Popping something is an old fashioned slang term for pawning something.
A working man or woman in the north of England would need their clogs until they died, unlike their overcoat or Sunday clothes that could be pawned on a Monday and redeemed on a Friday.
So Pop Goes the Weasel means pawning one’s Sunday coat (weasel & stoat) to buy the half pound of tuppenny rice.
But you could only pop your clogs if you no longer needed them - that is if you were dead.
Well, thank you for that lesson. Want to hear something "funny"?
We use statistics and models in pol-sci and economics, and in pedagogy too. Can you imagine trying to quantify and pin down variables for such fields? It makes determining if a virus/vaccine is dangerous a doddle.
So what pol-sci, economists and pedagogues do is, they (we, sigh, groan, one cross each line on the left) simplify until the theory fits the data, and vice versa. This is then made into policy and law.
I mention this for two reasons:
A) If you really want to know how a virus, bacteria, vaccine, other works, you can find out within a pretty good margin. There will be outliers, just like there's people the natural body temperature of whom is 35C, but those will be rare and methods for their inclusion/exclusion are easy to create.
B) Knowing that this is how pol-sci, econ and pedagogy actually works means never having to wonder [Why] what seems easy, empirically speaking, is, are and will be such flusterclucks as we have been witnessing for ca 25 years now; the fields named switched over from empiricism to models in the early-to-mid 1990s.
I used to teach the Physics I course - which is an intro course to the basics. Things like the laws of motion, work, energy, angular momentum, etc. Most of the difficulties arise in the 'modelling' - and part of that is figuring out what *variables* are going to be important. The maths, as maths, was almost always pretty simple stuff. The students were doing much more complicated maths in their math courses - but they usually really struggled when it came to *applying* even simple stuff to model physics problems.
One of the difficulties is in knowing which variables are going to be relevant. I used to give out more 'open-ended' questions from time to time so that they could practice the whole process of starting with a question and having to do everything - like a little mini-research project. Most often we'd be giving out well-specified problems (the weight of the object is this, it's acted on by this force in this direction, it was initially moving this fast, etc) but usually we don't have things laid out so nicely in real life.
If you 'translate' this process into much more complex problems - like those in a pol-sci scenario - then, as you say, even trying to figure which bits are relevant, or how they might all interact, is going to be really, really, difficult.
I think we need both empiricism and models - without the models it's hard to properly interpret the empirical data. The danger with models is that you can get a bit too wedded to them - and think they represent the 'truth' instead of only being a potential candidate for capturing some elements of the truth.
Sounds like how Natural Sciences (which was a lump-it-all together mask of physics, math, chemistry and biology) used to be taught here. From single principles and laws to more and more "it seems to be like this" to "this is the best we can figure right now", people splitting off to their relevant branches at the university-level.
At pol-sci, we were repeatedly told to remember we don't have any lab except empirical reality - and that past events while leading to present condtions and future changes aren't an exact road-map. What works well in Singapore in the 1980s need not work at all in Indonesia in the 2020s, so to speak.
Which frustrated the budding economists among us to no end; economists used to be forced and I do mean forced to take at least two semesters of pol-sci to round out their econ degrees. The older more level-headed and not very ideological lecturers at National Economy Center were quite open about their discpline straddling the fence between being an auditor and being social science; the younger ones insisted that their "advanced and complicated math" (feel free to laugh) meant it was a natural science on par with physics.
My brother the hydrogeologist says this about models, since he uses them and neuralnets every day at work:
"A model can help us with where to look and what to look for so it saves time and money, but we must go out and look too."
I was reminded of the Monty Hall problem, but maybe this is a bit far-fetched.
There are three doors. Behind one of them is a SCUM, and behind two are HEROes. Choose a door. If you find the SCUM, you get a free booster.
After you chose a door, the M.V. (master of vaccination) opens one of the two remaining doors, and there is a LIMBO behind. You are allowed to switch doors. Should you?
Yes, you should. My favourite proof: make it more complicated. There are now two candidates, always starting with the same door. Candidate no. 1 never switches, candidate 2 always does. Candidate no. 1 finds the SCUM with probability 1/3. Since either candidate 1 or candidate 2 will find the SCUM (one door is always ruled out by the M.V.), the probability for candidate 2 must be 2/3.
You know, if you want to amuse yourself, RR, you can just make up bizarre idioms of your own and many of us will believe that’s how Brits actually talk.
Many of the idioms that have 'stuck' with me are a bit old-fashioned these days, but I still like them. One of my favourites is the "more than one way to skin a cat" saying. When was skinning cats so popular that they came up with several ways to do it?
Popping something is an old fashioned slang term for pawning something.
A working man or woman in the north of England would need their clogs until they died, unlike their overcoat or Sunday clothes that could be pawned on a Monday and redeemed on a Friday.
So Pop Goes the Weasel means pawning one’s Sunday coat (weasel & stoat) to buy the half pound of tuppenny rice.
But you could only pop your clogs if you no longer needed them - that is if you were dead.
Ah - that's good to know.
It does make sense, after all!
(Thank you, Google and Quora)
Just reporting that the equations rendered properly when reading the email of this article on my iPhone.
Thanks!
Well, thank you for that lesson. Want to hear something "funny"?
We use statistics and models in pol-sci and economics, and in pedagogy too. Can you imagine trying to quantify and pin down variables for such fields? It makes determining if a virus/vaccine is dangerous a doddle.
So what pol-sci, economists and pedagogues do is, they (we, sigh, groan, one cross each line on the left) simplify until the theory fits the data, and vice versa. This is then made into policy and law.
I mention this for two reasons:
A) If you really want to know how a virus, bacteria, vaccine, other works, you can find out within a pretty good margin. There will be outliers, just like there's people the natural body temperature of whom is 35C, but those will be rare and methods for their inclusion/exclusion are easy to create.
B) Knowing that this is how pol-sci, econ and pedagogy actually works means never having to wonder [Why] what seems easy, empirically speaking, is, are and will be such flusterclucks as we have been witnessing for ca 25 years now; the fields named switched over from empiricism to models in the early-to-mid 1990s.
I used to teach the Physics I course - which is an intro course to the basics. Things like the laws of motion, work, energy, angular momentum, etc. Most of the difficulties arise in the 'modelling' - and part of that is figuring out what *variables* are going to be important. The maths, as maths, was almost always pretty simple stuff. The students were doing much more complicated maths in their math courses - but they usually really struggled when it came to *applying* even simple stuff to model physics problems.
One of the difficulties is in knowing which variables are going to be relevant. I used to give out more 'open-ended' questions from time to time so that they could practice the whole process of starting with a question and having to do everything - like a little mini-research project. Most often we'd be giving out well-specified problems (the weight of the object is this, it's acted on by this force in this direction, it was initially moving this fast, etc) but usually we don't have things laid out so nicely in real life.
If you 'translate' this process into much more complex problems - like those in a pol-sci scenario - then, as you say, even trying to figure which bits are relevant, or how they might all interact, is going to be really, really, difficult.
I think we need both empiricism and models - without the models it's hard to properly interpret the empirical data. The danger with models is that you can get a bit too wedded to them - and think they represent the 'truth' instead of only being a potential candidate for capturing some elements of the truth.
Sounds like how Natural Sciences (which was a lump-it-all together mask of physics, math, chemistry and biology) used to be taught here. From single principles and laws to more and more "it seems to be like this" to "this is the best we can figure right now", people splitting off to their relevant branches at the university-level.
At pol-sci, we were repeatedly told to remember we don't have any lab except empirical reality - and that past events while leading to present condtions and future changes aren't an exact road-map. What works well in Singapore in the 1980s need not work at all in Indonesia in the 2020s, so to speak.
Which frustrated the budding economists among us to no end; economists used to be forced and I do mean forced to take at least two semesters of pol-sci to round out their econ degrees. The older more level-headed and not very ideological lecturers at National Economy Center were quite open about their discpline straddling the fence between being an auditor and being social science; the younger ones insisted that their "advanced and complicated math" (feel free to laugh) meant it was a natural science on par with physics.
My brother the hydrogeologist says this about models, since he uses them and neuralnets every day at work:
"A model can help us with where to look and what to look for so it saves time and money, but we must go out and look too."
I was reminded of the Monty Hall problem, but maybe this is a bit far-fetched.
There are three doors. Behind one of them is a SCUM, and behind two are HEROes. Choose a door. If you find the SCUM, you get a free booster.
After you chose a door, the M.V. (master of vaccination) opens one of the two remaining doors, and there is a LIMBO behind. You are allowed to switch doors. Should you?
Yes, you should. My favourite proof: make it more complicated. There are now two candidates, always starting with the same door. Candidate no. 1 never switches, candidate 2 always does. Candidate no. 1 finds the SCUM with probability 1/3. Since either candidate 1 or candidate 2 will find the SCUM (one door is always ruled out by the M.V.), the probability for candidate 2 must be 2/3.
OOH - I like this!
Very good. Looking forward to part 2.
You know, if you want to amuse yourself, RR, you can just make up bizarre idioms of your own and many of us will believe that’s how Brits actually talk.
Many of the idioms that have 'stuck' with me are a bit old-fashioned these days, but I still like them. One of my favourites is the "more than one way to skin a cat" saying. When was skinning cats so popular that they came up with several ways to do it?