Arts or Sciences: the one and a half question quiz!

[odditycollector]

When my friend Dale opens a can, she always turns it upside down to open it from the bottom. One day her young son asked her why. "I don't really know," she said. "My mom always did it that way." She decided to call her mom and ask.

"When we brought the cans up from the cellar, the tops were always dusty," her mother explained. "I couldn't be bothered to clean them, so I turned them upside down and opened the bottom."

[Poll #1118728]

Comments

[victor-von.livejournal.com]

So, maybe to everyone's surprise, this makes me think of martial arts.

Martial arts schools, especially in America, have a tendency to reproduce moves exactly as the original Master taught them. However, when asked "Why does your hip drop when you do that move?" the answer is often "Because it does, okay?!?" This is especially true in Tai Ch'i "for health" schools, where the moves have been separated from the martial aspects of the form.

Possible answers to the above question include "Because it focuses your energy," or is "Because my teacher had a bad hip." My point is, if you don't know why you're doing something, you don't know what you're doing.

Which your story illustrates nicely. :-)

[odditycollector.livejournal.com]

That's really interesting - I guess hopefully the *best* teachers have learned from more than one person. Which, yeah, pro'lly not the casual Western ones.

(I was actually going to include an option for "interesting point about social evolution" but shrugged it off as too complicated. This was, of course, before I got to the second ... ;)