I went to a pretty good high school (cough, IB, cough) and I had a pretty great physics teacher. Yet we never went over anything like this video in our physics class. And it’s too bad because I think it would have really made physics that much more interesting.
Our kids love going for walks in the neighborhood. We live in a nice, safe neighborhood with lots of streets but also lots of sidewalks. The kids will ride their trikes or we will push them in the stroller. It’s fun for the whole family. However there’s one thing that’s really starting to bug me, and it’s not what I would have expected: overly polite drivers.
I’ve been trying to teach Eli about looking both ways before crossing the street. When we get to an intersection, we stop and I ask Eli to look both ways for cars. If there are any cars coming, he knows to wait because he “doesn’t want to get squished.” But more and more we run into the situation where the oncoming driver, in some misguided attempt to be polite, stops to let us cross and refuses to go until we cross.
Just stopping, in itself, can be forgiven. But almost every time this happens, the scene quickly gets ridiculous: I motion them to drive on by waving them past, and they wave at me to cross, and I wave at them to say “No really, you go on”, and they stubbornly refuse, so on and so on. It would be comical if it wasn’t so ridiculous.
So I recently came across a video that blew my mind. Apparently I’ve been tying my shoes wrong for 25+ years. I blame my parents. I’ve switched to the reef knot and sure enough, my laces look better and don’t come untied at all.
I’ve been reading Goodnight Moon for over three years now. While it is clearly a masterpiece on par with War and Peace, certain things about the story have always bugged me. For example, at the end of the book it goes “Goodnight clocks, goodnight socks” but the socks are never actually introduced in the beginning of the book. Also, the cats seem oblivious to the fact that there is a mouse running all over the room.