Remember all that stuff you learned in school and thought was kind of useless? Actually it was all taught to you so that you can carry on dinner conversations with five-year-olds.
Some things we have discussed over dinner (and breakfast, with much creaking of brain cells) recently:
- Vampire bats. Their eating habits, usual prey, and geographical range. Why they don’t like to kill their prey. Parallels to disease models.
- Fruit bats. Why trees are not mad at the bats and why they like animals to eat their fruit. Life cycle of trees.
- Volcanoes. How they erupt. A bit of plate tectonics. Why it’s a bad idea to peer into an erupting volcano or try to outrun stochastic flows. Lava and magma. The three states of matter. What happens when the hot lava hits the ocean. Combustion.
- Diamonds. How they’re made and where. The inner structure of the earth. The concept of rarity. The notion of supply-side controls.
- Daylight savings time. Why the days get shorter in the winter. Seasons and weather.
Still, having one’s brain stretched in this way is preferable to the alternative: carrying on a conversation with another adult while the five-year-old works herself into increasingly bad behaviour in search of attention. So.
I’m cool with all the biology stuff and can address economic basics with some confidence, but I am regretting not taking more geology. Great background for childrearing, is geology. Apparently.