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How to develop?

Good descriptions

Seek out Good descriptions, to tell of what is going on, and which of it is important.

Practice

Fermi Questions

Practice with Fermi Questions
and Knowledge you can work with...

Visualization and imagination

Scaling the universe to your desktop
Picturing altitude above maps
Probing near space with a flashlight.
Generating questions by teleportation.
Where is China? (or Antarctica, or...) It is down over there... Looking down, through the earth, at the rest of the globe.
A car trip to the earth's core.

Links to model solar system resources
The relative size of Earth, Jupiter, Sun (1 : 10 : 100)

Integrating measurement into your life

BodyRuler
measuring angle&distance with your thumb

Breadth, and a sense of what is reasonable

Scale of some things and `Powers of Ten'ish scales.
Scaling the universe to your desktop
Getting a feel for big numbers

Misc

Choosing good units
Measuring geologic time in earth-orbits-galaxy years.
And perhaps Order-of-magnitude calculation - a "you are already doing it" introduction

Atomic bonding (is fundamentally a balance of attraction (electrostatic) and repulsion (electron-compression).)

Fundamentally, integrate a thoughtful, approximate, numerate thread into your life.

History:
 2002-Apr-11   Changed links (evacuating www.tiac.net).
 1997.Aug.01 - First draft, from notes formerly in `Deep understanding'.

Doables:
 questions
  what of this is key
  what if ...
  if that ... then ...
  gedanken
  look at in a different way
  scale mixing (pet the cat-sized ant on your lap)
  teleportation
...
[i/o boxes | Feynman learning fuzzy concept story | ]

Robert Romer's "Qualitative Questions" AmJPhys64(7)1996July

[questions/daydreaming/calibration/integration]
[time: heart-rate clock, oom 1sec/beat, min/max 50/200 bpm, .3-1.2 sec/beat, 100+-x2 bpm, good(80bpm) is 3/4 s/beat, contrail-angle-time-altitude calc | reflex calib]

  From  Examples to use in intro biology:
I have relied on DAvid Letterman's Stupid Human tricks a lot to show 
anatomical features i.e the man blowing cigarette smoke out of his 
ear, another man "drinking" milk through his nose and squirting it out
of his eye, the girl who pushed her tongue behind her uvula and into 
her nasopharynx, are all clips I have used. It really gets the class 
going.
david woodman
dwoodman@unlinfo.unl.edu