It’s been a week of news items on attempts to formally impose religious views in science classrooms in Texas. Primarily, the headlines have focused on new web-based materials submitted to the Stated Board of Education (SBOE) for review under the new science guidelines approved a couple of years ago. “Proposed […]
Education
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I think a lot of people like to pick on places like Texas because of the very public way in which religion, politics, history, and science have been mixed up in discussions of education and teaching standards. An article I received today in the mail [1] suggests that we shouldn’t […]
When Galileo Galilei composed his treatise on cosmology, collecting his own many observations of the natural world into a coherent argument, he chose to present the work as a dialogue among three men. One of them, Salviati, spoke for Galileo, and the other two (Sagredo and Simplicio) represented the voices […]
I saw a USA Today article linked from Slashdot that reports on findings that Americans may not know enough science to make informed decisions [1]. When I clicked on that link, the USA Today article had embedded in it a link to a “true/false” question quiz about science, designed by […]
Well, we finally did it. After making some intro/outro music on Apple’s GarageBand, sitting down at the kitchen table, and talking into a microphone, Jodi and I have finally made our first podcast. You can get it from: http://twobodyproblem.cooleysekula.net/ You can subscribe (using Amarok, iTunes, or a similar program), get […]
Tonight on “Humankind”, David Freudberg inteviewed Helen Thomas, the feisty and sharp White House reporter. At one point, expressing her frustration with the state of willingness of the American People, said that she wished that less math was being taught in school, in favor of more civics and history. This […]
The Republican Presidential Candidates debated a few nights ago. They all invoked the name of Reagan, referring to the “Reagan Principle” or to his vision of government. In a time when the issue of climate change is so critical, I would warn these candidates to remember that it was Reagan […]
Did you know that the No Child Left Behind act requires all schools receiving federal money to make available the list of name, phone numbers, and addresses of all children upom request from military recruiters?
Over a year ago, The State Board of Education of Kansas revised science education standards, and admitted supernatural causation as part of science. This was part of a concerted effort by so-called socially conservative members of the board to revise science standards to make them more religiously correct. Science is […]
This past Friday, on “Talk of the Nation: Science Friday”, a half-hour of the two-hour program was devoted to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the Higgs particle [SciFriLHC]. The guests were luminaries of the hadron and future collider world – the spokesman of the CDF collaboration at Fermilab (Konigsberg), […]
What seems like a very long time ago, my family took a vacation. Vacations were a near rarity in my family – by which I mean the kind of textbook, campy Americana vacation depicted in movies. We spent lots of time at the beach, and plenty of time just hanging […]
I’ve had the privelege of participating in lobbying Congress about science for almost half a decade, and in that time I have seen scientists take more steps to raise their public profile. We have been graced by a number of opportunities to engage the public, and the government, about our […]