This article in today's Washington Post cracked me up. It is a story about all the bs answers that fathers make up when they don't know the answers to their kids questions while visiting museums and other tourist sites in DC. My favorite:
John Adami would probably know exactly what McLean means when she laments a museum's "intimidating mantle of authority." The Denton, Tex., dad was visiting Washington's museum row with his wife and five kids last week and had been fielding questions by the minute.
"It's a humbling experience," Adami said in front of the lunar landing display shortly after making a hash of explaining the Apollo programs. "It makes you question your intelligence after a while."
He turned slightly away from the family. "I've even been making up my own words," he said.
The story about the docent's hotline at the end is pretty funny too.
In honor of Father's Day, I invite all you dads out there to provide your best bs answers that you have given in response to one of your kid's questions like those in the story--but only if you got away with it.
Here, according to my father, as the words to out national anthem:
Oh say can you see
Any red bugs on me?
If you do, take a few,
So they won't land on you!
Of course, the best I ever heard was an old friend of mine whose father told her the world was in black and white before the 1960s....
That "world was black and white before the 1960s" bit comes from Calvin and Hobbes, which is a great treasure-trove of hilariously bad/inaccurate information passed from father to son.
http://www.geocities.com/CollegePark/ 6174/jokes/calvin-hobbes-science.htm
never linked before, don't know how, and gave up trying to comply with the instructions
I know that my parents both knew a lot, but when they didn't they said so, and turned around to work with me to find the answer. It taught me that I can learn what I don't know. Answers from parents, even if they're right, don't carry the realization that the parents had to learn it themselves. Yes, you might not know as much as Dad does now, but someday you will, and more.
It isn't answers that make good science (or any other branch of knowledge), it's curiosity.
I read that one and it made me wonder what the real answer was. So I asked my parents. They didn't know offhand, so they suggested I call my grandfather, who'd been an engineer (first with the Army Corps of Engineers, then laying out a lot of the railroad tracks through Minnesota and North Dakota). And indeed, he had the answer. To this day there's a lot I don't know (even in my chosen field) but I know who to ask, and that there's no shame in consulting the experts.
All that, and you're not going to tell us the real answer?
K
I got angry about father-child misinformation once at a museum. I was on spring break during my first year of grad school, and visited some friends in Chicago. One of them worked at the Field Museum of Natural History, so I went. While in the Egyptian exhibit, a little girl of about 4 years asked her father what was going on in a diorama depicting scenes from the Book of the Dead.
The very clear and concise caption described how the heart of a departed soul, or ka, is weighed against a feather. If the heart is lighter, the ka may proceed into the underworld. If not, the soul is immediately devoured by a crocodile-headed monster, and may never rest.
The father skipped the reading: "They're dancing."
C: Dad, how come old photographs are always black and white? Didn't they
have color film back then?
D: Sure they did. In fact, those old photographs ARE in color. It's just the
WORLD was black and white then.
C: Really?
D: Yep. The world didn't turn color until sometime in the 1930s, and it was
pretty grainy color for a while, too.
C: That's really weird.
D: Well, truth is stranger than fiction.
C: But then why are old PAINTINGS in color?! If the world was black and
white, wouldn't artists have painted it that way?
D: Not necessarily. A lot of great artists were insane.
C: But... but how could they have painted in color anyway? Wouldn't their
paints have been shades of gray back then?
D: Of course, but they turned colors like everything else in the '30s.
C: So why didn't old black and white photos turn color too?
D: Because they were color pictures of black and white, remember?
'No,' I said, 'I think I've got it down.'
'Well,' he said, 'anything else you need to know, you can learn at the poolhall.'
When I got kids of my own, any question they asked, they got as straight an answer as I knew how to give.
The machine was offering flavored condoms. Son got the flavors right--not very different from what you find on potato chips in the UK--but couldn't figure out just what it was being sold.
He accepted, for the time being, that they were balloons for adults.
I bs my kids so relentlessly than they caught on long ago and now do not believe me when I tell them the truth.
Tribology and other materials science research do pretty much follow Calvin's Dad's routine. It's just that they do it for components and then designers will do it for physical and/or computational models of the specific bridge.
One thing you should always include in your calculations: allow for a labor dispute during construction. A bridge that fell in Montreal September 30/06 failed due to bad methods and materials. There was a strike (and some Mob stuff) during construction, and the bridge wasn't built as designed. 30 years later the bridge falls and people die... gross up that safety factor!
- AJ
Lisa: Daddy, what's anchovy paste?
Me: Well, Honey, that's when your anchovies are coming apart and you need something to stick 'em back together with.
Lisa: Oh.
The lady in line ahead of us turned and gave me a look that was absolutely priceless.
Early on in law school I realized that if you asked a professor a question about a legal rule you could be virtually certain that he or she didn't really know the answer if the answer you got was "It varies from state to state." I've found this one useful as an alternative for dealing with my kids' questions. If they're young enough, it even works for scientific and technical questions.
I almost drove off the road and undoubtedly turned beet red.
He answered for me, "Oh, I guess it's none of my business."
Lengthy answer, birds and bees, bulls and cows, because Mummy loves Daddy.... Why do you ask, son?
"Because Jimmy next door comes from Glasgow."
Calvin learns science from his wise Dad
Here are two that I particularly like:
"Q. Why does ice float?
A. Because it's cold. Ice wants to get warm, so it goes to the top of liquids to be nearer to the sun.
Q. Is that true?
A. Look it up and find out.
Q. I should just look up stuff in the first place."
"Q. How come you know so much?
A. It's all in the book you get when you become a father."
I'm not a father, but I am an environmental engineer. When I talk to my family (parents and siblings) about environmental matters, I'm pretty careful to let them know when I DON'T know something for certain.
For example, there was the recent Supreme Court decision(s) regarding wetlands (which I see is Rapanos vs U.S.). My specialty is air, not water. And my area is technical, not legal. So I tried to make it very clear that I was giving my impression of what the issues were, and my impression of what the decision was and how it was reached. I made it very clear that if they wanted an accurate account, they should look on the Internet.
It seems to me that that's the best way to deal with kids, too. Especially kids as they get into the 7+ range. (Really little kids ask too many questions, and I can easily understand the desire to just ****make them stop***! :-))
But it's especially true that in the Google/Wikipedia/Internet era, answers are incredibly easy to obtain. And frequently it's possible to obtain both correct and incorrect answers in the Google/Wikipedia/Internet era.
So it seems to me that the best solution as kids get older than kindergarten or first grade is to encourage them to find the answers for themselves, and tell them you're interested in talking about what they find in their searches.
Sorry, a bit off-topic, but now that I look for more on Rampanos vs U.S., I see this beauty on a University of Georgia (Savannah River Ecology Laboratory) webpage:
"What on Earth was the Supreme Court thinking?"
So there you have it. The Supreme Court's job is to figure out what is the "will of the people of the country."
Can we check the book Calvin's father was given to see if that one is correct? ;-)
Did have fun when the youngest, not long after 9/11, asked what we would do if there terrorists in the neighborhood.
"Well, first I'd kill them, since I'm better armed and trained than they are. Then we'd loot their bodies of their own guns and money and anything else. Then I suppose we'd have to drag them into the desert and bury them, or else someone would ask where their guns and money had gone."
Wow, that's amazing.
On the other hand, if we could start with a clean slate, and only have laws where there was perfect unanimity among the citizens, we'd have a whole lot less law, wouldn't we?
Something tells me, though, that the fellow at the Herpatology Center really isn't pining for such a libertarian paradise. At the very least the law (or, rather, extension thereof) he favors certainly wouldn't pass the unanimity test.
When I was 12 I was flipping the light switch on and off to everyone's annoyance. Why? I was trying to figure out how fast electricity travels. My father told me that electricity travels at the speed of light and I left the switch alone.
This was a fine explanation for a 12 year old but later it did cause some problems for an 18 year old Electrical Engineering freshman ..