Re: [Phys-l] mushrooms ... and other terminology issues

["John Clement" <clement@hal-pc.org>]

Of course the fundamentalist religious groups do not consider humans to be
animals, so from their point of view it is correctly worded.  They reject
standared biology.  So various groups attach different meanings to words,
and apparently the FL governor had the law passed because of his particular
religious convictions.  Notice this comes in when we use the term "theory",
so I propose using "model" instead, which gets around this ambiguity.

But notice there is a veterinary exception.  This is presumably to allow
artificial insemination for breeding purposes.  However, it might allow vets
or their helpers to have sex with animals.  Incidentally this is called
bestiality or zoophilia.  I rather like the second term, it has a universal
ring.  Oregon has an anti zoophilia law with no veterinary exception because
of this very concern.  This means that theoretically cattle breeding is out
of business in Oregon since most cows are artificially inseminated and the
bulls are "milked".  Indeed in NY State the center for artificial
insemination is at the  Vet school of Cornell U.

Does this mean you are engaging in an illegal act if your dog or cat humps
you?  Or is it only the pet who is violating the law.  Or are you being
raped?  According to the Hittite law the animal must die and the human is
blameless.  But in other cases both must be put to death.

This sort of nonsense can be carried to extremes.  In the movie Christmas
Day about the WWI fraternization by the opposing armies on Christmas day, a
cat went from one side to the other foraging for food.  One officer said the
cat needs to be arrested for treason.  While the movie is fictional, a very
similar event did occur during the war.  A cat which frequented both sides
came over to the French side (as I recall) with a collar and a not asking
what regiment they were from.  The note ended being passed up the chain of
command and a general had the cat tried and shot for treason.

In either case it might not be upheld in the state courts if anyone dares
sue to have the law overturned.  Similar laws in two states have been
overturned, and 1/3 of the states do not have such laws including Kansas,
AZ, and TX.  If the real concern is animal welfare, just have a strong law
prohibiting animal abuse.

Yes words can matter, so we need to be very careful about the implications
of specific phrases when we teach.  That is why I think many otherwise
accurate textbooks have some very bad constructions, especially when talking
about heat.  You need to construct the texts around student thinking to help
them rather than around your thinking.  The goal is to lead them to clearer
thinking.  But this is not helped by throwing N concepts, technical jargon,
and ambiguous constructions per page at them.  Concept first terminology
second.

But that extends to specific mathematical formulations such as g=9.8m/s^2 in
the equation F_g=mg.  This has been around and yes m/s^2 is equivalent to
N/kg, but the latter set of units communicates to the students what is going
on, while the former one makes no sense because a book on a table is not
accelerating so you should multiply by the acceleration=0.  I was pleased to
see that the new revision of Halliday and Resnick by Laws et al. does use
N/kg and makes the distinction between gravitational acceleration and the
constant that goes into the local gravitational formula.  And YES, they are
mathematically equivalent, but they conjure up very different pictures in
student minds.  They do come from other different laws.  I can remember
having conflicting thoughts about the use of an acceleration to calculate
the gravitational force on a body at rest.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX


> Very true. In related news, Florida recently outlawed "sex 
> with animals" (http://www.southernfriedscience.com/?p=10369), 
> but forgot their basic taxonomy of humans. . ..