OK, Daddy, guess what? Here's my idea. We get a stick of wood and we put a timer on it, then we get a big rock and put it on the end. We have to put feet on the big rock, so it can stand on the stick.
Then when the rain comes down, down, down, we push really hard on the stick. We have to do a really big push, then the rock will go up in the air and come down, and the mountain will grow. Then we measure how much weight it took, and how much damage it did when it hit the ground. With the timer. Which isn't a timer, it's a scale.
That's what we're going to do tomorrow!
SteelyKid's plan for tomorrow.
(It's not perfectly verbatim, but that's pretty close to what she said when she came over with this drawing. At four-and-a-half, she's well on her way to being a mad scientist...)
- Log in to post comments
More like this
Some of you may know that a publisher contacted me last year about turning a piece of short fiction I'd written from an adult perspective into a young adult novel. There are several reasons I wanted to do this - the first is that in many ways, the young adult fiction market is much more vital than…
"Daddy? How do you make water?"
"You mean, what is it made of?"
"Yeah, what's water made of?"
"Hydrogen and oxygen."
"Oh. And what's hydrogen and oxygen?"
"They're chemical elements."
"So, when we drink water, we're drinking chemicals?"
"Well, yeah. In a sense, everything is chemicals. Water's a…
The Bottleneck Years
by H.E. Taylor
Chapter 53
Table of Contents
Chapter 55
Chapter 54
Greenhouse, May 31, 2057
Things were not looking good. At UNGETF, we were all too aware of of the unfolding disasters. The storms and wildfires, the floods and droughts were bad enough, but food production…
Today is the official release date for the paperback edition of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, so I wanted to write up something cool about quantum physics to mark the occasion. I looked around the house for inspiration, and most of what we have lying around the house is SteelyKid's toys. Thus,…
What always surprises me, with all of those apparent gaps of logic, is that if you ask questions, somehow the gaps get filled in :-) Mad scientist indeed!
It sounds vaguely like a certain experiment that a very smart lady undertook in the late 1700s trying to measure the impact of a dropped body by measuring the indentation on clay. The question up for exploration was the nature of gravity and whether it increased linearly or exponentially as the height of the dropped body was increased.
I suspect that although Steelykid lacks the scientific framework and language the basics of an experimental exploration are certainly present.
Has SteelyKid been learning geography? I see the word "Oslo" written on that stick. Maybe she's already dreaming of a Nobel Prize (the Peace Prize is awarded in Oslo; the others are awarded in Stockholm, which is probably harder for a preschooler to spell).
Prof. Freud would have seen a phalus in that drawing ...
I see she understands the importance of experiments.