My Missouri friend and I got into a discussion about mules on one of our
drives, because of the term Missouri Mule she considers herself an expert. She
says it has to be a female horse and a male donkey, because if they did it the
other way the girl donkey would not be able to handle it, and even if they did
it artificially a mule would be too big for her to deliver. Well just something
I picked up.
Maybe I used a bad example to say what I meant to about theories. Maybe I
should have said green men from Mars arriving and saying that they created the
whole thing, and planted that evolutionary evidence because they are jokesters.
What I was trying to say was that even the most solid theories of science can
theoretically be disproved. I remember reading some article some time ago when
they were searching for the top quark. The whole theory of elementary particles
was based on it’s existence, but they were having a hard time finding it, and
the guy said, well if we can’t find it, it’s back to the drawing board. They
did find it eventually.
And I don’t think that science, even that goofy modern physics has much to
say about the existence of God one way or another. Except for those people that
think the bible is the literal truth as to the flood and Lazarus coming back
from the dead, and those guys living for hundreds of years, and all that. I
thought the whole idea that those stories might be parables was sort of a modern
theory, but books I’ve been reading lately indicate many churchmen thought the
same thing as long ago as the reformation. Back then there were even some
saying the same thing you said, in that maybe the whole bible is false, but that
doesn’t mean the religion is a bad thing.
When I was student teaching and had a class of smart ass seventh graders I
had this idea for teaching the coriolis effect. I brought in some balloons and
blew them up in front of them and that did get their attention. Then as I was
using the balloon to demonstrate the effect I realized that I was doing it all
wrong, but by then the balloon thing had lost its charm and nobody was paying
any attention to anything I was saying, so it didn’t really matter. I had a lot
of incidents like that in my teaching career.
Weather is indeed complicated. In 1961 when computers were new, and time
on them was scarce, this guy, Lorenz, was running a computer simulation of
weather, and ran short of time one day, and copied the readings, which were all
to eight or nine decimal places, close enough he figured, and plugged them in
the next time he got computer time. But when he compared those results with
results he had gotten when he hadn’t been interrupted, they were completely
different. They weren’t different in the sense that it snowed in July, but one
reading had it raining and cold and one had it sunny and hot. Anyway that is
where the butterfly effect comes in, where the fluttering of a butterfly in
Peoria will effect whether or not it rains in Berlin on July 4th next year. And
it’s why predicting the weather a couple days from now is way harder than
sending a man to the moon.
Speaking of weather are you guys getting slugged today? While it is merely
cold and unpleasant here, I hear that the might of the storm is headed for the
upper peninsula. Speaking of which I was wondering about bears. When I was
talking about cats coming in all different sizes, the next closest animal I
could think of was bears. I think they go from about the size of a big dog to
those intimidating grizzlies. Do you have any bears up there?
I remember those Mercator maps. I used to wonder why Greenland wasn’t
ruling the world, and why they called Australia a continent when it was barely
the size of Great Britain. I suppose they could have made a similar map from
the south where I would be wondering why Antarctica wasn’t ruling the world, and
why the hell anybody was worried about that teeny tiny Russia.
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