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Author | Topic: How Scientifically Literate Are You? | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
ringo Member (Idle past 412 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined:
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I had never heard of "fracking" but it was easy enough to figure out from the options given. I think I could have gotten the other 12 when I was 12.
I couldn't do a test for gender because I'm at the Public Library, so I had to go on memory.
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ringo Member (Idle past 412 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined: |
Faith writes:
I hope you're forgetting things naturally and not deliberately unlearning them.
I'm sure I'd have gotten all of them when I was twelve too. Faith writes:
Somehow, I associated "fracking" with something plus cracking - which led me to petrochemicals.
Maybe not fracking though.
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ringo Member (Idle past 412 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined: |
caffeine writes:
Sun-tan lotion protects us from everything - cancer, old age, bad breath. Now with 87 per cent more snake oil.
By contrast, the one that the highest number of people got right was about sun-tan lotion protecting us from UV. Do we have advertising to thank for this?
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ringo Member (Idle past 412 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined:
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Percy writes:
Science isn't about memorizing the "right answers". It's about being able to figure out the best approximation.
I was expecting to see oil in the list of answers, not natural gas. Percy writes:
Case in point: my memory of what I knew when I was twelve might not be accurate.
I don't know what answer I might have given to some of the questions as a kid in the 1960's.
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ringo Member (Idle past 412 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined: |
Catholic Scientist writes:
I've always argued against the metric system being "better" than another system of weights and measures. It's just different. Its only redeeming feature, as far as I'm concerned, is the fact that it is nearly universal - and here in Canada we're influenced almost as much by the American system as by "our own" anyway.
The metric system is just so much better than ours....
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ringo Member (Idle past 412 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined: |
Catholic Scientist writes:
The other side of that coin is that it's easier to make mistakes lke dividing by a hundred instead of ten. A system that requires you to think is not "obviously" inferior. Its obviously better to base things off of powers of 10 than some random factor. You can do the math in your head, you can convert left and right. Simpler isn't necessarily better. Every year before Christmas and Father's Day, you see those commercials for supertools that can replace a whole toolbox full of conventional tools. The trouble is that a tool that can be used for everything is seldom really good at any of them. Edited by ringo, : Made a mistke in splling.
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ringo Member (Idle past 412 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined: |
quote:Predominantly? If you can't make up your mind which system you're using, it doesn't matter how good the system is.
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ringo Member (Idle past 412 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined: |
Dr Adequate writes:
So simple a child could understand it - just like Chinese.
And the old system was so simple.
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ringo Member (Idle past 412 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined: |
Dr Adequate writes:
That was my point: it's too easy. It's easier to make mistakes when you don't have to think about what you're doing. ... it's easier to divide by a hundred and get the right answer than it is to divide by 5280 and get the right answer. I'm not arguing that the Imperial system is better. I'm just saying that the metric system isn't intrinsically better. It may be better for some things but it isn't necessarily better across the board. That's why we still use Imperial measures for a lot of things when they're more convenient.
Dr Adequate writes:
Again you make my point. A giraffe is better for opening cans than a pillow. A stand-alone can-opener may be ideal for opening cans but it doesn't make a good pet. No single thing (or system) is all things to all men.
Arguing by analogy is like using a giraffe as a can-opener.
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ringo Member (Idle past 412 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined: |
dwise1 writes:
I recall paying 50.9 cents per half-gallon at a lonely gas station in the Fraser Canyon. I think it was 1977.
... the mechanical pumps could not be set for prices higher than 99.9 cents per gallon.
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ringo Member (Idle past 412 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined: |
NoNukes writes:
My argument is really from the opposite direction: that people using easy conversion factors are more likely to be careless with them.
Your argument here seems to be that finding imperial system conversion factors is difficult enough that a person who who wants to convert from feet to miles is more likely to find the correct conversion factor than when converting from, say meters to kilometers. NoNukes writes:
And yet we don't use them. Hmm.... There is a metric unit that is conveniently sized for any task. Convenience is as convenience does.
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ringo Member (Idle past 412 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined:
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NoNukes writes:
You can buy a metric tape measure but you can't buy a metric two-by-four to measure with it.
How often do you need to subdivide exactly one foot?
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