administration wants an instrument that matches the curriculum closer; you make it; they demand to know why it doesn't have X, Y, or Z. You point out that it isn't in the curriculum. They say "It should be!"
It happens every time. Even BMI, which was basically designed to find starving people, has been repurposed to define physical fitness--something it is not designed to do and cannot accurately assess.
People always misuse measures and then blame the person(s) who made them.
Welcome to my world.
And this is exactly why I oppose the repeated attempts to add more and more standardized testing to elementary education. Poor managers think that they can replace personal judgment with tests and statistics and systems. It's been shown to be a complete failure in industry according to every software engineering class I've ever taken, but education boards insist upon doing it for teachers and students.
If anyone's interested in this sort of thing, The Mismeasure of Man (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man) is a really interesting look at the ridiculous motivations and mistakes that resulted in IQ becoming synonymous with intelligence.
A child asking "Where do babies come from" isn't "Daddy, explain to me what biological processes occur when a man ejaculates in a woman's vagina while she's ovulating." It's the physical "where do babies come from?" i.e. Are they brought by a stork? Are they bought at a store? Is there biology involved anywhere in the process regarding baby making? etc.
So no, "where do babies come from" is NOT a science question when asked by a child.
The question that the child would ask if he wanted to know the biology would be something like "how do babies grow in mommy's tummy?"
No, children are extremely imprecise in their questions.
When I tell my five-year-old "The wind is blowing really hard," and he says "Why?" he is sometimes asking "What processes cause the wind to blow harder?" and sometimes "How can you tell the wind is blowing hard?" and sometimes "Why are you telling me this, mom? I KNOW the freakin' wind is blowing hard, it nearly knocked me over." ;-) It also means "I find your ideas intriguing and would like to subscribe to your newsletter" (i.e. conversation is fun, and this is how we continue it, right?)
"Where do babies come from?" is the typical formation of a question from a preschooler, but it's not obvious what they mean by that. Sometimes they mean "Why does Jane's family have a new baby, and ours doesn't? Can we go get one?" And sometimes they mean "I know the baby came out of Jane's mommy's tummy, but where was it before THAT?" and sometimes they mean "How do we make sure we avoid ever accidentally having me a little sibling that screams all night?" and sometimes they mean "Teacher Diane comes from Mexico; all the babies I've ever seen happen to look Asian; what country do babies come from?"
Before answering such a huge question, it's a good idea to find out what prompted the inquiry in the first place, to get a better idea what the question really is.
And while the question may not be biology, it is almost certainly some sort of physical or social science. Inquiry about how the world works is a primitive form of science. Even if you won't run across the answer your child is searching for in a biology or physics text, the process of asking questions and evaluating answers is how we learn to do science.
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?