The Hive Mind

So, I know that the youth of today is hyperconnected and in constant electronic contact, but this year it really has been striking.  There is a gaggle of junior girls (most of whom I teach but not all!) and if I tell pretty much anything to any one of them, they all know it  - pretty much instantaneously.  I have taken to referring them as the "Hive Mind".

After finally getting used to it and even coming to count on it, I was still surprised at the following sequence of events.  One-of-the-Hive was taking a late exam in the science office and had to explain to another science teacher that the exam marked "For mgsinθ" was not her (a different member of the Hive whose classroom nickname was obviously coined during our analysis of the inclined plane (Fun stuff happens in physics class!)).  She took the exam and left the office.  Shortly afterwards (like 2 minutes later), other members-of-the-Hive (including mgsinθ) walked in.  Excitedly, I started to tell her the story of how someone had tried to give her exam to the other student.  Very cooly, they informed me that they already know the story.  As I sat there stunned at the speed of the Hive Mind network, the test-taker came back in.  When I asked her incredulously, "Did you just start texting as soon as you walked out of the office?"  She looked at me like I was a fool and said, "No, I just ran into them in the hall just now."  Oh, right - that makes more sense...

That's all the tea I have for today...

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update:  Central Hive Members, one year later on Halloween:

Find me a picture of...

... what introspection looks like when you are 25 and you are on a leave of absence from grad school and just finished your first vendange with your uncle in Corsica.



circa 1995 St Florent, Corsica



It's strange but I can remember my exact state of mind in this bottom picture.  I remember that in addition to the overwhelming sense of impending future possibilities intersecting with my former projections, I was aware of my aunt snapping this picture and thinking "how amazing that this inflectional moment is being captured".  To think that was over 20 years ago...

Generations

Going through some old photos to scan (I recently did a little side project for my bro's 40th birthday and thus uncovered some old pics), I came across two cool generational pictures:

From the American side:



This is from 1970 in Florida.
Left to right:  My Dad, his Dad, (me), my Dad's mother's father.



This is probably 1997 or 1998 in front of the winery in Corsica.
Left to right: My Uncle's Uncle, me, my uncle.

Why so difficult?

A few years ago wspn (our student 'newspaper') ran tips about midyear exams and it turned out that students were mostly concerned about their science exams.¹  My own experience as a student of science was the same throughout my own education: Science was always my hardest class.  Now as a science educator, I think about this a lot:  Why is science class so hard?

I think part of the issue lies deep within how we as humans communicate and think. We have languages and mental models that evolved to describe our subjective experience of the world.  How could it be otherwise?  We receive a limited amount of information about the world through our meager five senses. From this information we construct some mental models of what it all means in our lives.  Specifically, we need to be able to construct models of what might happen to us in our own lives in the immediate future.  We have had no evolutionary need to understand the microscopic, or objects spanning beyond the horizon, or time scales shorter than half a second/longer than 100 years, etc.  What this means in a practical sense is that we are not in natural possession of mental or linguistic devices for these other (science-y) things.  Words are metaphorical in nature, not precision instruments.²  Even math, the “language of science”, is a logic structure invented in the minds of humans.³

So, unlike the other subjects we study in school, all of which are well suited for the mental schema we have evolved to describe the events in our lives, science is about the objective reality “out there” and not our subjective experience of it.  This means the study of science will be innately difficult as we struggle to retrofit words and ideas that have subjective origins to describe the objective reality science has uncovered for us “out there”.

Difficult, but rewarding! So, students, stick with it and take comfort from the fact that you are trying to do something unnatural whenever you study nature!

1 https://waylandstudentpress.com/53260/articles/how-to-survive-midterms-and-second-semester/

2 Lakoff & Johnson, Metaphors We Live By 1980

3 Lakoff & Nunez, Where Mathematics Comes From:  How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being 2000

Umberto Eco, Dan Brown, and Leon Foucault

Years ago, when Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code was the big summer read (can't even count the number of people who recommended that book to me!), I used to play the game "Judge people by whether they mention Umberto Eco when they mention Dan Brown".  Of course, almost no one ever did (either they don't make the connection between Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum" and "Da Vinci Code" or else they do and don't want to sound pretentious).

Of both books, I remember one big take away from each after forgetting all the details:
After Dan Brown:  "Wow, I must be pretty smart - I figured out all those puzzles right away!"
After Umberto Eco: "Wow, every deep insight I've ever had is someone else's trivial reference in a complex overlay of intersecting ideas."

Seriously though, I should reread Foucault's Pendulum for I remember profoundly the contrasting concepts of belief as embodied by the Pendulum itself:  Whereas religion's Faith is untestable; faith in science is testable.

Last summer, we saw the original Foucault Pendulum (well, almost - the original bob was off to the side as it has been damaged during a fall) in the Musee d'Arts et Metiers :

Afterwards, Irene and I were commenting to friends of just how much more popular Sainte Chapelle is these days than on our previous visits to Paris when they responded with "Yes, ever since the Da Vinci Code..."  Irene and I both responded with a groan of deep disappointment:

The mix of derivative and original work that I mused about in 2010 is now complete and inseparable.

Floppy Drives, Paris, and Feeling Old

As circular hard drives start to disappear, yet another computer phenomena will have come and gone  in my lifetime.  Here, at the Musee d'Arts et Metiers (as recommended to us by our good friend WW) that we visited in Paris this summer is a history of all magnetic storage devices.  Proudly (sadly?), I have worked with each one pictured here at one time or another:

What's a Floppy Drive?

(Thanks to Isabelle and Irene who took the photos for me!)

Ouch!

So, we've started watching "The Flash" as a family.  Here I am thinking it's good, wholesome family fun, when (out of the blue!) they pull this whammy of a sequence in episode 11 (season one):

Good physicist guy is caught coming out of a lab by evil head physics guy!  Then good guy threatens to reveal evil physicist's master plan (involving a combination of improbable, impossible, and needlessly convoluted physics) to the world, so evil physicist fights back.

(and here it comes...)

Evil physicist punches back with the hardest blow imaginable to a respectable physicist:

Oooh, the burn. 

Make the pain stop, please!