Thursday, October 21, 2004
I Don't Speak Numbers
Hello. I'm a human being, and like most of us, I too have been blessed with the wonderful gift of being able to communicate in a language. I've recently discovered an undercurrent of people who apparently no longer feel the need to communicate using words: number do a better job. These people are called scientists.
Yeah, that's right, I'm bringing it on and calling their bluff. Of course there are some wonderful scientists out there who can actually communicate through words, but there are some scary exceptions. This semester, I have the pleasure of getting up-close-and-personal with two of them.
One of them scribbles intimidating equations with 6 variables on the board and blurts a cocky, "OK?" after each one. Should someone ask her a question for clarification, her cocky smile will transform into a bitter frown right before your eyes, as if "How dare you not quantify your statements with numbers and equations?! How dare you be so unabashedly incompetent as to not understand these fundamental 'sentences' I'm writing on the board?!" Should she manage to overcome her outrage, a typical response will entail a crazy array of vector arrows, and more equations scattered across the blackboard.
Her colleague, our co-teacher is just as bad. Forget about expecting to hear English out of his mouth. A typical sentence from him is nothing more than a verbal description of some equation, "The perpendicular radiative intensity is proportional to the emissivity of the object times the Blotzmann constant times the average temperature to the fourth power." Sometimes he gets really into his numerical lingo, and you'd think he was climaxing. It's not a pretty sight, and trying to make sense of it, is well, I dunno. Consult a calculator.
I'm not going to underestimate the power of numbers and equations, but I'm taking issue with those who seem to overestimate it. A few equations describing the climate system can't nearly capture its complexities as a detailed verbal (or written) description. Some trend graphs and regression lines characterizing the past five years of the economy present an incomplete picture negelecting the causes, effects, and the human toll paid in the process. So go on, study your sciences. I am, I think it's important to be somewhat scientifically literate. But I resent the teachers who expect me to spew out numbers and equations like that's all there is to it.
Yeah, that's right, I'm bringing it on and calling their bluff. Of course there are some wonderful scientists out there who can actually communicate through words, but there are some scary exceptions. This semester, I have the pleasure of getting up-close-and-personal with two of them.
One of them scribbles intimidating equations with 6 variables on the board and blurts a cocky, "OK?" after each one. Should someone ask her a question for clarification, her cocky smile will transform into a bitter frown right before your eyes, as if "How dare you not quantify your statements with numbers and equations?! How dare you be so unabashedly incompetent as to not understand these fundamental 'sentences' I'm writing on the board?!" Should she manage to overcome her outrage, a typical response will entail a crazy array of vector arrows, and more equations scattered across the blackboard.
Her colleague, our co-teacher is just as bad. Forget about expecting to hear English out of his mouth. A typical sentence from him is nothing more than a verbal description of some equation, "The perpendicular radiative intensity is proportional to the emissivity of the object times the Blotzmann constant times the average temperature to the fourth power." Sometimes he gets really into his numerical lingo, and you'd think he was climaxing. It's not a pretty sight, and trying to make sense of it, is well, I dunno. Consult a calculator.
I'm not going to underestimate the power of numbers and equations, but I'm taking issue with those who seem to overestimate it. A few equations describing the climate system can't nearly capture its complexities as a detailed verbal (or written) description. Some trend graphs and regression lines characterizing the past five years of the economy present an incomplete picture negelecting the causes, effects, and the human toll paid in the process. So go on, study your sciences. I am, I think it's important to be somewhat scientifically literate. But I resent the teachers who expect me to spew out numbers and equations like that's all there is to it.
