Trumpets descended from trombones

Some parents in Sedalia, Missouri, are upset at a band t-shirt designed to promote the Smith-Cotton High School marching band's show, "Brass Evolutions 2009."






The school administrators decided to pull the shirts off the backs of their students, leading the local paper, the Sedalia Democrat, to post an editorial:

"School administrators overreacted to the pressure from some parents who obviously saw the image as promoting the theory of evolution and a threat to their own Christian beliefs."

The editors go on to say:

"We find nothing wrong with the T-shirts and believe the students should be able to continue wearing them if they choose to."

It is easy to bash the superstitious, the irrational, and even, at times, the religious, and "learned" folks do it all the time. That the editor's last name is Satnan only adds to the fun. I, for one, want to thank the parents who objected.

Do I think the parents were right? Nope.
Do I think evolution is a lousy theory? Nope again.

So what's my problem?

We did not evolve from monkeys!

We share a common ancestor. That's a huge difference.

That so few folks busy shoving the Constitution up the nostrils of their fundamentalist neighbors understand the theory of evolution themselves makes me want to pray for our country's future.

The photo is from the Sedalia Democrat here.
A thumbs up to BL Rag for picking up the story.

Walt Kelly and August light

August is a silly month--we gorge on the harvest while the sun swings wildly to the south in its death dance. Few of us notice.

Tonight Leslie and I feasted on eggplants from the garden, cooked over charcoals coaxed to flames by olive oil from Italy, a country I pretend to know something about, though I've only been in its airport in Rome. The flames were fueled by sunlight almost half a world away

Leslie and I spend half our lives near the Delaware Bay, Jersey side. We can watch the sun set on the water on the beach a few blocks away. In June we look to our right--now we look slightly to our left.

I was invited to three wakes this week, I went to two. I was older than the person in the casket in all three.

Our economy, our culture, depends on the illusion of immortality. If it did not, who would spend a Saturday afternoon watching golf on television?

***

I make melomel, honey fermented with fruit. It's the closest I come to playing God. I throw honey sent by a friend in Michigan in with water from Cape May with blueberries from northwest New Jersey. I add yeast, though I do not know its source. I stress the yeasties enough for them to make ethanol. (Happy yeast, dancing in oxygen, do not make alcohol.)

I just had a bottle from 2008. The blueberry bushes that provided the fruit are likely still alive, the yeast are not. The vintner who gave me the yeast nutrients still breathes.

I lost both my parents in Augusts past. I lost my sister in November a few years ago. The fading sun makes me nervous. No way to know who will be around when August rolls around again.

***

As you know, I teach biology.

As you know, we live in a linear culture. More. Brighter. Bigger. Better.

The dominant culture is wrong, of course. We live and we die, so others may live and die. The sun fades, the sun returns. We reap what we sow. I plant seeds in March so I can feast in August. As mysterious as it is, it is not overwhelmingly complex. (OK, the particulars are overwhelmingly complex, but the big picture of cycles is not.)

I was rock hopping on my jetty this afternoon--it was high tide.

The tide rise and falls here twice a day. The water rises and falls about four feet, an incomprehensibly large amount of water. The state wants the child to be able to tell important strangers that the reason the tide rises and fall is because of the moon, because of the sun. And that much is true.

But I ask--how much can a child who has never seen a beach know of the tides ?

***

This was supposed to be a post about Walt Kelly, the creator of Pogo. I got permission from Carolyn Kelly, Walt Kelly's daughter, to use a personal favorite panel of Pogo here.

On a good day, maybe 100 people take a peek at my blog. I write for an audience of one (Leslie), and am flattered by the attention of a few dozen other souls.

I sought permission from Ms. Kelly to use her father's cartoon. She granted it. This may be the highlight of my blogging efforts. My post on Pogo may be my last.

***

I teach. I have taught over a hundred souls a day in my classes. Most are there because the state of New Jersey deemed that they were required to take a science course in order to get a diploma. A few, a very few, choose to take science out of joy, out of love.

September is coming, and my energies will be focused on them for a long while.

I'll continue to write, of course. I've been writing in journals for years, and I have the joy of living with a woman who's a real writer who was foolish enough to fall in love with me. I'll probably continue to throw my thoughts out here, but the tone may change.

Stay tuned for Pogo.
"Don't take life so serious, son . . . it ain't no how permanent." - Porky Pine

Seeing the never before seen

On the same day I saw the never before visualized haustra of my large gut, Science magazine shows a photo of a single molecule.

Just posting because it's soooo cool! (My colon was cool, too, no sinister characters seen. And my gut looks a lot like the pentacene molecule above. Just sayin'.))

Photo via BBC News here.

On ice

Between my last post on politics and drinking 2 liters of Halflytely, I've exposed enough poop for one day, and I want to get back to science.




I have an ice maker I have been afraid to use--the refrigerator line is hooked up to a 1/2" copper pipe in the basement via a saddle valve, and all you need to know about saddle valves is that sooner or later they leak. No, gentle reader, this will not be a treatise on plumbing (though that would be a wonderful way to explain voltage and amperage).

While snooping around plumbing sites on how best to bypass the saddle valve, I stumbled upon a wonderful debate in the ice maker universe--should you attach the ice maker to the cold or hot water pipe?

On first blush, the answer seems obvious--put it on the cold line, why waste energy cooling down hot water. Leaving aside the Mpemba effect, in which hot water can freeze faster than cold water under some circumstances, turns out that by the time the water gets into the freezer, it will be at ambient temperature.

Still, some old-timers will insist that you tap your ice line into the hot water pipe, and they have a good reason.*

Boil some water, then put it in an ice cube tray. (If you're a young'un whose never seen an ice tray, just use a paper cup.) Pour the same amount of cold water from the tap into a similar receptacle.

Put them both in the freezer under the same conditions, yadda yadda. Wait a few hours, then take them out.

The ice made from the previously boiled water will be much clearer than the ice from the cold tap water. Plumbers know this, and most could probably tell you why, too, if you bothered to ask.

Can you figure it out (without using Google)?

There's an elegant, uncomplicated lab exercise at the Teachers' Lounge website that gives a huge hint--don't peek until you've given this some thought.

*A lot of folks worry about lead and other particles coming out of the hot water heater, and do not want their ice coming from there--I am not enough of a plumber to know how much a concern this is. Do not take plumbing advice from strangers on the internet.....

The ice delivery photograph is from the National Achives, taken in 1918.

Arne, meet Jack Jennings

August is the silly season, and while The Al and Newt Show promises to be entertaining, that Arne even proposed it does not bode well for his leadership. He may be the Secretary, but he's got plenty of competition for Chief of Silly.

Today I nominate John F. Jennings.

Jack Jennings is the President and CEO of the Center on Education Policy (CEP), "a national, independent advocate for public education and for more effective public schools."

The CEP is funded by several foundations, including The George Gund Foundation (whose "focus is on the transformation of public education in Cleveland in order to equip children from early childhood onward with the skills they ultimately will need to meet the demands of college"), the Joyce Foundation (part of whose mission is "promoting innovations such as charter schools"), and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. I leave it to you, gentle reader, to judge how independent the CEP truly is.

Despite the Act-Arne-No-Longer-Calls-NCLB, the WSJ reported yesterday that recently released SAT scores fell a tiny bit for the class of 2009, and racial gaps widened.

Jack Jennings was quoted in yesterday's Wall Street Journal:

"The bottom line is the country is changing dramatically. Unless minority kids are educated better, we are going to be in trouble because pretty soon they are going to be the majority."

Jack Jennings
President & CEO, Center on Education Policy

Let's dissect this.

"We" are not in trouble yet, because "we" are the majority. It's not a problem until "they" become the majority.

If Mr. Jennings was quoted correctly, he should resign.

I don't need a libel suit to add to my joys of imminently pending colonoscopy and gum scrapings, so I won't speculate what he might have meant, though I do invite the CEP to offer their interpretation.

Don't be fooled by the suits, the smiles, the touching condescension--a few very powerful people with more money than sense want to use public education for their private gain. Every now and then they expose their ends (so to speak).

(Oh, here's a photo of Jack--in case you were wondering....)

Al and Newt photo by Alex Wong, Getty Images, via USA Today.
The portrait of Mr. Jennings was lifted from the Tuscon Citizen.

The big bang as mythology

For all the noise about Darwin's descent with modification, a deep understanding of evolution provides a delightful way to hold together just about everything we know in biology without referring to supernatural concepts.

(In my best sotto voce I will happily admit that evolution does not help us at all in grasping how life came to be, and that the cell theory's weakness is that it cannot explain the original cell.)

You don't need to "believe in it"--there's no leap of faith needed--it works well, and unless some as yet fantastic empirical data gets revealed, it's not going to need major tweaking.

(Again in my sotto voce, I gleefully admit such unimaginably fantastic observations may indeed arise, which is why science is so much fun!)

Meanwhile, kids get drilled on the Big Bang Theory with little complaint in these parts, a model which purports to explain the origins of our universe (or at least everything since after the first 30 seconds, when the universe got to be a few millimeters in diameter, which, of course, makes no sense without a reference).

Look in a textbook and read about it--about 14 billion years ago or so (give or take a billion here or there), the universe was a singularity, a point. Something happened--and space started to expand, to exist.

Too many times I have seen this pictured as an explosion--the event is being viewed from the outside by the illustrator. The textbook I've used the past three years has a picture of an explosion among the stars:

The big bang theory says that 12 to 15 billion years ago, an event called the big bang sent matter in all directions. This matter eventually formed the galaxies and planets.

(Holt Science and Technology: Physical Science, 2006, p. 21)

Big problem--there was no outside, there were no directions-- at least according to the model. So who is looking at the "explosion"? God?

The model too often gets oversimplified, taught by folks with insufficient understanding (and I put myself in that category), and as a result we create myths instead of a scientific model.

When viewed this way, the Big Bang model becomes a religious one. Yes, I know the picture is just to help students imagine the event, and yes, I know that the textbooks are not pushing the God thing, but the result is the same. It's bad science.

What do I do? I hedge.

If we accept that the universe is expanding (and we do little in class to show this is so), then it makes sense to think that the universe was "smaller" or "more dense" in the past.

And that's as far as I can take it with "low level" freshmen, without getting into religious (by my understanding) grounds. My kids may leave 9th grade knowing a little less about the common scientific myths we thrust on 14 year old children in our schools, but I think they might have a better grasp on what science means.

I am a science teacher--I teach science.

The artwork is from NASA.

Public water and charter schools

Do you drink from public water fountains?

I'm guessing that Arne Duncan does not drink from public water fountains. I do (when I can find a working one). And that may be the fundamental difference between Arne and me.

Public fountains are disappearing because the concept of public is disappearing.

Public water fountains are not dangerous (unless cooties are real). Tap water is safe, and the spigots are designed to prevent contamination.

The rise of bottled water here in the States shows how a public institution can be demonized and replaced by a much more expensive privatized solution.

If you can put down the alcohol wipes to look at the numbers, though, you'll learn that tap water is safe, and that the government standards for tap water are higher than the standards required for the commercial stuff.

Charter schools are like bottled water--they're believed to be superior, and their standards are less stringent that their more public counterparts. (Yes, I know that charter schools are part of the public school systems, but they are not public in the sense that they equally accept all students. This difference matters.)

Quality?

A new report issued today by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes
(CREDO) at Stanford University found that there is a wide variance in the quality of the nation’s several thousand charter schools with, in the aggregate, students in charter schools not faring as well as students in traditional public schools.

NEW STANFORD REPORT FINDS SERIOUS QUALITY CHALLENGE IN NATIONAL CHARTER SCHOOL SECTOR

Arne called himself a CEO when he oversaw the Chicago Schools; I think he's doing the best he can with his God-given tools (or genome, take your picks), but basketball may be his strongest suit, and even there he was not NBA class. In polite company I'd say he lacks gravitas.

We don't want the CEO of Nestle's running our public water supply for obvious reasons; we should not have to put up with a former "CEO" trying to run our public schools.

The photo, "Child of miner drinking from water supply. Dixie Darby Fuel Company, Marne Mine, Lejunior, Harlan County, Kentucky, 09/13/1946," is from our National Archives, and is therefore public.