OMG. My 12-yo knows that! (Of course, we did go see the AMNH's Darwin exhibit, a few years back, so cool to see his actual desk.)

Sheesh. I mean, I understand that my cultural background doesn't match everyone's, but I'd still expect a critic to realize that Snoopy doesn't scamper (and isn't even a puppy).

Bless me. It's all in Plato, all in Plato.

Not Pluto.

That's a brain fart he'll have to live with the rest of his professional life.

At first I assumed he meant falsely cute in the title's allusion to Darwin. Which I didn't quite understand -- Matthew's meaning, not the allusion -- but at least it was better than the suggestion that van Vogt was writing about some kind of interstellar Snoopy.

Wow, I'll be someone's wishing for a do-over right now. o_O

Angie

Umm, someone aside from myself. [cough] I'll bet, even. :P

Angie

Did you know that the book's French title is La faune de l'espace, which means The Fauna of Space?

Hopefully they're still taught not to shut wardrobe doors behind themselves...

Oh, I never made that connection either. I have too many worse things to be ashamed of to feel much shame at that, though. Or maybe I did realize it at some previous point, but not as a kid when I first read it.

And never in the 12 years in the British school system (6 of them at a private school) did I encounter any of Darwin's actual writing. They don't teach it in English Lit and the treatment of the history of science in science classes is pretty minimal (and I'm not sure that more time should be spent on history).

The classical education is dead. Someone else would have to tell me if it ever really existed. Certainly my education did not involve much in the way of studying the classics but was focused much more on techniques and the best current consensus.

(Well, I say "current consensus", but that's not really true. In physics, for instance, the consensus they teach is that of about 1910. Or maybe 1850. Personally I think they should start all physics with quantum mechanics and work backward from there so you don't have to spend half your time unlearning whatever it was you were taught last year.)

Jacob, I don't think it was much different in my day.

On the other hand, at home we had a fairly big, gloriously illustrated, book which told you a lot about Darwin, what he found, and how it tied in to the history of life on Earth.

It was a long time before I realised that the Beagle was Hornblower-tech.

Chuckling @ Adam #2.
That is, <cough> I meant to say:
OMG WTF BBQ L00LZ! OMG TEH L0Z3RS!
PS Y U CALL SNOOP DAWG SNOOPY???

My thought process when encountering this book as a teen:

--Wow, that's a really stupid title...
--But it's a reference to Darwin!
--So what? It still sounds like shit.

I'm with Mr. Matthew. It's falsely cute, brings to mind a scampering puppy, and knowledge of its provenance does nothing to alleviate those things.

#10: "Personally I think they should start all physics with quantum mechanics and work backward from there so you don't have to spend half your time unlearning whatever it was you were taught last year."

I dunno -- most people aren't going to need QM unless they go on to study physics at the university level. Classical mechanics is all most people need, because it's equivalent FAPP to QM at macroscopic levels -- well, that, and you need a good grounding in it before going on to the weird stuff, otherwise you'll not understand the concepts used.

Besides, quantum mechanics if done properly is probably more intimidating to a secondary school student than classical mechanics, and there are enough problems with the mathematical content of the latter scaring people off already -- adding Hilbert spaces and so forth to curriculum would probably kill the subject dead.

I confess I didn't realize what Van Vogt's title was alluding to when I first read the book.

Of course, it was the first science fiction book I ever read. I was in second grade at the time.

No way I'm getting into that argument about what should be taught first; that's a black hole I've been into before*. But I will say that what's taught in secondary school science is 2 generations old of necessity because undergraduate science is typically one generation old, and that's what the teachers learned a generation ago.

Though sometimes it's not as far off as that. My high school chemistry/physics teacher taught basic quantum theory circa 1930 in chemistry (this was in the early 1960s): electron orbitals and the qm origin of covalent bonds, etc. He even tried to teach Relativity in physics, though he never did grok the twin paradox. On the other hand, the biology teacher had just gotten his master's and was teaching us general systems theory and levels of organization. Now that was an eye-opener.

* Yes, it is possible to get out of a black hole; the technique involves the sacrifice of a troll and a rainbow long enough to go over the event horizon.

I tend to think of Interzone as British Literary Snob, so maybe it's a Two Cultures thing.

Some people pick up information, the way some people pick up belly-button lint.

If there's a flaw in modern British education, it is that teachers have been pushed into teaching the test. There are several different sorts and, for the school, good test result bring rewards.

If the Beagle isn't in any test, it isn't going to get a mention.

You can know all about Darwin's Beagle and still get an image of a dog. One mental category doesn't rule out the other. That's the great thing about the human brain. Concepts overlap.

You're being a bit harsh, putting it down to poor education or snobbery. Imho, of course.

I don't have the original context, so I wonder: isn't it possible David Matthew knows what the title refers to, and considers it so famous he hasn't referenced it?

“The very title…is falsely cute, especially if it brings to mind a scampering puppy…”

That could mean, "Bad enough a cutesy play on Darwin, but this particular cutesy play could easily bring to mind a scampering puppy to back it up." The word "especially" seems to suggest a layered effect of imagery, with the second layer being a puppy. I always imagine a beagle whenever I read the name of Darwin's ship; basically, I'm thinking of two images at once (ship/dog).

Of course, he could mean dog/puppy, and no ship about it. From the quote, though, I don't know we can assume that.

Wow, it's an intellectual Darwin Award.

Meanwhile, I am very happy to find out that Snoopy is actively involved in the space program, and flies on every mission. There really is a Space Beagle.

And "Snoopy" was also the unofficial name of the lunar module for Apollo 10. The ascent stage of that LM was jettisoned after downing, and in heliocentric orbit. So that space beagle still voyages...

If I read it as a teen, it would have had the title "Unternehmen Milchstrasse" and I really cannot say if I did.
I *do* remember that at the age of twelve I understood a jocular statement that "after his famous expedition, Charles Darwin was able to prove that man had evolved from the beagle", without the ship's name being mentioned in the text.

@8:
Did you know that the book's French title is La faune de l'espace, which means The Fauna of Space?

I didn't know that, but that's not a bad pun for La faune de l'espece , meaning the Fauna of the Species.

Pendrift @ 24... Curses! A possible pun wnet right past me all those years ago?!

I think the key word in the quote is "if" -- if the quote had been "particularly as the title brings to mind...", then I'd find it hard not to give it Patrick's interpretation. The context would be key.

@24

Fauns in Space!

My memory is faintish after 40 years, but I *think* there's a reasonably direct reference to Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle in van Vogt's book. I remember reading it and making the connection, which hadn't hit me before.

Next year's Darwin Bicentennial & Origin of Species Sesquicentenary might raise the recognition factor.

BTW, any comments on the Nobels?

sean Williams @19: Harsh? Oh, please. Patrick is pointing at a funny. And it is funny; a would-be critic who misses an obvious and intended allusion in a work in favour of a superficial, unintended one, and critiques the latter only, no mention of the former, can legitimately be supposed to have missed the boat entirely.

If it'd been me that fumbled that one, I'd only be hoping I could live it all down by Christmas.

Start with nonrelativistic QM? Nonsense--they'll just have to unlearn it when they hit quantum field theory. Obviously the first class around about junior high should be about renormalization schemes, dimensional regularization and the Standard Model Lagrangian. In graduate school they can gradually work up to pulleys and inclined planes.

I'm reminded of someone (alas I don't recall who) harrumphing that Dan Savage's book title "Skipping Towards Gomorrah" was a shameless ripoff of Joan Didion's "Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

#30
It sounds almost reasonable.
My 8th-grade science teacher did introduce us to e=mc**2, mostly, I think, to impress us with how much e you get for a small value of m. (He gave us the the mass the sun loses in one second, and the value of c, and let us do the arithmetic.)

Matt McIrvin at #30: I know computers are a lot more powerful these days, but I don't think they are up to the level of fully simulating a pulley. That's a lot of atoms, and the rope is made up of all these organic fibers, from a physical point of view it's very complicated. Basically we know pulleys work in practice, but it's going to be quite a long time before we can fully understand how they work in theory.

TomB -- I actually had an acquaintance make a similar argument, in all seriousness. I was grumbling about being stuck in an embedded-software job instead of doing the computational chemistry that I'd spent all those years studying (because it's a subject I happen to find very interesting). She pointed out that the electronic devices I was working on were all made of chemicals, after all, so all I had to do was develop a system which would let me model the devices using the chemical-structure-modelling tools that I was already familiar with.

When I tried to explain that there was a serious problem of scale involved, she accused me of having a negative attitude. Of *course* I would never get it to work if I refused to even try it... but she was *sure* I could figure it out if only I looked at it the right way. I never did manage to get through that invincible ignorance.

Nobel Prize commentary:

Medicine: Count me as one of the ones disappointed that Gallo didn't split the Prize with Montagnier. Notice that both citations (for the HPV half and the HIV half) cite the discovery of the *virus*, not of what it *does*.

Chemistry Prize: Everyone's favorite, a methodology prize. No really, these are the best kind -- the Nobel committees live in fear of honoring something that turns out to be not all that important, but a useful technique is *always* important.

I gather that there's a bit of a kerfuffle over the Physics Prize, but I know less about the inner workings of that one.

Dunno about starting with quantum mechanics in high school, but I do think that undergrad quantum mechanics classes could ditch the month they spend on teaching physics as it was understood in 1899 and trying to convince the students that they should find the stuff they're going to learn in the rest of the semester so very surprising. Just teach it! I'd rather start with something simple, like the two-state system, than with complicated stuff like black body radiation that just happened to come first historically.

Of course, for all I know that's how these classes do work nowadays. It's kind of shocking when I realize how long ago my undergrad quantum mechanics class was.

Why do they have the beginning physics lab repeat the work of Galileo and Newton? I think we learned about five ways to get a rough value for gravity. (On the other hand, in the later semesters, we got to play with lasers and liquid nitrogen and a big electromagnet - but not all at once! And the extra short course on measuring radioactivity was a lot of fun, even though we didn't get to use pitchblende from Poland and the scintillation counter wasn't ready in time.)

P J,

When I see how much science fiction is written by people who don't have a grasp of what is contained in Principia Mathematica I have no problem at all with starting with the basics. Remember that Principia is also Netwon's introduction to integral calculus. The Fundamental Theorem of Integral Calculus is the dividing line between the great mass of the population that is scientifically illiterate and the smaller percentage that have a clue.

What is taught in physics class is not just physics but experimental science. The physics is trivial if you understand it---the experimental science is a world view that most people never grasp. I think most people could learn it given the proper tutelage.

As an analogy, think about learning music. Most young music students get wrapped up in playing the notes. It is much more important to learn to play the music and it is quite a different skill.

I was only half (or maybe a quarter) serious, and am not a teacher nor a physicist, so entirely unqualified to comment. Plus, I have no idea what order current curriculums teach things in. But I do think that quantum mechanics is not all that hard to understand, or perhaps that it ought not to be so hard to understand as it seems to be, and therefore maybe what's needed is an improvement in the explanations.

Also that a subject should start from some kind of a guide to the actual, latest consensus worldview. Which maybe they do these days. It's been a while since I was in high school.

Not that this has anything to do with the book.

I do think it's interesting when these evident differences about what constitutes "knowing anything about anything" come up. I wonder what the results of a survey would show about the overlaps and correlations among the things people put in that category. I try to be ready at any moment to discover how mind-blowingly embarrassingly staggeringly ignorant I am about any particular subject, so that when it proves to be the case (as regularly happens) I can move swiftly from the "OMG I can't believe I didn't know that, I must look such a fool" stage to the rather more useful "assimilation with previous knowledge" stage.

I also wonder whether the overlap will get wider or narrower in future. I can imagine people learning much more idiosyncratic subsets than the conventional school curriculum out of an ever-expanding base of knowledge and literature. Or maybe we'll wind up with everyone on the planet having read the exact same books in high school cause everyone, even the children of Asian steppe herders, now agrees that if you haven't read The Catcher in the Rye you just can't participate in civilized society.

Joel Polowin @ 34

Your friend was a classic case of being right for entirely the wrong reason. Feynman's original motivation for the idea of the quantum computer was to have a device that could simulate QM interactions at sufficient speed and complexity to make it practical to model mesoscopic matter, where non-quantum digital computers could maybe handle modelling a methane molecule at the time. The problem is exponential in the number of particles for non-quanntum computers, and polynomial for quantum computers, so there is a trick for solving the problem. You jut have to invent quantum computing.

I've still heard people say weather could be forecast perfectly accurately if there were just enough information put into big enough computers.

The whole thing about Chaos theory, contingency, Heisenberg & assorted basic concepts of unknowingness & randomness either haven't penetrated or their worldview simply rejects that entire group of concepts. Not to mention how it might apply to things apart from weather.

Principia Mathematica is not Newton's Principia, and famously takes some 360 pages to prove that 1+1=2.

I have heard it claimed that mathematicians think physicists are clumsy, while physicists think mathematicians are weird.

It would not astonish me if some mathematician has a completely different way of figuring out QM problems, buried in a proof of, for instance, Fermat's Last Theorem.

"Principia Mathematica is not Newton's Principia"

Wikipedia seems to think that Newton's book is often called that too. But - and we all know that Wikipedia is never wrong - they have "Principia Mathematica" take you to the Russell & Whitehead book. So it's a draw. Let's just say you're both wrong, for the sake of fairness.

I think drawing the line at calculus between the "scientifically literate" and those "without a clue" is a bit arbitrary. You don't need calculus for most of computer science, for instance. While it's nice to think that something you know and most people don't is also the true key to understanding the world, since we're all completely ignorant of about 95% of everything we haven't directly studied ourselves, I'd be pretty cautious about where to draw a line.

What do they teach them in schools these days? Not the things we think are important, for sure. Though *I* didn't know the relevance of "The Voyage of the Space Beagle" when I first heard the title (I remember thinking it a bit strange, so I found out what it meant), so clearly this has been going on for a while.

But. An example. I took Marianne to the House of Lords yesterday (I'm probably going to write about this for a fanzine), and as we got to the Houses of Parliament we passed the statue of Cromwell. "Why's there a statue of Cromwell there?" asked Marianne. "Wasn't he evil?" (this from children's books, especially "I, Coriander", which I liked but which Farah hated precisely because of its unthinking and stupid royalism). Later questions included "Does the Queen actually have to sign the Bill even if she doesn't like it?" which I think I certainly knew by the time I was 11 and which I was definitely taught in school. I also gave her, on the way in on the tube, a crash course in "How Bills go through Parliament". I *know* this isn't normally taught in schools, because not only did I not know it when I started working in policy, but we teach all our staff the same thing and none of them know it either.

I certainly knew what the title of Van Vogt's book was referring to when I first encounted it but I don't recall whether that was from my own general reading or something I was taught at school. Certainly things like this, and Harlan Ellison reporting that a reference by him to 'the emperor's new clothes' was recently met with incomprehension by a group of college students, are a bit worrying.

My mum has a much loved album called 'the Voyage of the Beagle' by a band named Galapagos Duck, which lead to several interesting conversations about Darwin when I was very small.

Incidentally, I'll be spending two weeks in the Galapagos (and another two weeks in mainland Ecuador) next January, which I am rather excited about.

If anyone has any suggestions for reading material/documentaries and the like for before I leave, it would be much appreciated.

I'm planning on reading Darwin's original work, but anything on evolution/ecuador/blue footed boobies etc is what I'm looking for.

Jacob @43, Stuart @38: Probably I was learning calculus around the time I was reading Voyage of the Space Beagle.

Then I could do derivatives, &c, fairly well & work out how & when to use them. Now? No chance. I have a very general idea & images of some diagrams.

Thirty years ago I needed extra statistical maths for my undergraduate honours work. Very little indeed remains — barely enough to excoriate occasional news stories' errors.

For 25 years I've been editing words & bending computer systems to my will (*koff*). Like an unused language, maths has faded from my mind.

On the general topic of what should be taught in schools, I strongly wish that there would be more focus on the process of learning, as opposed to the practice of learning.

Although this applies in most areas, it is most clear in science courses, where many students seem to fundamentally not understand the scientific method. In the end, about 50% of the value of a science education is the facts and theories. The other 50% is a fundamental understanding of the scientific method and how to use it.

Every science course should be paying a great deal of attention to making sure that students understand the how and the why of the scientific process, and which specific portions of science they teach are a little secondary to that, because once you have that to work with you can go a long ways, but without that, all the facts you have are basically a dead end.

That might seem obvious, but my experience says that a lot of science courses are missing it.

(On a totally unrelated note that just happened to come up as I was typing this post, if you search Google for "parochial", it also offers you the search results for "dictionary", because they are apparently so similar.)

What do they teach kids in British schools these days?

Reportedly, what powers a solar-powered snail.

FWIW, when van Vogt had a brief era of popularity in Czech translations in early 1990es, the series (published in instalments) ended up as "The adventures of the 'Space Hound'", though IIRC some of the accompanying "About the Author" materials (with other van Vogt stories?) used "... of the space 'Beagle'" and explained the reference.

My review was obviously not clear enough. I can only apologise for that.

Dave Bell @ 42:
Principia Mathematica is not Newton's Principia, and famously takes some 360 pages to prove that 1+1=2.

While it's true that the full title of Newton's book is Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematica Principles of Natural Philosophy), it is often referred to as "Principia Mathematica" (or just "Principia"). Of course, this may be more common among physicists and other scientists, who are less likely to have heard of Whitehead & Russell's book.

pericat @ 27... Fauns in Space!

Is it a satyr of the original novel published by MinoTor?

janetl @ 31...

I don't think I ever heard of that Doc Savage novel "Skipping Towards Gomorrah".
("Serge.. It's Dan Savage.")
Oh.
Nevermind.

I do think that undergrad quantum mechanics classes could ditch the month they spend on teaching physics as it was understood in 1899 and trying to convince the students that they should find the stuff they're going to learn in the rest of the semester so very surprising. Just teach it! I'd rather start with something simple, like the two-state system, than with complicated stuff like black body radiation that just happened to come first historically.

That's the Feynman Lectures on Physics, volume III approach, also used in Sakurai's intro-graduate textbook Modern Quantum Mechanics. I like it, but it does have the problem of starting out a bit dry and abstract.

What do they teach kids in British schools these days?

Going back 28-odd years, solving the Schroedinger wave equation for a unidimensional electron in a box was, indeed, part of the Physics 'A' level syllabus -- a couple of weeks after general and special relativity. So yes, 1930s era quantum mechanics at age 17/18 was part of the education system.

(Alas, I did rather badly at it.)

>the first class around about junior high should be about renormalization schemes

This presupposes a proper maths background: complex-plane integration, Riemann-Lebesgue theory, and group theory at least.

>#35 ::: Doctor Science
I spend enough time in the shallower end of the tubes that I feel compelled to speak for them, albeit mockingly: "Don't you know that HIV both was developed by the C.I.A. and does not cause the AIDS*---they spent billions and indulged in years of secrecy in order to develop a virus that does nothing at all...perhaps they are claiming godhood through their fine grasp of the Principle of Heavenly Œconomy."

*It's caused by poor diet, AIDS drugs, a splinter of the Knights Templar, and an excess of the bilious humour

I agree with some others that there's probably not a single point (or small set of points) about which knowledge or ignorance determines whether you're properly educated. In fact, that seems to be the problem with standardized testing.

And that's kind of a problem, right? We have standardized testing because we'd actually like to know which schools are doing a decent job. It's worth knowing that. It's worth acting on that knowledge, too. But by doing the testing and judging the schools/teachers on the results, we create a big incentive for both teaching to the test and for cheating. (Along with the fact that if you're unsophisticated in your interpretation of the test results, it will turn out that teachers of middle-class white and Asian kids are almost all really good, and teachers of poor black and brown kids from bad neighborhoods are almost all really lousy.)

My own experience is that if I'm not running into places of my own ignorance very often, I'm not pushing myself enough, not exposing myself to enough new ideas. Staying inside a bubble where only your current knowledge is enough to understand the world is like deciding that you'll never listen to any music that wasn't popular when you were growing up.

Michael #56:

Couldn't you work in mercury in vaccines and "the truth about the 9/11 attacks" in there, somewhere? I'm sure they're all involved in AIDS somehow....

I forgot my original comment: I don't think this is sneer-worthy, or yet another sign of the sophocopalypse. If it were The Voyage of the _Space_Beagle_ (in the absence of a working tag), or "The Voyage of the Space Beagle", or even The voyage of the space Beagle, now that would be a thing. It will be easier once your spex or implants flag nouns as proper or not, just as (if you are of a mind to do) it will flag dress as improproper or not, using laser-interferometric data and a Biblical/Quranic expert system.

Also, <Obligatory "'Two Cultures' reference>.

The classical education is dead. Someone else would have to tell me if it ever really existed.

It did. I studied Latin for 10 years and Greek for 6 at school. Once upon a time I could translate extracts from Macaulay into the style of Tacitus (with a dictionary to check whether a given word was current in silver age prose). I am not yet 60.

I have forgotten the whole lot, of course, but I have noticed that the best third generation programmers I've encountered in the real world tend to be trained Latinists at least as much as mathematicians, so there.

I didn't know the name of Darwin's ship when I first read Voyage of the Space Beagle, but I found the title's image neither cute nor scampering. I lived in the countryside and I'd seen fox hunts set off with beagles. I thought of the dogs as dedicated hunters.

Doris Egan, #20: I don't have the original context, so I wonder: isn't it possible David Matthew knows what the title refers to, and considers it so famous he hasn't referenced it?

If I had come across this line in a review, that would be my assumption. The idea that he didn't know the reference would never have occurred to me if Patrick hadn't suggested it. And, on a purely technical note, I can't think of any way to slip in the exposition that wouldn't have defused the joke.

Alas, by the time I reached secondary education we were reduced to a mere 5 years of Latin, no Greek, and the Latin omitted entirely any attempt to translate English into Latin. Quite how they thought you could learn a language without ever attempting to say anything in it is beyond me.

Looking at my childrens' recent educational careers, it is certainly possible to leave school in the UK with no significant knowledge whatsoever of science. The vast majority of children take a single "combined science" course. One typical curriculum is here:
http://www.21stcenturyscience.org/the-courses/core-science-science-for-scientific-literacy,907,NA.html

And the universities are no better. We recently met a young women doing a plant survey while we were out walking. She was a recent postgrad on her first job, with a degree in field ecology, and when we met her she was laboriously keying out a primrose. Walking around with her it became clear that despite three years of degree level education, she was unable to identify on sight a single flowering plant.

We really are heading towards a point at which there's no-one left who knows how the machines work.

Education in a culture consists of what the culture considers appropriate to denotatively communicate for:
a) expectation of "what someone in this culture needs to know to survive"
b) the culture to survive as meme and continue itself
c) extras considered "good" and appropriate, beyond pure survival of individuals complying with the cultural norms, and survival of the culture.
d) values reflecting the above

Dead White Males from the northern Mediterranean area as pedagogical mandates reflects the mindset and value set of renaissance Europe. The Greeks and the Romans had societies based on slave labor, and voting for their very limits classes of adult citizen males. The Greek city states got conquered by Macedonia and later Rome because they weren't much into cooperation.

Not being a white male, there's a limit to my admiration and extolling of the Greek and Roman culture, and their Importance. China seems have had some very advanced technology and social stability over millennia despite a lack Greek and Roman influence. The decisions for insularity and a stone boat over contact with the rest of the world, however, were factors which ultimated caused China to stop being in the technological forefront and be susceptible instead to foreign invasion.

Rome, for that matter, made the concious decision to squelch technological advancement, for fear of social change and particularly the prospect of the social system involving patron, the patronized, and slaves, changing.'

The technology in the Americas failed to get recognized as such--horticulture gets at lot less attention in the modern world as Important in general everyday life, than giant particle accelerators, say. But, look at diet and where the foods came from--peanuts, potatoes, tomatoes, nearly all squash, most beans, duck, turkey, maize, are from the Americans. Wheat, barley, rice, oats, sheep (though there are native American sheep, they weren't the ones domesticated), goats, cattle (though there is beefalo, with bison and bos taurus crossbred), chickens, lettuce, carrots, beets and their relatives, spinach and its relatives, soybeans, tef, most citrus, apples, pears, the cabbage family... are products of the eastern hemisphere. Both hemispheres had grapes.

The Americas had magnificent horticulture, some of which was intentionally suppressed (quinoa and another crop I can't think of at the moment, because they were also tied into homicidal religious rites and bloodletting) after Columbus. The depopulation and considerable social debilitation of the Americas occurred with the arrival of Eastern hemisphere pathogens on infected Eastern hemisphere natives. (Translation, the Europeans particularly were unsanitary and carried all sorts of nasty disease with them, that where the native populations didn;t all die from the spreading diseases, it weakened their cultures and societies anyway to where conquest was a lot easier.)

(I was very surprised to find out that domestic duck, is actually mostly mallard, which again, is an American native bird).

#63 Andy

And the universities are no better. We recently met a young women doing a plant survey while we were out walking. She was a recent postgrad on her first job, with a degree in field ecology, and when we met her she was laboriously keying out a primrose. Walking around with her it became clear that despite three years of degree level education, she was unable to identify on sight a single flowering plant.

Gak! A cousin of mine whose degree is in biology, at the age of two or three was doing better than that (he walked over to a plant and said, "smackdwagum" ( = snapdragon, which it was).

Hell, I'd be happy if the schools here did a good enough job at teaching classical mechanics that the students came out believing in wearing seat belts.

Andy @ #63, one of Clifford Stoll's pet peeves is undergrad astronomy students who can't look up at the sky (even in a suitably dark location) and name even a single constellation.

Paula @#64, I think the other crop you're trying to think of is amaranth. I've grown it, actually, but the one I grew was a variety bred for leaf production rather than the seeds, which were the part used in the religious rituals. It was pretty tasty, attractive and easy to grow.

Paula Lieberman # 64:
Rome, for that matter, made the concious decision to squelch technological advancement, for fear of social change and particularly the prospect of the social system involving patron, the patronized, and slaves, changing.'

Hmm... I think I might be kind of skeptical of that statement. Certainly, there were technological advancements during Roman times (e.g., concrete and other architecture advances; siege weaponry; more advanced water mills; etc.). And what evidence is there that the Romans "consciously" decided to squelch anything, other than, say, religious cults that seemed to threaten the existing social order (Bacchic cults during the Republic, Christianity during the Empire)?

Alison Scott @44:

Clearly there is a burning need for the UK version of SchoolHouse Rock, which taught at least one American generation to sing the Preamble to the Constitution, and about how bills become law.

Lila @67: How can students be expected to identify even the Big Dipper if they've never spent much time in a place where the sky gets dark at night? And where their parents didn't, either?

Now, one of *my* pet peeves is that 99.98% of movies & TV showing "space" depict a uniform sprinkling of stars and no Galaxy. The one exception was Babylon 5 -- they weren't consistent, but at least there *was* a Galaxy, much of the time.

Lila @ 67: One of my pet peeves is computer science graduates who can't program, can't do simple arithmetic in hexadecimal, etc. We tend to encounter them with alarming frequency at $WORKPLACE, where the interview process begins with a written skill test.

(Then there was the guy who made special arrangements to write the test from home, in another city. Most or all of his answers were cribbed from the web -- usually the second or third hit on Google. This came to our attention because one of his answers, to a math question, involved blather about selecting a group of atoms, applying a name to the group, and then running a function from the menu. My boss asked me if I, as a chemist, knew what he was going on about, and it seemed to me that that paragraph had been copied from documentation that I had written a few years earlier, for a chemical structure modelling software package. As it turned out, the text was from documentation for the equivalent feature in a competing software package. But the prospective job applicant hadn't even realized that the text was almost entirely irrelevant to the question he was answering.)

Doctor Science @#70, you have a point about the rarity of dark skies. But is it really prohibitively expensive to go somewhere that has them? Sure, many would-be astronomy majors come from families of limited means--but ALL of them? I would bet that from most areas in the US you can drive an hour or two and get to a fairly dark rural area. Compared to two weeks at Space Camp, a weekend stay in the Podunk Hotel in order to catch a meteor shower from a local beach or park would be fairly cheap.

Stuart, #38: The Fundamental Theorem of Integral Calculus is the dividing line between the great mass of the population that is scientifically illiterate and the smaller percentage that have a clue.

What an utter crock of shit. The existence of pop-culture TV shows like Watch Mr. Wizard and Bill Nye the Science Guy is proof that you don't have to get into integral calculus to be scientifically literate. I don't need to be able to describe the math of nuclear fusion in order to understand that it's what powers the sun.

Epacris, #41: The whole thing about Chaos theory, contingency, Heisenberg & assorted basic concepts of unknowingness & randomness either haven't penetrated or their worldview simply rejects that entire group of concepts.

I plump for the latter hypothesis. You have no idea how many arguments I've had with people who honestly believe that "everything happens for a REASON"! And they'll build the most rickety towers of pseudo-connection in order to avoid admitting that anything could be random. I've actually invented a new description for the logical fallacy I see them demonstrate: ante hoc, ergo propter hoc. As seen in the wild: "[horrible thing] HAD to happen so that you could have [good thing] now!"

*skipping to the end*

One: people need to be taught age-appropriate physics, at least as much as age-appropriate sex education. With luck, the former will, by the age of 16, allow the young human to do the math in her head and come up with an answer for (2xy=350)+(2xx=240)+(1xx=90)/(Plymouth Kcar)(wet road+15mph turn) which doesn't put the two boys and the extra little sister on the passenger side of the car and then go around the outside corner at 30. Equals tree, and damned lucky it was rotted from so many earlier impacts that no-one was killed.

Two: the reviewer was doomed as soon as he critiqued the title, which is always a sucker move.

Joel @ 71: Funny you mention it.

I just made a tentative hire yesterday, after a week and a half of interviews with different applicants. (We're going to have him do a toy-sized real-world project first and see how he does before we formalize the hire.)

I gave all the applicants a simple programming skills test - 3 fairly simple problems (parse a string containing a file name, test whether two rectangles intersect, and reverse a singly-linked list.) Two applicants, with years of resume experience, were completely unable to do any of them. One of these at least knew it and said "Oh no!" when I showed her the list of questions*. The other was blithering on confidently inventing new "or" operators and writing complete gobbledegook. A third applicant did OK at the first two, then asked "what's a linked list?" After I put my jaw back in and explained, he looked at it a bit and blithely said "I have no idea how to do that."

It's been a strong reminder that, apparently, a substantial number of working programmers can't thinks in code. I think there's a large degree of pure talent involved. It's not simply education or exposure, given the range of both I've seen in the last few weeks.

* I really was hoping we could hire her, because she had great QA and writing experience, and was demonstrating those skills, but we needed someone who could code too.

Lila @ 67:
... one of Clifford Stoll's pet peeves is undergrad astronomy students who can't look up at the sky (even in a suitably dark location) and name even a single constellation.

Heh... I'm reminded of a passage in Walden where Thoreau opines that not one of the learned astronomers of Harvard University would be capable of navigating his way across Boston Harbor, let alone the wider seas.

The truth is that there are lots of professional astronomers who only know a handful of constellations (I can probably only find twelve or thirteen myself), and more than a few who know none. It partly depends on how they got into astronomy, of course: those who came in via physics are less likely to know constellations than those who got started as amateur observers with backyard telescopes in their childhood.

On the other hand... I can't help thinking that complaints like "Oh, kids these days, they can't even identify constellations/primroses/whatever" are a bit superficial. It's not necessarily a good indicator of deeper knowledge or commitment, even though people may want to see it that way. (It's perhaps a trifle sad that modern-day medical doctors cannot, on the whole, read Galen in the original Greek. But if they could, it wouldn't tell you very much about how good they were as modern-day doctors.)

Matt@30 channels Beyond This Horizon's discussion of an infant's math education (that ends with ~"They hadn't started him on arithmetic yet; after all, he was only a baby.")

Stuart@38, Micah@48: definitely. ISTM that the prevailing attitude today is that scientists just make things up; an understanding of experimentalism, including experimental error, is key to understanding that scientists are not politicians. There should also be room for knowing how theories got discarded (e.g., was phlogiston really that stupid an idea before investigators got seriously quantitative?) and the difference between the basics and the bleeding edge.

DrSci@70/Lila@72: it doesn't take anywhere near that long to get to where you can see constellations; at my job, ~10 miles from downtown Boston, the Dipper and Orion (in season) are clearly visible despite the sidewalk lighting. Suburbs may be better for starhunting than exurbs as there's less clutter, provided the light pollution isn't too horrible. Maybe it's as much a question of being taught that there is something to see -- although I wonder why such people would even take astronomy; do they think it's a gut course or are they confusing it with astrology, or . . . ?

CHip@77: "or are they confusing it with astrology, or . . . ?"

They must be. How many people do you meet who are perfectly able to answer the question of whether or not a Cancer is compatible with an Aries?

One of my pet peeves is the vast number of educated, even scientifically-literate people I know who don't understand simple concepts about the law, such as the basis for judicial review of legislation, what "at-will" employment means and why it is the default in the United States, and the history and point of the Seventh Amendment. These are things that affect Americans' day-to-day lives much more than a detailed understanding of how nuclear fusion works or the grammar of Latin.

Where I try to avoid a total plunge into curmudgeonly elitism is getting away from the notion that anyone who doesn't "get" my speciality is an ignorant fool, and how Kids These Days are not taught such concepts as they were in my youth.

I think we would all agree that it would be nice if kids were given a well-rounded, fact-based education that focused more on understanding and less on how to fill in the little circles on the SAT. But let's not use that as an excuse to say that [my area of learning] is something any fool ought to know.

Clifton @ #75, I'd have embarrassed myself if given those questions. I learned a dead (programming) language.

The astronomy subthread is making me think of Walt Whitman's "When I Heard the Learned Astronomer," a poem which, alas, annoys me:

When I heard the learn'd astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.

I can't read this thing without thinking that Whitman is missing at least as much as the "learn'd astronomer." Probably much more--it's very likely that a habit of looking up in perfect silence at the stars was the reason the astronomer decided to learn about them in the first place.

@Joel #71 -

Ah, programmers who can't write code, can't think code, don't know the languages they claim to be able to write code in, can't solve simple problems, and can't imagine the basic routines behind an extremely simplified ATM (I mean, the idea that you need an operation to deduct money from the customer's account entirely escapes them).

The sad part is that some of them do get hired in the industry. I can't explain it, except that someone must want warm bodies more than thinking bodies. Sometimes if you hand them explicit instructions and then check the work afterward with a dedicated QA team you might be able to not lose money on the deal.

Over at The Company we tend to demolitions-interview our candidates---multiple phone screens and then multiple in-house interviews, and then group discussion as to whether we would want so-and-so on our team. Many times the interview process is cross-team, and the standard is: "If you think the guy 'might be a good hire' at that level and yet you don't want him on *your* team at that level, that's a no-hire."

Peter Erwin @76:
Most of them don't care; most "constellations" are what professional astronomers call "stellations" because there isn't really a "con-" (== "with"): they're artifacts of our viewing location and angle. Professional astronomers are more interested in true constellations — most of which aren't visible from the earth's surface.

Doctor Science @70:
Never mind the UK; there's a pressing need for it to be reintroduced here in the US. (The good news is it's in the bargain DVD bins at local grocery and discount stores, at least around here.)

Yesterday, the local SF club's meeting involved parlor games. One question was what the opposite of a positron is. Someone suggested a negatron.

What this discussion reminds me of a talk/exposition that Octavia Butler and Chip Delaney gave at MIT in 1998

Part of the discussion rolled around to the apparent decline of functional literacy in the "first world," and what might be the causes and effects from such a decline.

From my own comments during that discussion, I opined that sometimes it looked like a purposeful shift away from general literacy, and what the consequences could be:

"...As a perceived need for literacy drops, what we may see is a growing despotism of those who can read, who can control the information flow. And getting back to the fragmentation, the balkanization of language through slang may become a way that some people would possibly use to control segments of the society--the same way that in the past, people think and react to their neighbors differently on the basis of religion, color, or small shifts in language. You see it in very insular areas. There are places where you can still go today and you can live there for 40 years and you're still one of their flatlanders rather than being somebody who has lived there..."

[uh, huh, uh huh -- I finally get to quote myself..{/snicker}]

I gather that "negatron" has been used in the past to refer to electrons, though I don't know if the term is used at all currently.

Joel -- in re the three questions for the programming job -- depending on the computing language involved, I might not be able to pass your te, and I do have 30+ years of real-life/real-world programming experience using multiple computer languages. I would very likely be able solve them using pseudo-code, though.

This brings up the parallel issue of what is deemed "important" in a skill set. Is the knowledge of precise syntax and semantics of a particular language more important than than the ability to review a problem and be able to do root cause error analysis? This is the equivalent of the earlier classroom effort to find 6 different ways to estimate gravitational force -- the point of the exercise was not really to find the estimates of the force involved, but to review the steps required to find the result, including the acknowledgment that Sometimes You Make Mistakes, and to work on the path that shows you learned from that mistake*

* this lack of recognition of the need to acknowledge People Make Mistakes is what makes me want to yell at people who denigrate politicians who may have had a change of belief/action based on the acquisition of new facts. The set of information available changing may require that the beliefs dependent upon that information set may change.

I.E.: if the facts-in-possession that led a U.S. Senator vote to approve a war-powers declaration are proven to be false and/or fabricated, an announced declaration to be *against* that war, after the new facts are made available, is not a "flip-flop," but a rational and responsible act.

Joel --
No, No, the opposition to the positron would have to be the Susancalvin, of course.

Peter @ #76, I don't think a professional astronomer who's never looked up at the night sky is in the same category as a doctor who's never read Galen. It's more like a doctor who's never dissected a cadaver.

Those who know more astronomy than I do: aren't stars named after the constellations in which they appear, in order of brightness (e.g. 51 Pegasi)? In which case, aren't constellations relevant to astronomers, even though they're an artifact of the view from Earth's position?

The title might have been easier to parse if it had been The Voyage of the Starship Beagle; but of course, that is only because I grew up on "[..] the voyages of the Starship Enterprise."

Besides, wasn't 'space' as an adjective (space cop, space pirate, etc.) the marker for science fiction once upon a time?

I should add, The Voyage of the Space Beagle was one of the first bits of science fiction I was able to buy on my own dime; fondly recalled for that.

I think the title of Darwin's book is also falsely cute. The ship name promises a dog, and yet it's finches finches finches all the way down.

Melissa Singer @#1: I think I saw the same exhibit, but at the field. His notebook with the words "I think" written above a doodle of an evolutionary tree is one of the most inspiring things I have seen in my life.

Matt@54: Sakurai is very much the sort of approach I have in mind, yes. That's a graduate textbook, of course, but I think that approach would be reasonable for undergrad quantum mechanics too.

It would indeed have to be made less abstract, but that shouldn't be too hard; something like the Stern-Gerlach experiment would be a reasonable starting point.

I just can't think of any justification, other than tradition, for spending the first half of a quantum mechanics class going over some of the more subtle aspects of late 19th century classical physics. That sort of thing belongs in history of science classes. It's not as if classical mechanics classes do calculations the way Newton did. Better to teach science as it's understood today.

Ah, context....

There's writing that assumes the typical reader has alluded to information in the reader's knowledge domain, and there's also writing that assumes that the typical reader won't have the decoding keys/information. (Tuckerisms in a commercial work, for example, generally involve the assumption that the typical reader isn't going to notice "Lady Tersa" and think "Teresa Nielsen Hayden).

Books written for contemporary audiences usually include contemporary givens and use analogies, metaphors, similes, etc., that are contemporary, and that decades later, are inaccessible or have lost the meaning that they had. "'til the cows come home" is a saying that has a very compelling relevance/image to it to someone who's been around a herd of cows, which come back from the pasture to the barn every afternoon without human intervention. Someone not familiar that that characteristic of domestic pastured barned cattle, isn't going to associate that meaning with the phrase.

Cultures have information that has the assumption that the members of the culture have acquired that information, as part of the common cultural fabric. Writings, songs, plays, stories, tutorial methods... of the culture use that assumed common knowledge base and may completelhy depend on it for communication.

Regarding physics--Newtonian physics is macroscopically present. Quantum mechanics isn't. The apple falling off the tree, rain falling from the sky, baseballs and footballs coming down and bouncing, are everyday occurrences at the macroscopic level, and things that people see, hear, smell, touch, taste... the same is not true of quantum tunneling. There is an experiencial component to Newtonian physics, that is not as direct with quantum mechanics. Newtonian physics is a case of quantum mechanics, but it's the one that the general population has as daily existence.

And most people, have some degree of being not well equipped to deal with things that they haven't experienced, some people have very narrow imaginations, until there is a model that's tactile and real to them, they can't imagine something.... (Industrial control engineers can't "blue sky" brainstorm; they can invent to demand, but they need someone -else- to write the specification denoting performance, size, shape, weight, operation... and -then- they will invent something which will meet the specs. Other people come up with idea with no ability to come up with ways for things to implement the ideas, at the other extreme of inventiveness. And then there are "flowers are red, green leaves are green, there's no way to see flowers any other way than the way they always have been seen" closed mind types....

#47 Epacris

I was disgusted to see in the current verions of a particular military specifications, an equation which requires at least undergraduate level math and maybe grad level, to have a clue about--it wasn't that I couldn't follow it, it was that the spec seemed written by some contractor unable to comprehend or uncaring of the fact that the equation was NOT relevant to the typical readers trying to either implement the spec, or to make sense of the spec and follow it.

The equation pertained to the derivation of the rules--which are extremely badly discussed, all in passive voice, of course, and without being decently indexed, even though they're distributed as .doc and .pdf files!

One of the few things that the Carter administration did as regards military stuff that I approved of, was set a "plain English" policy for government documents. The Reagan nincompoops got rid of that, and the Bushwhackers further offended. And turning everything over to contractors too proud of their analytical skills and the abominable passive voice abominable tech writing prevalent to juried journal papers and not concerned with the ability of ordinary mortals to follow passive voice alleged information, has made it even worse. It's a miracle ANYTHING that made for the military works anymore, because the spec writing has gotten so lousy!

Craig R. @ 87: Joel -- in re the three questions for the programming job -- depending on the computing language involved, I might not be able to pass your te, and I do have 30+ years of real-life/real-world programming experience using multiple computer languages.

That wasn't "my" test described, though the one my employer uses is broadly similar. Would you be able to do that kind of task in a language that you were familiar with and which was suited to the task? That would be a reasonable comparison -- after all, we're giving the test to people who've applied for a position with an advertised set of skill requirements, and testing them for actual abilities with those skills.

And perhaps I'm showing my prejudices (or my age), but I really do think that anyone with a degree in computing science ought to be able to add 5 and 0xFFFE, as 16-bit values to give a 16-bit result, without a calculator.

David Mathew, #50, would you care to clarify your review?

Joel, the company I work for has occasional openings for people who can use Microstation. They say upfront that it's required, and still half (or more) of the people applying can't pass a simple written test on it (that's the first test they have to take).

I suspect a lot of people believe that charm (or a lot of jokes) can get you hired, even if you can't meet the minimum standards for the job.

Googling away...

{making strangled noises: http://smarthomies.blogspot.com/2007/09/hero-of-alexandria-greeks-and-mystery.html Flatearther-type homeschooler mindset,
It is the Word of God, taken as a unit, or the "Christian worldview," which provided the social and economic preconditions and wisdom necessary for the development of the industrial and technical West. No one else had this. Thus, only the wisdom of the word of Christ enabled the sharpest rise in the general standard of living the world has ever seen. For in Him "are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge." {making more choking noises}}

Ah, here's a more encouraging link:

http://etext.virginia.edu/cgi-local/DHI/dhi.cgi?id=dv4-48

The civilization of China, ancient, extensive, and resilient, gave the world a number of great inventions....we may tentatively assume that the diversion and ultimate frustration of the inventive impulse was due to the values inculcated by the powerful bureaucracy,
the low esteem in which utilitarian motives were held, and the real lack of incentives to economic activity....

The experiences of classical antiquity tend to confirm that the progress of technics can be arrested at any stage by unfavorable social influence. In particular it has frequently, and plausibly, been suggested that the institution of slavery accounts for the ultimate failure of Greek and Roman science and technics.... (words regardign Alexandria in Egypt being an exception as regards interest and advancement in technics, but that a single city couldn't carry out an technological and informational revolution on its own) Was it perhaps symbolic thatthe only one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world which served a useful purpose and was not an instance of conspicuous consumption was the Pharos at Alexandria?

[references at the bottom of the webpage, but no specific citations for the particular passages above]

Thinking tangentally, the answer to the question, "Why didn't Archimedes invent integral calculus" turns out to be, "He did, but in the centuries between him and the time of Newton and Leibnitz, not enough people were sufficiently interested/cared/cognizant for that knowledge to be intenionally preserved." That the information got rediscovered recently, occurred because modern technology allows scanning imagery, including characters, that over time got written over by later scribes who were more interested in putting down their own words, than preserving what was already written on paper, hides, and another material usable for writing on.

Values come into play... there was a monastery full of ancient manuscripts, that over time the monks of stopped being interested in the manuscripts for their contents, and instead was using them for fuel for heating and/or cooking.

Craig: in re the three questions for the programming job -- depending on the computing language involved, I might not be able to pass your test, and I do have 30+ years of real-life/real-world programming experience using multiple computer languages.

That's the reason each question begins, "In your preferred programming language, sketch out a function to..." and I accepted pseudocode as valid, as long as it seemed to approximate some sane language.

While our current development is in C#, I would slightly prefer someone who knows no C# but knows Java and C and C++ and Python and Perl, etc. as compared to someone who knows only C#. I had never seen C# before they hired me last year, and once I showed them a sample of my work they had no qualms about that.

I picked the problems fairly carefully too, as being characteristic of the kind of small problem that crop up and you have to solve constantly on the way to solving bigger problems. If you can't solve the small problems quickly and get them out of your way, the big ones are going to take you a hell of a lot longer.

#75 Clifton

My reaction would be, "Oh, no!" also.... (QA engineer.... but I have to do some thinking in octal, some in hex, and then there is mixed format variable, the least significant three charaters are octal, the most significant two two are hex, how's -that- for a headache!, oh, there's another example of a mixed format variable, the least significant character ranged 0 - 3, and the most significant character is in octal....) My view of program-something-to is "there are lots of references that state how to do those things."

(And mostly I do manual testing anyway. Some of the places I've worked, programming is not a highly relevant skill as regards, "what did the developers not address in the spec/design/user interface/user-lack-of-brain-and-lack-of-coordination areas? Examples include, "what happens when the user enters an illegal value?" --it's alas NOT rare that the software writer left out validity checking on input, or failed to allow for human error in data entry otherwise, or for just plain cluelessness or maliciousness.)

#77 CHip

The Schmuck in the White House is an experimental error?!

"are they confusing it with astrology?"

See the epilogue of Poul Anderon's The High Crusade

PJ Evans @98: It depends a lot on the company and the job posting. Sometimes "requirements" (especially in terms of industry experience or familiarity with a particular language) turn out to be more... "guidelines". If you're the kind of person who learns languages and tools quickly, you may apply anyway figuring that you can get a crash course that will get you up to speed. Applying the test is then the best way to make it clear to applicants that No Really, We Mean It. (I've *never* taken a job where I knew the primary language of development well -- or often at all -- before I started.)

Joel Polowin @ 86... Well, blow me down. The word has indeed been used to refer to an electron. I also found that...

Negatron was the eighth album released by Canadian thrash metal/progressive metal band Voivod.

I still think it sounds like the name of an enemy of the Transformers.

Joel Polowin at #96: 16-bit signed or unsigned?

Lila @ 89:

Peter @ #76, I don't think a professional astronomer who's never looked up at the night sky is in the same category as a doctor who's never read Galen. It's more like a doctor who's never dissected a cadaver.

Well, we were talking about the idea of people who didn't "know the constellations", not people who'd "never looked up"!

But the relevant question would, I suppose, be this: is item of knowledge or experience X something that contemporary professional training assumes or requires? E.g., do medical schools still require dissection of cadavers on the part of doctors in training? If so, then it is important. And by this test, knowing the constellations is not -- no one tests you on your knowledge of constellations during your Ph.D. (Now that I think about it... it's true that I might mock a fellow astronomer who admitted that they couldn't identify any constellations at all... but it would be light-hearted, and it wouldn't