The universe asks “Why not?”

I’ve been spending time lately looking at an amazing book my dad gave me, The Deep by Claire Nouvian, a photo essay about the creatures that live down there where no one goes (except, maybe and unfortunately, certain oil companies). The pictures, like the one above, are astounding, and Nouvian makes clear that we have only scratched the surface of the type of live that exists in that world. One can’t look at those pictures without thinking several things.

First, are there not certain similarities between the things deep underwater and those deep in space?

Second, it seems to me that Nature (with a capital “N”?) is really willing to try anything. A creature with seven eyes – let’s see. One lung? A mom who carries her unborn babies in her mouth? (Some frogs). Many of these experiments don’t work, or don’t work for long. (Hmmm – humans?) The restrictions on what kind of life is actually supportable for any length of time condemn many of them very quickly, but nature (small “n”?) seems to be shrugging its shoulders, unperturbed by its many failures and then saying, “Okay, what about this?”, and coming up with something even more bizarre. Every once in a while, one of them works – for a while.

In short, humans spend a lot of time asking “Why?” and the universe seems happy to ask “Why not?”

Good science begins in wonder. So does a good life, I think. So along with asking why, it’s a good idea just to walk around with your mouth open at the millions of bizarre things the universe offers up.

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How to Evaluate a School

If I were to design a test for the effectiveness of schools (and I won’t), one of the questions that everyone (teachers, students, administrators, staff) would have to answer would be, “How many people can you name?”. The more people everyone can name, the better the school.

Faceless and nameless doesn’t work in a learning environment, and when you read about the consolidation of schools to save money, you know it’s going the wrong way. The more people, the fewer of them you really know. When you know the people around you, and you feel part of a community, you care more about what happens.

There’s an editorial in the New York Times yesterday talking about the success of small schools in NYC. When large high schools were broken up to smaller theme-based schools, student performance went up (and not by some shaky test measurement, but by attendance and graduation rates).

Of course, this makes me think, “Well, duh”. It’s so obvious we shouldn’t have to say it. But it needs to be said. You can put all of this under the heading of “Things we know, but don’t pay attention to”.

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