TIL - today I learnt...

[Voy]

Mais concrêtement comment on fait pour se torcher sans se lever de la cuvette ?

 

On garde un nain dans la cuvette.

[Malky]

Mais concrêtement comment on fait pour se torcher sans se lever de la cuvette ?

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4P1eFyQEz-8

[Bisounours]

Sans déconner, il y a des gens qui font des études sur la façon de mettre le rouleau de pq sur le distributeur ? Et ils sont payés pour ça ?

[Tramp]

C'est probablement payé par le gouvernement et mis dans le budget recherche. Qu'est ce qu'on ferait sans la recherche publique hein ?

[FabriceM]

Sans déconner, il y a des gens qui font des études sur la façon de mettre le rouleau de pq sur le distributeur ? Et ils sont payés pour ça ?

 

Il y a aussi des gens payer pour nous expliquer la bonne position à prendre pour déféquer tout en évitant la rupture d'anévrisme et les hémorroïdes.

Et d'autres encore pour inventer des petits bancs à joindre au trône classique pour prendre ladite bonne position.

Et d'autres encore pour écrire des articles entiers sur le grand débat "nettoyage du cul à l'eau ou au papier : quel est le plus écologique ?"

[FabriceM]

payés*

[Voy]

C'est probablement payé par le gouvernement et mis dans le budget recherche. Qu'est ce qu'on ferait sans la recherche publique hein ?

Par expérience je dirais que ce genre d'études est davantage le propre des universités americaines.

Les sociologues du CNRS sont trop occupés avec les inégalités sociales.

[Tramp]

Oui je crois bien que ce soit Américain et je sais que le gouvernement fédéral en finance une bonne partie. Un congressman en fait une compil chaque année.

[Jason]

TIL

https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3ffsaj/til_that_during_american_civil_war_some_soldiers/

[Freezbee]

TIL que vu de l'étranger, la France aurait un penchant pour les manifestations ? Comprends pas...

 

Why are the French always protesting? Blame unions and history.

 

France has a certain reputation for its penchant for protest. It's not just a stereotype: The country has a long tradition of sometimes-radical political protests, one that goes back to at least the 19th century. That history continues now in part due to the strange nature of French labor unions — they're both weak and strong at the same time — to make a protest culture that's quite particular to France.

 

Et puis surtout, je ne savais pas trop dans quel fil poster cet article.

[Ray]

Richard Feynman a eu seulement 125 a un test de QI.

 

WTF?

[sans]

Le qi c'est un test à la louche, et ça ne teste pas toutes les facettes de l'intelligence. Par exemple si un type est incapable de remettre en cause ses convictions ça ne se verra pas sur son test, pareil pour un type qui se laisse facilement parasiter par ses émotions.

[Hayek's plosive]

Le qi c'est un test à la louche, et ça ne teste pas toutes les facettes de l'intelligence. Par exemple si un type est incapable de remettre en cause ses convictions ça ne se verra pas sur son test, pareil pour un type qui se laisse facilement parasiter par ses émotions.

Tramp et Philiberté, en somme?

[Freezbee]

Richard Feynman a eu seulement 125 a un test de QI.

 

WTF?

 

Le score de QI ne représente que la moyenne des évaluations de différentes fonctions (rapidité, mémoire de travail, calcul, visuospatial, etc). Ici, il s'agirait d'un test que Feynman aurait passé quand il était à l'école, dans les années trente... mais on n'en sait guère plus (et je crois que cette histoire de QI fut rapportée par Feynman lui-même). Normalement, seuls les psys sont qualifiés pour faire passer ce genre d'épreuve et en interpréter les résultats.

 

A Polymath Physicist On Richard Feynman's "Low" IQ And Finding Another Einstein

 

A conversation with Steve Hsu

 

Is it true Feynman's IQ score was only 125?

 

Feynman was universally regarded as one of the fastest thinking and most creative theorists in his generation. Yet it has been reported-including by Feynman himself-that he only obtained a score of 125 on a school IQ test.

 

I suspect that this test emphasized verbal, as opposed to mathematical, ability. Feynman received the highest score in the country by a large margin on the notoriously difficult Putnam mathematics competition exam, although he joined the MIT team on short notice and did not prepare for the test. He also reportedly had the highest scores on record on the math/physics graduate admission exams at Princeton.

 

It seems quite possible to me that Feynman's cognitive abilities might have been a bit lopsided-his vocabulary and verbal ability were well above average, but perhaps not as great as his mathematical abilities. I recall looking at excerpts from a notebook Feynman kept while an undergraduate. While the notes covered very advanced topics for an undergraduate-including general relativity and the Dirac equation-it also contained a number of misspellings and grammatical errors. I doubt Feynman cared very much about such things.

 

[FabriceM]

Feynman a eu la chance d'avoir un père formidable. Ca joue aussi.

[Mathieu_D]

Feynman a eu la chance d'avoir un père formidable. Ca joue aussi.

Comment ça ?

[sans]

Il lui a transmis les bons gènes.

[Freezbee]

Comment ça ?

 

À propos de son père :

 

[Neomatix]

Il lui a transmis les bons gènes.

Il lui a surtout fourni une éducation géniale et a attisé sa curiosité sur énormément de choses. Je me souviens notamment d'une citation de son père rapportée par Feynman

"Quel est cet oiseau ? En anglais il s'appelle xxx, en espagnol c'est yyy, en japonais c'est zzz... Apprends son nom en toutes les langues et tu ne sauras toujours rien à son sujet."

Ou alors il demande à son fils après qu'il eût fini ses études comment une particule peut émettre indéfiniment des photon sans perdre de masse.

Dans les années 30, normal l'éducation...

[ShoTo]

Ou alors il demande à son fils après qu'il eût fini ses études comment une particule peut émettre indéfiniment des photon sans perdre de masse.

 

 

Mais il n'a jamais compris la réponse

[FabriceM]

Comment ça ?

 

http://www.fotuva.org/online/frameload.htm?/online/science.htm

What is Science? (Feynman, Presented at the fifteenth annual meeting of the National Science Teachers Association, 1966 in New York City)

 

[..]

 

Under these circumstances of the difficulty of the subject, and my dislike of philosophical exposition, I will present it in a very unusual way. I am just going to tell you how I learned what science is.

That's a little bit childish. I learned it as a child. I have had it in my blood from the beginning. And I would like to tell you how it got in. This sounds as though I am trying to tell you how to teach, but that is not my intention. I'm going to tell you what science is like by how I learned what science is like.

My father did it to me. When my mother was carrying me, it is reported--I am not directly aware of the conversation--my father said that "if it's a boy, he'll be a scientist." How did he do it? He never told me I should be a scientist. He was not a scientist; he was a businessman, a sales manager of a uniform company, but he read about science and loved it.

When I was very young--the earliest story I know--when I still ate in a high chair, my father would play a game with me after dinner.

He had brought a whole lot of old rectangular bathroom floor tiles from some place in Long Island City. We sat them up on end, one next to the other, and I was allowed to push the end one and watch the whole thing go down. So far, so good.

Next, the game improved. The tiles were different colors. I must put one white, two blues, one white, two blues, and another white and then two blues--I may want to put another blue, but it must be a white. You recognize already the usual insidious cleverness; first delight him in play, and then slowly inject material of educational value.

Well, my mother, who is a much more feeling woman, began to realize the insidiousness of his efforts and said, "Mel, please let the poor child put a blue tile if he wants to." My father said, "No, I want him to pay attention to patterns. It is the only thing I can do that is mathematics at this earliest level." If I were giving a talk on "what is mathematics," I would already have answered you. Mathematics is looking for patterns. (The fact is that this education had some effect. We had a direct experimental test, at the time I got to kindergarten. We had weaving in those days. They've taken it out; it's too difficult for children. We used to weave colored paper through vertical strips and make patterns. The kindergarten teacher was so amazed that she sent a special letter home to report that this child was very unusual, because he seemed to be able to figure out ahead of time what pattern he was going to get, and made amazingly intricate patterns. So the tile game did do something to me.)

[..]

Regarding this business about names and words, I would tell you another story. 'We used to go up to the Catskill Mountains for vacations. In New York, you go the Catskill Mountains for vacations. The poor husbands had to go to work during the week, but they would come rushing out for weekends and stay with their families. On the weekends, my father would take me for walks in the woods. He often took me for walks, and we learned all about nature, and so an, in the process. But the other children, friends of mine also wanted to go, and tried to get my father to take them. He didn't want to, because he said I was more advanced. I'm not trying to tell you how to teach, because what my father was doing was with a class of just one student; if he had a class of more than one, he was incapable of doing it.

So we went alone for our walk in the woods. But mothers were very powerful in those day's as they are now, and they convinced the other fathers that they had to take their own sons out for walks in the woods. So all fathers took all sons out for walks in the woods one Sunday afternoon. The next day, Monday, we were playing in the fields and this boy said to me, "See that bird standing on the stump there? What's the name of it?"

I said, "I haven't got the slightest idea."

He said, 'It’s a brown-throated thrush. Your father doesn't teach you much about science."

I smiled to myself, because my father had already taught me that [the name] doesn't tell me anything about the bird. He taught me "See that bird? It's a brown-throated thrush, but in Germany it's called a halsenflugel, and in Chinese they call it a chung ling and even if you know all those names for it, you still know nothing about the bird--you only know something about people; what they call that bird. Now that thrush sings, and teaches its young to fly, and flies so many miles away during the summer across the country, and nobody knows how it finds its way," and so forth. There is a difference between the name of the thing and what goes on.

The result of this is that I cannot remember anybody's name, and when people discuss physics with me they often are exasperated when they say "the Fitz-Cronin effect," and I ask "What is the effect?" and I can't remember the name.

I would like to say a word or two--may I interrupt my little tale--about words and definitions, because it is necessary to learn the words.

[..]

There is a first grade science book which, in the first lesson of the first grade, begins in an unfortunate manner to teach science, because it starts off an the wrong idea of what science is. There is a picture of a dog--a windable toy dog--and a hand comes to the winder, and then the dog is able to move. Under the last picture, it says "What makes it move?" Later on, there is a picture of a real dog and the question, "What makes it move?" Then there is a picture of a motorbike and the question, "What makes it move?" and so on.

I thought at first they were getting ready to tell what science was going to be about--physics, biology, chemistry--but that wasn't it. The answer was in the teacher's edition of the book: the answer I was trying to learn is that "energy makes it move."

[..]

My father dealt a little bit with energy and used the term after I got a little bit of the idea about it. What he would have done I know, because he did in fact essentially the same thing--though not the same example of the toy dog. He would say, "It moves because the sun is shining," if he wanted to give the same lesson.

I would say, "No. What has that to do with the sun shining? It moved because I wound up the springs."

"And why, my friend, are you able to move to wind up the spring?"

"I eat."

"What, my friend, do you eat?"

"I eat plants."

"And how do they grow?"

"They grow because the sun is shining."

https://thinkingwiththings.wordpress.com/2012/03/19/richard-feynman-and-froebel-kindergarten/

The fact is that this education had some effect. We had a direct experimental test at the time I got to kindergarten. We had weaving in those days. They’ve taken it out; it’s too difficult for children. We used to weave colored paper through vertical strips to make patterns. The kindergarten teacher was so amazed that she sent a special letter home to report that this child was very unusual, because he seemed to be able to figure out ahead of time what pattern he was going to get, and made amazingly intricate patterns. So the tile game did do something to me.

[..]

Early in his book on Feynman, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, Gleick mentions in passing that before her marriage, Feynman’s mother Lucille trained as a Kindergarten teacher at Felix Adler‘s Ethical Culture School in New York. Eureka!

http://thenearbypen.blogspot.fr/2009/11/feynmans-father.html

Of course, Feynman's father taught him more than how to translate from words to reality. He also taught him to go from reality to words.

My father taught me to notice things. One day I was playing with an "express wagon," a little wagon with a railing around it. It had a ball in it, and when I pulled the wagon I noticed something about the way the ball moved. I went to my father and said, "Say, Pop, I noticed something. When I pull the wagon, the ball rolls to the back of the wagon. And when I'm pulling it along and I suddenly stop, the ball rolls to the front of the wagon. Why is that?

"That, nobody knows," he said. "The general principle is that things which are moving tend to keep on moving, and things which are standing still tend to stand still, unless you push them hard. This tendency is called 'inertia,' but nobody knows why it's true." Now, that's a deep understanding. He didn't just give me the name.

He went on to say, "If you look from the side, you'll see that it's the back of the wagon that you're pulling against the ball, and the ball stands still. As a matter of fact, from the friction it starts to move forward a little bit in relation to the ground. It doesn't move back."

I ran back to the little wagon and set the ball up again and pulled the wagon. Looking sideways, I saw that indeed he was right. Relative to the sidewalk, it moved forward a bit.

That's the way I was educated by my father, with those kinds of examples and discussions. It has motivated me for the rest of my life, and make me interested in all the sciences. (It just happens I do physics better.)

I've been caught, so to speak--like someone who was given something wonderful when he was a child, and he's always looking for it again. I'm always looking, like a child, for the wonders I know I'm going to find--maybe not every time, but every once in a while.

http://myhero.com/hero.asp?hero=Richard_Feynman_US

Richard Feynman: My father used to sit me on his lap, and the one book we did use all the time was the Encyclopedia Britannica. He used to sit me on his lap when I was a kid and read out of the damned thing. There would be pictures of dinosaurs, and then he would read. You know the long words –- “the dinosaur” so and so “attains a length of so and so many feet.” He would always stop and he would say, “You know what that means? It means, if the dinosaur’s standing on our front yard, and your bedroom window, you know, is on the second floor, you’d see out the window his head standing looking at you." He would translate everything, and I learned to translate everything, so it’s the same disease. When I read something, I always translate it the best I can into what does it really mean.

Richard Feynman: See I can remember my father talking, talking, and talking. When you go into the museum, for example, there are great rocks which have long cuts, grooves in them, from glacier. I remember, the first time going there, when he stopped there and explained to me about the ice moving and grinding. I can hear the voice, practically. Then he would tell me, “How do you think anybody knows that there were glaciers in the past?” He’d point out, “Look at that. These rocks are found in New York. And so there must have been ice in New York.” He understood. A thing that was very important about my father was not the facts but the process. How we find out. What is the consequence of finding such a rock. But that’s the kind of guy he was. I don’t think he ever successfully went to college. However, he did teach himself a great deal. He read a lot. He liked the rational mind, and liked those things which could be understood by thinking. So it’s not hard to understand I got interested in science.

Richard Feynman: I got a laboratory in my room. We also played a trick on my mother there. We put sodium ferrocyanide in the towels, and another substance, an iron salt, probably alum, in the soap. When they come together, they make blue ink. So we were supposed to fool my mother, you see. She would wash her hands, and then when she dried them, the towels … her hands would turn blue. But we didn’t think the towel would turn blue. Anyway, she was horrified. The screams of “My good linen towels!” But she was always cooperative. She never was afraid of the experiments. The bridge partners would tell her, “How can you let the child have a laboratory? And blow up the house!” — and all this kind of talk. She just said, “It’s worth it.” I mean, “It’s worth the risk.”

Richard Feynman: I took later solid geometry and trigonometry. In solid geometry was the first time I ever had any mathematical difficulties. It was my only experience with how it must feel to the ordinary human being. Then I discovered what was wrong. The diagrams that were being drawn on the blackboard were three-dimensional, and I was thinking of them as plane diagrams, and I couldn’t understand what the hell was going on. It was a mistake in the orientation. When he would draw pictures, and I would see a parallelogram, and he called it a square, because it was tilted out of the plane, you know. And I—“Oh God, this thing doesn’t make any sense! What is he talking about?” It was a terrifying experience. Butterflies in my stomach kind of feeling. But it was just a dumb mistake. But I suspect that this kind of a dumb mistake is very common, to people learning mathematics. Part of the missing understanding is to mistake what it is you’re supposed to know.

Richard Feynman: It isn’t the question of learning anything precisely, but of learning that there’s something exciting over there. I think that the same thing happened with my father. My father never really knew anything in detail, but would tell me what’s interesting about the world, and where, if you look, you’ll find still more interests, so that later I’d say, “Well, this is going to be good, I know — this has got something to do with this, which is hot stuff.” This kind of feeling of what was important and that is the key. The key was somehow to know what was important and what was not important, what was exciting, because I can’t learn everything.

(Animation Ends)

Richard Feynman: The thing that I loved was, everything that I read was serious — wasn’t written for a child. I didn’t like children’s things. Because, for one thing I was very very — and still am — sensitive and very worried about was that the thing to be dead honest; that it isn’t fixed up so it looks easy. Details purposely left out, or slightly erroneous explanations, in order to get away with it. This was intolerable.

Richard Feynman: I kind of try to imagine what would have happened to me if I’d lived in today’s era. I’m rather horrified. I think there are too many books, that the mind gets boggled. If I got interested, I would have so many things to look at, I would go crazy. It’s too easy.

[Hayek's plosive]

TIL

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Zarubina

 

According to Jerrold L. Schecter and Leona Schecter, Zarubina was "one of the most successful operators in stealing atomic bomb secrets from the United States".[citation needed] Together with Gregory Kheifetz (the Soviet vice-consul in San Francisco from 1941 to 1944), she supposedly set up a ring of young communist physicists around Robert Oppenheimer at Los Alamos to transmit nuclear weapon plans to Moscow.

 

Ce soir sur Planete +

[sans]

TIL que en France, sauf cas particulier, les tests de paternité sont illégaux. 

[Rincevent]

TIL que Amartya Sen, en plus de descendre d'une très prestigieuse famille indienne, avait épousé en secondes noces une héritière Rothschild (et brillante historienne par ailleurs). Et il a comme gendre le président de la maison d'édition Penguin Random House.

[POE]

Il lui a surtout fourni une éducation géniale et a attisé sa curiosité sur énormément de choses. Je me souviens notamment d'une citation de son père rapportée par Feynman

"Quel est cet oiseau ? En anglais il s'appelle xxx, en espagnol c'est yyy, en japonais c'est zzz... Apprends son nom en toutes les langues et tu ne sauras toujours rien à son sujet."

 

 

Il y a des contre-exemples, corbeau par exemple, se dit corax en grec ancien, koraki en grec moderne.

Feynman ne connaissait pas le cratylisme ?

[Argon]

Il lui a transmis les bons gènes.

 

Aucun gène positivement corrélé au QI n'a pu être détecté jusqu'à maintenant, cela reste une hypothèse de travail.

[Drake]

Une hypothèse de travail? Je doute qu'aucun scientifique espère un jour découvrir un gène "positivement corrélé" au QI (quoi que cela puisse vouloir dire).

[Ray]

Je pense qu'ils sont plutôt en train de chercher une synergie de gènes qui cause l'intelligence. Je sais que la Chine a récemment lancé un programme de recherche dans ce sens.

 

[sans]

Aucun gène positivement corrélé au QI n'a pu être détecté jusqu'à maintenant, cela reste une hypothèse de travail.

 

Les jumeaux élevés séparément ont des qi beaucoup plus proches entre eux que les frères adoptifs élevés ensembles.

[Rincevent]

Le système féodal des droits de maîtrise et de jurande par corporation a été certes abrogé par le décret d'Allarde, mais il a été remplacé par un système de patentes qui, si il permettait à tout commerçant d’œuvrer partout en France, rendait le paiement de la patente obligatoire pour tous, y compris ceux qui passaient entre les gouttes du précédent système. Le décret a ainsi condamné de nombreux pauvres et de nombreuses femmes (dont l'activité commerçante était très réduite en volume, voire occasionnelle) à devoir se priver d'une rémunération complémentaire, voire d'un gagne-pain de subsistance. En somme, le décret a ainsi empêché une partie des Français de sortir de la misère, et a contribué à la dégradation de la condition des femmes en France.

Vous pourrez aller répéter ça à Gaspard, tiens.