Month: June 2022

Categories
my thoughts

Day Eight

Evey kid starts out as a natural-born scientist, and then we beat it out of them. A few trickle through the system with their wonder and enthusiasm for science intact” – Carl Sagan

Languages; when I started thinking about this I was reading a primer on Latin. I have been fascinated with languages(although poor at learning them) since I started my studies in STS. (STS = science and technology studies or science and technology in society). While not a great insight, I think it is overlooked that if a language doesn’t have a word for an item, it doesn’t exist in that culture. Words I struggled with in STS were ontology and epistemology. And a reminder to those who hate wikipedia; I find it an interesting place to start my research on any topic. It just doesn’t end there.

However, as I thought about it, it isn’t about languages as much as its about formulating questions. How does a language evolve? Words must be created to describe a new thing. What would the word ‘radio’ mean to Socrates? Many questions were asked and answered over the past 2700 (or so) years. In our society, more people will quibble over the number 2700 than will be interested in the question posed.

As many of you know, history was not one of my interests until the aforementioned STS work. It seems to me the history and trajectory of a society can be told in the evolution of the language of a culture and the questions being asked within that culture.

During my short career as a teacher, well, formal career, I found students were often unable to formulate a question. As I look back over my varied careers, I find that is generally the issue; “what problem are we trying to solve, really?” The old saying,”A problem well stated is a problem half solved,” is more than a cute saying. It should be every scientist’s and engineer’s mantra. It is not at all clear to me that all studies start from that position.

It also occurred to me that there are far more answers looking for questions than well stated questions looking for answers.

“The one real object of education is to have a man in the condition of continually asking questions.” — attributed to Bishop Mandell Creighton, a British historian who lived 1843-1901.

Categories
education my thoughts

Computational Thinking in Education

Today’s scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality. — Nikola Tesla

What is computational thinking? Search for the term using Google returns a number of definitions; for example, DIMACS at Rutgers, Wolfram, and especially Stephen Wolfram.

I think this subjects is interpreted as “Computers in Schools.” In my opinion, simply teaching elementary school students how to program is a waste of time. From my limited conversations, it provides the already overworked teachers either yet another topic to cover, or perhaps a bit of a respite so they can concentrate on all the paperwork foisted upon them.

Computers can be a powerful tool for education and research; or, they can be another solution looking for a problem. If a student or researcher doesn’t know how to formulate the question, then a computer often provides a means by which wrong answers are achieved faster; and, unfortunately with the authority of being computer produced!

computational thinking
computational thinking process

In my opinion, this is where computational thinking enters. Computational thinking allows the ‘computer’ to become a part of the problem stating and solving process.

I must add, it is important that everyone learn how to observe. To me that means getting outside and observing the world. Or, perhaps, sitting in a coffee shop and observing the gestalt of the setting.

“In Mathematics the art of proposing a question must be held of higher value than solving it.” — Georg Cantor

Categories
philosophy

Ten

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology. – Carl Sagan

On two occasions I have been asked, ‘Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’ I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. – Charles Babbage

Imagination is the Discovering Faculty, pre-eminently. It is that which penetrates into the unseen worlds around us, the worlds of Science. – Ada Lovelace

Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men. – Martin Luther King, Jr.

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny…’ – Isaac Asimov

I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted. – Alan Turing

It is becoming clear that most great ideas have already been expressed. It is but necessary to sort them from all of the other ideas.

Categories
philosophy

Day Seven

第七天 Another “transliteration” of Day Seven, from Chinese. A browser didn’t like the Chinese characters as a file name.

I just find it interesting that seven in Simplified Chinese is qi. For some in the west seven is considered a lucky number. A reasonable translation of qi, is “life energy”.

In my opinion, it is interesting to contrast the view of our world through the minds of the “East” and of the “West”. Anything I write would be oversimplifications of these views. Perhaps when I become better at moving thoughts from mind to print I will address this. For now suffice it to say, “I find this an interesting topic.”

Qigong is the art and science of refining and cultivating internal energy.

— Ken Cohen

Categories
education Porch Ponders

DIES SEX

Day Six; transliteration can be dangerous or amusing; is transliterate the correct word for this? What is the word for substituting word for word rather than letter by letter?

In my advanced years, I am attempting to learn other languages. I find that translating word by word is but a small, and sometimes incorrect, part of this. Even learning sentence structure is insufficient. Learning a language is more than the syntax.

During my brief stint teaching physics and engineering, I tried to impress on my students that mathematics is the language of those(and probably other) subjects. As with any language, the syntax is a necessary but insufficient part of learning mathematics.

Most of our understanding of the world is through mathematics. Whether it be quantum physics, climatology or politics, math is the language. One would never think of understanding quantum physics without it.

“Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion.” — W. Edwards Deming

Too often we… enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.  John F. Kennedy

Categories
education Porch Ponders

Day Five

“Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.”

— Sir Arthur Eddington(1882-1944)

On considering “Oratorio for Living Things”, I am sitting on the porch, thinking. We view the world through the lens of a very small slice of time, space and wavelengths. We have built our view of our world in that set of dimensions our entire life. What if that set of dimensions is incomplete? What if the ‘spiritual’ dimension is real; but completely misunderstood? What if there are dimensions in which we exist but are completely unaware?

My view, education is the process by which we move the boundaries of the unknown; not a training ground for a high paying career.

“Wonder is the beginning of wisdom.”   ― Socrates

Categories
Porch Ponders

Day Four

“I would rather live in a world where my life is surrounded by mystery than live in a world so small that my mind could comprehend it.” — Harry Emerson Fosdick.

I am starting to believe that civilizations stagnate and die because they lose the desire to explore. This, in my opinion, is why space exploration, expansion and exploitation is crucial to the future of humans. Now, a darkly amusing thought, will spacers return in the distant future to help the ‘developing’ economies of these ‘earthers’? A question continues to ‘bug’ me. For thousands of years civilizations came and went all over the globe. A few hundred years ago something happened in Europe to place humanity on a completely different trajectory that has put us in this amazing technological civilization; what happened? Has it happened before? Was this really where it started? Has this civilization reached stagnation?

I am starting to believe that civilizations stagnate and die because we lose the desire to explore. Education is no longer an institution to explore one’s curiosities, it is a job training ground to further entrench our view of the current civilization. This is, of course, an opinion based on anecdotal evidence observed through the lens of one individual. An individual who has built a world view over a a 70 year span; a view that looks rather believable. A world view built on observations of a very narrow slice of time, space, and wavelength spectrum; and, perhaps, dimensions of which we are unaware.

“It’s a magical world, Hobbes. Old buddy … Let’s go exploring.”

— Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Waterson

Categories
Porch Ponders

Day Three

Words are interesting. A popular online game is Wordle. The Free Dictionary contains 158,390 five letter words; the goal of Wordle. The number used by Wordle varies from reference to reference; 2309 or 2315. In these references you will see the initial list contained 12,972 words of which 10,967 are accepted as guesses, but only the smaller numbers above are the solution words.

It is amazing to me that in three or four attempts one can eliminate most of these.

Categories
philosophy

Day Two

Time is but a state of mind.

“There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.” – Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi

The more I read the more I think there is significant ‘truth’ in fiction and much fiction in ‘truth’.