If you can't explain it to a 6-year old...

Definitions are the mind's comfort food. Why bother going on a rigorous diet of learning in detail how things work when you can pluck a definition out of a dictionary and ride with it?

It's a rhetorical question, definitions never solve the immense task of explaining the world and its various bits to a 6-year old.

Unless the knowledge has been ingurgitated and digested properly, until it's become part of oneself, there is no way any child would accept a packaged explanation.

Is that why the best sites on astronomy topics are those tailored for kids?

Comments

A dog's life

This is going to outrage dog lovers, but I think that humans’ tyrannical nature is revealed not just when it enslaves other humans, but also when it enslaves dogs. We never say 'free as a dog", do we? Just 'free as a bird'. Dogs and humans, not all what it seems. We take a wolf at heart and spend lots of time and energy teaching it to obey and react to commands. (To be more historically accurate, the 'taking' happened a long time ago, and it succeeded, so very different from cats.) We are prepared to downsize our vocabulary to a few words in order to achieve that. We literally put up with shit. All in the name of training, while the true purpose looks more like having a totally obedient living being under our control, one emitting apparent devotion. In humans it’s called the Stockholm syndrome. Even the basic freedoms of sniffing and running are restricted anywhere near human habitat. It takes a trip back to the wild

Beauty within, beauty without

"Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite" is a wonderful book by Robert Kurzban and the site where you can read a bit about it has a great URL too: https://www.hypocrisybook.com. It is all about evolution and the mind that has different compartments, creating this apparently terrible habit of noticing inconsistencies in all but ourselves. As our mind is a kind of cabinet with many drawers and some of them are full of junk and others of exquisite art objects, things can look a bit incongruous. Our inner balance depends on ignoring the co-existence of junk and art and happily thinking of the whole cabinet as a solid piece of furniture. This is of course a bit of a simplistic review of the book and the theory behind it, but it serves the purpose of my own theory: that physical beauty is our greatest source of hypocrisy. If there is a drawer that very few people dare to open, let alone examine its contents, that is the drawer of our looks. The real physical appearan

First Knight

Holding my breath on the edge of a language precipice, what a way to plunge into writing in anything else than my mother tongue. Mr Ambrose Bierce, would you like to have written "The foreigner's dictionary?"

Life by a thousand cuts

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