phl@druxy.UUCP (04/19/84)
Thanks for the help. Getting into this was an education in itself. My first attempts at finding supplies were visits to the toy stores. They handle nothing anymore for the kids who want to exercise an interest in astronomy, microscopy or chemistry. The only optics available are so poor that eyestrain would soon kill off any enthusiasm. Chemicals are outrageously high priced ($.95 an ounce for alcohol) and severely limited in selection because of safety laws even though PERFECT will still sell you all you need to make enough black powder to blow off a finger for $2.85. My only problem is finding sources. I wonder what kids with little money and parents who don't know how to track down what they need make out in getting this kind of stuff. Being in my second childhood I can afford to indulge myself now that I have tracked down FISHER and MERRELL and a couple of good used book stores. The minimum amounts I buy from the chemical houses are a little on the expensive side but one bottle will probably outlast my lifetime. The older text books are more than adequate in that most of the latest additions in the new texts involve things that are interesting but far beyond the range of my B&L's 1250X. The problem that we kids(!) have lies in getting from what we see back into the right section of the reference books. A good example of the problem was when I read up on diatoms and decided to track some down. I went out to a local lake got a bottle full of muddy water and took it home. I put a couple of drops on a slide and after a couple of false starts, yep, there they were. But then this bright green "fishing worm" came crawling into view. It took me the better part of the weekend to identify it as an oscillatoria because I was wrongly looking under animals because of the creatures motility instead of following my instinct and looking under plants because of the green color. Don't get me wrong. This is part of the education and the fun of doing it with a microscope but I can see where some things are going to be real fun without an instructor around. After all, no pain, no gain. The thing is that those of us with access to a good ref- erence library, experience in dealing with suppliers and access to something like the net (where we can ask dumb questions like I do) see the problem like we do any other job; those people without our advantages are left in a quandry of frustrated bewilderment. I guess bulldog tenacity is the answer. I once read that Japan's Emperor Hiro- hito is a world class amateur marine biologist with identification of over a thousand new organisms to his credit. I imagine there a areas in biology where pros rely on talented amateurs for raw data much as astronomers do at times when dozens of backyard astronomers line up to time stars grazing the moon or keep records of sunspots. Comet finding is also much left to amateur astronomers as is the timing of variable stars. Again, older and more technically experienced people know how to go about and get to what they want or expect, while the un- initiated are left too far behind. Referring back to the toy store for a minute, I also noticed that the stick and paper model airplane is also pretty much a thing of the past. I wonder what we are going to do for scientists, engineers and technicians a few decades from now if the trend continues and the youngsters grow up with no hands-on experience with the physical and natural sciences except for a few classes taught too late in high school by often incompetent teachers. (I had the unfortunate experience in 1953-1954 of having a physics/chemistry teacher berate me for an hour in front of a class for reading science fiction novels by Clarke,Asimov and Ray Bradbury. According to him, both robots and spaceflight were impossible and any student who wasted time on them was a fool. I often wonder how many careers he destroyed before they ever really got started.) Maybe a couple of you pros should get your heads together and write "THE FIELD GUIDE TO THE TEENSIES". Probably Hollywood would never make a movie out of it, but you could expect small (but regular) royalty checks for the rest of your lives. I'd buy one and so would a lot of parents who are frustrated by the present sorry conditions in both the marketplace and what passes for public ed- ucation. Thanks to you people I have received some good titles to track down and buy. If anyone else, either bewildered amateur or frustrated parent, wants a list I'll summarize it along with a few good texts I've found and get it to you somehow. One thing I've learned is that you gotta own em. It's a long trip to the lib- and it is usually closed when you need it the most. - Phil p.s. I hesitated for a while before putting this out on the net. It is too long. It is not really germaine to the purposes of net.bio. I decided to do it anyway. One of the duties of raising children is to identify the kid's aptitudes and ab- ilities early in his or her life and then steer, but not push, the kid in a dir- ection that leads to a life that is both intellectually and financially reward- ing. That is why we have toys and hobbies. Parents need an inexpensive way to let their kids experiment in different fields. If Joey can't do anything with his model airplane kit but cut his fingers, maybe he should try a home computer and the money spent on the knives written off. On the other hand, if Judy is going blind looking at the moon through that discount house toy telescope every night, maybe a couple of hundred bucks for a C-90 or C-4 would not be out of line when you consider that the toy is either thrown out or sold for $5.00 at a garage sale and the C-4 would probably go used for about as much as it cost if interest fell off later. (How's that for a forty-eight year old bachelor?) The problem I see coming (and honestly haven't got any answer for) is that the kids and their parents no longer have the resources to spend for playing around developing an interest in the sciences and the schools do not put the equipment they have available to use at a young enough age. My own school could afford junior varsity football at the seventh grade level, but you couldn't even get into the biology lab until the tenth grade. A biology club was out of the question because of the "lack of funds" and we were "too young". As I see it, those of us who make our living in the scientific and technical fields have got to do something (and I don't know what it is) to develop and encourage our replacements or we are going to be very, very old before we are allowed to retire to our beer and ballgames. p.p.s I didn't mean to imply that programmers were digitally incompetent in the p.s. Some of my best friends are programmers. One of them pointed me to a whole software library covering cell structure,growth,etc. My answer was thanks, but no thanks. That stuff is probably a great teaching aid and supplement to the students' course, but that relaxed study of the Pleides on a clear night at 30X or of a rotifer at 100X on a cloudy one can never be replaced by a computer gen- erated cartoon. But I don't have to tell you people that.