Nerds Make Science Fun!

Wow, I haven’t written a post in such a long time.  But I really feel I do need to put this out, since science education is a very important issue to me. Because my AP Biology exam is coming up, I’ll be busy for the next few weeks, so I have to put it up now, in case I forget later.

Let’s face it; most people will not enter a field of work where science will be used every day. They will most likely find jobs that require a good amount of technical knowledge, but they won’t really use things like the properties of cell membranes or the base pairing rules for DNA. They’ll probably need to know things like how to use the company’s computer databases, or how to dodge and deflect complicated questions from customers who actually bother to read the fine print on cell phone billing contracts (my parents). These kinds of jobs require people to be patient and diligent in order to be successful, but they usually don’t have to be knowledgeable about anything outside the instruction manual.

So, why does science education even matter for most folk?

Because the world runs on science.

Everything, everything, from the clothes on your back to the water that you drink, to the car that you drive and the food that you stuff in your mouth, comes from science. Our modern society relies on the fact that science can provide all the resources that humanity needs to survive, and not only provide them, but provide them to such an excess that we can have luxuries and powers that not even the greatest kings could ever have hoped to obtain.

Now, the world is also becoming more democracy orientated. The power to make decisions is passing from the hands of the elites into the hands of the commoners at an astounding rate. In short, the social order has been upset. Commoners are the masters of the leaders, and the leaders kiss the boots of the commoners in the hope that the commoners will elect them to power.

So what happens if you allow commoners who don’t understand science to elect the leaders of a world that is powered by science? Remember, what people do not understand, they will fear. What they will fear, they will move to attack and harm. So, you’re going to get some sort of explosion. This explosion (hopefully) isn’t literal, but sooner or later, there will be a clash of opinion and propaganda lead by people who fear science against fact. And because those in power are beholden to these people, they will bow to the pressure and use their power to move against science. This can be seen today in the US, where creationists wield considerable influence in the government, and have come very close to have schools teach religion as science.

Now, if these attacks succeed, the consequences will be disastrous. Again, just look at the United States. Right now, foreigners who have come to study in the US are earning 55% of the engineering doctorates and 30% of the natural science doctorates. (Note: I’m not xenophobic. Just demonstrating how much of a beating science has taken in the US). The citizens of the US have lost a lot, because many of these people take their education back to their country of origin without working in the US. The skills they painstakingly learned are being taken somewhere else, and now there is a lack of educated and trained professionals in the fields of medicine and engineering.

Imagine if this happened on a global scale. Imagine a drop in the global interest of science. A lot of progress would be slowed, maybe even halted, because of anti-science campaigns by scared fundamentalists. When new threats arrive, new progress will not be able to deal with them, because of a lack of support from politicians who wish to remain in power. And sooner or later, a threat that is strong enough to inflict an enormous amount of damage on humanity will appear, and science will not be able to respond quickly and effectively, because the lack of understanding of the general public will hamper and maybe even negate this response.

So, to sum it all up, science education is important because by educating people about science, you are also teaching them to support policy that will benefit everyone instead of their own short-sighted interests, and you also encourage them to select leaders who will most likely be able to acheive these benefits.

So, I’m not too educated when it comes to chemistry, but I’m taking AP Chemistry this year.

The problem is, for the practice problems in the test prep books, there seems to be no rhyme or reason for when the ions of an acid/base or salt are shown, and when the entire compound is shown. It’s not just a strong/weak distinction: I’ve seen both types split and together in different questions. It doesn’t seem to be based on solutions either. I’ve seen aqueous acids and bases in both forms, and sometimes in the same balanced equation.

Right now, I’m taking the guess that they will show the separated parts in an equation balanced with the ion electron method, or when the parts of the compound don’t match up.

On a related note, KCl is supposed to be an insoluble salt, yet I’ve seen an aqueous solution of KCl written as K+ in the equation, while Cl turned into chlorine gas.

I suppose I’ll figure it out eventually, but for now, it ticks me off.

-T

So, I’m running low on ideas, so I’ll give a blurb about some current events.

So apparently some people in Texas are thinking of seceding from the US. I won’t say if this is a good idea, but I’ll say that nobody wants another Civil War. Incidentally, according to some of my sources, Texas was not given the right to secede when it was annexed, but was given the right to split into five states at its own discretion.

Also, two interesing things about this:

First, I saw this on Yahoo or Time, but Bush Jr. and Sr. were both from Texas, and there’s no laws saying they can’t be President of Texas, so Texas may want to think twice.

Also, I’d expect a good number of liberal politicians to be supportive of secession, because for them, that’s the biggest red state knocked out of the picture.

This is just me making an uninformed statement, since I haven’t looked up much about it, but I get the feeling this is going to end up like the bird flu and mad cow disease.

When I say that, I mean that people will be scared to death of the appropriate animal for a little while, eventually catch on that it’s not a pandemic, and go back to their normal diets.

However, I did catch from the news that it has “pandemic potential” (if that’s anything more than buzzwords), and that it’s primarily transmitted between humans, so this might be different.

Anybody remember that TV show battlebots?

Well, I found this, which is probably about as close as you can easily get to battlebots.

It’s not just battlebots-stile battling. The competing link on the main page gives a list of the events. They even have weight classes for the robot combat.

They also sell their own android kits, the type used in their humanoid robot competition, and have a (several hundred pages long) tutorial on how to build your own combat robot.

This is too awesome for words. You can bet I’ll be showing up.

-T

This is a really old subject, but I’m bringing it up because my school is going up for accreditation.

Now, I’m not sure if federal standards would fix the problem, but the state of education is dismal.

Some states, California among them, have set their standards ridiculously low, so that many students in the state are “proficient” by state standards but not by national standards. Mississippi, the most famous example, was best in the nation by their own standards but the worst in the nation by national standards.

Here in California, perhaps even more sadly, the High School State Exit Exam tests high school seniors on ninth grade material. About a third of them pass.

And now, I will leave you a quote that invented for this subject:

“Palo Alto got their passing rate from 35 percent to 42 percent and called it a great success. If I tried that, I would not have the lips to say ‘great success.’”

Yeah, I’m running short on random post ideas. Blame my schedule.

-T

So, I was bored today, and I decided to make a custom T-Shirt.

It was partially inspired by Fahrenheit 9/11 (that Micheal Moore film, which we’re watching in school), partially by some blogs I was reading that bashed the reasons for invading, and partially because I’ve been meaning to express my creative tendencies for some time now.

The result is this.

Sorry that it’s a little pixellated, but I had to make it bigger so the text is a bit easier to read.

I’d buy it and wear it as an argument starter, but I don’t think I’d be able to sneak it past the radar, and I’m not about to shell out $25 for a single T-shirt.

It might be a better deal if I could buy in bulk for a big protest or something, but that’s a story for another day.

I almost forgot, here’s the text in case it doesn’t work for anyone.

Front:
IRAQ
[Silhouette of Iraq]
Remind me, why did we invade?

Back:
Was it:
The WMD’s
which weren’t there?
The Bioweapons
which weren’t there?
The “terrorists”
who never attacked us?
Or was it just a stupid idea all along?

-T

Edit: changed it to the second design, which has more grammatically correct text that matches the script above more closely.

Okay, so quick rant.

On mythbusters, they tested the static friction force of a normal boot, then the same boot on top of a banana peel by sticking them on an incline. The boot fell off at 45 degrees, and the boot plus banana fell off at 15 degrees.

Then they said that the boot had three times the frictional force.

This is wrong. The frictional force is proportional to the sine of the incline angle (from the horizontal), not the angle itself. For those who actually punch in the numbers on a calculator, the sine of 15 degrees is a bit over .257, and the sine of 45 degrees, which you should memorize, is .707, which is slightly less than three times as large. I can guess two reasons for why they did this.

Either they were tired, lazy, etc. and just said it, and nobody on the editing team caught it.

Or they did it on purpose because the average American citizen knows/retains jack squat about trig and they didn’t want to slap a random “Warning: Science Content!” for something that petty.

Also, I’m implementing categories.

Wow, it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything.

Anyway, I went to the San Francisco Academy of Science a little while ago, and it’s alright, but not as great as I was expecting. It seems to be a more academic museum, and lacks the hands-on exhibits that, say, the Exploratorium has.

The website will tell you it has three floors plus a roof exhibit, which sounds impressive, until you actually go there and find out there’s really nothing on the second and third floors, except for movies (you need to add money to the ticket) and lectures (you need a membership). The living roof exhibit is basically their solar plant, and makes for a good photo shoot, but you won’t see birds or insects in anywhere near the number their website implies.

They have an aquarium with pirahnas, alligator gars, a coral reef, and loads of other animals. That’s pretty interesting, and they do have some hands-on exhibits that involve sticking an object on a pad to see a video. They also have a swamp with their famous albino alligator.

They also have some exhibits about evolution, with some hands-on stuff, like working with a fake finch’s beak, and telling how animals got to the Galapagos islands, but they really don’t have any “Holy crap that’s awesome” things that you’d expect from the Exploratorium.

The museum has two domes. One is their planetarium with movie showings (get there really early, and pay extra), and the other is a rainforest dome with three levels of rainforest, with free-flying birds and butterflies, and exhibits off on the sides with contained reptiles and cockroaches, spiders, etc. This leads to an underground Amazon river area with an underwater view, which eventually leads back to the aquarium.

All in all, the museum is big, but there’s not quite as much material as you’d hope for. On the other hand, their exhibits are certainly impressive, and it’s worth a visit and a day there, at least.

And its fans (okay, check that, its more rabid fans) are idiots. If you flip out at the title without reading the post, or if you do not understand the meaning of satire, you are one of those idiots.

For great justice, I will now compare:

Stephanie Meyer (SMeyer)
and
A conglomerate of Stalin and Hitler (S&H)

S&H: Killed millions.
SMeyer: Driven countless more to thoughts of suicide.

S&H: Exposed the world to the dangers of fascism and tyranny.
SMeyer: Exposed the world to how incredibly low publishing standards are.

S&H: Hitler wrote and published his succinct Mien Kampf.
SMeyer: Wrote and published the equivalent of a Mary Sue-laden anime fanfiction, not to mention her ridiculously long descriptions of Edward Sparkles with his shirt off.

S&H: Ensures there will never be a Super-Hitler or Super-Stalin who kill twice as many people.
SMeyer: Ensures there will be another author attempting to publish bad fanfiction.

S&H: Have forever ruined white supremacy, communism, tyranny, and Nazism.
SMeyer: Has forever ruined vampires.

S&H: Crimes against humanity.
SMeyer: Crimes against biology, tradition, sanity, vampires, and literature.

S&H: Incredibly potent statesmen. They would have been the best in their time, if not for the “let’s kill people” part.
SMeyer: A mediocre author who has published a mediocre but overhyped book that quickly devolved into a cash cow franchise. She has been compared to JK Rowling, but in no way meets the standard.

S&H: Got the youth involved in politics.
SMeyer: Encourages teenage sex and pregancy.

S&H: Preached that true love was loving your country.
SMeyer: Taught that true love is stalking and suicide threats for males, and submission and dependence for females.

S&H: Have plenty of character flaws.
SMeyer: Bella Mary Sue is, well, a Mary Sue.

S&H: Fanatical followers.
SMeyer: Fangirls.

S&H: Hitler displayed initiative in his writings and speeches. Not sure about Stalin.
SMeyer: Displays pedophilia in her books.

S&H: Hitler took full responsibility for killing opposing party members.
SMeyer: Has shirked from the responsibility of explaining the attempted murders perpetrated by Twilight fanatics.

S&H: Plot evil plans.
SMeyer: No plot to speak of.

S&H: Kaiser Helmets and Swastikas, respectively.
SMeyer: Sparkling Vampires.

S&H: Hitler’s concentration/death camps had grotesque surgical experiments.
SMeyer: Vampire C-sections. By using teeth.

S&H: Led to computers, nuclear power, the space program, encryption ciphers, etc.
SMeyer: Led to fangirls, attempted murders, and a fifth book that is the first book from a different POV, with more stalking.

S&H: Cannot be killed by time travel for fear of causing paradoxes, Super-Hitlers, etc.
SMeyer: Fire away!

Over&Out,

-T