Let’s talk about science education this weekend

I’ll be at the West Metro Critical Thinking Club on Saturday morning to talk STEM. Come on down and tell me what you think — I’m aiming to set up the issue and then try to get opinions from the audience, so the more the feistier.

TOPIC: STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) and the Liberal Arts: How do we teach science?

There is a constant push to change education from an experience that broadens the mind to one that focuses students on a vocation. We’ve got universities hiring business people with no educational experience to make them more profitable, and people seriously questioning the value of disciplines like philosophy, psychology, sociology, or anything that others disparagingly call “soft” subjects. At the same time, there are advocates of reform who think algebra is useless, and that we waste too much time teaching mathematics that, they think, no one will ever use.

P Z will be presenting an interdisciplinary, liberal arts perspective on science education — we need all facets of human knowledge if we are to adequately comprehend our own narrower fields of interest. I’ll be interested in getting a discussion going about what attendees expect from a college education.

Bring back Pangaea!

Everything was better in the good old days.

Unfortunately, being in the middle of a continent means I’m still stuck in the middle of a continent.

Bring back the Western Interior Seaway! We only need to rewind the clock to the Cretaceous, rather than the Permian, to give me some oceanfront property.

westerninteriorseaway

Infantilization and brutality

spankings

Jezebel does it again. They’ve gone rummaging through film archives and compiled a collection of clips that expose the mainstream attitude towards women: they are like children, and deserve to be spanked by a strong man.

With the camera rolling or not, stories coming from Hollywood studios presented a consistent message that spankings were a healthy part of a woman’s life. At the same time, all across America women were getting spanked by their husbands—and taking them to court.

To many American women, a spanking was the fruit not of charming adoration but domestic tyranny. Sometimes these spankings were precipitated by violent behavior on the part of the wife—but just as often it was for her failure to be a docile servant.

It got me wondering…was there ever a scene in an old movie in which a man gets rude or uppity or deserving of discipline, and another man grabs him, flings him over his knee, and starts walloping his butt with a hairbrush? Ever? And wouldn’t the public have been horrified at the impropriety of such a scene, with all its implications of ownership, disrespect and disregard, and sexuality?

World’s most popular spot for racists, creationists, sexists, homophobes, transphobes, and Christians

cesspool

You know what I like about Twitter? Everyone lets it all hang out. It’s humanity without the filters, where people say precisely what’s on their minds without trying to second-guess whether it might offend someone. And it reveals the ugly truth: a lot of people actually are world-class assholes.

Take the announcement that Harriet Tubman will be honored on the $20 bill. As expected, some people on Twitter are raging over it. Cynics, rejoice: the ugliness of humanity is on naked display in one easily accessible place. I mean, look at this:

That’s the kind of thing you wouldn’t normally see outside of Twitter, or a Ku Klux Klan rally, or Thanksgiving with your relatives, or some such similar venue outside the bounds of civilized society.

Here’s another example. I am not a sports fan, but even I have heard of Curt Schilling, but not because of baseball — it’s because he’s an astonishingly ignorant jerk on Twitter. He’s a creationist, he’s a homophobe, he’s simply a disgraceful human being. Without Twitter, though, people might still think of him as a guy who was really skilled at playing with a ball and stick. But no, he happily exposed the rotting, maggot-filled black pudding that constitutes his brain to everyone, and now ESPN has fired him. ESPN has never been at all coherent on their policies on these things — they suspend contributors over far more trivial offenses than Curt Schilling routinely committed — but he made some sneering transphobic comment about bathrooms that finally was enough, and the just plain fired him. About time.

So he wasn’t humane enough for a sports network, but you’ll be pleased to know that he still has his Twitter account, where he’s currently representing Christianity and weeping over his martyrdom. Twitter has no expectations of decorum or intelligence.

I get spam

I got an email today claiming that the Bible contains the cure for diabetes.

It’s a detailed look at one of one of the most controversial passages in the entire Bible.

Its meaning has been studied and examined for thousands of years, but recently, scientists have linked this passage with something no one could have imagined.

In a shocking twist, researchers may be looking to the Bible to cure one of our deadliest diseases.

Thanks to a misunderstood phrase buried on Page 1,117 of the King James Bible… people from across the country are miraculously curing themselves of diabetes…

Sometimes in as little as 3 days!

Atheists hate this… but they can’t refute it.

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I ♥ Elizabeth Warren

Ted Cruz was whining about how rough his life is, with all the sacrifices he’s had to make to campaign for president of the United States. So Warren replied.

Exactly right.

She is going to be a fantastic president in 2020.

Atheist “spirituality” and “mindfulness”

Wonderful-things-happen-when-your-brain-is-empty.-380x213

I despise it. But it’s the new thing, and there’s a lot of promotion of this “mindfulness” nonsense. Yeah, it makes you feel better, which is a good thing, but so does prayer, and acupuncture, and petting a puppy, and taking long walks on the beach. That something might have subjective effects is useful — we all do things that are enjoyable, and we should — but that’s different from claiming it causes material improvements in your physical state.

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Larry Alex Taunton, Ghoul

taunton

Another Christian has written a book to lie about Christopher Hitchens. This one is claiming that he and Hitchens were great good buddies, that Hitchens was sympathetic to Christianity, and that he may have converted on his deathbed (he doesn’t know for sure — he wasn’t there — but he’s going to sell a book with that claim).

He appeared with Chris Matthews on MSNBC’s “Hardball” on Monday night.

He read the book and he loved it, Taunton said of Matthews. He knew Hitchens, and he liked Hitchens. He thought it was a compassionate take on friendship. I don’t know if I can write anything ever again that gets universal praise from both the left and the right. This book is getting quite a reaction. The reception has been so kind, no nice. The atheist Michael Schermer loved the book.

Oh, now that’s a great recommendation.

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It’s only plutonium. It’s only near the Columbia River.

hanford

Hanford, in Washington state, has been processing plutonium for decades. The radioactive waste is pumped into gigantic, double-walled tanks with a capacity of a million gallons each, which, we are told, prevents the deadly stuff from leaking into the Columbia River drainage basin. It’ll just get caught by the outer wall of the tank! No worries!

That is, until the inner tank starts leaking heavily, and they procrastinate for years over doing anything about it.

“This is catastrophic. This is probably the biggest event to ever happen in tank farm history. The double shell tanks were supposed to be the saviors of all saviors (to hold waste safely from people and the environment),” said former Hanford worker Mike Geffre.

Geffre is the worker who first discovered that the tank, known as AY-102, was failing in 2011. In a 2013 series, “Hanford’s Dirty Secrets,” the KING 5 Investigators exposed that the government contractor in charge of the tanks, Washington River Protection Solutions (WRPS), ignored Geffre’s findings for nearly a year. The company finally admitted the problem in 2012.

What with the mega-earthquake waiting to destroy the region, and the volcanoes primed to bury Seattle in ash and lava, and the giant pools of deadly plutonium on the Eastern side of the state, it’s a wonder that I managed to survive growing up there.

Washington state is on my short list of places to someday retire to (if I should live that long), but maybe I ought to consider changing it up to places that are safer. Like Australia. They’re always bragging about their lethal wildlife, but back home, we are threatened with the grand forces of geology and nuclear physics.