My grade 10 science textook, still in use in 1969, had a picture of a TV equipped with a mirror in the lid. It told us that unless we had attended the New York World’s Fair, it was unlikely we had seen a television set. However, it didn’t explain how a TV works. It was too busy explaining how a steam-heat system keeps your house warm.
You can imagine what the rest of the book was like — and the school board that for 30 years thought it was the cat’s pyjamas.
That’s how my school did it.
In junior high (7th+8th grade) we learned about some beginnings of man (yes, actually taught evolution! Shock! Horror of horrors!) and did a lot of time on ancient cultures, as well as early Asia, Rome, Greece, Egypt, and a bit of Central and South American Indians.
In 9th grade we had early European history, going from the fall of rome to the early colonial period. 10th grade had early US History, going from Jamestown-ish to the end of Reconstruction. 11th grade was 20th century US history, WWI to the 80’s, with PLENTY of time on Vietnam.
If you wanted more, there was AP US History, for seniors, that covered all of US history in one year, but tried to go into good detail (since it was AP,) and as such ended at WWII.
Holy shit, I didn’t know that!
The only thing I know for sure is that nothing about that situation was cut and dried. Someone who says “they would never surrender, ever, period, the bomb absolutely definitely saved millions of lives” is wrong. But so is someone who says “oh, they were clearly about to surrender, we just dropped the bomb and killed hundreds of thousands of pure innocent lives to bully the soviets”.
Certainly there will never be unanimity on this issue. This site , though perhaps not impartial, quotes many (which could be referenced elsewhere) as opposed to the use of the bomb. Including:
MacArthur (as recalled by his consultant Norman Cousins)
Eisenhower
There are more, and certainly there are quotes and cites for opposing views. I tend to side with Ike, MacArthur, and former president Hoover in that it was unnecessary.
I think I can summarize.
The main thing to realize here is that scientists don’t particularly care about peppered moths. The story has been included in textbooks because it’s simple, people can relate, and it illustrates the point quite nicely.
So, on one side, you’ve got scientists, 99.9% of them who don’t give a flying fart about peppered moths, but trust the 0.1% who do. On the other side, you’ve got anti-evolutionists, most of whom don’t care about scientific truth, but are simply looking for talking points for their audiences.
Everybody agrees that the bulk color of peppered moths have varied with respect to the amount of pollution. Some people say it’s because of direct evolutionary pressure (birds eating the easily visible ones), some say it’s because of “industrial coloring” (since many other species changed color too). Everyone agrees that in order to make the pretty pictures for biology textbooks, photographs were staged.
That the photographs were staged is not scientific evidence against the author’s original conclusions. It’s simply a glib way to dismiss an irrelevant example, and as such, pretend as if one has just undermined evolutionary theory altogether.
It’s a talking point, not a logical argument.
I was taught that Rosa Parks just got fed up one day and decided she was going to stay put on that bus. I was pretty surprised to learn (many years later, in grad school) that she was planted. That’s not to say that she wasn’t brave, courageous, and worthy of the fame she got from taking her stand (or rather, not taking a stand…), but at the same time I felt let down by the idea that the whole affair wasn’t as spontaneous as I was led to believe.
-Tofer
My use of the term “current” here is imprecise (see below) but you’re incorrect in your statement that “Electricity travels through the entire body of the wire,” if by that, you mean “electrical energy.” Electrical power–that is, the transmission of electromagnetic energy via a conductor–requires a continuum of charged particles to act as a source for the EM field; in a metal lattice, these are the electrons that are loosely bound to the lattice (rather than an individual atom) in metallic bonds, but it could just as well be a cationic solution or a charged plasma. It is a mistake, however, to equivilate electricity with the flow of electrons or charged particles, which is the vision most people have when they think of current. The electrical field, which is the “volume” of the energy being transmitted, surrounds the conductor; in a plasma or a dispsered conductor it could be coincident with the volume of the condutor (causing some rather troublesome effects like self-induction) but with a thin metallic wire virtually all of the field is external to the wire.
Current, with respect to electricty, has at least three distinct and contradictory meanings, which no standard text on physics or electrical circuits that I’ve used[sup]1[/sup] has ever explicity described. Current can mean:
[ol]
[li]Conventional current, which is instantaneous current (I) as it is used in elecrical circuit analysis and measured in amperes. It is a measure of the energy flux available over a given potential difference, P=IV. You can think of as little blobs of energy and virtual charge–call them Coulombions–flowing along the outside of the wire (where the propagation velocity of EM radiation is much higher than through metal), but this is just a mathematical construct. [/li][li]Electron current or charge-flow, which is the actual movement of electrons through the conducting medium. With regard to a metallic conductor, this is much slower than common sense would lead you to believe; in fact it is vastly slower, on the order of millimeters per second. [/li][li]Virtual (or AC) current is the result of conducting alternating current (AC) power over a potential drop. In the previous two definitions of current, instructors and students generally apply the “water flowing through a pipe” analogy to explain electrical condution, which works well up to a point, but doesn’t offer a metaphor for AC power. With AC the current (in terms of either of the two definitions) alternates–reverses direction–to create a potential difference that ranges between a positive and negative amplitude with respect to neutral ground. The average current is, of course, zero; neither the electrons nor the Coulombions actually go anywhere; they just tango back and forth, shaking around in phase to generate the varying EM wave. A resistive element at ground doesn’t care whether the difference is positive or negative, however–just so long as there is a difference–and so the power delivered is all positive. The average power, therefore, is positive, and in order to make some sense out of this we use the root mean square (RMS) value for voltage across a resistor. Similarly, while the real current is zero, we get an equivilent current from I[sub]AC[/sub]=P/V[sub]AC[/sub]. Again, there is no physical reality to this–no green blobs of energy particles shooting through the wires and exploding in a lamp filament to generate light–but when we speak of current through a device plugged into the wall outlet this is what we mean. [/li][/ol]
When I made the above-quoted statement I was using “current” in that that third sense, i.e. the actual transmission of energy via AC, rather than the “proper” (but not common) definition of 2.
AC power lines are made of multistranded material in order to increase tensile strength and fatigue resistance and because it is easier to draw many small wires than one large diameter wire. Most high tension wires are actually made of copper-clad steel or aluminum wire in order to increase strength while allowing sufficient conduction. Braided wire does take a slight hit in conductivity over a solid wire of the same diameter, but it is significantly less than would be expected by a comparison of sectional areas; the inefficienies of braided wire have more to do with the (slightly) nonuniform field they generate rather than the missing material inside. Encasing the wires in a vacuum would make them even more efficient (as the EM field wouldn’t be slowed by the diaelectric of insulation or air) if you discount the fact that the wires wouldn’t be able to convect away excess heat.
The notion (as implied by the myth as stated in the original post on the topic) that electricity conducts down the surfaces of individual strands is wrong, though, and results from an incorrect application of the skin effect. Not only are the relatively narrow wires too small for for the skin effect to make any significant impact at the 50Hz or 60Hz, but the fields from the wires and direct condution where the touch would cause the fields to interfere with each other. Much higher frequencies–such as those used in audio transmission and communications signals–can see this effect, which is the reason that shielded cable is used, but this isn’t a reason for braided wire in electrical power transmission.
Stranger
[sup]1[/sup]Even Feynman, in his Lectures On Physics (Vol. II, Section 27 IIRC) makes the error of assuming that electron flow equals electricity and uses the concept in his examples.
I took US History in 1979–and we didn’t make it past the Cold War. So, Vietnam was not covered, nor was Watergate.
I also had the every year we start with those damn Pilgrims and work our way up.
Sadly, we never delved into Miles Standish and the rest of his merry band o’ travellers–we just learned the ships’ names etc. And we never got anywhere–from 3rd grade on, we relearned Jamestown, Pilgrims, and the Revolutionary War.
yippee.
Back in the day, history was not made to come alive–in fact, I think the preferred method was to make it as boring as possible.
My daughter is now in HS–and taking AP Euoropean History. She took AP Human Geography-- a fascinating way of looking at our collective past.
If I hadn’t had “the History of England” in college–and a great US history teacher who was a lively speaker–I would probably hate history to this day.
I was told that Trinonmetry would matter in my life–I am still waiting for proof.
My college chemistry prof mis-pronounced iron. It took me a whole 3 hour lecture to figure out that her word, “eye-ron” was iron–in fact, I didn’t get it until she wrote Fe on the board. My Dad had taught me some of the abbreviations for elements was I was a wee one.
I can’t even start on the nursing instructors (for some reason we don’t call them professors)–really, we would be here for days. Suffice it to say that each had her own little pet prejudice about health, culture or gender.
I give up. How are you supposed to pronouce it? That’s the only way I’ve ever heard it said and I’ve lived on both coasts and in the south.
It’s even more complicated than that. We were reluctant about sharing any of the details regarding the atomic bomb with the Soviet Union (and Churchill was vociferous on the topic) and feared that if they knew that they would enter the Pacific war and sue a peace with Japan, thereby taking control of a vital strategic position off of eastern Asia (and potentially reinforcing a Russian-Sino Communist dominion over all of Asia).
Of course, the Chinese and the Soviets have a great historical animosity which the sharing a econo-political dogma did nothing to abridge, and the Russians were well aware of the progress and goal of the Manhattan project, thanks to a couple of spies at Los Alamos. As BobLibDem indicates, the significant issue was the maintainance of the Emperor. Whether that was a valid point or not–the Emperor remained “in power” but was strictly a figurehead and renounced his divinity and therefore his claim to rule–there were many issues surrounding the decision to drop The Bomb.
As MaxTheVool says, it was not a cut-and-dried decision; Roosevelt may well have been more restrained. Truman, wanting to get the war over and (possibly) not really understanding the implications of atomic weaponry, wanted a resolution to the fighting. Oppenheimer and General Groves needed to justify the $2B+ cost of the Manhattan Project as well as on-going research and development. General Curtis LeMay just wanted to blow the hell out of Japan’s industrial capability and was chaffing at the restriction of not being able to touch certain cities; he warned in one memo that if they didn’t drop the bomb soon there would be no relatively undamaged targets to hit. (They wanted an intact city to exmplify the damage that a single bomb would do.) Churchill, an original opponent of strategic bombing before the V2 and the failure of tactical bombing in Germany, was mostly concerned about forestalling Soviet expansion in both Europe and the Pacific, and maintaining Allied (that is, British and American) superiority. The scientists who worked on the project (and who had virtually no input on post-war strategic and political development) were split between wanting to finish the project and abhorring the use against a non-German target. And the spectre of a drawn out fight or indefinite blocade of the Japanese islands while coping with both Soviet and Mao-China expansion was a prospect no wear soldier, from the Commander in Chief to the guy swabbing the deck on a supply boat embraced.
“What might have happed if…” is an interesting intellectual exercise, but in the case of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki there are too many variables to come to a definitive conclusion. Had we not used The Bomb and come to some kind of cooperative agreement with the Soviets over development and deployment, it is possible that we could have aborted the Cold War entirely. On the other hand, a Soviet presence in Japan probably would not have been as beneficial to the Japanese as American restoration efforts and might have instigated a near-term open conflict between a fearful China and the Soviets.
It is interesting that people focus on the roughly 150,000 people killed by the atomic attacks, and not the million or more who were previously, and just as horribly, killed by the firebombing attacks by the XXI[sup]th[/sup] Bomber Command of the Army Air Force under LeMay, as well as the millions severely injured or left homeless. Strategic bombing is, by definition, an atrocity directed at noncombatants.
Stranger
Another vote for “it’s more complicated than that.” My understanding is that the U.S. wanted an unconditional surrender and wasn’t going to get it.
I would guess that had more to do with their water supply than their love of suds.
Eye-urn.
Wait, I, WHAT? I didn’t know that, either. Off to Wikipedia with me! Actually, this thread has enlightened me on a few points.
I’m sure I was taught a number of other non-facts, but as I’ve forgotten most of what I learned, anyway, I don’t remember any off-hand.
While you’re there, look up John Scopes.
Eye-Earn.
Of course, I’m from Pittsburgh, and we pronounce it “ahrn”
Those are all good ones. I was shocked when I first visited New Hampshire and read a copy of the 1790 Canterbury, NH town census. There were 8 slaves listed for that tiny town. How could this be? There was slavery in New England? Then I read about how Boston and Newport, RI were huge slave ports. I started to realize that the following is not accurate:
Northerners say: “Please outlaw slavery. We have always thought it was evil” Southerners reply: “Leave us alone. We love shackling people. We want slaves forever”.
I would make things a lot more clear if it was outlined the correct way with everything included.
It was quite common in those days for virtually everyone to drink beer or “cider,” since the water supply was often contaminated. Beer, of course, would have kept better on a long ocean voyage than water. I have been told, but have no cite, that the beer and hard cider was not as high in alcohol as what we drink today, but this may be fallacious.
That one I learned recently in a Natural History magazine article about the trial.
You mean the real Scopes Monkey Trial wasn’t as dramatic as Inherit The Wind? (Stephen Jay Gould had an excellent summary of the trial and its setup in one of his essays republished in Ever Since Darwin (I think…Amazon’s table of contents page for the book is totally wonked.)
In fact, slavery didn’t end in the United States until the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Even the Northwest Ordinance and the Emancipation Proclaimation did not free slaves in border states or in Northern states that had not already abolished slavery, though slave trade with other nations had been prohibited earlier. (Big deal; at that point most of the nations of Europe had already prohibited slave trade.)
This isn’t to say that slavery wasn’t a major issue, or there wasn’t a considerable public opinion in the North against slavery, but it was hardly a case of “The Good Guys in Blue Coats” against “The Bad Guys in Grey Coats”. The agrarian South, with its highly labor-intensive cotton crop and tobacco crops, felt that they had both an economic justification and need for slavery. The industrialized North and the grain- and animal-husbandry-based economies of the Midwest has less of a perceived need for free labor. The situation is more complex than most junior high and high school texts are willing to address, and I daresay that most textbooks either say or give the impression that slavery ended with the Emancipation Proclaimation, which is a contemptable lie.
Stranger
However the issue of slavery and allowing more slave states is what pushed the South to rebellion, if they couldn’t maintain slavery in the USA, they would leave the USA to maintain slavery. So in many ways the simplistic “South wanted to keep enslaving fellow men and the North didn’t” is basically true.
I would say the gray coats were defending the bad guys even if they weren’t bad themselves and the Blue Coat conscripts were at least following a leadership that wanted to abolish slavery and maintain the Union. I would say that counts as the good guys.
Yes I am well aware that the average conscript didn’t really give a fart about slavery but at least the Union leadership did.