From: geni geniice@gmail.com
On 1/13/07, Fred Bauder fredbaud@waterwiki.info wrote:
'I've run afoul of the rules lawyers on Wikipedia many times. It's getting to the point where >you can't even say the sky is blue without one of these little Napoleans squawking, "Original
research! Need citation!"'
Problem is whith that classic example is that the sky often isn't blue. It spends a fair bit of time being black with white bits. Depending on where you are grey may be popular and red/pink may appear as much as twice a day.
Yeah, and remember the song from South Pacific: "When the sky is a bright canary yellow/I forget every cloud I’ve ever seen./So they call me a cockeyed optimist,/Immature and incurably green..."
Actually, I've been brooding about this topic since it came up last year, and I've been troubled by the meta-question:
WHY is "the sky is blue" taken as the emblematic unchallengeable fact, since it's not even close to being true?
I think the answer is that we've been brainwashed by being _told_ in elementary school that "the sky is blue," and we continue to believe it as having some quality of magical truth to it, even though we can see with our own eyes that it is false.
In fact, I don't think we're actually told that the sky IS blue, I think we're told that we should "color the sky blue." On doing a little Google Books searching, I found some entries that suggest that the reason we were told that is not because it is a science fact that little minds should know, but because coloring is a classic educational arena for teaching children how to follow instructions: "Children must learn to follow directions for many reasons... Say, "Color the sky blue." Children then are ready to be given two instructions to follow, and they follow them in order: "Color the grass green and the sky blue." •Next they learn to follow three instructions..." Burmeister, Lou E. (1983). Foundations and Strategies for Teaching Children to Read. Addison-Wesley. ISBN 020110802X. , p. 103
"Now we are going to color some of the picture together," I tell them... "What color do you think Mary's dress could be?" They decide on blue. I move around as they color the dress. Then we look at shoes and color Mary's shoes black, and finally we color the grass green. Later they will get the chance to finish the picture using whatever colors they want. Approaching coloring in this way seems to help the children who have little or no experience with coloring and prevents them from taking one crayon and making random marks over the paper." Josephine McLaughlin, Sylvia Andrews (2003): "Soaring With Reading and Writing: a highly effective emergent literacy program," p. 67.
P. S. Speaking of things that we can see with our own eyes are false... Genesis 1:16 says "And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also." Why aren't fundamentalists troubled by the fact that you frequently see the moon during the day, and frequently can't see it at night?