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top| Developing "deep" understanding |
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| Rough Draft |
How to develop?
Good descriptions
Seek out Good descriptions, to tell of what is going on, and which of it is important.
Practice
Fermi Questions
Practice with Fermi Questions
and Knowledge you can work with...
Visualization and imagination
Scaling the universe to your desktop
Picturing altitude above maps
Probing near space with a flashlight.
Generating questions by teleportation.
Where
is China? (or Antarctica, or...) It is down over there... Looking
down, through the earth, at the rest of the globe.
A car trip to the earth's core.
Links to model solar system resources
The relative size of
Earth, Jupiter, Sun (1 : 10 : 100)
Integrating measurement into your life
BodyRuler
measuring angle&distance with your thumb
Breadth, and a sense of what is reasonable
Scale of some things and `Powers of Ten'ish scales.
Scaling the universe to your desktop
Getting a feel for big numbers
Misc
Choosing good units
Measuring geologic time in earth-orbits-galaxy years.
And perhaps
Order-of-magnitude calculation - a "you are already doing it"
introduction
Atomic bonding (is fundamentally a balance of
attraction (electrostatic) and repulsion (electron-compression).)
Comments encouraged. - Mitchell N Charity <[email protected]> |
Fundamentally, integrate a thoughtful, approximate, numerate thread into your life.
History:
2002-Apr-11 Changed links (evacuating www.tiac.net).
1997.Aug.01 - First draft, from notes formerly in `Deep understanding'.
Doables: questions what of this is key what if ... if that ... then ... gedanken look at in a different way scale mixing (pet the cat-sized ant on your lap) teleportation ... [i/o boxes | Feynman learning fuzzy concept story | ] Robert Romer's "Qualitative Questions" AmJPhys64(7)1996JulyVisualization
[questions/daydreaming/calibration/integration]
[time: heart-rate clock, oom 1sec/beat, min/max 50/200 bpm, .3-1.2 sec/beat,
100+-x2 bpm, good(80bpm) is 3/4 s/beat, contrail-angle-time-altitude calc | reflex calib]
From Examples to use in intro biology:
I have relied on DAvid Letterman's Stupid Human tricks a lot to show
anatomical features i.e the man blowing cigarette smoke out of his
ear, another man "drinking" milk through his nose and squirting it out
of his eye, the girl who pushed her tongue behind her uvula and into
her nasopharynx, are all clips I have used. It really gets the class
going.
david woodman
[email protected]