IANAPhysicist, but it is my understanding that light always travels at the same speed. Light appears to slow down due to photons being absorbed and emitted by the atoms/molecules that make up the medium, a process that happens slower than the speed of light, making light appear to move slower.
Light travels very slowly (a “dead stop” is “very slowly”) through a block of aluminum, while sound still moves along at pretty good clip.
I think that the “smart-ass” variable here is too high. If those tests had any meaning, I’d bet the answers would be better. Next time they should try “if you get them all right, you get this $20 bill”, and I bet that the rate really goes up.
Which brings us to another quote from “Bob” that may be his second* most profound teaching:
“Act like a dumbshit and they’ll treat you like an equal.”
- His most profound teaching?
“Don’t just eat that hamburger–eat the HELL out of it!”
Sure, and that’s great. So how do we determine which particular factoids should be considered basic knowledge and someone who can’t regurgitate them is worthy of the label of “moron”?
Most of the stuff we’ve been talking about simply does NOT come up in real life. I can think of a handful of people for whom knowledge of planetary orbits is a practical matter(and thus reinforced via real life) versus about one hour of the average sixteen thousand three hundred eighty hours of “education”. (5 days a week *7 hours a day * 36 School Weeks a year * 13 years = 16,380 hours for a high school graduate) Which of these 1/16380ths should be considered basic knowledge and those unable to recall them scorned?
I think critical thinking skills are far more important than factoids in determining if someone is feeding you a line. I’m dismayed when I see studies of critical thinking skills showing poor results. Still, I think the idea of rational ignorance holds more often than not. I just can’t get worked up about someone who doesn’t know particular factoid X at any given moment even if I think factoid X is fairly basic knowledge.
Probably, but we’re not talking about MANDATING restrictions on knowledge. We’re talking about if it should be considered an objective fault in a person to not know specific factoids. The reality is that the VAST, VAST majority of human beings through history would not be able to correctly answer those questions. They would also not be able to answer a question about the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow. This does not make them morons. It is perfectly rational to limit the amount of knowledge you store and retain to those topics you will use. I don’t do that myself, but I can’t really fault someone for doing it.
Enjoy,
Steven
I’ll agree with you to a point - as a planetarium instructor, I often am faced with questions like “how far away is Pluto from the Sun”? Well, the answer (about 4 billion miles) is easy, and yes, boring.
But armed with that knowledge, as well as, say, the distance from the Earth to the Sun, a student can use some critical thinking to make some guesses about differences between Pluto and Earth, namely that one of them is frickin’ cold. And if later someone claims that there’s a newly found planet 10 billion miles away, basking in the warm rays of the Sun, the student will hopefully know that it’s total BS.
My point is, I don’t see how you can have critical thinking skills without having a few factoids rolling around to back them up.
Absolutely! Synthesis of information(critical thinking) can not take place without multiple sources of information(whatever line someone is feeding you, plus your own background knowledge, plus some other people’s lines, independent investigation, etc.). Those with large reserves of personal background knowledge will have a much easier time in this process than others. This is generally a good thing. What I don’t see is how it is justified to belittle people whose general background knowledge pool does not include specific factoids, especially when their exposure to those factoids was probably limited to just some cursory treatment of the subject in school when they were children. Is that fair? Should I have the right to walk up to someone and ask them some question about something they have had only a tiny bit of exposure to (1/16380th of their time in school) and then mock them if they get it wrong? I admire copious memory and instantaneous retrieval of factoids in my computer systems. I admire analytical skills, personal effectiveness, and personality in my fellow human beings.
Enjoy,
Steven
Well, that really comes down to a certain cultural consensus – and I’ll be the first to admit it’s not fair – to the effect that, for instance, remembering that it’s the Earth that orbits the Sun is “basic”, almost cathechetical knowledge. The kind that is kind of expected in the same way as is remembering what is the capital of your own country, or who is its Head of State (don’t get us started on the people who can’t handle THAT one).
My theory is that this actually disturbs many people in the sense of “Damn… what other assumed common points of reference and/or premises does this person NOT share with me…”.
But we don’t have a cultural consensus. There is no one giant book of factoids that is published in every language in every country that everyone is granted equal access to and learns cover to cover. We don’t even have that on the national, state, or even local level. Cirriculum differs as does educational effectiveness from place to place and person to person. So outrage at ignorance of some “basic fact” is based on individual opinions of what should and should not be considered “general knowledge”(and I am unanimous in this!) or sometimes, like in this thread, small group consensous. Fine and dandy by the way, individuals and groups are clearly entitled to their opinions about what factoids should be “basic” and they are free to weep at their fellow citizen’s lack of knowledge of those factoids. What I object to is taking this pool of factoids that individuals or small groups consider “basic” and trying to elevate it to universal measuring stick standard. I support the right of my fellow citizens to be ignorant of the orbital mechanics of the solar system if they decide this is not an area they wish to dedicate portions of their limited resources(time, energy, etc.) to educating themselves about. I also see no reason to heap approbation upon them for choosing a different set of factoids to keep in their heads than I choose to keep in mine.
I feel much the same way and I attribute much of the outrage to shock and fear from the shaking of what individuals consider the foundations of common discourse between adults in society. A paradigm clash, if I may borrow an overused idiom, which leads to some uncomfortable thoughts that either this person is screwed up or that I am screwed up! So we look for reassurance that we are ok and it is this poor ignorant schlub that is the problem. The reality is that neither is the problem. Just backtrack to some common frame of reference(or more frequently, just abandon that line of discussion because odds are it wasn’t critical to whatever relationship you have with that individual) you both agree on and then move forward. We do this every day about other issues where one person has specialized knowledge and has to communicate across educational/knowledge differentials. Why be forgiving when Bob doesn’t know off the top of his head what a Widget does but berate him when he doesn’t know what causes the seasons?
Enjoy,
Steven
Mtgman: * What I object to is taking this pool of factoids that individuals or small groups consider “basic” and trying to elevate it to universal measuring stick standard.*
As I suggested in my previous post, though, basic scientific awareness is not just a random “pool of factoids”. It’s the foundation of a fundamental understanding of the everyday physical universe, and the lack of it is deeply impoverishing.
I agree that it’s silly to attach this kind of importance to mere quantitative details like the exact distance of the earth from the sun or the exact value of the gravitational constant, etc. But the basic concepts are in a different category. If you don’t have some kind of basic picture of how the physical world works, you really are condemning yourself to an unnecessarily restricted mental outlook. As I said, it’s a deprivation on a par with not being able to read or do basic math.
The real problem with not knowing that the earth orbits the sun instead of vice versa, as I said, isn’t that you’re missing some random factoid that society has arbitrarily decided you must know. It’s that you’re totally ignorant of how the physical universe works, and of the meaning of the most elementary natural forces, and of the most fundamental realities that have shaped our whole existence as a species and in our cultures.
Mtgman: * I support the right of my fellow citizens to be ignorant of the orbital mechanics of the solar system*
Ah, the right to ignorance; what would we do without it? Sure, anybody’s got a right to choose to be ignorant of even the most basic physical realities. But that’s not a value-neutral choice: it’s a most regrettable deprivation, and it’s perfectly reasonable to Pit it as such.
And to repeat: it’s not the possession of the factoid that makes the difference here, it’s the conceptual understanding. I freely admit that somebody who has simply memorized the statement “the earth orbits the sun”—without having any notion of why it’s so or how it connects to other basic physical concepts—is no less ignorant, in any meaningful way, than the poor schlub who doesn’t even know whether the statement is true.
Don’t worry; it gets worse:
My colleagues and I are appalled at the number of students who believe all of the following:
*You can never start a sentence with the word “because.”
*A.D. stands for “After Death.”
*The U.S. Civil War was fought in the 1960s.
:smack:
Can you give me a summary of this? Because from where I’m sitting this seems as arbitrary as anything else. The “most elementary natural forces” to me means electromagnetic, gravitational, strong nuclear, and weak nuclear. At least two of those topics(nuclear forces) are absolutely NOT basic knowledge that you learn in grade school type stuff. So what, exactly, is the subject matter a person should be expected to have a grasp on? I’m not trying to start a fight here, I just had to do some real soul searching after seeing the “Harvard kids didn’t know what caused the lunar phases!” video because I, with my two science degrees, didn’t know what caused the lunar phases. It had just never come up. After a few minutes of thinking about it I was able to put two and two together and realize it wasn’t the Earth’s shadow because that is called an eclipse and we don’t have a total lunar eclipse every month. Still, a friend of mine, one of the most intelligent people I know was also ignorant of the causes of the phases of the moon. It is knowledge for knowledge’s sake, which should be laudable, but the default is ignorance and people should not be looked down on for being in their natural state.
I disagree. The natural state of the human being is to be ignorant of damn near everything. It is praiseworthy to rise above this, neutral to remain at it, and damnable to intentionally delude yourself.
Enjoy,
Steven
Congratulations, you’ve just disproved General Relativity.
Or else you’re wrong.
Oh blah. Realized after posting that it has nothing to do with GR.
I still think you’re wrong though. If you drop both objects at the same time, any movement of the Earth will be towards both of them, not just one of them. Even if you dropped them separately, any difference in distance travelled would be less than an atomic radius.
Newton’s law of universal gravitation gives the formula for calculating the magnitude of the force of gravity between two objects as F[sub]grav[/sub]= Universal Gravitation Constant (G) + Mass of the first object + Mass of the second object summed and then divided by the square of the distance between them. So F[sub]grav[/sub] = (G + M[sub]1[/sub] + M[sub]2[/sub]) / d[sup]2[/sup]
If I hold M[sub]2[/sub] constant(the mass of the Earth) and increase M[sub]1[/sub] the calculated force will increase because we have increased the value of the top term while holding everything else constant. Thus two objects of differents masses will have different amounts of force exerted on them via gravity between themselves and the Earth(and vice-versa).
This is somewhat offset by the fact that larger masses need more force applied to them to attain the same acceleration. From Newton’s second law, Force = Mass * Acceleration. Solve for Acceleration and you get A = F/M. So there are two things at work here. Firstly the force of gravititional attraction IS greater between the larger mass and the Earth, but it also needs more force to make it accelerate at the same rate. These will often cancel themselves out(the force differences are small to begin with) unless you get REALLY REALLY precise.
Enjoy,
Steven
Uh, no.
Here is how it works. Dad has 26 chromosomes in every cell in his body, except for his sperm cells, which have 13 chromosomes: half of what he carries. The arrangement of chromosomes in his regular cells look like this:
XX XX XX XX
XX XX XX XX
XX XX XX Xy
XX
Split them in half to make sperm cells in his seminiferious tubules, and you get:
- X X X X 2. X X X X
X X X X X X X X
X X X X X X X y
X X
One set for each gamete (sperm cell). For ever cell that meiosis splits into two, 50% of them will contain an X chromosome in the “sex-determination” pairing, and one will contain that lonely y.
With Mom, it’s the same deal.
Skin cell:
XX XX XX XX
XX XX XX XX
XX XX XX XX
XX
Gametes:
X X X X
X X X X
X X X X
X
You cannot create gametes with something you don’t carry in your own body. Nature can’t make something from nothing. Since mom only has “X” in her sex-determination pairing, she can only contribute Xs.
Dad, however, can contribute an X or a y, meaning that no matter what, a normal, healthy zygote will have at least one X chromosome. If it’s paired with dad’s X, then you have a girl. If you get a y from dad, it’s a boy!
~kfl, amateur human biology enthusiast
Ugh, should have previewed.
Chromosome formation in male gametes is as follows:
Option 1:
X X X X
X X X X
X X X X
X
Option 2:
X X X X
X X X X
X X X y
X
The second-to-last chromosome is the one that determines sex.
:eek: Are you sure Dad’s human? Homo Sapiens Sapiens has a diploid(somatic) number of 46 and a haploid(germ) number of 23.
Enjoy,
Steven
A bowling ball does fall faster than a feather. This a a scientific fact. Proveable in an experiment, even. ( I just did it with a ball bearing and a feather)
True- in the artificial environment of a vaccum, they both fall about the same. But in “real life” that 14# black plastic sucker is going to hit the dirt first. 
BLOODY HELL!
It was between my wife, (who was a NURSE) and Google, when my memory failed, and I went with the wife. It’s a good thing she quit nursing, I guess.
That will teach me, now won’t it.