Last Saturday 2007

Workout Notes Rest day; did a yoga class with my daughter.

Update I couldn’t resist: 3 mile easy racewalk around the neighborhood; I had good footing on the roads, even if many of the sidewalks were unusable. Note: going at 4:15 pm isn’t a great idea; folks are going out at about that time.

Speaking of yoga: I sometimes check out other people’s yoga practice photos. One of my favorite is Yoga Chickie’s. Some snapshots with comments:

I am not even close to this one (Peacock)

One of the problems is that when I try to go horizontal, my forearms and elbows don’t stay together and my wrists scream in pain. My shoulders aren’t flexible enough as yet.

This one:

I can hold for a few breaths without touching a wall; I still haven’t “figured out” the balance and I don’t have enough control to dispense with the wall altogether.

This one:

Perhaps in another lifetime.

I can get my torso maybe to within, say, 30 degrees in front of my legs ; that is about it. On the other hand, her torso is well behind her legs.

Science and Learning

There is an interesting post at Sandwalk about fundies not actually learning science in college.

Last summer Tom Bozzo, an economist in Madison Wisconsin, played around with the latest data on science education in America [Scientific Knowledge in the US by Religion]. He was interested in any correlations between religion and the understanding of basic scientific concepts.

A reader reminded me of this data. It was discussed on several blogs last summer but I had forgotten the details. There’s one pair of graphs that are particularly interesting. The first one shows that fundamentalist Protestants, as expected, do not believe that humans evolved whereas atheists—and most other groups—accept the scientific facts. [...]

Keeping all these cautions in mind, it is still quite remarkable that some significant percentage of fundamentalist Protestants can go to college and still reject the basic scientific fact that humans evolved. Note that in all of the other groups the college educated subset are more inclined to accept evolution. (Do most of those “college” educated fundamentalists go to some cheap reproduction of a college run by a religious organization?)

As we’ve seen time and time again on the blogs (and elsewhere), the Christian fundamentalists have erected very strong barriers against learning. It really doesn’t matter how much they are exposed to rational thinking and basic scientific evidence. They still refuse to listen.[...]

(larger)

There may be more than meets the eye here. My hunch is that people often do learn new stuff provided it doesn’t conflict with the “common sense” that they bring into the study of their subject. If the new material does violate their “common sense” (e. g., is non-intuitive to them), then it takes a long, long time to internalize the new material and make it a part of their everyday thinking.

To see an example of this in other areas, consider physics. In the paper by Sanjoy Mahajan that I linked to (pdf file), several examples of people not being able to applied the physics (and mathematics) that they “know” are given. Here is a sample question:

Suppose you are on a Merry-go-round with a friend who is a diameter away from you. You throw a ball to her. The path of the ball is a straight line relative to

• The earth only
• The merry-go-round only
• both the earth and the merry-go-round
• neither

Only 58 percent of physics students got it right, and only 40% were both correct and “sure” of their answer!

To see more on “bad physics” and how it gets passed along in the popular media, go to Bad Physics