as featured in Desert Exposure Magazine
2021 has been a milestone for my 6-year-old granddaughter (and if anyone can tell me what a milestone is, I’d be grateful). A few months back she rode her bike without training wheels for the first time, and recently she swam without floaties.
I guess all kids look cute, but she looked ESPECIALLY cute dog-paddling across the pool all by herself. She’s evolved to a more traditional way of swimming now, and, cold water or not, is not afraid to jump in. That little girl takes up a lot of my time, but the day will come when she'll have other things to do and other people to do them with, so I'll enjoy it while I can.
Myself, I didn't learn to swim until I was 13, and only because I didn't want to look like a dork to any of the girls at the public pool. You can't put a move on somebody when you're drowning.
My mother, bless her heart, was deathly afraid of water. If I so much as stepped into a puddle, she'd yell, "Get out of the water! You'll DROWN!" If we visited someone who had a pool, she'd warn me, "Don’t go near the water! You'll DROWN!"
Funny, but she didn’t seem as concerned with my brother.
"Jump in," she'd tell him. "The water's fine."
"But mom," he’d whine, "I can’t swim."
"I'll watch you," she'd assure him, and then walk away.
Of course I'm only kidding. She never encouraged any of us to jump in, not even my brother.
The first time my granddaughter swam by herself we were at the pool in the apartment complex my daughter lives at. As my granddaughter was putting her Olympic-level skills to work, she tuckered out and swam to the ladder that was in the four feet section. My granddaughter was “taking five,” as she put it.
Hanging on the handrail, she told me, “Look, grandpa, I can do underwater math.”
She pinched her nose and dunked her head below the surface. When she raised it, she informed me the ladder had three steps.
Hmm… underwater math.
Without intending to, she came up with ANOTHER original math theorem.
First, like I told you last month, she came up with:
Everything Equals Itself,
and now:
Math Is Constant (Even Under Changing Conditions).
So, whether you’re on dry land, underwater, or flying through space, math doesn’t change. It remains constant. You can’t say the same for anything else.
Is this important?
Well, it was certainly important for NASA to know the math they used here on earth to get Neil Armstrong to the moon would stay the same once he was there so he could get back.
Obvious?
Yes.
But it took a falling apple for Isaac Newton to discover something as obvious as gravity. No one had made that connection before. And don’t get me started on whoever came up with zero or negative numbers.
If you’re looking for useless concepts, look no further than Schrodinger's Cat or Zeno’s Paradox. Other than sounding pretentious, what practical purpose do either of these concepts serve?
In the first, physicist Erwin Schrodinger asserted if you put a cat and poison into a box and sealed it, the cat will simultaneously be alive and dead. Alive because it wasn't exposed to the poison, and dead because it was. It is only when you look inside that the cat becomes one or the other.
In the second, Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea proved movement is impossible. Say you wanted to walk from here to there. First, you have to get to the midway point. Before that, however, you have to get to the quarter point. But before THAT, you have to make it 1/8th of the way there. Then 1/16th of the way. Then 1/32nd, and onward into infinity. Infinity, well, goes on infinitely, thus making movement impossible.
Those two notions remind me of the scene in Animal House where three college students are getting high with their professor, and one of them blows his own mind imagining that a whole universe could exist in the tip of one of his fingers. I don’t know what Schrodinger or Zeno were on, but I’d like to give some to my father when his Alzheimer’s causes him to become aggressive.
Meanwhile, my daughter taught me a little something about negative numbers. We were at Barnes & Noble. As we were looking around, I found the only copy of a book I had been looking for. “Blood Meridian” by Cormac McCarthy. I heard about it from Greg Fitzsimmons, a comedian whose podcast I enjoy. It takes place in the days of "Lonesome Dove," but it’s a darker tale. I was going to buy it for myself, but I made the mistake of telling my daughter that my brother would like it.
“He would?” she asked, taking the book out of my hand. “Can I buy it for him?”
He’s her godfather, so what could I say?
“Can you lend me twenty dollars, dad?”
I got out my wallet and lent her the money. I peeked inside before closing it. Yeah, it looked pretty negative to me.
I prefer underwater math.
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Math books are sad because they have so many problems.
theduchenebrothers@gmail.com
@JimDuchene
