361–370 of 433 posts
I was quite touched by the book "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee. Its central character, Atticus Finch, has become to me somewhat a role-model. If and when I raise children in my life, I'll be extremely contented if I manage to do it like he does in the story, and if my kids turn out like his.
Besides being a woman, Marie Curie was the first and ONLY person to ever recieve a Nobel Prize in different sciences. Something her male counterparts have yet to do, so maybe there's something there besides her sex.
Let N be the number of great scientists. It would be sensible for the curriculum to include the n greatest scientists, where n N . Since Marie Curie always gets included in the textbooks, we can conclude either that she ranks as one of the n greatest scientists, even for very small n , or that the reasons for her inclusion go beyond her scientific accomplishments. Considering how few history textbooks mention (for ex…
I think Paul Dirac is insufficiently praised not only in the layman's world, but even in the scientific community. Although he was a contemporary of Albert Einstein and although his contributions were comparably important and various, Einstein enjoys a rock-star-like status, whereas Dirac is quite inadequately acknowledged.
The same would hold for Arnold Sommerfeld, Leonhard Euler and many others, some of whose names and contributions I perhaps don't know about.
Does it count as a 'lie' if it is believed by the parent? The reason that parents don't want kids to swear is because they genuinely believe that it is wrong for some reason. The don't know the reason themselves, and so break the rule and become hypocrites, but they still believe that it is wrong and want their children to do better than they did. With regard to group identity (and religion,) most parents actually ad…
Thanks for writing such a questioning essay. I have two young boys and have spent a lot of time thinking about how my wife (an African-American physician) and myself (a European-descended American evolutionary biologist) are going to say to them about sex and drugs and death. My wife and I usually resolve these conversations by saying that we won't have to have "the talk" because our sons will be hearing about birth control from the time of their own birth. So far that's been true. Now that my older son can talk, I'm surprised about the stuff that I feel perfectly comfortable saying in front of him. However, I still feel like there's stuff I'd have trouble being honest about (like explaining why people abuse drugs --- I don't understand it myself). I've particularly thought about the duality of sex that you mention: "Yes, your parents have sex, and if they didn't you wouldn't exist, nor would it be nice to live here, but you shouldn't do it because you don't know what you're doing." Obviously there are certain ways I can be honest, but it ends the conversation a lot faster to just lie.
Another issue, that you mention in your notes, is there are some things that kids just believe, without adults trying to deliberately deceive them. My son probably thinks that Thomas the Tank Engine is somewhere right now being really useful.
My parents could have lied to me about a lot, but they didn't because I have three older brothers and it was hard to keep lying to me when my brothers were finding out they'd been lied to. Also, I think as parents they just tried to be honest about things like sex and death. One of my brothers asked my father what a blow-job was in the middle of Thanksgiving dinner. I wasn't there, but my mom tells me that my father did, in fact, tell him later.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh, I interpreted "almost no one reading this knows..." as referring to the users of this board.
Your original interpretation was right. Perhaps I underestimated the number of physicists hanging out here. (I hope so! It would be cool to think people here know who these guys are.) In any case, the original point remains: even on Hacker News, Marie Curie is far better-known than Lev Landau, and it's not because she was the greater scientist.
"The truth is common property. You can't distinguish your group by doing things that are rational, and believing things that are true." This, my friends, is a pearl of wisdom.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let N be the number of great scientists. It would be sensible for the curriculum to include the n greatest scientists, where n N . Since Marie Curie always gets included in the textbooks, we can conclude either that she ranks as one of the n greatest scientists, even for very small n , or that the reasons for her inclusion go beyond her scientific accomplishments. Considering how few history textbooks mention (for ex…
You forgot to mention Turing :) Turing doesnt get much space in school textbooks. And von Neumann too despite being one of the giants of mathematics in 20th century.