Daily Archives: June 13, 2009

T or F? F

Posted on by

Remember the important rule of true-or-false questions: if any part of the statement is untrue, then the statement is false.

14-year-old hit by 30,000 mph space meteorite

A schoolboy has survived a direct hit by a meteorite after it fell to earth at 30,000mph.

No, false. There’s no way the meteorite was traveling 30,000 mph when it hit him, nor did it hit him and then form the crater. This doesn’t mean the chunk isn’t a meteorite, nor that he wasn’t struck by it — elements of the story are certainly plausible, and there’s no reason to suspect that anybody is fabricating the event. I suspect it’s a case of a reporter doing a minimum of background fact-checking and seeing that meteors travel that fast in space and just ran with it — no feel for the number being reasonable (supersonic, and many times faster than a bullet) or reconciling the relatively minor injury with this and the creation of a crater.

There’s a fairly thorough discussion of the details over at Bad Astronomy

Let's Teach Adults, Too

Posted on by

How to Teach a Child to Argue

And let’s face it: Our culture has lost the ability to usefully disagree. Most Americans seem to avoid argument. But this has produced passive aggression and groupthink in the office, red and blue states, and families unable to discuss things as simple as what to watch on television. Rhetoric doesn’t turn kids into back-sassers; it makes them think about other points of view.

I had long equated arguing with fighting, but in rhetoric they are very different things. An argument is good; a fight is not. Whereas the goal of a fight is to dominate your opponent, in an argument you succeed when you bring your audience over to your side. A dispute over territory in the backseat of a car qualifies as an argument, for example, in the unlikely event that one child attempts to persuade his audience rather than slug it.

Teaching kids how to argue properly presumes that the parents know how to argue, which I don’t think is generally the case. But that’s a rant for another post.