The Star Wars prequels justly get a lot of scorn. Someone has gone to some effort to edit the three movies, deleting a lot of stuff and tweaking (and outright replacing) some voices. I haven’t watched ’em yet (currently downloading them), but the idea sounds good. A fuller description of the process is HERE.
It has its moments.
The latest strategy is outlined in this piece in the rampagingly-leftist Guardian:
In short, the argument boils down to this: scientists and engineers are too easy to see the world in terms of right and wrong answers. Thus scientists and engineers need to be retrained to not draw such binary conclusions.
The problem, of course, is that the world often *does* boil down to “right and wrong,” or at least “correct and incorrect.” While there may not always be a right answer to an issue, there are always wrong answers. You need an airplane with longer range. Will range be improved by replacing the jet fuel with distilled water? No, you won’t. There’s a clearly wrong answer. Will you improve the range by painting the plane with culturally inclusive and diverse murals that celebrate the wide range of genders that people can express? No, you won’t.
You want to decrease the CO2 levels in the atmosphere while maintaining the standard of living for the west and increasing it for the rest of the world. Can you do this by banning nuclear power? No, you can’t. You want to build a 200-story skyscraper in an earthquake zone that is frequented by hurricanes. Cane you build it out of bamboo and brick? Maybe, but not for anything remotely resembling a budget. A plague has broken out. Can you effectively deal with it with homeopathy, holy water, smoke signals and bloodletting? No, you can’t.
The story in the Guardian, and the report it reports on, claims to be about how to deal with ISIS. But in the larger sense, the goal would be to water down engineering and science. Is this an unintended consequence, the authors simply didn’t think it through and realize that if they corrupt STEM, they’ll trash the future? Or is it an effort to intentionally do exactly that?
In a world that’s facing an increasingly chaotic climate, a world that needs more and more physical and energy resources, a world that *needs* to expand out into space… what sort of man suggests that what we need are *fewer* effective and competent scientists and engineers?
The conspiracy theorist in me wonders if there might be some transfer of funds, or at least suggestions, heading towards these sort of people from places like Beijing. *They* would seem unlikely to mind if western STEM programs were turned into sources of muddle-headed dingbattery.
Nope. NOPE.
Some would say “That driver is extremely lucky.” To which I reply “If he’d been lucky, he wouldn’t have to get a new car, clean out his shorts and get therapy/drugs to get a nights sleep from now on.”
Since the Tie Breaker FLV Test has not been run, Bruce is not permitted free run of the house, and all interactions with the other cats are closely monitored. Earlier run-ins have resulted in hissing and swatting and attempts at biting, but things have calmed down since they’ve been able to interact through the screen door. Today I brought Bruce up for a while to sit in the sun , and three of the four other cats were friendly with him (Raedthinn refused all interactions). On the whole they got along well. Eventually Bruce and Buttons got to smacking each other, but all in all it went better than expected.
Oddly enough, cats cost. If’n you’d care to help out…
First up:
In short… a little kid sent a message filled with random symbols, and the school and a bunch of parents freaked the frak out. Around 200 students were pulled out of school the next day.
And then there’s this perennial favorite:
Which includes this glittering nugget:
This week, a Montgomery County school removed Huckleberry Finn from its curriculum after a group of students said the book made them uncomfortable.
Gah. Algebra made me uncomfortable back in the day, but the school made me take it. Bullets made my Dad uncomfortable back in the sixties, but that didn’t stop the Army from shipping him off to Nam. If we’re to the point that *words* that make kids uncomfortable is cause enough to neuter their educations, we’re pretty much doomed.
And then there’s this (irrelevant, but approximately equally stupid):
at least he wasn’t hit by a car while lying on the sidewalk. The cops suggest, rather startlingly, that alcohol might have been involved.
An interesting discussion of some recent reports:
In short,a few as-yet-non-peer-reviewed reports suggest that there are a multitude of Earth-size and larger planets floating around *waaaay* out there, including a potential brown dwarf at an impressive distance of 20,000 AU, conveniently located almost directly on the way to Alpha Centauri.
Problem is… probably not. If the most optimistic estimates of what have been seen are true, then extrapolating the discoveries over the whole sky would seem to indicate that the solar system includes not three-ish Earth sized worlds, but hundreds of thousands of them. The total mass of all these worlds would seem likely to make a hash of the solar systems gravity field, throwing the orbits of the outer worlds into chaos.
In any event, it’s great seeing new stuff being discovered Way Out There. The future of mankind lies in the dark between the stars.
No, not that one. This one:
Belgium, of course, does not have a First Amendment/Freedom of Religion. The idea of banning Scientology wouldn’t fly in the US, but I guess it might over in Europe. And if Scientology is successfully banned… I can imagine another religion or two that the Europeans might be interested in taking a look at.
Well, this is just spectacular:
A new strain of E Coli has been found that is not only resistant to all antibiotics, it also infects other forms of bacteria. But it doesn’t kill those bacteria… it transfers its bacterial resistance to them.
Even better: it was discovered in China a few weeks ago (in pigs, then raw pork, then people)… and then in Europe (German poultry and a Danish man) this week, as well as in Malaysia.
*Awesome.*
Don Vader might’ve worked too…