omenti

reader's comments on education

A few weeks ago I asked for your comments on education

 

It struck me that the people on the omenti post alert list are an extremely interesting lot and it would be great to gather some comments.  Several of you are educators and a wide variety of backgrounds are represented by the others.  

so the homework … and this is only for those who are interested is saying something

Write a short piece (one to a few paragraphs) on one or two significant bits from your k12 (or equivalent for those outside of the US) education.  What made it good or bad?  Was  the focus right?  How does it compare with your perception of today?  How does it compare with other countries?…  anything you want.  Sign it anonymous  if you like, but give the country where it took place and the half decade when you graduated (early 70s, late 80s, …)

 

In order of arrival is how you replied:

 

I'm female and graduated high school in rural Alberta in the early 2000s - so recent!

My memories are mostly not good.  I was classified as a special education student because I am very hard of hearing.  I also look a bit unusual and the two of these made me unpopular with the other kids.  The school had me in normal classes after the third grade, which was good, but I resented how some of the teachers treated me.  The  big exception was in the 7th grade where my English teacher got me started on poetry and Shakespeare.  He encouraged me to read everything and to write and he did it in a way that challenged me and made me feel special.

Because I had some problems is some classes I was put on a vocational track.  I looked at the possibilities and didn't see much of a life for myself, so I left home a day after I graduated and started building my own life.  Except for my love of reading and getting the basics I don't feel the schools properly prepared me.  They may have been good for some, but decided I was "special"and forced me onto a path that wasn't me.  My parents agreed and I was trapped.

My brother was a good student and was properly challenged. There were piles of homework for him while I had almost none as his classes expected something of him and mine didn't of me. He became a mechanical engineer and will tell you some of his best classes ever were in high school.

Jheri O.

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Sorry this is a bit late.   It was fun to write many things about my education.   Here is my conclusion.

You asked a great question, and one that we should all spend time reflecting on.   I originally wrote a very long response to your note, outlining numerous people and events that impacted my education.   It wasn't one thing, or one person, it was the stringing together of significant experiences (successes and failures, strengths and weaknesses) over many years.  

I grew up in Wisconsin in a very middle class family that went through divorce.  The family side could be considered failure, but it opened up an entire world of exploration for me as my parents were off figuring out their own lives.  I had to figure out a lot on my own.  I had a thirst for knowledge about many things in life.

I have always been highly competitive (still not sure why) and from early on I was always in advanced math and science classes and it came very easy to me.  However, I was always a slow reader - great comprehension but very slow at reading.   My grade school had a reading program that was structured around a weekly competition of reading volume and comprehension.  I won most weeks of this competition, but it probably took me a lot more time than others.   Why did I spend the time?   I liked to win!  The system was structured to fit with my competitive nature. Without competition, I'm sure I would have focused on my strengths (math and science) and ignored my weaknesses.   It's a good thing Twitter wasn't around -  that would have been much easier to win by today's standards (based on watching my kids, it's about followers and creative Tweets).  

In middle school and high school we didn't have reading competitions, but we did have 45 minutes of silent reading every day.   At first I hated it.   Fiction books were boring when it took as long as it did for me to read them.  In 9th grade, the rules changed.  We could read whatever interested us for 45 minutes.  This gave me 45 minutes a day to explore newspapers and magazines.  It was my favorite part of every day.   I gained a great appreciation for reading about interesting new things around the world.   And it wasn't reading from web pages - I had access to many paper-based publications in our library.   I originally started with Sports Illustrated, and quickly moved on to a much more diverse collection of publications given the need to fill 45 minutes a day.

My educational institution created a competition to get me focused, and then forced me to take the time to explore things that were interesting to me.  It won't work for all, but it worked for me.   This way of operating has created a constant level of change in my learning that has allowed me to maintain interest in learning more.   I knew everything as a teen and now know there is always something to learn and new experiences to string together.   

Success in learning is not money, it's the stringing together of new experiences.  It's even better if you care about those that you are sharing the experiences with.

Gregg G

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what I remember from my K12 education was a lot of freedom and experimentation.

I enjoyed K12 in the Netherlands in the 80's.

Kind regards,
Michiel P

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A talk about education I gave recently in Vegas is finally online. 15 mins short:

https://vimeo.com/74978969

Cheers,

Jerry M

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When I grew up in HK, there were *four* standardized entrance exams before one gets into university (at US/Canada equivalent grade 6, 9, 11, 13).  Adding to the mix the British style examination system (where your rank is based entirely on tests + year end exams), you can see how much of our schooling was in preparing for taking examinations.   It was a sure way to hinder developments in individual curiosity and cultivate broader interests.  Yes, I did have classmates that developed outside interests and hobbies despite the system, but I suppose there are always exceptional kids everywhere.  I think what you're after is looking into how to improve the average. 

I guess the deeper question is that: given that there's a limited number of spots in top universities, and as long as these schools remain desirable, there'll still be kids (parents) that will try to game the admission process.

Let's hope there are more examples of universities that rely on different types of admission process (I think there's the new engineering school in Boston that uses something different, can't remember the name of it now)

Mike Y

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I think of most of my education as pretty bad in terms of what other people tried to impose on me.  I don't think of K-12 fondly. But I think what I have learned and how I have learned how to learn are totally marvelous. I was really inspired by my high school biology teacher, who seemed to be using notes from her college classes to generate our materials. It was just the right edge of flow for me, and I thrived in her classes. I still remember so much of what I learned there, 25 years later. We had a special program at the sophomore and junior levels of high school.  The sophomore year, the class was called "Workshop of Life" and built up from individual survival (reading Lord of the Flies and going for a survival overnight trip) through level of societal organization until it culminated with a game of countries, politics, and trade. The integration of literature, history, and culture in the class really absorbed my interest. The junior year, the class was 2 periods long and called American Cultural Studies. I was terrible at doing my homework and developed a bad habit of synthesizing everything I heard, making an insight about it, and then pitching in with that as a comment. I still do that process today. One of the teachers (there were three) said a few things that deeply stuck with me. He said, "there are no right or wrong answers, just more or less appropriate ones." When I was studying post-modernism years later, people wondered why it was all so intuitive to me. I link it back to that first moment of letting go of an objective ultimate truth when I was 15.

I clearly learn better in integrative environments that have clear practical application. I can't hold my attention on abstract concepts that don't have tangible use to me. I knew my brain worked differently than those around me, but grades didn't seem to be tied to that at all. I found k-12 school frustrating and a bit annoying. So I left at 16 to go to college, which was a much better environment for me.

Now that I have kids, I find it disturbing that my bright kids are being taught by people who clearly have half the capability of my kids. Don't tell them I said that. So I tell my kids to play along at school, but that we know what their gifts are and to follow their own curiosity.

~ Jean class of '90 cut short to '89 in the US.

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Lived in a small agricultural+college town in Michigan.
The local flour mill was a big deal: employment and thrills: flour mills
explode. The 9th grade Science teacher (~1957) was wonderful. Two
experiments stand out: 1) 'Flour Mill Explosion' and 2) 'Leiden Jar
Human Chain Shock.' Great learning not be permitted today.

Flower Mill Explosion: Big metal New Era potato chip canister, 1'x2',
small hole in side for rubber tube feeding gas to a Bunsen burner
inside, another hole for a larger tube to allow the teacher to blow
vigorously into the bottom of a funnel. Put ~ 1/4 cup of flour into the
top of the funnel, light Bunsen burner, put top firmly back on canister,
back away and violently blow into the tube making a fine flour mist:
simulating flour dust and a spark in the mill. Result: a large ball of
fire, the top hits the 12' ceiling and the kids are 1) 'blown away' and
2) learn what its like to work at a flour mill. Impressive.

Leiden Jar Human Chain Shock: Charge a large Leiden jar with a spinning
wheel with double ended brushes - visually impressive. Have kids make a
ring around the jar holding hands. Kid at one end teacher at the other,
kids grabs post of jar, teacher grabs the other and CRACK! everyone gets
a jolt they never forget. Lesson electricity, even static, can pack a
wallop - be careful.

Norm S

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I graduated from high school in 1969.  My k-12 was in catholic schools in steel towns around Pittsburgh.  The most significant events form me was the introduction of "Modern Math" in my grade school curriculum and my journeys with friends to Buhl Planetarium in Pittsburgh for classes in science and engineering.  It was continuing place of wonder and I loved the classes and the atmosphere.  Very few of the nuns were strong in math or science.  In high school we did get a fairly strong dose of science and math, least I thought so until I took calculus I at Notre Dame and many peers scoffed at our textbook, Thomas, since they had gone through it in high school!  But actually far and away the most influential was the local Carnegie Library in Duquesne and in Pittsburgh.  They opened my eyes to science and science fiction and I never look back.

It was at Notre Dame that I was introduced to the arts and that makes me a firm proponent of STEAM not STEM, there are many ways of knowng this world - most influential in this was my philosophy professor Ernan McMullin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernan_McMullin, best professor I ever experienced.

Gregg V

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No summary - feel free to add your comments in the comments sections if you missed the "deadline" or feel the need to comment. Here is what I put together for mine:

 

I've written a post on my k12 education - a lot of it was free range. and another post links to a few other bits.  Enough free time to become bored was centrally important to me, but so was the rest.

Thinking specifically about school a few teachers come to mind - oddly enough both were history teachers.  

I had Mr Wolff for world history in the 10^th grade and the history of religion in the 12^th.  One of those amazing lecturers who made the subjects come alive, he also got into trouble with the school board for creating his own curriculum and was suspended for the religion course as it failed to emphasize that Christianity was the "right" religion.  I corresponded with him in college and for years afterwards and was lucky to have him as a friend.

The other significant teacher was Ms Boe for 11^th grade American history.  She lectured and had no tests.  The work consisted of a paper on two or three topics that was due every two weeks.  It was the first class where I pushed myself.  I'd spend at least an hour a day reading and preparing for the paper the first week with that doubling the second week.  The papers were due on Mondays and most of Friday night and Saturday went to writing a draft with Sunday going into the final paper.  She was a notoriously tough grader and I was the only student in her three periods to get an A for all of the grading periods.  This was not talent based - somehow she lit a fire and inspired me.  At first it was  an attempt to get a good grade, but after a few months I came to love sitting in the school library and going to the public library to read. From about April on to the end of the term I ended the paper with a question I had.  I don't know why, but it seemed reasonable.  Then something remarkable happened - something that spoke very deeply and directly to me.  A packet arrived in the mail a few weeks after I graduated.  In it was a fifty or so page paper on the five or so questions I had asked.  

They both taught because they had a love of learning.   I haven't had a history class since the 12^th grade and my education is far too narrow.  But teachers like Joe Wolff and Beverly Boe, along with the postal mentors I had, lit something and started the process of learning how to learn. Something I'm still working on, but a thing of great value.

There were a number of ok teachers along the way and I'm sure I didn't appreciate many of them.  There was too little of the arts and learning how to make things with my hands - although more than our local school system offers today.  I picked up some of that myself, but it is even more important these days.

 

__________

 

Recipe Corner

 

Really good and really simple.

 

Apple and Fennel Salad

 

Ingredients

 

° 1 fennel bulb thinly sliced

° 1 apple cored, but unpeeled, thinly sliced

° 2 tbl good quality extra virgin olive oil

° juice from a lemon

° 1 tbl honey

° a pinch of salt

° a bit of freshly ground black pepper

 

Technique

 

° mix the fennel and apple slice together in a bowl

° Whisk the oil, lemon juice, honey, salt and pepper and drizzle over the fennel and apple

 

it's raining shoemaker's apprentices

Very few people are great impedance matches.  I was having lunch with one of them today.  Jean is great at connecting people and their ideas of one tribe with another with little loss of meaning.    Impedance match may not mean very much to you - certainly not if you conjure up the standard dictionary definition of impedance.  

 

In physics and engineering it takes on a special meaning.  Impedance is the opposition of the flow of energy by a system to the flow of energy from a source.  If the impedance of one system is very different from that of another, power transfer from one to another suffers and there can be other nasty effects.  Frequently another system is inserted between the two that matches the impedances thus maximizing power transfer.

 

This does mean very much to most folks and coming back home I found myself wondering about a better description of what these people do.  As luck would have it I overheard a couple talking about the rain last week - "cats and dogs" said one.  Now I was thinking about idioms and translations - det regner skomagerdrenge came to mind.¹  A good translator would know that it's raining shoemaker's apprentices is equivalent to the American cats and dogs expression.

 

A good human impedance is something of a universal translator where some deeper meaning of the thoughts of one group are successfully communicated with another.  Watching these people you note they are rarely expert in both fields, but are able to encourage a good flow of communication.

 

A few weeks ago I was at a conference with a few dozen really bright people - people from a variety of fields. One got up and invoked a comparison by saying quantum mechanics invalidated Newtonian physics.² Later she threw in the phrase skating to where the puck's wave function will collapse.  Physically both of these are inaccurate descriptions of the world we mostly live in ...  they can have deeper meaning at the edges, but hearing them used like that forced me to pause and think.  These are common perceptions and are undoubtedly in wider use than what a physicist would say.  Many of you also happen to be "too" specialized and may have the same problem. With me it was bad as I didn't realize how maladroit I was.

 

It happens there is an area of physics I really want to communicate to people with non-technical backgrounds.  I have this notion it may help them make some important decisions.  I've worked with someone from a very different walk of life and we made a bit of progress in framing some ideas, but we came to the conclusion this is not the way to communicate to a general audience.  I've been trying to learn from others who have had success sorting out this type of communication.  How do these impedance matches do their thing?  A few are making progress - Neil deGrasse Tyson comes to mind as does Bill Nye, Bob McDonald, Robert Krulwich and others.  And there are folks like Alan Alda who are trying to teach scientists to communicate

 

... but check out the proposal Bill Nye's television proposal

 

 

 

__________

¹ I don't know much Danish, but this is such a wonderful idiom

² Quantum mechanics is a better description of the world at very small scales.  Most of the interactions we're familiar with are accurately enough described by Newtonian physics.  You can use QM, but its answers are equivalent to Newton's world.  It does not invalidate Newton's work.

³ We can talk about the wave function of the puck, but it is hideously complex and using classical mechanics gives us a result we can calculate.  It is a cute description, but also one that is mostly useful for a variety of reasons.

 

__________

No recipe this time, but a bit of kit I can recommend.  Michael Rhulman's Badass Spoon.  A deep perforated spoon designed for poaching eggs (Sukie loves ours), it is well suited for a variety of dishes where a deep dish perforated spoon works - reasoning with beans for example.  Spendy and worth every penny.

a dark sky and major change

Last week I was stretched out on a dock near Woods Hole, MA watching the sky at four in the morning.   A few hours before I was in a great discussion and, walking back to my cottage, I noticed the sky was dark.  Much darker than I'm used to these days.  The Milky Way was wonderful and the night was only a bit on the chilly side.  It seemed a shame to waste the experience so I watched the sky until dawn.

 

The last time I had been around a dark sky in the East was during the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy.  I was able to spend several hours watching, but it was cold outside and inside as our area was without power.  There are times when I'm upset at all of the artificial lighting that ruins a good view of the night sky, but not during this period.

 

On the dock I started to think about the dramatic change brought on by the Industrial Revolution as well as a few current changes.  Laying there my body was ticking away at something around 90 watts - less than my daily average of about 110 watts.¹  During my rowing sessions I'm up to about 700 watts for about an hour and a half, but that is all I can manage.² 

 

A really interesting question to ask is how much power am I using beyond just keeping my body running?  I drive a car, have a house, fly every now and again, eat food raised by someone, buy things and so on.  I've done some calculations for my own use as well as the average per capita use for a few nationalities.  

 

It turns out Americans are something over 13,000 watts. To put that in perspective a hair dryer is about 1,500 watts.  You can come up with your own number by adding up your personal energy use, but you have to include the energy cost of the inefficiency of power generation, how much was used to make and move your stuff and what it takes to run all of the elements of the economy you use.  For example -  per capita power used by the Department of Defense is a bit less than 100 watts - about the same as the average person.  The post office is a couple of watts - about the same as a small night light.

 

Danes use about half of what we do and the Swiss even less.  There are huge inefficiencies that we can address.  But how has this changed over time?

 

In 1800, near the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, worldwide per capita power usage was about 600 watts - only six times higher than a modern person's power requirements.  Now it is about 2,500 watts - there are a lot of people living in the third world as well as those who are much more efficient than Americans.

Not quite a factor of five, but going from a global per capita energy use that wasn't that different from pre-industrial living - most of the energy used probably went into farming, heating and cooking - to what we have today brought dramatic change.  Change for better and worse, but mostly better to date.  Losing power during Sandy makes me appreciate why people were willing to spend substantial fractions of their income to have electric lighting installed in their homes as soon as electricity was available and why the buildout of the electricity infrastructure was such a massive and politically important thing.

 

At the same time electricity was reshaping our lives, petroleum and the internal combustion engine made the automobile practical. That, combined with the road infrastructure that came about in a few decades radially altered so much about how we live.  It also dramatically increased our usage of energy forms with consequences we have only started to realize in the past few decades.

 

About seventy years ago people in my own community worked on harnessing much greater energy densities and the ability to supply mind numbing amounts of power - the energy density of ²³⁵U is a few million times higher than that of oil and sadly, under the right conditions, it can be released in a short amount of time. 

 

It is a remarkable testament to humanity that only two devices have been used against people in the Summer of 1945 and nothing has happened since.  Many in the physics community became pacifists as they reflected on the scale and nature of the change. The notion that it had become possible to destroy much or even most of humanity was potent enough to prevent disaster.  I was thinking of offering Robert Oppenheimer's famous quote from the Bhagavad Gita, but watching him is more powerful

 

 

 

Huge changes that few would have predicted...  genies that,  for good, bad or evil,  can't be forced back into the bottle.  We tend to be surprised by the changes and react with varying degrees of clue.  Maybe we can learn from our past encounters...  at least I hope we can.

 

The discussion going on just before my pleasant re-acquaintance with the Milky Way centered on society and computer security issues.  The meeting had been scheduled for some time, but the NSA revelations from Edward Snowden increased the sense of urgency.   People are not equipped to think about and compare risks and our social interactions are such that our views of privacy don't map onto what has developed.  The scale of social media, sales and marketing, and other areas like government surveillance are all out of proportion and we need to find our way.   We are being forced to think about fundamental changes to things we have just assumed and the ride promises to be rough^.3  

__________

¹ Colleen and I found it was much easier for most people to understand power rather than energy.  The average person requires about 2,000 nutritional calories of energy from food every day.  That works out to something close to 2,400 watt-hrs.  (there are any number of units you can use to express energy in - watt-hrs, calories, BTUs, therms and so on - they are just energy, so you pick what is convenient) Power is just the rate energy is used and you can easily find average power over a period by dividing by the length of time of the period.  Here the average power over the course of a day is 100 watts.  Remarkably lightbulbish.  When you sleep it is less, when you are exercising or doing manual labor it is more.

I like to use watts and watt-hrs as it is convenient to compare many forms of energy and power we use.  For quick back of the envelopes a nutritional calories is about 1.16 watt-hours - rounding to 1.2 should be good enough for many estimates.  So a 4 calorie M&M would provide near 5 watt-hours of energy.  If you could easily convert most of that chemical energy to electricity, you'd have the basis for a great battery - technically a fuel cell - for your smartphone.

² I can deliver about 150 watts of power to the rowing machine for long (at least to me) periods, but am only about 25% efficient at turning food energy into work.  So my muscles require about 600 watts from my metabolism.  Light exercise doesn't allow you to eat much, heavy exercise does.

³ I have quite a bit to say about the NSA and other programs as well as corporate surveillance, but this is not the place and I'm sure in five or ten years it would seem ridiculously naive anyway. Feel free to chat if you want some of my views and I'd be interested in those of others.

__________

Recipe Corner

 

A friend lives in Cameroon.  I've been trying to learn some of her dishes (at least those without meat) and find this one a winner.  I don't know what it is properly called

 

Mashed Sweet Potatoes from Cameroon

 

Ingredients

 

° 1 large sweet potato

° 1 head of garlic (she loves garlic and uses two, but start with one!)

° 1 tsp cooking oil (I used a cooking grade olive oil - canola would be fine too)

° 1 very ripe avocado

° 1/3 cup sliced onion

° juice from 1/2 lime (I only had a lemon on hand and substituted it)

° sea salt and freshly ground pepper

° fresh parsley or some other herb you like

 

Technique (modified for American kitchens)

 

° preheat your oven to 400°F

° Skin and dry the sweet potato, poke holes into it and nuke in a microwave for about four minutes

° cut the top third or so off the head of garlic and make sure every clove is exposed.

° put the garlic on foil, drizzle with some oil and wrap leaving the tops exposed

° roast the sweet potato  for about 20 minutes in the oven until it is soft.  At the same time roast the garlic, but leave it in for a total of about 30 minutes or until golden brown and soft. 

° let the garlic cool and squeeze the cloves out

° mash the sweet potato and garlic and season with salt and pepper to taste

° peel the avocado and mash adding the citrus juice.  combine with the sweet potato

° serve and top with the onions and parsley.  You can be a hedonist and fry or roast the onions...  I won't tell

 

 

 

lunartics, steam and beyond

About ten months ago the night sky was impressively dark for this part of New Jersey.  On the first night after Sandy's clouds parted and the Milky Way was visible - even with a nearly full moon.  It was the first time I've seen our galaxy from this place.  The moon gave just enough light so you could make your way around without a flashlight.  I remember walking that night and thinking about what it must have been like before electric and gas lights.  A full moon would make a traveler's life a bit easier.

 

Your mind wanders and you think about history.¹

 

In about 1765 a group of industrialists and natural philosophy types began to meet once a month by the light of the full moon at Soho House.  For fifty years these lunarticks formed a learned society know as the Lunar Society of Birmingham.  Its membership included Josiah Wedgwood, Matthew Boulton, James Watt, Joseph Priestly, James Kier and Erasmus Darwin and at least a dozen others who made a dent in the universe.   They were there to talk about the intersection of industry, science, engineering and math.  Some were intellectuals, some had no formal education, most were at the core of the revolution.  The food was good and the ideas even better

 

Information was shared, new ideas ignited and relationships and partnerships developed.  James Watt may have been an impressive inventor, but happened to be someone who didn't cross the t's and dot the i's when it came to turning invention into innovation.  He was full of ideas and always on to the next curious thing.  There was a period when he focused on the steam engine, but his interests turned out to be much wider.  Without Boulton, a driven industrialist,  it is likely we wouldn't know him for the steam engine and power wouldn't be measured in watts.²

 

James Kier was one of the central figures of the society. A chemist when chemistry was becoming central to the notion of manufacture at an industrial scale;  perhaps it is only natural he would be the glue of the group.  Information sharing was critical and he concerned with translating French publications for himself and others in the society. Josiah Wedgwood swore by Kier's translation of a chemical dictionary as he did his experiments methodically sorting out how to make fine china on an industrial scale for the emerging middle class.  

 

Kier was concerned with alkalis - important for many products, but he was concerned with soap.  He managed to perfect the large scale manufacture of soap using some of the process control techniques pioneered by Wedgwood.  Regular use of soap led to improved hygiene and some of the greatest gains in average human lifespan we've seen.

 

Wedgwood was a methodical soul inventing and perfecting many of the concepts used in process control leading to more efficient mass production.  He also invented and promoted numerous marketing techniques in use today - "buy one, get one free", illustrated catalogs, direct mail, traveling salesmen, self-service and free delivery.

 

About the time the Lunar Society faded from view - also roughly the time of Davy's death - the word "scientist" came into regular use.  A new field that had been in the works for a few hundred years became recognized.

 

It began to fade as London became more of a center of innovation, but there were connections with people from the Royal Society.  Humphrey Davy was one of the connections.  A cross between a world class experimental scientist and a showman, he and others would fill a lecture hall with paying customers to learn about the latest discoveries.  He and a few others were the Carl Sagans and Neil deGrasse Tysons of the day.  But I mention Davy for another connection that is relevant today.  

 

People in the arts were important to the science.  You had to be someone of an artist to illustrate observations and there was a notion that scientific and artistic thinking were one and the same.  Samuel Coleridge was a friend of Davy and both had something of a romantic sensibility.  It was felt that poetry, art and chemistry all required imaginative analogy and that progress in science would be impossible without an artistic sensibility. Art and science were the same thing to these people and had not separated.  With time the symmetry would break, but it is impossible to ignore the creative connection.  Coleridge and Wordsworth planned to have Davy come with them when they set up creative shop in the Lake District.  

 

Perhaps this was STEAM 1.0 - science, technology, engineering, art and math.  STEM education is seen as critical these days and many of us believe STEM+the arts - STEAM (as popularized by RISD) is even more important.  At the dawn of revolutions you need many types of minds to make sure the field of dots you are connecting is large.  It happened at the dawn of the industrial revolution and once again we are witness to its hopeful flashes.  

 

the connections led to unexpected revolutions

 

Wedgwood and Erasmus Darwin were friends and the families of friends often link. His daughter married Darwin's son and he became the grandfather of the Darwin you have heard about...³

 

__________

¹ It is likely most of you know more about history than me.  One of the holes in many technical education paths is an avoidance of the historical development.  Since science builds on itself this may seem natural and it is certainly best to learn current science, but there is also great meaning in the story of where we've been.  Some schools have excellent history of math, science and technology courses which should be taken with the core work.  The historical context makes the current results - as well as those that will come - even more beautiful.

² Or horsepower for that matter.  Horsepower was a marketing concept Watt and Bolton used to give people a feeling for what their product  was capable of...

³ There have been a few revolutionary minds in science.  Their discoveries would ultimately be made because Nature is the reference, but the timing could be very different.  Perhaps the discoveries would be made much later and perhaps the timing would have been inappropriate to ignite fields - or not.  Our lifespans might be much shorter now if the discovery of evolution had been delayed fifty years.  

The arts are different as something fundamental is not being uncovered.  Without Bach we would have never had the Six Suites ....

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Recipe Corner

 

I was in Arizona last week staying with my sister Corinne and her husband Jeff.  Breakfast involved some of the best muesli I've had.  This is a good starting point for a superior homemade blend.

 

 

Jeff's Muesli Recipe 

 

Ingredients

° 5 scoops rolled oats

° 5 scoops any type granola

° half scoop raw unsalted sunflower seeds

° half scoop sesame seeds

° half scoop raisins (obviously you could go with any dried fruit)

° half scoop hazelnuts (I toast them for 12 minutes at 325)

 

Technique

° I sprinkle on golden flaxseed

° serve with milk, almond milk, greek yogurt (I like Fage 2% plain) or plain skyr 

° if necessary sweeten with a bit of maple syrup 

° top with sliced banana, fresh or frozen raspberries, blueberries or blackberries.  Some crushed pecans are also great