On 2 March 2014 20:02, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote: > I have a friend who's daughter was leaving home in California to attend > a university on the east coast. On her last day, she and her daughter took > a walk on the beach to talk and enjoy the sunset together. It was a > beautiful display of reds and yellows. > > Daughter: I'm going to miss this. > Mother: Well you can go to the beach there too. > Daughter: No, I mean the sunsets. > Mother: Why can't you enjoy sunsets back east? > Daughter: The sun sets in the west. > > She thought about canceling her college. > > To some extent, just how bad this is depends on what she was studying. As Sherlock Holmes fictionally observed, it made no difference to his profession whether the Earth orbited the Sun or the Moon, and he tried not to learn such "irrelevant" facts. (And the novel that won the Man Booker prize recently was based on astrology, and the highest grossing movie franchise to date was based on children who can do magic...)
...but despite all that, I agree. Maybe this young woman was going to study something in which even a knowledge of elementary astronomy is unnecessary, but I'm with C.P.Snow on this one, there are some basics that everyone should know about (even people who don't aspire to study at university). -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
