Olympics starts at 8:08 on 8/08/08

From Britannica Blog:

Today is 08-08-08, and according to news reports, the Chinese authorities were to take full advantage of the fortuitous numerical convergence and start the opening ceremonies for the Olympic Games precisely at 8:08 Beijing time...

Tolerance Police reprimanded by court on speech codes

The champions of tolerance and diversity at our university campuses took another hit from a federal appeals court which ruled yesterday that they actually have to be tolerant and allow for diversity. The third circuit court of appeals ruled that Temple University's speech code was unconstitutional.

From the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education's press release:

"The Third Circuit's ruling today is a clear and crucial victory for freedom of speech at our nation's public colleges and universities," FIRE President Greg Lukianoff said. "The court's decision serves as unequivocal notice to university administrators across the country that the First Amendment still applies on campus. Today's victory demonstrates, yet again, that public universities maintain unconstitutional speech codes at their peril."

Even the ACLU was on the side of the angels on this one.

British official, operating without law, proposes teaching creationism as science

A British official is calling for the teaching of creationism alongside evolution despite the fact that the country has not passed a Science Education Act like that recently passed in Louisiana. Critics of the Louisiana legislation, SB 733, claimed that the law, which calls for the application of critical thinking, logical analysis, and objectivity in the teaching of science subjects, would bring on a flood of creationist propaganda in Louisiana schools.

So far, however, there have been no reports of any significant creationist activity in Louisiana schools, while in Britain, which is limping along with no such law, is apparently way ahead of Louisiana.

How can this be? Do the British not understand that they first need to pass a bill requiring objectivity in science instruction before they can teach creationism? Here we go and help them in two world wars and they go and do this. It's enough to make the critics of SB733 look bad.

Louisiana passed the bill, which detractors opposed on the grounds that it would open the floodgates to the teaching of Genesis in public schools. Part of the concern could have stemmed from the fact that it could result in students learning about how Noah took 2 animals of each kind aboard the Ark, and public school children can't count that high.

We need to put Barbara Forrest, the philosopher of science who led the opposition to SB733, on a plane and send her over to explain to these people proper procedure on this kind of thing.

They can even keep her for a while.

The real threat to science education (Hint: it's not creationists)

Peter Wood, executive director of the National Association of Scholars, writes in the most recent Chronicle of Higher Education about why he thinks more American students are not succeeding in science:

The science "problems" we now ask students to think about aren't really science problems at all. Instead we have the National Science Foundation vexed about the need for more women and minorities in the sciences. President Lawrence H. Summers was pushed out of Harvard University for speculating (in league with a great deal of neurological evidence) that innate difference might have something to do with the disparity in numbers of men and women at the highest levels of those fields. In 2006 the National Academy of Sciences issued a report, "Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering." Officials of the National Science Foundation and the Department of Education are looking to use Title IX to force science graduate programs to admit more women. The big problem? As of 2001, 80 percent of engineering degrees and 72 percent of computer-science degrees have gone to men.

... A society that worries itself about which chromosomes scientists have isn't a society that takes science education seriously.

Chinese officials stuck in the Middle Ages, still believe gender is determined

Okay, like, what century do these people live in anyway? Here is a country wanting to enter the 21st century that doesn't understand that gender is a social construct. They are obviously still caught up in the patriarchal systems of the past.

Sheez.

Maybe we could ship some professors from the University of Kentucky's Gender and Women's Studies program over to Beijing to set them straight.

Solzhenitsyn is dead: Long live Aldous Huxley

Alexander Solzhenitsyn is dead. He was a real life Winston Smith, George Orwell's character in 1984 who committed thought crimes against the Party. Only Solzhenitsyn, unlike the fictional Smith, actually got away with broadcasting the atrocities of totalitarianism and lived to see the demise of the Party.

While Winston Smith became a martyr, Alexander Solzhenitsyn became a prophet.

But with the death of communism, it is no longer Orwell's vision that casts a shadow on humanity; rather, it is the vision of another writer who wrote his dystopia 16 years earlier than Orwell whose prophecies are now being fulfilled.

Writing a few years earlier than Orwell, Aldous Huxley, in Brave New World, wrote of a future world far different from that of 1984. As Neil Postman once observed, Orwell's world was one in which people were enslaved by the things they hate, while Huxley's was one in which people were enslaved by the things they love. In Huxley's world people are not ordered by any Big Brother to do things they don't like: they're merely expected to do all the things they do like--without restraint. They are to have all their desires satiated. No pleasure is to go unhad.

In fact, Solzhenitsyn had a few things to say about this himself.

The old Orwellian world of communist totalitarianism needed a Gulag to imprison people. The new Huxleyan world needs no prison camps: the slavery is evident anywhere there is a television, or a computer, or a cellphone.

Where is its prophet?

Global warming skepticism from Down Under

Arthur Herman talking trash to the global warming alarmists in the Australian. Isn't there somebody, somewhere who can silence this man?

The New York Times takes another hit on their misreporting of whether boys are better at math than girls

The always interesting 3 Quarks Daily blogs an article from the City Journal, titled "Math is Harder for Girls," a response to a recent New York Times article that came to the defense of the fairer sex with a little statistical hootchycoo, proving in the process that, while journalists may not be very good mathematicians, chivalry is clearly not dead at the Times.
Heather MacDonald points out, as I noted in an earlier post, that while mean scores are similar between boys and girls, boys tend to fall out on the outer edges of the bell curve--they are overrepresented among both the best and the worst math students. So to say that boys outnumber girls among the best math students is absolutely correct.
Tamar Lewin, who wrote the original Times story, either considers this statistically insignificant, or just plain misreported it.
Now I am not particularly interested in whether boys are better at math than girls or vice-versa. What I am interested in is the abuse of science for ideological purposes. When Lawrence Summers was run off from Harvard recently for speculating about this issue, I pointed out that what cost him his job was not what the data on the relative math skills of boys and girls were, but rather that he questioned the difference in the sexes at all. The bottom line is that to say girls are fundamentally different from boys in any respect will today get you run off from the our institutions of higher learning--those bastions of free inquiry and academic freedom.
I imagine the Times coverage of this issue was driven by its politically correct ideological agenda. That is, in any case, its customary MO. With ideologues, science always takes a back seat to politics. Facts really don't matter to their position; all that matters is where they fit in their ideological Procrustean bed.
In fact, I wonder what the folks over at the University of Kentucky's Gender and Women's Studies program think of all this. Where do the conservative members of their staff fall out on this issue?
Oh, I forgot. There aren't any conservatives there.

Dueling John Edwardses

Andy Naselli at Between Two Worlds calls attention to the Oxford American Dictionary's entry on 18th century American Theologian Jonathan Edwards, America's greatest Christian theologian, which is, let us say, anemic. It is particularly ironic that Jonathan Edwards' entry is shorter than John Edwards, the senator from North Carolina.

Is John Edwards really more significant in the total scheme of things that Jonathan? But I guess if you think about it there's one thing John Edwards has done that Jonathan never did: the latter never appeared in the National Enquirer.

The Saudi's aren't the only ones who hate the West. Take a look at your local public university

A new Hudson Institute study claims that the Saudi Ministry of Education is still promoting hate against the West. Why are we so upset about this? Our own universities have been doing it for a long time.

The "Critical Thinking Skills" Hoax

Kentucky School News and Commentary yesterday blogged about "creative and critical thinking skills" programs being promoted by the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD). Modern educators love this stuff. It sounds lofty and progressive, but in reality it is mostly fluff.

Just take a look at the article and then try to summarize what it actually says. The ASCD article is a case study in what is wrong with much of modern educational attempts to teach "critical thinking skills": they come up with a few touchy-feely processes that promise all sorts of New Age benefits but which actually produce nothing.

If schools were serious about thinking skills they would go back to the things that were included in the old classical curriculum--like Latin, logic, and rhetoric.

You want real solid thinking skills? Try to match a Latin oun of a particular declension with one of the several kinds of adjectives in case, gender, and number--and do it in a matter of seconds. You want to think critically? Try to create a 2nd, 3rd, or 4th figure categorical syllogism and reduce it to the more simple first figure using the appropriate reduction rules in traditional logic (there are four) and do it in under ten seconds. Or take an issue that you have formulated from a question and decide which of the topics of invention should be employed in classical rhetoric--and then employ them.

If modern educators really wanted critical thinking skills, this is what they would do. But the problem is that the point of the classical education is acquisition and persuasive expression of truth, whereas modern education is more concerned with things like self-esteem.

"Critical thinking skills" programs like those touted by the ACSD are like so many things in public education these days: they are designed to make it look that the establishment is doing something to move our schools ahead when they really aren't.

I've heard of a "man bites dog" story before, but this one takes the cake

A Florida television station reports that an 11 year old Brazilian boy was attacked by a pit bull--and bit back. The dog attacked the boy, biting his arm, and the boy responded by grabbing the dog and biting his neck. The boy lost a tooth in the scuffle. It was a canine, of course.