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Executive
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2007
Book Reviews |
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Father
Knows Less Or: "Can I Cook My Sister?": One Dad's Quest to Answer
His Son's Most Baffling Questions by Wendell Jamieson |
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Rating: |
*** |
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(Recommended) |
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Click on title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Parenting Wendell Jamieson is city editor of The New York Times, and a parent.
Unlike many of us parents who evade the multitude of questions that come from
our kids, or at best respond with half baked answers or a promise to look it
up, or Google it, Jamieson listened to his seven year old son’s questions and
went to experts to find the answers. The result of this process is compiled
in Jamieson’s new book, Father
Knows Less Or: "Can I Cook My Sister?": One Dad's Quest to Answer
His Son's Most Baffling Questions. Jamieson used his own son’s question
along with those of others. Here’s an excerpt, pp. 74-78: “Why is red for stop and green
for go?" WYATT
HARTE, age three, Carl
Andersen, manager of the Federal Highway Administration's Arens
Photometric and Visibility Lab, TurnerFairbank "Robert Stevenson, who was
very active in the British lighthouse service, was looking for an alternative
color to white—most lighthouses had a white beacon—because he was building a
lighthouse near to one that already existed, and he was afraid that ships
wouldn't be able to tell which lighthouse they were looking at. Of the light
sources and colored glasses available at the time, he found that red was the
next most intense light—that was the color that would be seen from the
greatest distance. So red was adopted in maritime signaling as an
alternative to white lights, and was later adopted by the British Admiralty
in 1852 for the port-side running light on steam vessels. "A
vessel observing that red light at night on another ship had to yield
right-of -way to that ship. Green was adopted for the starboard-side running
light: vessels seeing the green light on other ships had the right-of-way.
When railroads were developed, engineers adopted this existing system as
meaning stop and go. Then as motor vehicles began to appear, engineers
adopted railroad signaling. And in 1914 Children
zero in on contradictions. Boys may be attracted to things with wheels, but
it took a girl to notice an interesting fact about "How come you don't have to
use a car seat in a school bus?" —LUCY BARRY, age six, Nancy A. Naples, commissioner, New
York State Department of Motor Vehicles: "Children
under four years of age have to use car seats on a school bus. In 1987, the
New York State Legislature passed a law that requires companies that build
large school buses to install seat belts for each seat. The law says that all
of your friends that ride with you on the bus, and your bus driver, too, have
to wear seat belts. When you get on the bus, remember to put your seat belt
on and wear it until the school bus comes to a full stop." I
appreciate Commissioner Naples taking the time to respond o little Lucy's
query, I really do. But like many public officials or employees of major
corporations who would only answer via -mail, there is a certain
blandness in her reply,
as though it ad been created by a committee. Also, I must point out, she didn't
answer the question. So I went elsewhere. Michael
Butler, regional president, Automobile Club of "One-word answer:
compartmentalization. The backs of school bus seats are high. The child can
only go so far forward and backward in an accident. If they go back, the
back of the seat will protect their head against whiplash. If they go
forward, then they are going to have the same effect because of the seat in
front of them. They can't go too far forward. Most buses today have to be
equipped with a seat belt lap belt, which protects the pelvic area and keeps
their butts to the break of the seat, which is where the bottom of the seat meets
the back of the seat. In some instances in special-needs buses, they do have
child seats for additional protection, but that's in a specialized
situation, where there might be handicapped children. The typical accident in
a bus would not involve a rollover; it would be a low-speed crash, and a lap
belt is sufficient protection with compartmentalization because everything is
soft all around the child. When I was riding a yellow school bus, the seat
came up to the middle of your back and that was it." "How
many bullets does a machine gun shoot?" —JOE
ROSEN, age five, Gunnery
Sergeant William E. "Gunny" Bodette, Jr., Second Marine Division, "The M240G machine gun,
the preferred machine gun for the Marine infantry, can fire 650 to 950 rounds
per minute. It's called the cyclic rate. We've got 50-caliber machine guns
that can fire 45o to 55o rounds per minute. We also have another machine gun
that is called the M249 SAW—squad automatic weapon—and that can fire 725
rounds per minute. Those are the basic machine guns that the Marine infantry
uses. The only drawback to carrying a machine gun now is the weight of some
of them. The machine guns that we use now are extremely accurate and they
really do bad things to bad people. All Marines are cross-trained on how to
use a machine gun. The standard issue for most Marines is an M16. That fires
a three-round burst. They used to fire fully automatic, but we were wasting
too many rounds to kill one enemy." "Why do clouds make
shapes?" —JIO
K.AMATA , age
six, while looking out the car window at clouds on the way home from school
in Aizumi, Gavin Pretor-Pinney, author and
founder of The Cloud Appreciation Society, based in London, which has five
hundred members in thirty-nine countries: "Meteorologists divide the
infinite varieties of cloud formations into ten basic types. Not all of them
make shapes—some are just too blurry and indistinct to have any clear edges
to them. But the ones that are best at it are the sharp-edged 'cumulus'
clouds, which are the fluffy cotton-wool tufts you see on a sunny day.
Cumulus often look like elephants. This is because these clouds can develop
vertical towers, borne on rising columns of air called thermals. As the cloud
reaches the ripe old age of ten minutes or so, its droplets can start to
evaporate away at the sides, leaving a central trunk that curls upwards as it
is blown along in the wind and looks like the trunk of an elephant. This
might be why ancient Hindus and Buddhists believed elephants to be the
spiritual cousins of clouds." `Where does wind come
from?" —STEPHEN
DiNISO, age ten, Jeff Warner, meteorologist, Penn State
University, State College, "The Earth, because it is a
globe, heats unevenly; it does not heat the same at the equator as it does at
the poles. That leads to the formation of zones of high and low pressure. At
the ground, then, that difference in air pressure causes the air to start
moving. Air has properties of a fluid, like water, and much like water wants
to flow downhill, from high to low, air wants to do the same. So where there
are areas of high pressure—meaning lots of air—air wants to flow from that
zone of high pressure to a zone of low pressure, where there is less air or
less weight of air. That starts the wind flowing. That motion of air at the
surface is what you feel as wind. There are other things that happen that
cause it to blow in certain directions—like the Coriolis effect, an apparent
deflection to the right, in the northern hemisphere, of things that are
moving above the ground that are not in contact with the Earth—but the main
reason for the wind is the movement of air from high to low pressure, which
is called the Pressure Gradient Force." After
a few pages of Father
Knows Less, readers understand the process, and the rest of the book
involves getting amused by the questions, and somewhat bored by the serious
answers. Honestly, I think some of my made up answers were a lot more fun for
everyone. No matter how we answer the questions of children, it’s all about
the relationship between parent and child. Steve
Hopkins, October 25, 2007 |
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Go to Executive
Times Archives |
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The recommendation rating for this book appeared in the November
2007 issue
of Executive Times URL for this review: ttp://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Father
Knows Less.htm For Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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