Well, Put Me in the Zoo!

A bedtime favorite at the Riddy house is Robert Lopshire's "Put me in the zoo".
We own the one below subtitled "A book of Colors".  In a store today, Sebastien spotted the book on the left.
Oh my!  All these years, we have been missing parts of the story and the colors were so different.  Apparently, the "Bright and Early Board Books" are abridged and scaled down in more ways than just size! .
Foolish me, I had always assumed it was the full book, just in a different format.
Buyers of books for little ones, beware!

Invisible Gorillas

There is a new book out, brought to you by the same people (Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons) that brought us the famous "count the number of times the ball gets passed" experiment (see video below). 

I haven't read the book, but just from this review from Scientific American, I know these guys are on the money: (all italics lifted from the SA review)
We think we see things as they really are, but “our vivid visual experience belies a striking mental blindness,” [the authors] write.


They cover the illusion of memory, how often our memories are born from our own embellished stories; the illusion of knowledge, we think we know much more than we actually do; the illusion of cause, we quickly assume correlation means causation.


Perhaps the worst illusion of all, the failing that leads to others, is the illusion of confidence. We profoundly overestimate our ability to see things as they are. As the physicist Richard Feynman famously said: The first principle is you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.


If that one was too easy for you, try this one:

Bohr vs. Hegel

I made a timeline for my class of the "light is wave / light is a particle" battle, started by Huygens and Newton; ended by Bohr over 200 years later:

Bohr is often quoted on this subject:

“There exist two sorts of truth:

trivialities, where opposites are obviously absurd, and

profound truths, recognised by the fact that the opposite is also a profound truth.”

This strikes me a slightly more profound and deep version of old Hegelian Dialectic:

 

Sometimes there is no satisfactory synthesis - the thesis and antithesis stay opposites while both remaining true.  The interesting thing to me is the apparent contradiction is only in our own minds, not out there in nature...

A picture is not a graph

We were talking about refraction in class the other day.  I drew a straight line down the middle of the board to separate our two mediums (imagine water on the left and air on the right).  Then I drew a horizontal line to represent the normal to the surface (our reference line for measuring angles).  Finally I drew an incoming ray and its refracted ray.

Shortly after, a student referred to this picture as "a graph."  I was actually confused, trying to think of a real graph I may have shown them.  When  I realized what she was talking about, I said "a picture is not a graph - this is a picture."  She responded by saying it had a y-axis and an x-axis and it looked just like a Cartesian coordinate system.   I am now recalling an incident last year when a math teacher came and told me that I was teaching the kids the wrong thing.  Apparently my students told her that I had insisted the range was the horizontal axis (making the domain the vertical one by default I suppose).  I explained that, in projectile motion, we call the maximum horizontal distance a projectile attains its "range".   Only now do I realize the students were once again confusing a picture for a graph:

My Brother, Biblical Hero

The Bro is published; he has a book out on programming the iphone and ipad with 3D graphics:

     I have been showing  the book off to family and friends.  One person remarked, "Hey - how come he didn't just write a whole bunch of apps for people to download and make money that way?" 

     I responded "My brother could sell the fish, or he could teach people how to fish..."