26 Mar 2017, 10:09 am
I never really read the The Little Prince book until this last week. Long story, for those interested in math, there is something obscure called "The Little Prince's Problem," which is to figure out the analytic shape of a planet that maximizes the gravity at a point of its surface, given a fixed mass and a fixed density. You'd think that 330 years after the discovery of gravity by Isaac Newton in 1687, this problem would have been solved a long time ago. Well, as it turned out, it might have been solved before, but the formal publication of the solution only happened two years ago in Eur. J. Phys. 36, 055010 (2015). To be honest, many other people clearly have stated and solved the problem before. But I don't think there was a formal publication until 2015. Some people have claimed to have seen it in a physics competition for high-school students 20 years earlier.
It's an interesting math problem, the shape can be solved by high-school students, without calculus. But here I want to talk about The Little Prince, the book.
As I have shown a few times before, this is a picture that I drew and incorporated into my otherwise fairly serious PhD thesis.
Back then in 1992, I did not know anything about autism. Nor have I read The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. So, looking back at it all, it kind of freaks me out a bit. Now that I am reading the book, it triggers just so much "resonance." I can talk non-stop about the lessons in life from this book, especially for autistic families. I think parents with autistic children should at very least watch this video (the first two chapters of the book):
And here are the Baobab trees (from https://www.buzzfeed.com/emw/10-the-little-prince-quotes-we-should-all-live-b-c4ro)
And here is a paragraph from a copy of the book I borrowed from local public library for my daughter:
... But if it's the seed of a bad plant, you must pull the plant up right away, as soon as you can recognize it. As it happens, there were terrible seeds on the little prince's planet... baobab seeds. The planet's soil was infested with them. Now if you attend to a baobab too late, you can never get rid of it again. It overgrows the whole planet. Its roots pierce right through. And if the planet is too small, and if there are too many baobabs, they make it burst into pieces.
The author later stated that this picture drawing of baobabs is the biggest one in the whole book. So to him, this is one of the most important messages he wanted to convey: "Children, watch out for baobabs!"
Baobabs, refer to "bad thoughts" in general. In the context of Saint-Exupéry, it might even refer to the rise of Nazism in particular. But since the author made it general, let us not assign too much weight to politics here.
In the case of autism, I draw analogy between baobabs and children's tantrums. Each time time there is a baobab seed sprouting, you must pull the plant up right away. Otherwise too many baobabs will end up making the planet burst into piece. My children are always happy and smiling, but that's because I have been pulling up their baobab sprouts regularly. As the book says: "It's a very tedious work, but very easy." I have been able to pull up my children's baobabs, because I used to draw pictures and talk to them at bedtime, every night, even when they were non-verbal. With that, I removed their bad feelings from everyday. I call it the "double-entry ledger." And I made sure that all negative items are properly cancelled inside the double-entry ledgers in my children's brains. There is a reason why my children are always happy and smiling. I have racked my brain trying to figure out an alternative to picture-aided talking, but so far I have come up empty. My point is, I have no idea what other parents do to pull up the baobabs from their children's minds. I can only conclude that most of the parents out there just don't do it. They let the baobabs pile up, until it's all too late.
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I can only wonder, whether schizophrenia could be avoided by teaching children to pull up another type of their baobabs early on. Frankly, no one has taught today's children how to get rid of their anxiety issues. It's all very simple. A simple digital voice recorder and you can get rid of your anxiety issues. You only need to establish a "space-time wormhole tunnel" between your negative moments and your positive moments. It's all very easy. Yet people don't teach their children how to do it. Until it's all too late.
