Category Archives: Science and Edumacation

Politics, Science and Edumacation

A Tangled Web

NYT looks at some of the myriad issues involved in the energy bill.

The more I look at it, the more I think a national energy policy is a dumb idea. Our congressmen are not smart enough to understand a complex industry and the result of their attempts to interfere — tens of billions wasted on synth-fuels, billions more on ethanol to pollute the air and drive up food prices, billions more for oil companies to do what oil companies do anyway — have been laughable.

No, let the market decide. Restrict the federal role to funding basic research and environmental controls, but get them out of the micro-management and subsidy business. They don’t know what they’re doing. Would you want a bunch of lawyers rushing in and telling you how to do your job? Why do we have this national delusion that energy is somehow a different industry and government can run it better than the people who have spent their lives within it?

Politics, Science and Edumacation, Socialism

Friday Linkorama

Sue and I are watching Penn & Teller’s Bullshit! series during feeding breaks. Tonight we watched the show focusing on Norman Borlaug. Read Easterbrook’s outstanding profile and get angry at the enviro-assholes trying to keep Africa in starvation.

That’s real racism.

Why is it that being a commie is still fashionable while being a Nazi isn’t?

The Bushies boasts about bigger welfare rolls. Only this Administration would crow about increasing poverty.

You have got to be fucking kidding me.

'Culture', Science and Edumacation

But Then Boortz is Right

And after slamming Boortz, I’ll agree with his attack on more school stupidity.

But as Gailes, an honor student, crossed the stage last month to accept her diploma, the members of the audience cheered. According to school administrators, the celebratory display for Gailes and four other students warranted punishment. They withheld the students’ diplomas because family and friends violated a no-applause rule during the school’s graduation ceremony.

Apparently, some people made too much noise so they banned all noise. This is typical government school thinking. Deal with the guilty by punishing everyone. It’s the same mentality that says that if a student fights back against a bully, both are suspended. And it’s garbage. You can define acceptable and unacceptable cheering. And you can find better ways of dealing with it than a “guilt by association” punishment of the innocent student.

Reading between the lines, I suspect they were trying to avoid charges of racism as the rowdy cheering was from some of our nation’s more exuberant minorities. Ironically, they stumbled right into that nest as the punished students were . . . members of more exuberant minorities.

Boortz also links to this wonderful story about a Polish man coming out of a 19-year coma to find that Communism has fallen and Poland is vibrant and alive. I’ve often thought about how amazing it would be to take a time machine and jump every 20 years in history, familiarize yourself with the world, then leap again and see how it solves its problem. I suspect the man would happily have lived through those years. But his medical time machine gives him a perspective that no one else has.

When this man fell into a coma, I was 16 years old, a miserable loner in high school who hoped he’d one day be writer. The menace of nuclear war still hung over everything but Reagan was still President. In the last 19 years, I’ve gotten a Ph.D., moved a million times, watched my team win the World Series, witnessed the fall of the most vile system known to man (Communism, not the three-network TV oligarchy), seen the rise of the internet, continued to write in small dribbles and today had a daughter of my own.

Funny old world. Not too bad most of the time. And pretty fucking good when you smooth it out over a 20-year time-span.

Science and Edumacation

Raise Your Hand!

At least, if you’re not in England.

Teachers should not ask pupils to put their hands up if they can answer a question in class to stop quiet children falling behind, according to government advice.

…

Education Secretary Alan Johnson said: “We need to make sure that no-one is left behind at any point – from the most gifted and talented children at the top of the class, to the quiet child who is well-practised at hiding from the teacher’s gaze at the back of the class.”

Bzzzt. Wrong. This again reflects what’s wrong with public schools — the notion that everyone needs to move at the same pace and respond in the same fashion. If only they could march down the halls in lockstep…

I was a shy kid. I never raised my hand. And my education turned out just fine, thank you.

The report found that it is often boys who fall behind in English at primary school, while girls were more likely to be found among those struggling to make progress in maths.

Teachers felt that children suffered because parents stopped helping with homework when maths, in particular, was becoming too complicated.

Notice no excuse is given for the boys’ struggles in English. This, of course, could never mean that there might be genetic sex-based difference in verbal and mathematical ability.

The methods included choosing which child to question in class instead of inviting all the pupils to put up their hands if they know the answer.

Children could also be given 30 seconds “thinking time” before being asked to answer or told to discuss questions in pairs before answering, the Department for Education said.

Drawing on my four semesters as a college teacher . . . which is four more that most of the idiots opining on this . . . I actually would always use that first method, but in a way that any educator would flinch over. I would choose a student and if they didn’t know the answer, I’d throw it open. Kept them on their toes. It also made them speculate a little bit at times, which was cool.

As for the 30 seconds of thinking time, I never had 30 seconds to spare — even in a three-hour lecture.

A three hour lecture.

Civil Liberties, Politics, Science and Edumacation, Taxes and Spending, War on Terror

Friday Linkorama

Taxes destroy an old amusement park. I hope the city thinks its worth their art subsidies and other waste.

The internet weights about the same as a grain of sand.

Cato on why we should be leery of Rudy:

Here’s why: Throughout his career, Giuliani has displayed an authoritarian streak that would be all the more problematic in a man who would assume executive powers vastly expanded by President Bush.

His support of water-borading is another reason. If Kerry were president right now, I’d support Rudy. But we need someone to repair our government’s adherence to constitutional principles.

Finally, Congress is pushing back against the CIA gul-, er, prisons. Four of seven Republicans. Let’s hope this is just the beginning.

The border agent decided the TB man didn’t seem sick so he just let him in.

Yeah, we’re going to stop terrorism by closing the borders.

Politics, Science and Edumacation

Gore Again

Sullivan thinks that Gore is a man of reason and common sense.

Yeah, right. Gore is saying the seas are going to rise a meter in the next decade and it will make droughts and crop yields worse in America.

FACT 1. There is not one shred of evidence in the refereed scientific literature speaking of a three-foot increase in sea level in ten years. The best estimates from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change range from 0.8 to 1.7 INCHES.

FACT 2. There is no trend towards increasing drought area in the United States that is related to planetary warming. We have good data on drought area back to 1895. The correlation between the area of the U.S. under drought and planetary temperature is statistically ZERO.

FACT 3. As the mean planetary temperature has warmed since 1975, U.S. crop yields have INCREASED significantly, just as they did during the period of cooling from 1945 through 1975, or during the warming from 1910 to 1945.

Al Gore is what he has always been. A pseudo-intellectual trying to sound smarter than he is. He makes some good points on the stupidity of the current Administration — it’s hard not to these days. But people of reason do not engage in panic-mongering. Whether it’s the President authorizing torture or a self-opinionated would-be president hyping climate change.

'Culture', Culture War, Politics, Science and Edumacation

Linkorama

I’m working on two big posts on immigration. In the meantime….

  • Why I’m sometimes embarassed to life in Texas.
  • Yeah, right. I call BS.

    In a recent study, sociologist Diane Felmee found only a third of women said looks were the first thing that attracted them to a man. Most preferred a sense of humour or financial and career success.

    This has never been my experience. And I mean ever. I have known precisely one woman in my life who preferred geeky men. She was also my first girlfriend (and eventually moved on to better looking ones).

    No, these are women who want to have their cake and eat it, too. When they’re young, they want to have sex with hot men. And now that they’re older, they want to settle down with the other ones. And the plain or ugly men are supposed to settle for never having a wild and crazy youth. Garbage.

  • Johns Stossel breaks out the nun-chucks on ethanol. If you’ve read my blog (cue crickets chirping), you know how I feel about this boondoggle. On this blog, we obey the laws of thermodynamics.
    • Science and Edumacation

    Aluminum?

    Anyone else reminded of cold fusion?

    Pellets made out of aluminum and gallium can produce pure hydrogen when water is poured on them, offering a possible alternative to gasoline-powered engines, U.S. scientists say.

    I’m not sure what they’re proposing to do with all this aluminum oxide but I’ll tell you on thing: this won’t work. We seem to have raised a generation that don’t understand the laws of thermodynamics. You can not get more energy out of a system than you put in. I guarantee you that the energy involved in manufacturing, transporting and recyling the aluminum-gallium mix is going to exceed that produced by the hydrogen.

    So we’re back to square one.

    Politics, Science and Edumacation

    Savage

    Much as I respect Dan Savage, he’s buying into the total liberal line with this line of crap:

    Here’s the headline from my morning paper: “HPV Factors in Throat Cancer: Study Could Shift Debate About Vaccine.” You bet it will. Up to now, the HPV vaccine—which, again, has proven 100 percent effective against the cancer-causing strains of the virus—could merely prevent 10,000 cases of cervical cancer in American women every year, along with 4,000 deaths. But now the debate could shift—it will shift, it already has shifted—because it’s no longer “just” the lives of 4,000 American women that are on the line, but the sex lives of 150 million American men.

    “If men got pregnant,” goes the bumper sticker, “abortion would be a sacrament.” Now that straight men can get cancer from eating pussy, the HPV vaccine is going to go from controversial to sacramental faster than you can say, “Suck my dick.”

    I’m sorry, Dan, you’re wrong. As I said before, there are very legitimate reason to oppose mandating the HPV vaccine. I have a friend who suffered the side effects of DES and am nervous about mucking about with a reproductive system decades before use.

    One of the things we can not do is let the Religious Right write the script on this debate. The issue is not whether the vaccine is going to create a generation of sluts; the issue is whether the government should be making a difficult and uncertain decision for people.

    Politics, Science and Edumacation

    Shaddap!

    Yeah, teachers at public schools want parents to be involved.

    Yet some parents in Montgomery County and elsewhere have discovered limits on the get-involved policy when they ask questions about individual teachers, whether those queries are about alleged abuse of students or a decision to fire a popular instructor.

    School officials said they are required to hold back information because of privacy laws, union contracts and potential lawsuits. Some acknowledged that a more open policy would help families handle the repercussions of incidents involving teachers. But the officials said there is little they can do.

    The key phrase in that paragraph is “union contracts”. Five to one this fired teacher had failed to genuflect to the Union in some way. Was probably making the other teachers look bad. I’m reminded of Jaime Escalente, a situation in which the teachers’ union decided that keeping latino kids pig-ignorant was worth getting rid of a trouble-maker.

    Of course, the parents’ and students’ opinions don’t matter. They never will so long as the system is a government monopoly. It’s about the special interests — bureaucrats and unions. That’s all that matters.

    The more time goes on, the more I find myself agreeing with Neal Boortz’s extremism. Big Education — that ugly intersection of teachers’ unions and politicians — may be a greater threat to our future than Al-Quaeda.

    Yeah, I said it. I have far more fear of my kids growing up ignorant and out of work than their being killed by a terrorist.

    The worst thing is that we’ve got millions of dedicated teachers out there trapped in this broken Soviet-style system. Is anyone going to speak for them? Does anyone care? Teachers love their unions. And they fail to realize that these unions are destroying their chance to make a difference.