Ponderings of a Scientist

As many of you know Zipy and I are taking a pre-baby vacation to London in mid-Feb.  As such we are diligently creating a list of all the sites we want to see there and thought YOU could be of help.  Vote for your top 3 must sees in London today!  If we go there we will be sure to send you a picture of ourselves enjoying your good advice.

I just read a breif in the Portland Press Herald about a hockey game in the Asian hockey league with a score of 52 to 1! hehe

The United Nations just released a report citing the opinions of over 2,500 scientists in regards to Global Warming.  Guess what, there is a 90% chance humans are causing/increasing global warming.  No surprise there, any intelligent human knew that. The more exciting news, Exxon Mobil has given an American Think Tank over 1 million dollars to pay scientists to dispute the findings.  That’s right if you are a relatively important scientist willing to write a paper or give a speech against this report you can get up to $10,000 from Exxon Mobil.  What’s wrong with that, there just encouraging debate (read: bribbing scientists!)?

Recently published in Time Magazine by Claudia Wallis and Sonja Steptoe….

“There’s a dark little joke exchanged by educators with a dissident streak: Rip Van Winkle awakens in the 21st century after a hundred-year snooze and is, of course, utterly bewildered by what he sees. Men and women dash about, talking to small metal devices pinned to their ears. Young people sit at home on sofas, moving miniature athletes around on electronic screens. Older folk defy death and disability with metronomes in their chests and with hips made of metal and plastic. Airports, hospitals, shopping malls–every place Rip goes just baffles him. But when he finally walks into a schoolroom, the old man knows exactly where he is. “This is a school,” he declares. “We used to have these back in 1906. Only now the blackboards are green.”

American schools aren’t exactly frozen in time, but considering the pace of change in other areas of life, our public schools tend to feel like throwbacks. Kids spend much of the day as their great-grandparents once did: sitting in rows, listening to teachers lecture, scribbling notes by hand, reading from textbooks that are out of date by the time they are printed. A yawning chasm (with an emphasis on yawning) separates the world inside the schoolhouse from the world outside.” - Check out the whole article.