Quickies
Quickies 1.11
‘Morning! I’m covering for Jen this morning as she is busy (moreso than usual) saving the world!
- Memories of naked Alexander Skarsgard – “…we were wondering if the show would have Eric running down Sookie’s road, completely naked, just like we remembered from the book.” (from Christine)
- Nobel laureate, Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, takes aim at pseudoscience in India – “Dr Ramakrishnan said homeopathy had been advocated for life-threatening diseases like AIDS and cancer, for which there are real effective medicines, while astrology can be abused and used to influence decisions.” (from Agranulocytosis)
- Number of families seeking vaccine exemptions rises in Wisconsin -“Twenty years ago, less than 1 percent of students opted out of shots. Last year, nearly 4 percent did, including nearly 3 percent in Madison.” (from Chasmosaur)
- In 2011 three young women swept the top prizes of the first Google Science Fair. At TEDxWomen Lauren Hodge, Shree Bose and Naomi Shah described their extraordinary projects— and their route to a passion for science. (from cerberus40)
- And, from my neck of the woods: “A Georgia school insisted today there was no “maliciousness” intended when a third grade math quiz asked students to compute the number of beatings a slave got a week and to calculate how many baskets of cotton he picked.” – What now?
Seriously, Georgia? If you really wanted to teach black history, do it for realz!
If 8 slaves could pick 56 fruits when they weren’t beaten at all and they could pick 64 fruits with one beating, how many fruits could they pick if they were beaten four times?
Show your work. Use illustrations to support your answer. Remember: This is Black History Month!
Later, we’ll study this clever phrase for remembering resistor colours.
Honestly, this is probably just one utterly insensitive teacher, but still …
I haven’t read any of the articles yet. But word of advice… If you’d like me to read every link here at Skepchick just make the showing text match that of today’s first story. (jk I read them all anyway)
I will now be thinking of Alexander Skarsgard all day. Naked. I am okay with this.
Ditto ;)
It would be nice to see a popular news source cover the aftermath of a measles or whooping cough outbreak and interview the parents of the dead or disabled children. Pulitzers come out of such stories. ::dangles carrot::
Wisconsin vaccine exemptions: It is not surprising about Madison. See http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2011/01/why-the-prius-driving-composting.html?ref=hp
Key quote: “I talked to a public health official and asked him what’s the best way to anticipate where there might be higher than normal rates of vaccine noncompliance, and he said take a map and put a pin wherever there’s a Whole Foods.”
That is so sadly on the mark. I know so many people that I respect as highly intelligent, well meaning people that fall for this fallacious bullshit.
I would loose it, if my kids came home from school with questions like that.
The comments in the pseudoscience in India article show that we have a long, long way to go in the fight for logic and reason.
For the record, I am 99.99% convinced that homeopathy is total bunk, based mainly on the impossible theoretical basis of it all.
The remaining 0.01% of doubt? Maybe the diluent used contains some of Daedalus2u’s NO bugs!
I would so enjoy that, cos he could sue the lot of them for breach of patent and end their scourge once and for all!
The Naked Skargsgaard post is an excellent example of skeptisism.