Daddy, let me tell you all about the universe

Noah has, in his own 4-year-old way, figured out how the universe works. The solar system, the planets, the earth, volcanos, icebergs, the water system, the weather, life--animals and plants alike, machinery, even the big topic of evolution. Yes, penguins used to fly, but they no longer can even though they have wing-like flippers, and he goes on and on with certainty. He still occasionally puzzles over gravity a little bit ("Why can't you SEE gravity?") but he thinks he's got the basics down.

During the first two lectures of the "Statistical Methods for Epidemiology" graduate course that I sat in on, I thought that although I didn't get the formulas and the symbols, I had understood the basic idea. Okay, you design a study and find appropriate statistical tools to analyze it. And in the process there are many technical aspects that you have to deal with. But the gist is there. Fine. Understood. Ready to move on.

Wait. Not so simple. Now I realized I was just like Noah. The less you know about something, the more you think you've understood it. As the lectures got more and more obscure, to the point that I couldn't parse a single line in my 8-page notes, I decided to step back and study a basic statistics textbook. Five chapters later, I am humbled by the depth of the topics and have decided to stop going to the graduate course, as there's too much I still need to learn! It turned out that phrases I heard had specific meanings and whole theories behind them. I was too naive! So that's why I am home right now rather than in class. I should stop this entry right now and head Chapter 6 of my statistics book!

PS. On the other hand, it's rather nice to be Noah. He has no inhibition about learning anything. He hasn't been told that he couldn't do math, or he's not good at something. He embraces whatever knowledge and ideas that come to him and tries to figure out how they works in his own way. Don't know exactly at what point in life we become humbled, intimidated and hence inhibited.