Sorry, Scotland

A teacher in East Kilbride, Scotland, openly admitted to being a creationist, and promoting creationist beliefs in the classroom. They’re everywhere, so this is unsurprising, but this is what I have to apologize for:

Education chiefs launched an investigation earlier this month after it emerged that members of a US pro-creationist Christian ­religious sect, the West Mains Church of Christ, had been working as classroom assistants for eight years at Kirktonholme Primary in East Kilbride.

American creationist fifth columnists seeking to corrupt education in Scotland! I thought we were allies.

At least we sent you the stupid ones.

During a discussion on the Big Bang – the scientific theory explaining the origins of the universe – pupils were also said to have been told by teacher Leonard Rogers that people must stop putting their faith in things that cannot be proven.

Wait. “Stop putting their faith in things that cannot be proven”…well, there goes the entirety of religion, then.

Tech reporters, a suggestion

Try asking difficult questions. I was reading this enthusiastic story about smart contact lenses, and I had one big one. It isn’t answered.

Now, Google’s taken another step in normalizing Glass. It’s unveiled a smart contact lens containing a silicon chip so small it’s the size of a piece of glitter.

The lens is intended to help diabetics track the glucose levels in their tears. It has a sensor embedded in the thin plastic and a wireless chip so that it can communicate with other devices. And engineers at Google’s secretive X labs are working on putting LEDs in the lens so that it can show users a visual warning if their glucose reaches dangerous levels.

Scale that up, and what you get is a version of Google Glass that fits in your eye.

Wait, wait, wait. The lens of your eye is not going to focus on something plastered on the surface of the lens. You aren’t going to be able to put a video screen equivalent on there and have text scroll by, for instance. I can see the specific example they mention working — a pulsing flash, out of focus and seen as a changing level of light, could work as an alert — but you’re not going to be able to scale that up into a heads-up display, for instance.

They have a video demo of a similar system. It’s a contact-lens-sized disc, all right, clamped in place with great big connectors leading into it, flashing a dollar sign under computer control. Yeah, I can see it when your video camera is focused on it from a foot away…but try sticking that directly on the lens and then shoot your video. It will be disappointing.

Miniaturizing circuitry is not news. There’s a problem in optics here that the gushing gadgeteers aren’t at all prepared to even think about.

White people, stop embarrassing me

The country has gotten better — we have less overt racism, people are generally ashamed if they’re caught expressing bias. But it’s the subtle stuff, the premises that form the foundation for racism, that still poison our citizenry. Unbelievably (for me, at least), white Americans now think they are the victims of racism.

The study was conducted by Sommers and co-author Michael I. Norton of Harvard asking a roughly equal national sample of 209 Caucasians and 208 African Americans to indicate, on a scale of 1 to 10, the extent to which they felt blacks and whites were the targets of discrimination in decades spanning from the 1950s to the 2000s. The scale’s ranking of 1 indicated “not at all” while 10 indicates “very much.”

Both groups reported roughly the same things for the 1950s, with neither believing Caucasians experienced much racism at all during that turbulent decade. Both similarly agreed that at the same time, there was substantial racism against African Americans. Both groups also agreed that racism against African Americans has steadily decreased over time. But here’s where the study gets interesting. Caucasians surveyed believe that the discrimination faced by their African American neighbors has decreased much more rapidly than the African American respondents. Furthermore, they believe that while African Americans now have it better, they – the Caucasians surveyed – have taken their place as the primary targets of discrimination.

How? How can anyone think that? I can’t think of a single thing where being black would privilege someone over me — nothing I aspire to is hampered by the color of my skin.

An astounding 11% of Caucasian respondents assigned the maximum rating of 10 to the seriousness of anti-white discrimination. Compare that with only 2% who reported the same of anti-black racism. Caucasians, the study found, often believe that racial equality is “a zero sum game,” where one group gains at the expense of others.

When the goal is equality, that should tell you right there that it doesn’t have to be a zero sum game — when obstacles are removed from one person’s progress, that doesn’t mean they have to be placed in someone else’s way. Do they think Harrison Bergeron is non-fiction?

Deadbeat corporation

You had to know just from the name that Freedom Industries had to be an exploiter — that’s how right-wing capitalist thugs always name their enterprises. No surprise: they’re filing for bankruptcy.

Freedom Industries, the company responsible for the chemical spill that left 300,000 West Virginians without tap water for the better part of a week, filled for Chapter 11 bankruptcy Friday.

“I think they underestimated the liabilities just a tad,” attorney Aaron Harrah, who firm filed a purported class action lawsuit against Freedom and West Virginia American Water Co., told the Wall Street Journal. According to the Charleston Gazette, the company’s assets and liabilities are each listed as between $1 million and $10 million. Freedom owes $3.66 million to its top 20 unsecured creditors, over $2.4 million in unpaid taxes dating back to at least 2000 and nearly $93,000 in Kanawha County property taxes, about half of which were past due and had become delinquent.

They haven’t paid their taxes in over a decade? And no one in West Virginia thought to crack down on the deadbeats, or that maybe a company that can’t pay their bills might be delinquent on safety maintenance as well?

I don’t even…

Every once in a while, I learn something about fundagelicals that I find simply discombobulating. Some Christian guides prescribe that a man should keep track of his wife’s menstrual cycle on the family calendar, even.

I mean, I knew that these patriarchal religions were all about controlling their women’s reproduction, but I had no idea. What’s the rationale? Here’s one reason given:

In his 1986 volume, Research in Principles of Life Advance Seminar Textbook, on page 170-171, Gothard suggests that a man keep track of his wife’s menstrual cycle and use it as a reminder of the sufferings and death of Jesus, then quotes Isaiah 53:4-5.

So Jesus menstruated? What?

The other reason is the infantilization of women’s behavior: they’re at the mercy of their cycle, so you need to be prepared to deal with them when they go all hormonal.

But this is something that goes on far beyond a man actually tracking his wife’s circle. It’s rather pervasive. Women are dismissed all the time for just being “hormonal,” and “it must be her time of the month” is a common response to a woman’s anger. In fact, there was a time men argued women shouldn’t be elected to political office, because of their periods. Do women’s hormonal cycles sometimes make them break down crying or get angry for no reasons? Perhaps, but guess what? Everyone has hormones, not just women. Everyone has bad days, not just women. And you know what? I’ve seen this “she must be on her period” line used to dismiss women’s actual needs and actual concerns.

You know, I did not track my wife’s menstruation at all. Sometimes I’d find out, obviously, and every once in a while she’d get menstrual migraines, but that’s about it for indicators — and I know some women do have debilitating physiological responses to their cycle. But I have never, ever known my wife to have a particular emotional excess or intellectual deficit in response to hormonal changes.

But maybe if I’d kept a big note on the calendar, I’d have had an excuse to belittle her once a month.

Reason opposed by unreason

Unreason being represented by its champion, religion…as always. The rational politicians in Idaho are trying to end the practice of faith healing on children; the irrationally religious politicians are trying to stop them.

A Republican lawmaker in Idaho is trying to stop a law aimed at preventing the deaths of children whose parents eschew medical treatment in favor of prayer. The Associated Press reported that state Rep. Christy Perry (R) believes that a law proposed by Democratic Rep. John Gannon violates religious freedom of families who believe God’s will supercedes modern medicine.

“This is about religious beliefs, the belief God is in charge of whether they live, and God is in charge of whether they die,” said Perry of the Followers of Christ, an extremist group who have let at least four children die of treatable illnesses in the last three years.

Perry, your beliefs do not trump the reality of dead children.