Teaching Science To Dumb Kids

I used to love this show:

Awesome!

Thanks to CaptiousNut for this one.

Moronic Pseudo-Science

"16 out of the last 17 years....we've had record temperatures..."

????

Okay.

The *record* is only 100 years or so long...

AND Earth (my least favorite planet), is allegedly 4 billion years old.

So, yeah, let's all go and extrapolate from this STATISTICALLY INSIGNIFICANT sample set!

One might euphemistically call this *intellectual arrogance* from a present-tense Moron...

But whatever you want to call it....it's not *science* by any stretch.

Brookhaven National Boondoggle - Welfare For School Nerds

Today my son had a science class some 65 miles east at Brookhaven National Laboratory - pictured above.

I'd never even heard of it before and was AMAZED at how freakin' huge it was. I mean it was a few miles wide and I hadn't seen this many über-GEEKS since I was last in Cambridge, MA.

An alien visiting from outer-space and armed with today's conventional stereotypes would probably presume that these disheveled, socially-awkward pocket-protectors were homeschooled rather than in fact the *best and brightest* churned out by SCHOOLS.

While my son attended his class:

1) Blocks and Marbles: Students work in design teams to develop a solution to an engineering problem. Teams will construct a "ride" for a marble that must meet specified design criteria. Students will be introduced to the law of gravity.

2) Seeing the Light: What is light? How is a rainbow made? Through a series of experiments students will explore the properties of light. Discover how shadows are made, how light is reflected, and how light can be bent to make colorful rainbows. Students will also see the results of mixing the primary colors of light and experiment with our shadow wall.

3) Sounds Around: Discover how sound is produced and how it travels. Analyze how different pitches and volumes are produced. Experience sound waves as they pass through different states of matter. Watch your sound waves on an oscilloscope and try our invisible strings exhibit!

...I made my way around the *campus* and cafeteria and couldn't get over how much taxpayer money is essentially burned there. I mean all those Phd's make 6 figures+; and they were all moving at about the same speed as the obese women employed by the DMV.

Apparently it's an astounding $760 million a year - that's the annual budget for this boondoggle which employs 2,800 people.

The Republicans tried to cut its budget by 1/3 this year but failed - as they do in every other cost-cutting attempt. They fail so much a supporter of theirs ought to seriously wonder about sincerity.

Of course if I were President dictator....I'd close the whole thing up tomorrow!

I got real angry thinking about this but then I realized that there are probably a hundred of these boondoggles all over the country (esp. near Washington DC!) and that it's just the first one I really came into direct contact with.

My son's class? It was decent. And it was FREE....but only in a manner of speaking.

I was told that the 80s classic motion picture - The Manhattan Project - which I remember enjoying very much, was filmed at Brookhaven Labs:

It featured a young *Miranda* (aka Cynthia Nixon) as the girlfriend.

Science OR Nescience?

Hah!

Now I'm certainly no flack for their ONLY political opponent...

But this is ridiculous.

How about, "DEMOCRATS AGAINST ECONOMICS"???

Since they collectively don't understand the basics of say *the pricing of goods and services* right now, right here on planet Earth y'all will have to forgive my skepticism about their INTERESTED, apocalyptic multi-decade weather forecasts.

Of course there's a chance they do in fact understand economics but they set is aside so as to retain power via *class warfare marketing*.

Except that there's plenty of EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE against that possibility...

Krugman is, of couse, low-hanging fruit and must be summarily dismissed.

Click Here - to read an old post where I Marginalize a famous Harvard economics professor.

On Alarmist, Inverted Quack Scientists

Enter Ann Coulter:

As I described in my book "Godless," both the government and the entire mainstream media lied about AIDS in the '80s by scaring Americans into believing that heterosexuals were as much at risk for acquiring AIDS as gays and intravenous drug users. The science had to be lied about so no one's feelings got hurt.

In 1985, Life magazine's cover proclaimed: "NOW, NO ONE IS SAFE FROM AIDS." In 1987, U.S. News & World Report reported that AIDS was "finding fertile growth among heterosexuals." Also in 1987, Dr. Oprah Winfrey said that "research studies" predicted that "one in five heterosexuals could be dead from AIDS at the end of the next three years."

In 1988, ABC's "20/20" claimed the CDC had discovered a shocking upsurge of heterosexual infections on college campuses. It struck no one as odd that 28 of the 30 infections had occurred in men (with alphabetized spice racks and at least three cats, one named Blanche).

Two years later, CNN broadcast that same 1988 study, proclaiming: "A new report from CDC indicates that AIDS is on the rise on college campuses."

A quarter-century later, and we're still waiting for the big heterosexual AIDS outbreak.

But at least science achieved its primary purpose: AIDS was not stigmatized as a "gay disease." Scientific facts were ignored so that science would be nonjudgmental. That was more important than the truth.

Yeah, that's an actual product for sale on CafePress.com!

See also:

More Crackpot Conspiracies On AIDS

On AIDS

Medical Morons

No Sharing Calculators...No Water Bottles...

Peter Gray has a post up this week on *cheaters* with a special emphasis on scientists.

Essentially, he asserts that the very structure of curricula-bound, grade-focused schools cultivates academic foul play - from grade school right through the working years.

Our system of compulsory (forced) schooling is almost perfectly designed to promote cheating. That is even truer today than in times past. Students are required to spend way more time than they wish doing work that they did not choose, that bores them, that seems purposeless to them. They are constantly told about the value of high grades. Grades are used as essentially the sole motivator. Everything is done for grades. Advancement through the system, and eventual freedom from it, depends upon grades.


Students become convinced that high grades and advancement to the next level are the be-all and end-all of their school work. By the time they are 11 or 12 years old, most are realistically cynical about the idea that school is fundamentally a place for learning. They realize that much of what they are required to do is senseless and that they will forget most of what they are tested on shortly after the test. They see little direct connection--because there usually is none--between their school assignments and the real world in which they live. They learn that their own questions and interests don't count. What counts are their abilities to provide the "correct" answers to questions that they did not ask and that do not interest them. And "correct" means the answers that the teachers or the test-producers are looking for, not answers that the students really understand to be correct.


In many cases the rules about what is and isn't cheating in school are arbitrary and have nothing to do with learning. If you create a summary sheet of the terms and facts relevant to a test and then consult that sheet while taking the test, you have cheated. However, if you create such a sheet and commit it to a form of short-term memory that lasts just long enough for the test and then vanishes, you have not cheated. If you create a term paper by copying out large chunks of other people's writing and pasting them together, that is cheating; but if you do essentially the same thing and then paraphrase sufficiently rather than use the copied paragraphs exactly, that is not cheating.


Students understand that the rules distinguishing cheating from not cheating in school are like the rules of a game. But in this case it's a game that they did not choose to play. They are forced to go to school, forced to do the assignments, forced to take the tests. They have little or no say in what they study, how they are tested, or the rules concerning what is or isn't cheating. Under these conditions, it's hard to respect the rules.


Not surprisingly, surveys show that cheating is very common in schools. In fact, if "normal" means what most people do, then school cheating is normal. On anonymous questionnaires, as many as 98% of students admit to some form of cheating and roughly 70% percent admit to repeated acts of the most blatant forms of cheating, such as copying whole tests from other students or plagiarizing whole papers.


The surveys also reveal an overall increase in amount of cheating in recent years and a shift in who does most of it. In times past, the most frequent cheaters were the "poor students," who cheated out of desperation just to pass. Today, however, the highest incidences of cheating are among the "best students," the ones destined for the top colleges and graduate schools...


One of the tragedies of our system of schooling is that it deflects students from discovering what they truly love and find worth doing for its own sake. Instead, it teaches them that life is a series of hoops that one must get through, by one means or another, and that success lies in others' judgments rather than in real, self-satisfying accomplishments.

I guess you are supposed to read the cheat sheet (video) when drinking the water???

Thanks to my SoPhilly Jabronis for bringing this to my attention.

Bad Science & Worse Government - More Lethal Than Pig Flu

With the winter approaching....the alarmist push for *flu vaccines* from interested parties (Big Government, Big Pharma, Big Medicine, Walgreens, CVS, etc) is already well underway. Although I expect even fewer Americans this year to submit this this nonsense (though perhaps not in our most Moronic state - Massachusetts).

Today I came across another comprehensive debunking of flu vaccine propaganda that's well worth reading (and it's not from Natural News!):

New Proof That This Common Medical Treatment Is Unnecessary And Ineffective

See also my prior posts:

Pig Flu Bogeyman - Up For Slaughter

Upping The Dosage For Pig Flu Morons

Upping The Dosage For Morons

Last week, up in Moronic Massachusetts, I had to bear two *adults*, medical professionals, wax euphoric about *vaccines*. Seriously. One of them loudly asserted:

"I'm a big believe in vaccines!"

And the other other expressed total agreement. Seriously.

I mentioned that hundreds of kids in Australia supposedly went into convulsions after receiving the pig flu shot. Now what did they think of that?

More importantly, had they even heard of that???

No they hadn't. But one of them had an answer nonetheless, mumbling something about kids *fainting* at the sight of needles. He then asserted that because polio had been eradicated by vaccination....that therefore all vaccines were safe.

Seriously.

Such is sorry intellectual state of Big Medicine and Big Science today - both incurable poisoned by government subsidy.

The big news today is that Big Government is now pushing quadruple-dose flu shots for the most vulnerable Morons.

(NaturalNews) The vaccine industry has now decided that injecting senior citizens with the "standard" vaccine dose just isn't working. (Gee, really?) So now they've decided the way to make it work better is to offer a quadruple viral potency vaccine that packs 400% more viral fragments into one toxic shot.

The target for this quadruple vaccine injection? Senior citizens, of course -- the very people most likely to suffer the most serious side effects from a vaccine overdose. The FDA reportedly approved the new vaccine in April even though no scientific tests have ever been done to show it reduces flu symptoms. Then again, since when did vaccines have anything to do with real science in the first place?

What's especially entertaining about all this is that the FDA's approval of this quadruple potency vaccine is a blatant admission that single-dose vaccines just don't work! Obviously, if the single-dose vaccine was working as advertised, then it would be 100% effective and there would be no need for a double, triple or quadruple-dose vaccine. But all of a sudden, now that the quadruple-dose vaccine is available, the regular single-dose vaccine "isn't good enough."

This is a semi-long video, but it'll grab the open-minded remnant:

DIY Space Program

Homemade Spacecraft from Luke Geissbuhler on Vimeo.

Video from a camera attached to a weather balloon that rose into the upper stratosphere and recorded the blackness of space.

Visit www.brooklynspaceprogram.org for all the info.

Sombrero tip to Taylor for sending me this one - though I had to edit out his unflattering remarks about the boondoggle/sinkhole known as NASA.

Moronic Hydrophobia

A Couple of Brainiacs Afraid of Swine Flu

H2O: Dangerous Chemical!

A student at Eagle Rock Junior High won first prize at the Greater Idaho Falls Science Fair, April 26. He was attempting to show how conditioned we have become to alarmists practicing junk science and spreading fear of everything in our environment. In his project he urged people to sign a petition demanding strict control or total elimination of the chemical "dihydrogen monoxide."
And for plenty of good reasons, since:

• it can cause excessive sweating and vomiting
• it is a major component in acid rain
• it can cause severe burns in its gaseous state
• accidental inhalation can kill you
• it contributes to erosion
• it decreases effectiveness of automobile brakes
• it has been found in tumors of terminal cancer patients

He asked 50 people if they supported a ban of the chemical.

Forty-three (43) said yes, six (6) were undecided, and only one (1) knew that the chemical was water.

The title of his prize winning project was, "How Gullible Are We?"
He feels the conclusion is obvious.

Big Science Fraud - Human Genome

A Decade Later, Gene Map Yields Few New Cures

Ten years after President Bill Clinton announced that the first draft of the human genome was complete, medicine has yet to see any large part of the promised benefits.

For biologists, the genome has yielded one insightful surprise after another. But the primary goal of the $3 billion Human Genome Project — to ferret out the genetic roots of common diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s and then generate treatments — remains largely elusive. Indeed, after 10 years of effort, geneticists are almost back to square one in knowing where to look for the roots of common disease.

One sign of the genome’s limited use for medicine so far was a recent test of genetic predictions for heart disease. A medical team led by Nina P. Paynter of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston collected 101 genetic variants that had been statistically linked to heart disease in various genome-scanning studies. But the variants turned out to have no value in forecasting disease among 19,000 women who had been followed for 12 years.

The old-fashioned method of taking a family history was a better guide, Dr. Paynter reported this February in The Journal of the American Medical Association.

In announcing on June 26, 2000, that the first draft of the human genome had been achieved, Mr. Clinton said it would "revolutionize the diagnosis, prevention and treatment of most, if not all, human diseases."

"Genomics is a way to do science, not medicine," said Harold Varmus, president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, who in July will become the director of the National Cancer Institute.

The last decade has brought a flood of discoveries of disease-causing mutations in the human genome. But with most diseases, the findings have explained only a small part of the risk of getting the disease. And many of the genetic variants linked to diseases, some scientists have begun to fear, could be statistical illusions.

Hah!

You have to love that line - Genomics is a way to do science, not medicine!

In other words, it's a stupendous waste of taxpayer money.

Remember all forms of subsidized research, be they academic, medical, environmental, biotechnical or whatnot, are nothing more than WELFARE FOR NERDS - mostly Boston nerds with ideas so worthless that they could never attract private capital in furtherance of them.

The image above is of a Nazi scientist using physiognomy/phrenology to study another useless idea that wouldn't be funded by private capital....he was studying the all-important question, "Who was an Aryan?"

Note that phrenology and physiognomy, while scoffed at today, were at one time *cutting edge science*. They were the *Human Genome Project* of yesteryear!

A Guy I'd Like To Have Punched

Anyone who's read much of Marginalizing Morons is familiar with the my conspiratorial history of Big Government and one-world elitists.

I just came across a fellow by the name of Lord Bertrand Russell.

Check out what this *Nazi* said/wrote some 60 years ago:

"Physiology and psychology afford fields for scientific technique which still await development. Two great men, Pavlov and Freud, have laid the foundation. I do not accept the view that they are in any essential conflict, but what structure will be built on their foundations is still in doubt. I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is mass psychology.... Its importance has been enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of propaganda. Of these the most influential is what is called "education." Religion plays a part, though a diminishing one; the press, the cinema, and the radio play an increasing part.... It may be hoped that in time anybody will be able to persuade anybody of anything if he can catch the patient young and is provided by the State with money and equipment.''

Russell continued, "The subject will make great strides when it is taken up by scientists under a scientific dictatorship....The social psychologists of the future will have a number of classes of school children on whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakable conviction that snow is black. Various results will soon be arrived at. First, that the influence of home is obstructive. Second, that not much can be done unless indoctrination begins before the age of ten. Third, that verses set to music and repeatedly intoned are very effective. Fourth, that the opinion that snow is white must be held to show a morbid taste for eccentricity. But I anticipate. It is for future scientists to make these maxims precise and discover exactly how much it costs per head to make children believe that snow is black, and how much less it would cost to make them believe it is dark gray."

Russell concluded with a warning: "Although this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for a generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen."

What an elitist butthole!

Sadly he was also a prescient butthole.

A guy this depraved should probably have been sterilized AND life-sentenced to a bucolic paradise where his mind-poison could be contained....like ANWR.

But instead, on the contrary, he was actually given a Nobel Prize...."in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought." !!!

See also - A Junk Debunk.

Big Science Is Racist!

Consider this headline:



Combined with:



If A correlates with B...

And B correlates with C...

THEN these scientists collectively asserted that minorities have lower intelligence!

I'm against all these ridiculous studies. Next they will correlate poverty with *low personal assets* or something.

And this isn't science at all. It's merely propaganda for self-perpetuating bureacracies and race-baiting politicians.

Did y'all know that we have a federal *office of minority health*? And that it's funded to the tune of $50 million every year?

Here's a funny straight from its website:

MONDAY, Feb. 1 (HealthDay News) -- The health-care portion of President Barack Obama's 2011 budget proposal includes $1.4 billion to overhaul the nation's food-safety program, $1.6 billion to expand child-care programs, and $1.7 billion to fight waste, fraud and abuse, Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of Health and Human Services, said Monday.

Y'all catch that?

They are going to SPEND $1.7 billion to fight *waste, fraud, and abuse*!!!

Why Big Science Is A Joke Today

It's been shown that *scientists* today are the most intellectually monolithic voting block. They vote for the *same party* (take a wild guess) even more consistently than African-Americans - well over 90% of the time.

So in a convoluted sense they are right that there is *no debate* on scientific issues like anthropogenic climate change....and the utility of the metric system.

Why exactly is there no debate?

That's a discussion for when we have more time.

But today I want you to click here and read (skim by necessity) one scientist's efforts to simply add a comment to some published academic research that he thought was bunk.

A quarter of the way through that litany I thought for sure it was rank hyperbole - if not a joke. But Prof. Rick Trebino claims it's a real life play-by-play of what happened to him when an academic journal published a paper that pretty much contradicted his life's work.

All I have to say is "WOW".

Let this be a reminder that one should always look askance at *what researchers and scientists* sell us these days.

Remember, they are not really scientists in the true sense of the word.

With their rank censorship and obscurantism, they are better described as today's high priests of information.

I submit that Big Government should not in any way shape or form be subsidizing *research* and that every flaw, communicative and otherwise, within today's scientific community descends from that fundamental corruption.

But again, add that on my list yesterday of outrages so far from the public consciousness that they don't stand a chance of ever being debated - no less rectified.

UPDATE - I changed "anthropomorphic" to "anthropogenic". See comments.

Science - A Self-Unconscious Religion

Forbes' Peter Huber on so-called *global warming*:

Outsider faith in global warming has to be grounded on trust in higher authority, disconnected from any critical scientific reflection at all.

Promoting that kind of faith is the exact opposite of what science teachers should be doing. The Royal Society, in the words of its executive secretary, was formed "to replace unsound thinking about the world with knowledge based on observation and experimentation."

For many scientists of the Enlightenment, science reinforced religious faith. They discerned "God in the machine," God the watchmaker, God in the wondrously functional complexity of life and the cosmos. The mental models of their day couldn't track these wonders back to any other cause, so the cause must have been God. Their arguments remain accessible to people of ordinary intelligence and curiosity. And they have since led to accessible (and to my mind, compelling) counterarguments that can be discussed in simple yet still scientific terms with middle-school kids. By contrasting watchmaker and blind-watchmaker views, side by side, a good teacher can convey something profound about the method, power and limits of science itself. Grown-up climate modelers might learn something from these classes, too.