A Little Red Ball

This is my favorite joke:

If you give a little red ball to a mathematician and ask him/her find the volume of the ball, what will they do? They will measure the diameter of the ball and use the formula for the volume of a sphere to figure it out.

Same scenario, only with a physicist. What happens? The physicist submerges the ball in water and records the change in volume, which every physicist knows is the volume of the ball.

If you give the ball to an engineer, what happens? The engineer pulls out a little red ball chart, of course.

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Besides being incredibly funny, it illustrates how differently people think, or at least how people are trained to think differently. Each person approached the little red ball in a different way to solve the same problem. The physicist and engineer have both been shown how to use a formula to find the volume of a sphere. and the engineer knows how to measure the volume by displacing a liquid with the ball, but chooses instead to use a chart. (I would guess that the mathematician also knows about displacement, but just in case physics wasn't required for the degree...) The solutions they chose show a stereotype about the most common approach to solutions in their given fields.

Sometimes that training limits us. For instance what if the engineer can't find that particular ball on the lovely little ball chart? What happens then? Stereotypically, the engineer would pick one ball that was bigger and one ball that was smaller and simply say that our little red ball was somewhere in the middle. That only gives you an idea of what the solution is though. If you wanted better idea, the engineer could enter all the little red ball data into a computer program and make graphs and charts and extrapolate (predict by projecting past experience or known data) the answer. Wouldn't it have just been easier to find a ruler and use the formula you already know?*

My point is that sometimes we have a answer right in front of us, that always gives us a great solution, but we look at it as too simple and we go about doing things another way, but put more work into than we should, and end up with a solution that wasn't exactly what we were looking for in the first place.

So where am I going with all of this? Well, lately, I've been a stressed out parent, with a colicky baby and three other kids to take care of, I bet most of you can understand why. I haven't been as good with my kids as I should be, and the solution to my problem just kept getting harder and harder to find. The solution was there in front of me all along and I had just forgotten about it.

Jamie and I recently got some new parenting books. Both came as recommendations from friends. They reminded me that the best way to be the best parent I can be is to love my kids and be positive. Discipline doesn't require an angry reaction from me, in fact it's better to keep cool and treat discipline situations as learning experiences for my children.

Isn't interesting that in a home where there is one mathematician/physicist and one physicist/chemist that we were using the engineer's solution all along? (No offense Lyn)

*(The engineer would probably have to make a measurement anyway, but any measurement could be taken that is listed on the little red ball chart, like if the weights of the balls were listed for instance, then creating the program and then weighing the ball could be used to find the volume of the ball. In case you're interested, which you probably aren't.)