Weird Song of the Week Sample - Cars and Education
Cars and Education
Friday 28 February 2019
In Australia, our last car manufacturer, Holden, is shutting
its doors. Holden is a subsidiary of
American car manufacturer General Motors.
It was GM who decided the bleeding needed to stop and they made the decision
to close Holden here in Australia. This
decision comes with job losses and a lot of nostalgia over Holden cars and in
particular, the Holden Commodore which I believe is the closest thing Holden
had to the American Cadillac. For a
while, one can still get a Holden through what’s left of current stock and from
used car dealers. Whether one wants to
or not remains to be seen. As time
passes, however, Holden cars will be harder and harder to fine. That got me thinking that eventually, the
only way to possess a Holden is to do what Johnny Cash did when obtaining his
Cadillac. Well, I mean of course, what
the character in his song One Piece At A
Time did. Johnny himself could
afford to buy whatever model of Cadillac he wanted.
Cars are such an integral part of our society that there
have been many songs written about cars. There are too many of these songs to
list in detail. One of my favorites is Highway Star by Deep Purple.
This song, like a number of others, draws similarities
between a car and a girlfriend. For many
guys, a car is a really big deal whereas for most women, a car is a means to
get from A to B.
I would have talked more about cars, and songs about
cars, but something else happened in the news I thought was worth
mentioning. This has to do with the
passing of Katherine Johnson who died at age 101. If you have seen the movie Hidden Figures starring Kevin Costner, you
know about her. IF you haven’t, I highly
recommend you do watch it. Katherine
Johnson is an American hero most Americans know nothing about.
Johnson was a genius at math. She could calculate faster than many
computers of her era. We’re talking
1950’s and 1960’s. She could do more
complex calculations faster than the computers of the day. When the USA decided to land on the moon,
they hired a number of what NASA called human calculators to deal with the
complex calculations required. It is a
mark of how desperate the United States was to beat the Soviet Union to the
moon, that they hired a black woman for this task. Johnson was not the only black woman hired,
but she was one of the best at what she did.
At that time in the USA, African-Americans were not considered equal to
white people. It is amazing to think
that one of the most advanced developed countries used to have black toilets
and white toilets, black restaurants, and white restaurants, black schools, and
white schools.
Our declaration of Independence, written in 1776 contains
the lofty words: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are
created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable
Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Thomas Jefferson, the slave owner who wrote these
words, believed that all white men were created equal but black men were
inferior, and all women were inferior.
It took a few constitutional amendments, a civil war, and a few more
laws to change the country so that these words now mean all human beings are
created equal.
Orbital mechanics are very complex because not only do
you have to deal with constantly moving bodies interacting with one another,
you also have to deal with stress on the spacecraft caused by the rotation
brought about by orbital mechanics. In
the 60’s, no one really knew anything about orbital mechanics at this level, so
human calculators like Johnson did more than crunch numbers. They were instrumental in deciding whether
proposed flight scenarios actually worked.
She was instrumental in inventing a new branch of mathematics called Analytical
Geometry to deal with the complexity involved.
In fairness to the Russians I should point out that the
Soviet Union was working on the same thing and since the laws of physics apply
equally to Russians and Americans (though Donald Trump might dispute this), I
can only assume that Russians also invented the same geometry to deal with the
same issues. The Russians were well
ahead of the Americans for much of the space race so this branch of mathematics
was probably invented by Russians. But
at the time, we did not have access to their mathematics, so analytical
geometry had to be invented twice as it were.
Thus, a poor unknown black woman, educated at a poor
black college, was pivotal to the space race.
After the moon landing, Johnson went on to pioneer computer algorithms
and programming languages. She was a
true American hero.
All of this diverted me away from cars and got me to
thinking about songs dealing with education and mathematics in particular. The classic song about education is, of
course Another Brick in the Wall.
When it was our turn to graduate from high school (and
for my Hawaii readers I went grad Radford, 1981), our class was given the
privilege of choosing our graduation song.
I was part of a committee of students to do this. We chose Another
Brick in the Wall. For some reason,
the school rejected our choice. We did
not know the school could or would do this.
But this is what we want, we said.
Choose another song, they said.
So we chose Freebird by the
Charlie Daniels Band.
The school rejected that as well and took away our
privilege. Desiring students who were in
line with their antidisestablishmentarianism leanings, the school authorities
sacked the committee and created another committee of students. These students, made up of all girls, chose The Greatest Love of All which the
school accepted and that became our graduation song.
The Greatest Love of All has many covers. One of the best is by George Benson.
Although I like this song, and is, in fact, one of the great
shower songs of all time, I felt we ended up with a wimpy graduation song. Pink Floyd should have represented us.
This video called Modern
Educayshun, while not a song, is very funny and kind of apt for our times.
But when it comes to comedy sketches about education,
nothing beats The Five Minute University
by Father Guido Sarducci in my humble opinion.
Guido Sarducci is a fictional character invented by comedian Don
Novello. The good Father is the gossip
columnist for The Vatican Enquirer.
This university, which costs $20 at the time, teaches you
in five minutes, everything you will actually remember five years after
graduating from a normal university. And
you even get 30 seconds of Easter Vacation.
And just for fun, here is another Father Guido Sarducci
classic.
As far as songs go, we once again turn to the great Tom
Lerher who was a mathematics professor at Harvard, so he knows something about
math. He wrote a song called New Math which is the Weird Song of the
Week for this week.
Remember, in the new math, the right answer is not
important. What is important is your
journey. And yes, I feel this kind of
sums up a lot of modern thinking.
I always used to get nervous in school when after writing
numbers and symbols all over the paper, and moving expressions from one side of
the equation to another, and performing really funky algebraic tricks (I was
very good at this), the answer was 3.
After all that, and it’s 3.
Really? That can’t be right. Surely after all that, I should get a more
complex answer like the square root of a negative transcendental number.
As someone who was and still is very good at complex
algebra, I really, and I mean really, struggled with Analytical Geometry. The people who invented this from scratch
cannot be praised enough. It was hard
enough to deal with after it had been invented, so to actually invent it is
brilliance personified. Katherine
Johnson was one of those people. May she
rest in peace.
posted by Marc Breault @ 5:13 AM
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