Tag: learning

Posted on
by
Image of restored specimen of a squat quadruped with knobby back
An ankylosaurus: by Emily Willoughby (e.deinonychus@gmail.com, http://emilywilloughby.com) – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30925563

Like many kids, I was into dinosaurs. I had fun reading about the different types of dinosaurs, and trying to figure out which was the biggest, strongest, or most powerful. Over the years, I got interested in other things so dinosaurs have not been in the front of my mind. Recently my son has helped me to reconnect with the amazing world of dinosaurs. My son (two and half years old) loves dinosaurs and has been starting to learn some of their names (like ankylosaurus) so I have naturally been learning with him. To my surprise I’ve found that dinosaur research, and paleontology as a whole, has made tremendous progress since I was a kid.

Here are some specific examples:

  • Spinosaurus is the largest carnivorous dinosaur ever and had a crazy looking spine on its back. The finding of new Spinosaurus fossils as spurred a lot of research trying to understand whether it was aquatic, what the spine was for, and what it ate. The evidence is suggesting that it may have been one of the only swimming dinosaurs!
  • Tyranosaurus Rex was huge, but how fast was it? There has been a lot of back and forth but according to this 2017 paper, they probably weren’t that fast and mostly walked. Very disappointing! I still am hopeful that they could run as fast as a Jeep, but it did get me interested in the general relationship between animal size and speed (see this interesting blog post going into the details about animal speed)
  • Dinosaurs had efficient respiration with air sacs like birds (living dinosaurs!). In addition their bones were often pneumatic meaning that the air passages went through the bone. This made the bones light and strong which may have been one of the traits that allowed dinosaurs to get so big.
  • There is a wealth of evidence and theories about how different dinosaurs and other animals evolved. I really enjoyed this Eons show exploring how pterosaurs evolved the ability to fly.

Dinosaurs remind me that the world has not always been like it is now; it has changed and most likely will continue to change. The dinosaurs showed that huge land animals are possible. Could they evolve again? Could genetic engineering help? Jurassic park made it seem like a bad idea, but I would be for it. On a darker note, the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs (except the birds!) in particular is a reminder that millions of years worth of effort can be erased in a day. But perhaps the survival of our ancestors and the ancestors of other current species is an inspiration that life could survive the next big catastrophe. I like to remember we are part of the same story that includes the dinosaurs, and it is not over yet!

Posted on
by

I was at the the beach this past week, and one of the days we got a chance to do some star gazing. It was a new moon, and the sky was full of stars (and some satellites). I wanted to take a picture to capture the majesty. In the past, I’ve tried to take pictures of the stars and have failed, but recently I’ve been getting better at manual mode on my Galaxy S9, so I tried again. This time it worked! Here was the result:

The night sky at the Jersey Shore.

There were a couple of settings that made the picture possible. With manual mode, I set the focus to infinity so the stars would be resolved. I fully opened the aperture to let in more light, and I set the phone down on a box so that it did not move. When it was taking the picture, the phone automatically determined the exposure time which ended up being around 10 seconds. I also raised the ISO level, but that may not have been the best idea because it can introduce noise. If you’re interested in learning more, there are many guides available, I came across this one today and found it to be informative.

Good luck with your astrophotography! Here’s a picture of the big dipper to close:

The big dipper.

Posted on
by

I was super excited to go skiing for the first time as an 11 year old. My older brother and I had signed up for a ski trip run by our town, and we were on a bus with a bunch of people I didn’t know. Going skiing was something I had dreamed of doing ever since watching Olympic alpine skiing as a very small child. Every winter I would sled fanatically any time it snowed, but I longed to go skiing. This was my chance!

I ended up learning how to ski quickly and loving it. My first day, my brother and I stayed on the beginner hill, but by the end we were flying down that little hill. Since then I have gone on to ski black-diamond slopes.

Why did I learn skiing quickly, while other people struggle greatly? Since then I have failed multiple times trying to “teach” friends how to ski. But then I have another friend, Keith, who learned how to ski even faster than me and was on black diamond slopes on his very first day!

How people learn is a whole field of study that fascinates me. Today, let me share a few of my thoughts about how learning works based on my own experience and from what I have picked up from reading about learning.

I think that there are many, many mini skills that are needed to accomplish any physical skill like skiing, swimming, or even walking. Having a toddler in the house makes that very clear. My son will try all sorts of variations on manipulating objects and repeat again and again. I believe that these games help him to build up a suite of mini skills that can eventually be drawn upon to learn skills like shooting a basket or doing stand up paddle boarding.

Perhaps getting stuck when attempting to learn a new skill is just a sign that one needs to learn some more of those mini skills. I had that experience with snowboarding which I tried for the first time with my friend Keith who was trying skiing. I had hoped that my experience with skiing would help me to pick up snowboarding. No luck! I kept on falling, and just felt very unstable on the board. I couldn’t turn or stop, so I had to fall. Sometimes the falls were awkward half-falls, and other times I would do a face plant into the icy snow. In the end, I gave up and switched my snowboard rental for a ski rental. Then Keith and I had a blast for the rest of the day racing down the advanced hills.

I didn’t try snowboarding again for over a decade, but when I did try snowboarding I picked it up right away and I loved it! I’m not sure how this happened, but I attribute it to learning how to do the RipStik (see the image below). A RipStick is like a skateboard but has only a single wheel at each end attached with swivel casters. To move you have to swivel you legs back and forth which somehow generates motion. It was definitely a challenge to learn but I learned it during a summer living with a group of my friends while going to Rutgers.

RipStik_Classic_BL_Product
The Razor RipStik

Somehow when I returned to snowboarding I felt like I was able to transfer some of the skills I had picked up from the RipStik. I felt much more comfortable balancing on the board. I could swing my legs and hips to enter in to turns and I could control how the edge slid through the snow.

When I tried snowboarding as a teenager, I wasn’t good at it, but when I tried it again over a decade later I was a ‘natural’. This experience and others like it, make me question the idea that some people are inherently good or bad at certain skills or sports. Yes, some people will learn skills much faster than others. But do not write off the slow learners! Once they master the necessary mini-skills they can catch up pretty quickly and perhaps they can experience the joy of flying down a mountain on a snowboard!

Do you have the experience of failing to learn something the first time and then picking it up years later? I’d be curious to hear about it. I’m also interested in learning more about what the scientific research says about how people learn.