Starship Asterisk*

owlice wrote:lol, Amir!!

Ann wrote:
Indeed, our very own Art Neuendorffer is inspiring!

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The Heartland Institute, a far-right climate change denying "thinktank" has put up a series of billboards so disgusting, so vile, that I find it difficult to find words to tell you just how disgusting and vile they are.

So instead, I’ll show you one: ...

bystander wrote:The Heartland Institute sinks to a new low
Discover Blogs | Bad Astronomy | 2012 May 05

geckzilla wrote:According to their website, they only planned to run it for 24 hours to begin with. I wonder if that's true?

geckzilla wrote:
I bet Ted Kaczynski played video games.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski wrote:
<<Theodore John "Ted" Kaczynski was born on May 22, 1942, in Chicago, Illinois, to second-generation Polish Americans Wanda (née Dombek) and Theodore Richard Kaczynski. At six months of age, Ted's body was covered in hives. He was placed in isolation in a hospital where visitors were not allowed, as doctors were unsure of the cause of the hives. He was treated several times at the hospital over an eight month period. His mother wrote in March 1943, "Baby home from hospital and is healthy but quite unresponsive after his experience."

As a result of testing conducted in the fifth grade, which determined Kaczynski had an IQ of 167, he was allowed to skip the sixth grade and enroll in the seventh grade. Kaczynski described this as a pivotal event in his life. He recalled not fitting in with the older children and being subjected to their bullying. As a child, Kaczynski had a fear of people and buildings, and played beside other children rather than interacting with them. His mother was so worried by his poor social development that she considered entering him in a study for autistic children led by Bruno Bettelheim.

Kaczynski attended high school at Evergreen Park Community High School. He excelled academically, but found the mathematics too simple during his sophomore year. During this period of his life, Kaczynski became obsessed with mathematics, spending prolonged hours locked in his room practicing differential equations. Throughout secondary schooling Kaczynski had far surpassed his classmates, able to solve advanced Laplace Transforms before his senior year. He was subsequently placed in a more advanced mathematics class, yet still felt intellectually restricted. Kaczynski soon mastered the material and skipped the eleventh grade. He was encouraged to apply to Harvard University, and was subsequently accepted as a student beginning in 1958 at the age of 16. While at Harvard, Kaczynski was taught by famed logician Willard Van Orman Quine, scoring at the top of Quine's class with a 98.9% final grade.

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Kaczynski also participated in a multiple-year personality study conducted by Dr. Henry Murray, an expert on stress interviews. Students in Murray's study were told they would be debating personal philosophy with a fellow student. Instead they were subjected to a "purposely brutalizing psychological experiment" stress test, which was an extremely stressful, personal, and prolonged psychological attack. During the test, students were taken into a room, strapped into a chair and connected to electrodes that monitored their physiological reactions, while facing bright lights and a two-way mirror. Each student had previously written an essay detailing their personal beliefs and aspirations: the essays were turned over to an anonymous attorney, who would enter the room and individually belittle each strapped-down student based in part on the disclosures they had made. This was filmed, and students' expressions of impotent rage were played back to them several times later in the study. According to author Alston Chase, Kaczynski's records from that period suggest he was emotionally stable when the study began. Kaczynski's lawyers attributed some of his emotional instability and dislike of mind control to his participation in this study. Indeed, some have suggested that this experience may have been instrumental in Kaczynski's future actions.>>

owlice wrote:There has GOT to be a better way to educate very bright kids than whatever is usually available to them.

Moonlady wrote:My experiences are that ignorance is a combination of scientists on high horses hiding their data of fear being stolen and published by others, and after years of education, only be able to talk in terms used in their profession, bad public school teachers who can not explain basics in science, ( and I doubted many times, if they comprehend what they teach at all or do they just be a parrot?!) Difficult and expensive (! ) access to information, ( till Worldwideweb appeared but still not all languages provide scientific information),
I moved a lot as a kid and went to different schools, it is the same everywhere, teachers can influence kids much, but when they start speaking in a language no one but physicist understand, kids or people in general, turn away, get bored etc. It is important for me that science should not generate more and more abstract terms, till they sound "intelligent" or feel special because of their way to commuinicate, but still be understandable. Terminology is not about sounding complicated. People shouldnt feel excluded from scientists and scientists should leave from time to time their ivory tower.

As Rob said, communication is the key, exchange of information and understanding what is said, can make science more attractive and all the misinformation or superstitions go away.

geckzilla wrote:You really think that having concise words is deliberately designed to make people who don't know them feel bad? Part of learning about science (or anything, really) is becoming familiar with definitions of words. I don't even think it's possible to simplify some topics more than is already done. There's some pretty esoteric words (and especially acronyms... so many acronyms!) when you really start to dig but for the broadest topics I've always found a Wikipedia article or a quick Google search helps me understand well enough. Then again, I kind of take my constant connectivity to the internet for granted. It would be a lot more difficult to understand any of this stuff without it.

As Rob said, communication is the key, exchange of information and understanding what is said, can make science more attractive and all the misinformation or superstitions go away.

It isn't that simple. The problem is that much of the public is very poorly educated, and easily led around by their noses by those who deliberately mislead (and that isn't the scientists). It's a problem that can only be fixed with more people capable of critical thinking (which is a skill unrelated to science)- and in the U.S., at least, the trend seems to be towards an even less educated general public.

Moonlady wrote:
Oh I think I must have been in the worst public libraries in the world...in one city I lived, it was even closed because it couldnt be funded and the most horrible one was, when I lived for two years in another country, I was banned from the public library because of the political opinion of my stupid parents.

Moonlady wrote:Less educated than it is? Scary...if the government, any leader does not accept, or worse, does not encourage open-minded, critical , sceptical citizen, they just want sheeps :shock: :?

Chris Peterson wrote:

Moonlady wrote:
if the government, any leader does not accept, or worse, does not encourage open-minded,
critical , sceptical citizen, they just want sheeps [sic]

Sheep is [sic] precisely what many of those in positions of power want. And it seems to be what they're getting.