thanks mr spook.
today i held one end of grandson's Slinky, had him hold the other and we stretched it out about 4 feet.
i had him "tap" it repeatedly until he became aware of the wave traversing mr slinky's full length and bouncing off the ends. he was fascinated.
he's eight. I'm laying groundwork now.
in that last link you gave to Bill,
he said
" I kept discovering new ways in which I'd MISunderstood it myself, and I kept adding to the growing pile. The misconceptions list became large, and soon I also was discovering parts of electricity that the general public invariably found misleading, or parts that were universally explained badly even in physics textbooks."
it seemed an uncanny parallel to this, from Lavoisier's Introduction to his treatise on Chemistry:
""Instead of applying observation to the things we wished to know, we have chosen rather to imagine them. Advancing from one ill founded supposition to another, we have at last bewildered ourselves amidst a multitude of errors. These errors becoming prejudices, are, of course, adopted as principles, and we thus bewilder ourselves more and more. The method, too, by which we conduct our reasonings is as absurd; we abuse words which we do not understand, and call this the art of reasoning. When matters have been brought this length, when errors have been thus accumulated, there is but one remedy by which order can be restored to the faculty of thinking; this is, to forget all that we have learned, to trace back our ideas to their source, to follow the train in which they rise, and, as my Lord Bacon says, to frame the human understanding anew.""
the more things change, the more they stay the same.
i was profoundly affected by Lavoisier's essay when first read it thirty-odd years ago, and always keep it handy.
Lavoisier speaks to the importance of unambiguous language in explaining things, and indeed that's the hardest part.
http://web.lemoyne.edu/~giunta/lavpref.html
"But, after all, the sciences have made progress, because philosophers have applied themselves with more attention to observe, and have communicated to their language that precision and accuracy which they have employed in their observations: In correcting their language they reason better."
i know I've posted the Lavoisier piece before, but old men repeat themselves...
if you're really with nsa you will see plenty of Lavoisier's compounding of errors it's inherent in bureaucracy.
( i used that paragraph about 'ill founded suppositions' in more than one inter-department memo. )
May i also recommend Parkinson's "Law of Delay" ? Even Gorbachev quoted him...
regards,
old jim
