Last night, as I walked out of the office about 5:45 p.m., I looked up at the Moon and saw right next to it a bright object, and snapped a photo with my camera.
Turns out that was Jupiter next to the moon. And it turns out too that only recently scientists understood why Jupiter appears smaller than Venus when you look at it with your eye, but larger than Venus when you look at it through a telescope.
The problem, which was first documented by Galileo, is that Venus is smaller than Jupiter and thus when we see it (even though Venus is closer) it should appear smaller. But it doesn't, unless you look through a telescope.
The reason is because of the way our eyes look at white things against black backgrounds. When we see a white spot on a black background, the brighter that spot is, the larger our eyes imagine it to be. So Venus, which is brighter than Jupiter, appears larger because our eyes think brighter= larger.
THE THINKING MAN'S BLADE RUNNER: a short scifi story about life, and love, and having a girlfriend who is actually a clone programmed by a computer who gets mad at you because she thinks you're trying to reprogram her. SAME OLD SAME OLD...
I took today off from work to celebrate Sweetest Day with Sweetie, who is my sweetest. (The actual day is tomorrow, but it's easier to go have a relaxing time while Mr F and Mr Bunches are in school than if they are with babysitters.)
We went to the Chazen Museum of Art on campus, which you may remember from the time I took the boys there and snapped a few photos of stuff despite knowing that it's illegal (?) to do so. This time, I had more time, and fewer bored 7-year-olds, and so I got LOTS more pictures.
Herewith:
These were pictures near the bathroom on the first level, just before the main gallery. They made me think of math homework.
The main exhibit, which I took only a few pictures of because the security guards were watching us like hawks -- honestly, they were, by the third floor Sweetie, when the guard for that floor walked by us for the zillionth time, said "Do you think we're being watched?"
I did.
Probably they were aware that I was sneaking pictures and were trying to catch me in the act. Being an art museum security guard is probably pretty dull, because of the low number of art heists being pulled off these days.
Heist is a good, solid, old-fashioned word that should be used more. Another one? Swindle. I don't know why I thought of that just now but it's true: nobody ever says swindle anymore.
Anyway, the main exhibit, as it turns out, was a traveling show by Romare Bearden, who is a famous artist, I'm told, and the exhibit was a double set of heavy charcoal/or ink line drawings -- they looked more like sketches than anything, but I liked them a lot -- that told the story of the Iliad, followed by paper-and-paint collages of The Odyssey.
The collages were great: they contrasted the Odyssey with the Civil War and US aggression to Indians through the shapes and color choices, while also being clearly the Odyssey, or at least so far as I know since I gave up reading that boring poem, only to then like the collages. Turns out what it was missing was bright colors! (Turns out my reading habits are the same as a parakeet's!)
I could only get that one quick snap of a battle, because the security guard was on us like... I'm coming up a blank. He was on us like something that is really on another thing, if that other thing is doing something that would get that thing kicked out of an art museum.
This:
... was neat. Hey, I never took any kind of art classes that would teach me how to properly critique art, so you get what I can give, here.
You can tell from the close-up what the texture was like:
I believe that is cake frosting. I could be wrong.
One of the first dates I ever took Sweetie to was the Art Institute in Chicago (the same place Ferris went on his day off). I enjoy art museums almost disproportionately. We spent about 1 1/2 hours here today before heading off to lunch. I could've spent even more time, and when I mentioned that to Sweetie she said we didn't have to leave, but I didn't mind: I go to this museum 1-2 times a year.
(It helps that it's free. Although I did donate $2. In the olden days, when we first started dating, I never gave anything to the "suggested donation" boxes but now I give a bit.)
Many of the pictures actually have me in them: they are self-portraits, unintentionally.
That is a close-up of a glass sculpture in other glass, and the glass display case is a two-way mirror: you can see in but on the other side it reflects, which I thought was genius.
I am standing beside the glass, looking in, and it's reflecting me back. It took me a second to realize that this was the artist's intended effect:
It was great. I wish I could own art like that.
Sweetie drew my attention to this one: you can't tell from a still photo, but those thought balloons are actually video monitors, which show a loop of the artist putting in the display, and then the word balloons say things, and sometimes the artist's hand is shown drawing. Like in this shot where you can see the blank room before the painting was hung in it and before a photograph of people looking at the painting was taken. On the right-hand side, a hand is making red dots over the screen:
I found it very thought-provoking. And also, it's Art Made Of People Standing In Front Of Art.
BONUS ART: what I realized as I looked at it was that Sweetie and I were standing, me on the right, her on the left, and therefore were re-enacting the picture were were looking at . We were People Standing In Front Of Art Made Of People Standing In Front Of Art.
On the bridge between annexes, there were sculptures. This is a view looking towards Lake Mendota; off in the distance to the right is a red castle that Mr Bunches likes to go visit when we go bum around the campus.
One of my favorite things to do is go the college and environs and hang out. I like this precisely because I am not in college. While college had its moments, when I was in college and law school I had to work and go to school and I made so little money that my budget for everything besides rent and tuition was twenty dollars a week, and I lived in a series of apartments that ranged from terrible to dreadful.
Now that I am not in college, I can take a day off from my job and go hang out and enjoy it without having to worry about term papers, and then go back to my comfortable house which is stocked with luxuries like snack chips made from lentils. That's really a thing! Sweetie got them this week. They're pretty good.
THIS:
is a pottery vase. It's hard to tell, but upon close inspection (as close as you can, anyway, through glass), the vase is not three dimensional: those points are simply drawn/painted/somethinged onto the surface and glazed on. But in real life the effect is even more real-life. In that picture, if you look at the top of the vase, you'll get the clearest idea of how realistic the illusion that those things are actual spikes really is.
While I've been posting this, the song Sensitive Artist by King Missile just came on my iTunes, so coincidentally symbolic-seeming music break!
You should listen to it while you read the post!
Speaking of sensitive artists, here is an artsy, black-and-white photo of a gallery:
The first shot I took of the gallery had Sweetie in it. I am forbidden to post photos of Sweetie -- who recently had a one-shot modeling deal -- on the Internet.
More art:
This is me, in front of an elevator door that used to be on the Chicago Board of Trade elevator. That was in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, too! It's like we were re-creating that day!
Enoug with Regular People Standing In Front Of Art! Let's have some'
Famous People Standing In Front Of Art:
Napoleon and Horse Standing In Front Of Art:
A Statue Of A Guy* Standing In Front Of Art.
*I forgot to read the card about who it was.
Abraham Lincoln Standing In Front Of Art!
Kind of looks like he's looking down her dress, doesn't it? Pervo.
Artsy black-and-white photo palette cleanser time. In this context, palette has its formal meaning.
Time to show how smart I am. This is a painting of Apollo pursuing Daphne with Cupid. The old God I think is Poseidon? It's by Paolo di Matteis, from around 1700,
And if you look it up, you'll learn that Apollo chasing Daphne was a popular subject for paintings in the 1600-1700s. The legend in brief: Apollo teases Cupid for playing with a bow and arrow, bragging that Apollo is a great warrior and telling Cupid to stick to torches. So Cupid curses him: he shoots Apollo with a golden arrow and Daphne with a lead one, so that Daphne will hate Apollo and Apollo will love her. Apollo begs for her to marry him, but she hates him (because of the lead arrow, remember) and she tried to flee, even though her father Peneus, wants her to marry Apollo and give him heirs. Why Apollo didn't just force her is anyone's guess, although Wikipedia says that he couldn't catch her without Cupid's help.
Cupid does help Apollo, though, probably because he knows something terrible will happen, I guess? And Apollo tries to kiss Daphne who begs her father for help, and her father turns her into a laurel tree, which is why laurel trees' leaves don't rot now: they are magicked, and Apollo was heartbroken.
Also according to Wikipedia, the famous painting The Kiss is based on that legend, but I don't know if that's true.
Anyway, what I thought about the painting was how childlike Apollo's face was: having read about 1/3 of the Odyssey, I know the gods were petulant and childlike, but I wondered today if the painter did that deliberately -- make Apollo seem childlike -- and if so, whether he did it because of Christianity (making pagan gods seem less like adults in paintings) or because of his own view of Apollo's actions and life, that he seemed childlike.
Or maybe he just wanted the Gods to seem more unreal: grown bodies but strangely childlike faces do that pretty effectively, imparting a bit of timelessness, or agelessness -- but in a way that suggests that they are not just unaffected by time, but experience it differently than we do. Maybe time flows in spirals for the Gods? Or Mobius strips: Imagine if your own personal timeline was not a line, but instead a Mobius loop, endlessly retracing itself without seeming to.
Heady stuff. Let's close for today on a picture of a bunch of dead animals:
That is Still Life with Game, Fowl, and Vegetables, by Adriaen van Utretcht. I'd say he nailed it with the title.
I've always wondered about gas giant planets, like Jupiter. Isn't there something in there? I used to wonder. Or is it really just all atmosphere? It seemed to me that if there was something down in the middle of the planet, it wouldn't be fair to call it a gas planet, but instead it would be a planet with a larger atmosphere, to my mind.
Our planet, for example, is a rocky planet, I know: It's mostly rock, even the middle, which is to say it's mostly solid, not liquid or gas. The gas part of our planet, the atmosphere, extends out only 300 miles, so calling our planet a gas planet would be wrong; if I were to consider the atmosphere part of the planet...
...which it seems to me you have to, if you're going to allow gas planets to be gas planets, because every planet astronomers call a gas planet is mostly or completely just atmosphere...
... if I consider the atmosphere part of the planet then ...
the Earth, which has a diameter of 7,926.41 miles is 8,226.41 miles counting the gases, and only 3% of our planet's total diameter is gases.
I got to thinking about this because of Mr Bunches' interest in the planets, which has rekindled my own interest in the planets. Mr Bunches recently got himself a book about the planets.
Actually, he got himself two books about the planets. He got the first book about the planets on a trip to the bookstore, and that book came with not just the book, but also a miniature orrery and a planetarium that runs on one AA battery and so it's not very bright and doesn't exactly light up the entire room with the stars the way one would hope a planetarium would. The night this little AA Planetarium worked the best was the night that we had a blackout that lasted 1 1/2 hours during a thunderstorm, and Mr Bunches was not in a mood to know that the planetarium worked because he was out-of-his-mind crazy with terror.
Mr Bunches does not like the dark. He doesn't even like the dim. He wants things bright, and when he goes to sleep at night it is in a room that is lit by a bright overhead lamp and his TV and, a recent addition, his nightlight. That is barely enough, and if we wait for him to fall asleep to turn off the light, he might sleep through that but if he wakes up he will holler until someone comes to turn on the light, at which point he'll drop right back to sleep.
(Usually.)
Blackouts are terrifying occasions for Mr Bunches, because they only occur at night and because they leave him in absolute pitch black, as it did one Saturday night recently when it started raining and the boys were in bed, almost asleep. Sweetie and I were watching TV and the rain intensified until it got hard enough to knock down a power line somewhere, and all the lights and televisions went out.
It took less than 0.00001 seconds for an unearthly howl to emanate from Mr Bunches' room down the hall and by the time we got there, about 5 seconds into the blackout he was pounding on his door and sobbing. Sweetie had to hug him and calm him down while we tried to convince him it was okay, but he was having none of it; he kept crying and being scared, even after we went downstairs and used our laptop and iPad, both with batteries, to provide a little light. We tried to get him to sit and play some games on the computer to calm him down but it barely registered. He mostly sat on the couch, hugging Sweetie and crying and asking her if "they" could "just find the morning."
(Mr F was unaffected by the blackout, really. Mr F is unaffected by many things, being mostly easygoing and accepting of his lot in life. Mr F came downstairs and sat with us while we waited for the lights to come on. After a while, when they didn't, Mr F wanted to go back up to bed. I didn't feel right about him sitting in a pitch black room sleeping. It's one thing when a room is dark by choice -- the darkness isn't as bad when you can fling it away from you at a flick of a switch. It's another thing when it's there for good and you can't do anything about it, so I took an alarm clock that we had that has a button you can push to light up the face. I taped the button down and put it in Mr F's room with him, and gave him a little flashlight we had to hold. I sat there reading my Kindle while he slept, the flashlight unheeded near him.)
Eventually, Mr F was asleep and I saw Mr Bunches' planetarium and took it downstairs; I thought if he saw the stars on the ceiling it might calm him down, so I lit it up and looked, and because everything in the world was dark, the dim, AA stars were bright enough to make a soft, fuzzy universe on our kitchen ceiling.
I said to Sweetie "Have Mr Bunches come see" but by then he had drifted into a fitful sleep and eventually the lights came back on. It is sadly ironic that for Mr Bunches to make full use of one of his favorite toys he will have to suffer through an experience that is nightmarish for him.
(Mr Bunches had to get the second planet book, which was identical to the first, because Mr F accidentally broke the orrery that came with the first planet book, so we went and bought a replacement.)
In Mr Bunches' book of planets, the book talks about how Jupiter has a core of rock somewhere down inside it, confirming my suspicions that gas planets aren't always gas planets the way I think of them. Another book of Mr Bunches, one I bought him because he was getting bored with his first book of planets, says that one of the other gas planets, I think it's Neptune, is made up of frozen gases, which at first seemed to me to be cheating: if you're going to say it's a gas planet, then it can't be solid, right? Think about if Neptune really were made of just hydrogen and oxygen. If it's a gas planet, then it's nothing but air, right? And if that air is frozen, then it's simply an ice planet, not a gas planet: ice is the solid form of the gaseous state for water. Or something like that.
This all made me wonder why there are gas planets, and specifically how they work, so I spent some time yesterday reading about them and trying to figure it out: What would make the gases cling together as a planet, spinning and swirling? Why don't they just dissipate? Does our atmosphere dissipate? Maybe a little? Maybe some atoms escape from our gravity but mostly they're held by the mass below them, is how I understand it, but in a pure gas planet, then what would be the center of gravity that holds them together, I wondered.
It's not like I have the answers, because a day of paging around on the web doesn't replace years of studying astrophysics, but here is what I have gleaned so far:
Gas planets are stars that dropped out.
Jupiter, Saturn, those kinds of planets are collections of gases that never quite ignited as stars. They weren't big enough for nuclear reactions to start, or they were made up of the wrong elements to start burning (according to the book The Disappearing Spoon, which I'm reading, stars can only create elements via fusion up to iron before they explode, so all elements beyond iron were created by exploding stars and can't be used by normal stars.)
Jupiter, for example, is mostly hydrogen and helium, just like a regular star, but it's too small to spontaneously combust, so instead it starts it's own weird reaction, like having a molten core of gases that react like plasmas, but not quite, and by having an electrical-conducting outer metallic shell of hydrogen, which when I read it made me think that Jupiter is actually like this Giant Electric Metal Balloon of Wonder, orbiting the sun,
...all of which got me to thinking about having been raised to believe there were gas giant planets and rocky planets, the dichotomy still used today in Mr Bunches' books of planets. What do we gain by dumbing down the universe in that way? When I was younger, I never used to question the idea that there could be a gas planet, but, then, when you are young you tend to believe a lot of things unless you are given a reason not to believe them.
For me now, it was Mr Bunches' little kids' book of planets that first told me that some of the gas planets were frozen and some had rock in them, and that caused me to think more, even, about those planets than I had in years, until I sat down and read more and learned just how weird our solar system really is. In a single afternoon I learned how big the Earth's atmosphere is, learned about how Jovian planets can give off more heat than they absorb, being something between planets and stars, learned about how ice planets and gas planets really behave, and was left with tons of questions to follow up on.
That's all well and good, but I'm forty-three. I may read and think about these things for a while, but what if, instead of being told that there were just gas and rock planets and that's it, move on, what if back in school I'd been told that Jupiter isn't so much a "gas planet" as it is a kind of star, almost, that's covered (we think) in a thin metallic electrical shield of metal, while its nearby neighbors are giant balls of frozen methane.
What if I'd been told that stuff, back then, and had started asking the questions at 10, 12, 15, that I'm asking now? Maybe I still would have become a lawyer, but maybe I wouldn't have, and there's be another physicist or astronomer out there.
I like to tell people about the astronomy class I took when I was in college, my senior year. I loved it so much that had I taken it freshman year, I might have majored in science. That professor did a remarkable job of making me think, ask questions, and he demonstrated in such a way how weird and awesome the universe is that I wanted to know more about science.
By that time, I was accepted in law school and committed to being a lawyer, and I've asked different questions as a result of the timing of those things.
All of which is to say: I probably should have woken up Mr Bunches, so he could see his stars that night.
UPDATE: RE: PT Dilloway's comment, below, and my Paul-Simon inspired response to it:
I see faces, and so do you, and because I see faces, I'm probably wrong about the bees. But if I am wrong about the bees, then maybe Carl Jung was wrong about beetles.
I'll explain.
Not long ago, I was sitting in the emergency room waiting for a chest X-ray results to come back -- the trip to the ER having been made against my will because I knew I didn't need the emergency room.
That's another story, I suppose; briefly put, I had been having a bad day, heart-wise, and had chest pains and trouble breathing, but not the heart-attack-y-kind of chest pains, which I know all too well. So I went to the Urgent Care, where I took care to describe my symptoms and then took care to specifically tell the doctors it was not a heart attack, pointing out that I knew what a heart attack felt like because, you know, I'd had one. Only when you have had a heart attack, every time you have a medical condition that's anything but "Stepped on a rusty nail" you're going to get an EKG and shipped off to the ER.
Which is what happened to me: I got shipped off to the ER, where I lay on a stretcher trying to breathe and not be dizzy and also to keep patiently explaining to the various doctors, nurses, and anyone else who walked by that I was not having a heart attack, and also that my vision was going kind of tunnel-y, which I found concerning.
They gave me a vision test, then, which, I'm pleased to note, I passed.
Five months later, I'm left with no answers about what I now call my liver condition, other than to assume, on my own, that it's because of the bees, and to then find out that I might just blame the bees because that's what people do, and also because it's all related to seeing faces in things where there are no faces.
Here's how I get from "I'm not having a heart attack" to "Blaming the bees is kind of related to the Man In The Moon."
That night, while I was waiting to have the ER doctors confirm what I'd been telling them all along -- that I wasn't having a heart attack, remember -- which they eventually confirmed -- I had nothing to occupy me except my cell phone, and the curtain that cut me off from the rest of the ER.
The curtain hanging in front of me was one of those abstract-y curtains that had a bunch of little boxes each with sort of shadow-y figures in it, and I occupied myself for a while by trying to figure out the pattern of the boxes... because (a) I'm that kind of person and (b) what else are you going to do in the ER, play Angry Birds? You can't do that. If you play Angry Birds in the ER, they're going to treat you less seriously than they already treat you, and am I alone in having an inferiority complex at the ER? They never take me seriously, it feels like. When I went there after the bee stings, they gave me some Benadryl and were going to send me home right up until I collapsed. When I went there a week later with a heart attack, they gave me some antacids and were going to send me home, again. Then, when I went there against my will and told them it definitely wasn't a heart attack but it was something else kind of serious seeming, they treated me for a heart attack.
Plus, they checked my vision. I can't forget that.
Anyway, laying there looking at the curtain pattern, I came to realize that every fourth block or so had a pattern in it that looked exactly like a stylized, 80s-woman-wearing-sunglasses. I was convinced that was what it was; I could see the 80s-lady so clearly that after a while I couldn't not see it.
I didn't get a picture of it, but if you ever saw one of those Nagel paintings like the one that's on this post, you get the idea; the woman on this post in fact is almost exactly what this blob-on-the-curtains looked like.
Eventually, I got out of the ER, with no answers (but okay vision), and I almost forgot about the woman, but not completely, because here's the thing: I knew that there was no woman on those curtains.
It was an entirely abstract pattern. I was sure of that. But yet, I'd seen a woman.
That's what led me to realize, this morning, that my feeling about the bees was probably wrong entirely.
See, I knew that the reason I'd seen a woman on the curtains is because humans are, in fact, hard-wired to see faces. I read an article a long time ago that noted that -- that human beings tend to pick out details in any random assortment of objects and mentally assemble them into faces, which is why this commercial exists:
What I didn't know, until today, was that there's a word for that: Pareidolia, or the phenomenon of seeing stimulus in a random sound or image.
I know that word because I went looking for it today, to find out why it is that humans assemble things into faces, only once I found out the word for it, I found out that people don't just assemble random objects into faces -- we take almost every random thing we see, things that are jumbles or mix-ups or mishmashes or simply white nose -- and assign meaning to it.
That guy, Chonosuke Okamura, actually took photographs of what he thought were fossilized remains of tiny people, and more than tiny people, tiny dogs, and even tiny gorillas. He published pictures of the fossilized faces of tiny humans:
Pareidolia also helps explain why there's a man in the moon,
I'd gone looking for the word for seeing faces in things, and found it -- but what I found before I found that word was a different word: apophenia, which is a related phenomenon, and means the experience of seeing patterns in random collections of data.
Apophenia is what Carl Jung blamed for people believing in synchronicity, and what's possibly responsible for my thinking that all this not-having-heart-attacks is related to the original bee stings that I got about a year ago that led to all the trouble. Apophenia, as I see it, is a feeling that things can't be coincidental.
I had a case once where a woman was in a low-impact car accident and developed a very serious injury as a result of that accident, at least according to us and her doctor. The insurance company defending the case claimed the accident hadn't caused the injury -- but the symptoms of the plaintiff's condition began shortly after the accident, and repeatedly, throughout the years that I worked on this case, someone from our side would raise the question: Do they want us to think that's just coincidence?
That's how I came to blame the bees for my ongoing not-a-heart-attack: I'd never had any problems before, then I got stung by bees, then I had problems, including heart attacks and not-heart attacks. Do they want me to think that's just coincidence?
But maybe it is; what Jung meant was that events can be grouped by cause-and-effect -- the bees caused me to have a heart attack -- or by meaning: The bees caused me to suffer, and other things cause me to suffer, and I therefore relate them to the same thing.
What's interesting is that Jung, who coined the term synchronicity, didn't seem to ultimately believe that things were just coincidence: Jung talked with Einstein and Wolfgang Pauli about his theories of synchronicity and how they might relate to then-evolving theories of quantum mechanics, and later on seemed to believe himself in synchronicity as more than just our brains imposing order on random events, but as something larger. He wrote of treating a patient:
A young woman I was treating had, at a critical moment, a dream in which she was given a golden scarab. While she was telling me this dream, I sat with my back to the closed window. Suddenly I heard a noise behind me, like a gentle tapping. I turned round and saw a flying insect knocking against the window-pane from the outside. I opened the window and caught the creature in the air as it flew in. It was the nearest analogy to a golden scarab one finds in our latitudes, a scarabaeid beetle, the common rose-chafer (Cetonia aurata), which, contrary to its usual habits had evidently felt the urge to get into a dark room at this particular moment. I must admit that nothing like it ever happened to me before or since.
That leaves open the question, still, of whether we impose order on random events, or random events aren't random. Suppose Jung's patient had been talking not about beetles, but about clouds. Jung likely wouldn't have thought anything about the beetle knocking at his window, other than that it was an annoyance.
Jung's thinking on the topic led me to looking at Littlewood's Law, which is a law that says you can expect a miracle to happen about once a month. Littlewood based that on a theory that a miracle is a "one in a million" event -- something of special significance that occurs about one time out of every million events. Littlewood then said we experience one event per second, most of them unexceptional (you reading this line is an event.) In 35 days or so, you've gone through 1,000,000 waking moments, and so the odds are that something exceptional happened to you in one of those moments.
Exceptional being the key word; when I looked at the pattern of my songs randomly played on my iPod during one jogging session, each one had something to do with health, or life, or death -- an exceptional occurrence, that such synchronicity would occur while I was jogging. Except that we're back to my imposing the significance on the songs, especially depending on how loosely you define the relationship of the songs to the theme.
Which leads up to confirmation bias, or the tendency people have to favor information that backs the conclusion they want to make. If you, like me, oppose gun ownership*
*guns and cigarettes are the only two things people make which, when used exactly the way they're intended to be used, are fatal
then you probably remember stories about three-year-olds grabbing guns and killing people, and don't pay much attention to the fact that thousands of hunters roam the woods every year shooting deer and very few fatalities occur**
**assuming, of course, that you don't count the deer.
Confirmation bias can be as dangerous as synchronicity, depending on who you're talking to; I assume that any chest pains I suffer are related to my heart and were caused by the bee-stings initially, and that there's some fundamental change that occurred when those bees went all bee-y on me and I heroically saved Mr F and Mr Bunches' lives***
***It was heroic, and neither of them got stung.
But if that's a false belief -- if that's me imposing order and meaning on my life by grouping random events by meaning -- then what of the doctors, who look at my medical history and decide that chest pains=heart attack? They want to be sure that I'm not having another heart attack, thereby exposing them to ridicule on my blog and worse*4
*4 I am a lawyer, after all. I'll sue you at the drop of a hat and not think twice about it.
And I got started on all this simply by seeing a face in the curtains, which is where the headline for this post comes from: Having been told once that people see faces in almost everything, I can't stop seeing faces, and in fact, I've made a game of it, almost, because (a) I'm that kind of person and (b) what else are you supposed to do when you're working/driving/supposed to be in a meeting? Play Angry Birds? I don't think so. I'm tired of that game.
And you probably won't be able to stop. Look around where you're sitting right now. I bet you can find 10 different faces without even trying.
The point of this post is to mention cool things I never learned in school, and pareidola and the rest of these things are all very cool things that I never learned in school and probably nobody ever learned in school, which seems kind of wrong to me; schools are supposed to be teaching students how to think after all, aren't they? They should be; schools teaching people when the Civil War started isn't really productive anymore. We can all look that up. But schools teaching people how to think is productive, and teaching people now just how to think but how we actually think also seems important to me...
...if only to let us know why there's an 80's Nagel painting in that curtain on the ER, and why the doctors are going to keep telling us that we're not having a heart attack as we wonder about the Nagel painting.
The Boy is going to a baseball game, for a school field trip.
What, you might ask, is the educational purpose of a baseball game during the school year? I might ask that, too, but I would just get an eye-roll, as I did. It turns out there is no educational purpose to going to the baseball game during school. They're going for gym class. They're going to watch a baseball game and get credit for it as part of gym class.
That's sort of the last straw for me, I think. I used to respect this school -- the high school for Middleton and Cross Plains, Wisconsin -- but now they stop classes for Brett Favre's retirement and take kids to baseball games during the school year without even the pretense of teaching them something, and they've made up snow days by extending each class by 0.0003 of the day, and it's apparent to me that schools have given up trying to teach kids, and instead are just warehousing them and trying to kill time until the employees retire.
That's the end of a long, slow slide into irrelevance and uselessness that schools have been on since, well, forever. It's not as though schools were terribly helpful and relevant when I went to them; back then we read things like The Canterbury Tales and studied The Gilded Age and performed experiments designed to teach us how to identify a salt using a Bunsen burner, and I was left bored by about 98% of school -- all the while being curious and excited about everything around me. School was boring; learning was not.
After graduating high school, I learned just how fun learning can be by continuing to learn, and by virtue of some very good professors in college, professors who showed me how math could be interesting, physics could be entertaining, learning could be fun.
After last night, when The Boy first told me that they're going to a baseball game for school, and then told me that it 'wasn't worth his time' to try to figure out a problem because he could "just ask someone at school" how they did it, I decided I had to fight back the only way I possibly can.
No, not by parenting.
Not by educating people.
I meant by wasting time blogging when I'm at my office and should be working.
Hence, Cool Things I Never Learned In School, another hopefully-regular feature on here where I'll present...
... wait for it...
... Cool things I Never Learned In School, in hopes that people will read them, share them with others, tell their kids about them, and hopefully, somewhere along the lines, someone will learn something and the irrelevant, useless schools will be re-energized and start actually teaching kids again.
Also, I'm doing it because I think these things are cool.
