Writing Challenges
This week's Odd Prompts writing challenge at More Odds than Ends was from Cedar Sanderson: It did not hold up to analytical observation.
That could be just any hard sf story in which the story is about the process of science, but it made me think of something I wrote for another writing challenge some time ago:
There is a good reason to continue discussing older theories in my science classes. They may be superseded, they may have no predictive value, but they are not worthless. Far from it, they help demonstrate how the process of science works, and many times they show up the various errors of thinking that human beings are prone to, from the tendency to confuse correlation with causation to the failure to ensure that one's measurements are indeed valid. Maybe with a better understanding of our fallibilities and weak points, we can avoid another fiasco like AXIL.
(Within the Grissom timeline 'verse, AXIL or Advanced X-Ray Interferometry Laboratory was an orbital telescope with a fatal flaw that was discovered only after a number of important papers and dissertations were based upon data from it, with much embarrassment for all involved)
Since it's supposed to be a quote from Ursula Doorne, a radio astronomer who's an important character in the Shepardsport stuff (including the Shepardsport Pirate Radio Experiment in Storytelling), I decided to dig a little more into her method of teaching, through the eyes of Molly Blaine from "Lunar Surface Blues" and some more stories currently in progress.
========================================================================================
Teaching Duties
In theory, everyone in Shepardsport had a teaching responsibility, even if it was as simple as helping the younger children with their reading and arithmetic skills. In practice, there were more people than classes that needed taught, so a lot of people without science or engineering background ended up as teaching assistants, helping a senior researcher or engineer with a class so that person could focus on research or keeping the settlement running.
As Ursula Doorne's research assistant, Molly Blaine now had the privilege of being her assistant in her introduction to astronomy class. It covered most of the basic material that Molly had seen in jr high and high school general science courses, but the way Dr. Doorne went about it was so different from anything Molly had ever experienced.
They'd started with the earliest evidence of humans studying the skies in order to track the seasons, including the ancient star charts that were hidden in what looked like spots on the sides of game animals in cave paintings. Now they were moving into the period in which proto-astronomy got taken over by soothsayers and went into the weeds of astrology - but Dr. Doorne didn't just dismiss it as foolishness and move on. Instead, she was digging into the fundamentals of why and how humanity's study of the stars went so badly awry for so long, and just what cognitive weaknesses enabled it.
Molly was familiar with the causation vs. correlation problem, and the idea that seasonal variation in maternal diets during pregnancy in early civilizations could lead to personality types tending to cluster in a way that would make astrological signs seem to be predictive. But while she'd heard about the Chaing-Mendholssen experiments disproving superdeterminism in quantum mechanics, she'd never realized that they also discredited the central premise of astrology, that one could predict the future through the stars.
And then Dr. Doorne showed another aspect of herself, one that Molly had never expected, when she said, "Or to quote Shakespeare, 'the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves."
Even as Molly struggled with her astonishment, she recalled that Dr. Fitzhugh had used that same quote in Intro to Psychology, in his discussion of internal vs. external locus of control and its effect on both individual psychology and culture.
==========================================================================================
I don't know whether this bit will actually appear in any of the Molly Blaine WIP's, but even if it doesn't, it's always fun to explore the characters a little.
I also did get a story done for this week's Indies Unlimited Flash Fiction Writing Challenge. I found the prompt rather uninspiring, and the resulting story has the problem of being more on the order of an extract from the fourth book of the Lion in Scarlet sequence, rather than a freestanding story. I hope the moment in Elaine's life at Sparta Point makes sense even without knowing the huge volume of Grissom-timeline history behind it.
As always, if you'd like to participate in Odd Prompts, just send your prompt in to oddprompts@gmail.com to be assigned a prompt of your own. Or if you're not up to the commitment of trading prompts, you can always check out the spare prompts and see if any of them tickle your creativity.
There will be a new word and picture prompt up at Indies Unlimited on Saturday. There will be no voting, because of the delay in posting.
In the meantime, keep writing.
That could be just any hard sf story in which the story is about the process of science, but it made me think of something I wrote for another writing challenge some time ago:
There is a good reason to continue discussing older theories in my science classes. They may be superseded, they may have no predictive value, but they are not worthless. Far from it, they help demonstrate how the process of science works, and many times they show up the various errors of thinking that human beings are prone to, from the tendency to confuse correlation with causation to the failure to ensure that one's measurements are indeed valid. Maybe with a better understanding of our fallibilities and weak points, we can avoid another fiasco like AXIL.
(Within the Grissom timeline 'verse, AXIL or Advanced X-Ray Interferometry Laboratory was an orbital telescope with a fatal flaw that was discovered only after a number of important papers and dissertations were based upon data from it, with much embarrassment for all involved)
Since it's supposed to be a quote from Ursula Doorne, a radio astronomer who's an important character in the Shepardsport stuff (including the Shepardsport Pirate Radio Experiment in Storytelling), I decided to dig a little more into her method of teaching, through the eyes of Molly Blaine from "Lunar Surface Blues" and some more stories currently in progress.
========================================================================================
Teaching Duties
In theory, everyone in Shepardsport had a teaching responsibility, even if it was as simple as helping the younger children with their reading and arithmetic skills. In practice, there were more people than classes that needed taught, so a lot of people without science or engineering background ended up as teaching assistants, helping a senior researcher or engineer with a class so that person could focus on research or keeping the settlement running.
As Ursula Doorne's research assistant, Molly Blaine now had the privilege of being her assistant in her introduction to astronomy class. It covered most of the basic material that Molly had seen in jr high and high school general science courses, but the way Dr. Doorne went about it was so different from anything Molly had ever experienced.
They'd started with the earliest evidence of humans studying the skies in order to track the seasons, including the ancient star charts that were hidden in what looked like spots on the sides of game animals in cave paintings. Now they were moving into the period in which proto-astronomy got taken over by soothsayers and went into the weeds of astrology - but Dr. Doorne didn't just dismiss it as foolishness and move on. Instead, she was digging into the fundamentals of why and how humanity's study of the stars went so badly awry for so long, and just what cognitive weaknesses enabled it.
Molly was familiar with the causation vs. correlation problem, and the idea that seasonal variation in maternal diets during pregnancy in early civilizations could lead to personality types tending to cluster in a way that would make astrological signs seem to be predictive. But while she'd heard about the Chaing-Mendholssen experiments disproving superdeterminism in quantum mechanics, she'd never realized that they also discredited the central premise of astrology, that one could predict the future through the stars.
And then Dr. Doorne showed another aspect of herself, one that Molly had never expected, when she said, "Or to quote Shakespeare, 'the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves."
Even as Molly struggled with her astonishment, she recalled that Dr. Fitzhugh had used that same quote in Intro to Psychology, in his discussion of internal vs. external locus of control and its effect on both individual psychology and culture.
==========================================================================================
I don't know whether this bit will actually appear in any of the Molly Blaine WIP's, but even if it doesn't, it's always fun to explore the characters a little.
I also did get a story done for this week's Indies Unlimited Flash Fiction Writing Challenge. I found the prompt rather uninspiring, and the resulting story has the problem of being more on the order of an extract from the fourth book of the Lion in Scarlet sequence, rather than a freestanding story. I hope the moment in Elaine's life at Sparta Point makes sense even without knowing the huge volume of Grissom-timeline history behind it.
As always, if you'd like to participate in Odd Prompts, just send your prompt in to oddprompts@gmail.com to be assigned a prompt of your own. Or if you're not up to the commitment of trading prompts, you can always check out the spare prompts and see if any of them tickle your creativity.
There will be a new word and picture prompt up at Indies Unlimited on Saturday. There will be no voting, because of the delay in posting.
In the meantime, keep writing.