Small & Puny; Big & Clumsy

Reason # 47,042 why I love teaching physics:

Where else do you get to say the same thing makes us seem"small and puny" and, later in the same lecture, it makes us feel "big and clumsy"?  The topic is mass and when looking at the primary role of gravity in a cosmic sense we little tiny, short-lived humans seem inconsequential (as we are!) but when we look at where mass comes from and search ever-smaller until we find fundamental particles, we realize we are just too big to able to appreciate how things are stitched together.

Wedding in Algeria in the 1940's

Found in a box in a closet in Corsica on an old 8 mm tape.  Digitized to DVD, mailed to the USA.  Played on a laptop, filmed by a document camera.  Uploaded to a google drive account, downloaded and then re-uploaded to a youtube.com account... and, now, blogged.

My grandparents' wedding:

Old Wine, Sour Wine, 21 Day Old Wine

When I worked in the winery, Roger used to keep a container of constantly fermenting vinegar in a dark corner of the winery.  I understood the basics:  by keeping a bacterial culture alive in the container, we could continually drain off some vinegar when we needed some for the home kitchen and occasionally we would top off the container with left over or spilled wine.


However, I never understood the word "vinegar".  Not being much of a French reader or writer, there is a lot about the language I miss. "Vin", of course, I knew meant wine.  "Aigre" is a common word that means sour.  But, somehow, I never made the connection that the French were saying "VinAigre" from which we took our "Vinegar". ("Doh!")

If you know how to read & write Chinese, you already know how to make vinegar! The character on the left means "rice" and the one on the right means "vinegar".  Here's the breakdown for the vinegar character:

Three weeks of bacterial fermentation to take wine to vinegar sounds about right to me.
To write it is to know it!

Testing and "Thinking, Fast and Slow"

Daniel Kahneman has written a (I think) very important book.  I don't really know because I only read his introduction.

However, there was so much meat on the bones in that intro that I returned the book to the library already in order to spend time pondering what he has to say.

Basically, he says the evidence is that when people draw quick conclusions (intuitive?) they are thinking heuristically.  By this he means that we leap to conclusions ("fast thinking") based on a personal probability based on our own personal experiences.  In other word, if the only "Joe" 's you know are plumbers then when you hear about someone named Joe you assume he is a plumber until proven otherwise.  If you are thinking "slowly" (nonheuristically) then you would, of course, know that most Joe's are, in fact, not plumbers and not leap to that conclusion.

This has me thinking about very well prepared, smart physics students who do poorly on conceptual multiple choice questions yet can correctly solve a long, difficult mathematical physics problem that uses those same concepts.  Could it be "fast" thinking on the multiple choice leads them to fall into a cognitive trap made of their own prior misconception and naive intuition about phenomena they have not experienced whereas on the longer, mathematical problems they go into "slow" thinking and use process-oriented thinking rather than heuristic mapping?? Cool...

I have to think about his some more...