Eccentric Flower talk:201011/Competence

Danima:

Holy crap get out of my head.

Well, except for the part where you even *attempt* to build square drawers. It's like I'm you, minus most of your competence.

(would a smiley be, er, frowned upon here?)

-- 19:03, 16 November 2010 (GMT)

Joy:

You do realize that your brain understands perfectly well how it is translating a word you want to write into motor planning actions to type, right? It just isn't consciously available to you. And neither is about umpteen billion other things your mind does for you without your having to, or being able to, "think" about them.

I will swear to you that I cannot learn chemistry. It doesn't make any sense to me, and it didn't matter how much I tried to assimilate the material, I never did very well. This is you discounting your own strengths here. You program well not just because you learned the rules, and followed the instructions, but because you have a feel for how these things work - either through innate abilities or acquired skill, you have a knack, just like some people have a knack (not me) for throwing a football.

Think about the sheer amount of time you've put into the things you do well. I promise you that some of the things you think are hopeless would turn out to be within your grasp if you just put in the same amount of time. But I'm with you on the quick rewards and doing it right and laziness factors.

-- 19:12, 16 November 2010 (GMT)

Columbina:

You do realize that your brain understands perfectly well how it is translating a word you want to write into motor planning actions to type, right? It just isn't consciously available to you.

Oh, definitely, but it still makes me suspicious. I worry about all inexplicable processes. Full transparency and disclosure, that's me.

I'd like to note that a lot of the situation with learning things (or not learning things) depends not just on the thickness of the brain but the teaching method. I have for twenty years been refusing requests to go to training sessions for new computer techniques, because I have learned by bitter experience that they do nothing - for me. I don't say they don't work for others. To learn a new computer language what I must do is, first, go find the O'Reilly book(s) for that and buy them. Second, get a compiler. Third, sit down and try to write a few simple programs in them. When I stumble, I look up the answer. Lather, rinse, repeat. This is the only effective way I have ever learned a new programming language.

Sometimes learning something is a matter of getting the one specific phrase that is meaningful to you. I was about to talk about how my chemistry faltered when it began to get into moles and molar masses and the quantitative aspects - which, let's be fair, was fairly early on. I was going to gripe about how this concept made no sense to me. And then I looked up "mole (unit)" in Wikipedia and I found this:

If I'd ever had a chemistry teacher who had ever bothered to say that - 1 mole of calcium-40 is just about 40g, 1 mole of carbon-12 is about 12g - I then might not have had so much trouble there. If they had then gone on to say "and that 1 mole always has 6.022andchange x 10^23 atoms in it," then I would have had a hell of a lot better report card in chemistry somewhere around tenth or eleventh grade. It's all in the magic words.

[Edited before our local chemistry ace can come in and correct me. Apparently one mole of C-12 is EXACTLY 12g because it is the defining standard. By the by, the actual atomic mass of Ca-40 is some 39.yadayadayadayada, which is what 1 mole of it weighs.]

(I was an ace at chemistry as long as it was about reaction equations, because reaction equations were like algebra to me - you always come out with what you came in with, just changed in form - and algebra in turn was like a logic problem, albeit one which was even more useless than a normal logic problem. I was competent in math through algebra and trigonometry, but no math beyond geometry and basic arithmetic has ever been useful to me in the real world. Chemistry, on the other hand, has plenty of uses in the real world, for example knowing why you should not use both a chlorine-bleach-based and an ammonia-based cleaner in the same toilet.)

-- 19:42, 16 November 2010 (GMT)

Joy:

Oh, you introspectionist!

Luckily I'm okay on the "do not mix these two chemicals together front" since I don't have to understand why in order to believe a trusted source it is true.

I was aces at qualitative chemistry, because I knew how to follow instructions and be careful and take notes. I can barely remember anything else. I have to imagine reaction equations would be okay, because I'm okay at algebra and like the logic problem/follow the rules to a solution aspect of math (and linguistics).

-- 19:49, 16 November 2010 (GMT)

ProfRobert:

"knowing why you should not use both a chlorine-bleach-based and an ammonia-based cleaner in the same toilet"

Hey, why wouldn't you want to recreate WWI in your toilet? If you fiddle with the proportions, you can have both poison gas *and* explosions!

I still think one of the neatest things about chemistry is that two super-dangerous substances, sodium (which explodes on contact wtih water) and chlorine (lethal gas) combine to make table salt. How cool/weird is that?

-- 21:11, 16 November 2010 (GMT)

Columbina:

http://graysci.com/chapter-one/making-salt-the-hard-way/

INCREDIBLY DANGEROUS. DO NOT DO THIS.

Also, I own this book and it is awesome.

-- 21:22, 16 November 2010 (GMT)

Columbina:

An article only a chemistry or numbers wonk could love:

http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/2007/2/an-exact-value-for-avogadros-number

If you're curious to see what the number looks like written out in long form (e.g. if you're like me and exponential notation is conceptually meaningless), there are several examples in the article.

ETA: I understand exponential notation just fine. It's just that the numbers are meaningless until I can see the size of them written out. 1.5 x 10^6 is perfectly fine, but not until it's written 1,500,000 do I say, "Oh, look, one and a half million." Of course when you get up into the 10^23 range the numbers are too large for comprehension anyhow, so it doesn't make much difference. Still, I do like to see all those digits arrayed on the page.

-- 21:42, 16 November 2010 (GMT)

Columbina:

Also (yes, my brain is refusing to focus on what I'm supposed to be doing for more than ten minutes at a time):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Million

If you ever want to understand my sense of humor, you will need to understand why I find this page incredibly amusing, especially the list of significant 7-digit numbers it ends with. Amusing, I'm afraid, in a not very flattering way, along the lines of, "My god, someone actually cared enough/was crazy enough to write all this." Others seem to feel that way about, say, the turnip disambiguation page, but of course I feel it's USEFUL to know whether you're talking about white turnips or big yellow turnips in the country of your choice, especially since no one outside the American south seems to know the helpful word 'rutabaga'. (However, the Scots have 'neeps,' which is almost as much fun to say as 'rutabaga,' so they get a pass.)

-- 21:58, 16 November 2010 (GMT)

Joy:

Huh. I'm New England through and through and we always say rutabaga. An essential part of Thanksgiving!

-- 20:05, 17 November 2010 (GMT)

Jette:

I have never eaten a rutabaga in my life and I'm not sure I've seen one in person, but New Orleanians are a little weird. I've never been offered a turnip at Thanksgiving in this part of the country, although I miss the stuffed mirlitons my great-aunt used to make (she calls them "mellytons").

I only recently realized that swede = turnip after getting tired of reading it in British novels and not knowing exactly what it was. I thought it was akin to suet or something.

-- 20:45, 17 November 2010 (GMT)

Bunny42:

My late husband, who grew up in VT, introduced me to turnips at Thanksgiving (sauerkraut, too, which happens to taste really good with turkey), just mashed with butter and S&P. I'd never heard of it before then.

As for rutabagas, they make a nice sweet addition to New England boiled dinner. I don't think I've had them any other way. My mom was in France during the war, and when they ran out of potatoes, they had to learn to like rutabagas. After she came here, she never wanted to see another one, so we never had 'em as kids.

Interesting how a post about competence manages to devolve into a discussion of veggies.

-- 22:25, 17 November 2010 (GMT)

DanLyke:

I just have to comment on Theo Gray's Mad Science: Before he moved further away, the neighbor 3rd grader used to knock on our door with that book in hand and say "will you help me do a science experiment?"

It only took a few of those before we got to the "but everything we haven't yet done in this book scares me" stage. And at least one of our experiments lit the neighbor's lawn on fire, so my "what's safe to do in the back yard"-ometer is already clearly miscalibrated.

That book rocks.

-- 16:13, 18 November 2010 (GMT)

Peebles:

'Apparently one mole of C-12 is EXACTLY 12g because it is the defining standard.'

Aww. Thank you.

-- 06:47, 19 November 2010 (GMT)

Columbina:

Jette, one of my hobbies is collecting other names for the mirliton. I am so happy to have an excuse to share this brain dump that you didn't want with you! [deep breath]

In English it may be called the chayote, christophene, chocho, vegetable pear, or mango squash.

Places with French-spoken heritage mostly call it 'mirliton' (possibly with variant spellings). A lot of places in the Caribbean use "christophene" (again w/var.) which seems to have come from the British originally. "Chocho" (also cho-cho, chuchu, chow-chow, shushu, xuxu) comes from Africa. The Aussie/NZ term "choko" probably is a variant on those. "Chayote" itself is the Spanish term.

Most other names for it attempt to be straightforwardly or whimsically descriptive, trying to get hold of the fact that it's a cucurbit that tastes like a starch. In parts of Equador they call it "papamelo," potato melon. In Paraguay "papa del aire." In Italy, "zucca centenaria," which is apparently meant to mean it is a squash that is wrinkly like an old person. The Chinese may also be referring to its wrinkliness when they call it "Buddha's hand squash" (I won't try to reproduce the characters, but I should note that in Chinese "squash" and "melon" are the same thing, "gua.") They also call it "closed palm squash" - again, probably because of the shape.

Then there's the "this came from somewhere else" names: In Indonesia its name means "Siamese pumpkin," in Myanmar "Gurkha fruit," and in Malaysia "English cucumber."

Finally, in parts of Puerto Rico, in a rude joke, the vegetable is sometimes called "mujer propia" - one's own wife - because it has almost no flavor.

-- 14:56, 19 November 2010 (GMT)

Thomas:

Thanks to Google I now know here we are supposed to call the mirliton a Mexican cucumber. And that I have never encountered this vegetable in person.

-- 15:59, 19 November 2010 (GMT)