First perfected by the Zen Nippon Chick Sexing School in Japan, I believe.
And zennipponchicksexing.edu would be the coolest domain name ever.
Throwing rocks. You just have to practice and learn it using your own arms - you can watch someone else doing it, but I don’t think that’s the same as being taught - you pretty much have to self-teach
I used to work in a zoo, and we got boxes of frozen day-old male chicks. Some larger places would get them delivered even cheaper, live. At a former job, my Dad often had the task of killing thousands of them. Really not why he wanted to work at a zoo…
Most physical stuff can’t really be taught exactly; you can show someone a thing you can do, you can tell them practicing methods that worked for you, but really, it comes down to people just trying it enough to get it to work. Doing circus stuff, it’s pretty common for people to ask you to tell them how you’re doing something. They’re rarely happy with the explanation of ‘I tried it a lot of times until it worked’, but that’s often the truth.
Common sense? I don’t know if it can be taught. I think a lot of it’s instinctual and some of it is a learning curve based on experience, but some people just don’t seem to have it.
I want to take issue with the second part of this, composing. Songwriting is a very well understood process. Anyone should be able to learn it as easily as learning to write coherent paragraphs.
Velocity, I share your burden. I’d love to be a virtuoso on any instrument but despite numerous attempts competent is the best I’ve achieved. However, songwriting is a lot simpler than learning to play was.
“A red guitar, three chords and the truth”
Odd the you’d mention it, but tomorrow night I will be teaching people exactly that.
Specifically curling, but the act of delivering the stone down the ice is sometimes referred to as throwing a rock.
A couple of nitpicks. Actually, a bit more than a nitpick regarding the reference to “second-generation ENIAC-type super computers” which is wrong on several counts. ENIAC was hardly “second generation” and inasmuch as it didn’t even contain a stored program, and was barely a computer at all by contemporary standards. It was a very primitive early type of computer, the only one of its kind, that went into operation in 1946 and was quickly superseded. By the late 60s, the world – and NASA – was well into the third generation of solid-state computers. There may still have been second-generation machines like the IBM 7090 at NASA, but the System/360 was already well established, a modern computer architecture that defined the classic mainframe architecture that persists to this day. Neither the second generation 7090 class nor the System/360 class third generation bore any resemblance whatsoever to ENIAC.
That said, I basically agree with your statement about the use of digital computers to compute ballistic and orbital trajectories, and that has been the case since around the 1940s with analog and primitive digital computers and most universally at least since the early 60s. The idea of extraordinary humans being somehow able to do these things in their heads is indeed just a myth. It is, however, also true that NASA did employ people as so-called “computers” in the 50s and early 60s – in fact this is the subject of the Oscar-nominated film Hidden Figures. But these were not so much amazing mystical savants as skilled mathematicians and specialists in analytic geometry plying their skills using calculators, and they were pretty much superseded by second-generation computers like the 7090 and eventually System/360 class mainframes as the space program got seriously under way.
That’s why I figured. They know where all the objects will be. They have the physics equations. What part do they need someone who banged their head and became Rainman for?
I am of the opinion that unless something is beyond a person’s cogitative or physical abilities, pretty much any skill can be taught if one has the desire (which can’t be taught).
Physical stuff absolutely can be taught. At one point, I could not shoot a basketball, ice skate, ski, golf, ride a bicycle or skateboard or any number of other physical activities. Later, I could. Maybe not awesomely, but certainly competently.
I don’t believe I could learn to dunk a basketball however. Simply because it’s probably beyond the capabilities of my 5’10" frame to jump that high. But who knows? Maybe if I put 10,000 hours into jumping.
Again, if I’ll bet if I put someone through several years of West Point / Harvard MBA style schools of leadership and management, I could create a reasonably competent leader. So long that person had the desire and interest. Maybe not Patton. But certainly decent enough.
I could never read those signals that people send when there is romantic interest. My girlfriend before I met my wife said she sent signals for months, but even in hindsight I couldn’t see it. I can play music by ear, though. I can’t see it being taught to someone without the knack.
Ditto on both counts. I’ve almost never been able to tell when a woman was romantically interested in me except when she told me so directly or made it very, very obvious. And I can also play piano by ear. I don’t know how I’d teach it to someone if they don’t have the ability to convert heard notes to piano keys; perhaps the only way that would work is that most people can sing songs by ear and so maybe that can translate into fingers on keys.
I’d say that in general, the ability to generate creative ideas is something that is almost impossible to teach. Someone either has that inner wellspring of creativity or they do not. Closely tied to this might be the ability to hear music and “see” appropriate scenery or scripts to match to it for a music video.
Other person: How’d you play that?
Me: I dunno; I just did.
Ms. P: Did you see how she looked at you?
Me: No.
Ms. P: She was totally giving you “that look”.
Me: I didn’t see anything. I’ve known her for three years. She’s never noticed me at all.
And after they finally send a signal via clue-by-four (in my case anyway) and you get all “giggly and stuff” (the ex-wife’s term for adult-naughty-fun) a lot and get married and have kids and buy a house and all that, making the relationship work and last. You can pick up tips and hints and things, but making a relationship a lasting success, you learn as you go, it just can’t be taught.
Yeah, I’ve never been able to pick up those kinds of signals, either. Or there just have never been any signals to notice.
Common sense.
The Martian was a movie made by a Hollywood studio. Hollywood is know for cars that explode in a fireball when bumped by a shopping cart, bare-knuckle fist fights that go on for many minutes on end, and imperial storm troopers who could not hit the broad side of a star destroyer unless that was not what they were aiming at. The flaws in The Martian, some of them critical plot points, are numerous and absurd. If you want realistic science, stick to Futurama, because Groening knows his shit.
Achieving a high degree of proficiency is almost never accomplished by being “taught” how to do it.
I’ve worked in engineering for many decades. I have been asked on numerous occasions to “mentor” some of the young engineers. I always refuse. I tell my supervisor, “The skills I have can be learned, but they can’t be taught.”
Being a Certified G or 7 feet tall. You can’t teach that.
Well, it makes sense that a woman would have a finely tuned radar to picking up on signals when another woman is interested in a man.
Speaking of detecting clues: Does the username P-Man mean “Piano Man?” maybe you said so before but I don’t recall.
Nope, I don’t even play piano (guitar is my instrument). I had a nickname that began with P in school, and there were a couple of episodes of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse where he was called P-man by members of the puppet band, so a couple of friends hung the moniker on me.
I totally agree. I’ve worked with men that just knew how things came apart and went back together. It was instinctive. I knew a guy that rebuilt transmissions. Sometimes he had to wait a couple weeks to get parts. He still could reassemble that transmission from a box of parts.
I’m reasonably mechanical and can fix things. I don’t have skills like those guys. I take lots of pictures to remind me how parts originally fit together.