Ten-year-old Isaac Douglas Wilcox jeopardized his entire future career in science today, when he described the maximum size of an Australian salt water crocodile as “seven to eight feet.”
Fortunately, his vastly more knowledgeable father was there to correct this serious breech of cognition, and he quickly righted the error, pointing out that “Salties” grow to twenty to twenty-five feet in length. (The largest ever found was 29 feet in length.)
(This post has nothing to do with the fact that Isaac loves pointing out those extremely rare occasions when I am wrong in a scientific area. It’s all about the newsworthiness, folks.)
Later that day, I asked my Dad what family of invertebrates slugs and snails were in. He said, “I do not know.”
(Gastropods is the answer.)
When I was seven years old, I beat my 34-year-old Dad 30-to-10 in basketball.
And, a couple of months ago, I beat him 12-to-zero in Halo 2.
I owe my PhD advisor about a truck load of beer on “beer bets” we made about which scientist did what experiments, and various other disagreements most of which I lost. I did win a few bets- one was on spelling- Salomon Berson- he and Roselyn Yallow (who won the Nobel Prize) developed a way to measure hormone concentrations- the RIA- radioimmunoassay 🙂
I don’t think we’re going to get Isaac started on “beer bets” just yet (especially as we don’t drink), although he has tried to get extra cash in a similar manner.
It seems from his comments, that the satisfaction of being right at my expense is a great motivator.
Beth won a spelling bet? Don’t believe it! I bet Isaac could outspell you if you omitted scientific names. Just plain old words. Isaac, ask her how to spell a word that starts with “d” and ends with “ly”, has 10 letters and means “most assuredly”, “absolutely”, “you betcha”