Wednesday, December 8, 1999

Splish Splash I was taking a bath ...!

A school science experiment -" Dipping into science " (Projo Dec.6 , C1 West Bay) .The picture shows Nicole Boucher immersed in a tub of water. A little too C-O-L-D Nicole ?

The story does not mention that the Rocky Hill school demonstration was a repeat of the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes famous experiment: Was the King of Syracuse cheated by a goldsmith ? Was the royal crown a fraud ? While in the tub ( Splish, Splash, I was taking a bath ! ) he had a " eureka " idea - the volume of the water he displaced in the tub was equal to the volume of his body - an irregular shape like the king's crown . It was then a simple matter to compare the volume of the crown with its weight - volume divided by weight equals DENSITY.

Yes, the crown was a fraud and the goldsmith's head - we assume - was lost to science !

Just this criticism : Why the extravaganza to demonstrate a rather simple concept ? The main problem was to determine the volume of an irregular body - a rock would have sufficed !

The students could learn a lesson in CONCENTRATION from old Archimedes : He was killed while studying a geometric figure. Bertrand Russell suspects that the Roman soldier who murdered him -against orders! - had suffered through Euclid's geometry .

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comment:
  Ron, I love it! This is the most creative and interesting post I've seen
    for months.
    Keep up the great work. You're the second Democrat on this forum that's
    got a real brain. One question, was it a good looking girl?
    Ciao
    Guy 

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comment from Ron Marshall:
Hi Ron,
         You tickled my funny bone by using  "Splish Splash.." in your post
    on Archimedes! It proves that the happy, liberated  kid in you is
    irrepressible! I noticed that you did manage to touch some cord in Guy
    Fawkes. That alone is something close to a miracle! Even with all his
    emotional Fail Safe defenses up and that hard crust to fortify them, I
    think something genuinely free & ALIVE flew in under his radar. A song
    like Splash Splish could  easily strike a vibrant cord in him., since he
    could very well associate it with a more carefree younger "happy days."
    I think something of the truth you spoke about in our chat, about
    finding a world outside ourselves and feeling liberated, is so
    compelling that not even a staid and crusty conservative like GF can
    escape it. He may still be responding in a self-referential way, but he
    was able to get outside himself also and acknowledge that you'd done
    something "fantastic." And yes, he learned even a poor dumb Democrat can
    have a brain!
 

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Ron