![[Little man pirates of the Carribean]](http://whenchemistsattack.com/blogfiles/manpirates.jpg)
Is this a film about bloodthirsty midgets, or is it about something much more sinister?
Archive for July, 2006
Little man pirates of the Caribbean!
Friday, July 28th, 2006Friday cat – I could sell this stuff …
Friday, July 28th, 2006Continuing last week’s bathroom theme, here’s Rusty again:
![[Rusty on TP]](http://whenchemistsattack.com/blogfiles/rusty_tp_1024.jpg)
Rusty: I could sell this stuff better than those stupid bears!
As always, click the image to enlarge.
The Bible as a science book
Wednesday, July 26th, 2006There are people out there who want to use the Christian Bible as a science textbook. I am not exactly sure why they do this, but it forces them to use all sorts of weird mental gymnastics to make right that which modern science has shown to be wrong. It’s tough to be a Biblical literalist. Mike Adams (link above) illustrates why:
Leviticus 17:11 says, “For the life of the body is in its blood. I have given you the blood on the altar to purify you, making you right with the Lord. It is the blood, given in exchange for a life that makes purification possible.†For centuries after these words were written by Moses the scientists were bleeding the sick with leeches. How much better would humanity have fared, had these scientists listened to the Word of God?
Adams is apparently suggesting here that we start to perform ritual animal sacrifices – which is what Leviticus 17 is clearly about if you read the whole chapter. Adams claims to be on his eigth reading of the Bible and should know what the context of his quote is, right?
This particular chapter is also one of those that inspire Jehovah’s Witnesses to refuse blood transfusions, and we all know how well that goes.
Back to Adams
Isaiah 40:22 says, “God sits above the circle of the earth. The people below seem like grasshoppers to him! He spreads out the heavens like a curtain and makes his tent from them.†Scientists once thought the earth was flat. Had they read the great prophet Isaiah, they would have learned much earlier about the “circle of the earth.â€
Circles are flat. Perhaps it would mesh better with modern science if the verse had said “sphere”. But as long as we’re in Isaiah, let’s visit Isaiah 24:1 – Behold, the Lord maketh the earth empty, and maketh it waste, and turneth it upside down, and scattereth abroad the inhabitants thereof. How’s that supposed to happen? (This verse makes perfect sense if the Earth is flat, but not so much sense if it’s spherical.)
I should add that Adams would have to look really hard to find “scientists” who thought the Earth was flat throughout much of recorded human history. Heck, the ancient Greeks knew the Earth was spherical and even estimated its size!
Can’t we all just stop trying to turn religious books into science books? It’s bad for science teaching, and it’s bad for religion.
Public versus Private – again
Tuesday, July 25th, 2006That report from the Department of Education turns out to be pretty interesting – especially when you look at a few comparisons between public schools and private schools.
One interesting point is the fraction of students in the public schools with either learning disablilites (LD) of some kind or who are learning English as a second language (ELL). These students are more difficult to teach (in terms of time and money) than a non-disabled student who is from an English-speaking home. The data below was for fourth grade reading, but the percentages are similar for the other groups the study examined.
| School type | Percent LD | Percent ELL | Percent LD/ELL |
| Public | 14% | 10% | 22% |
| Private | 3% | 1% | 4% |
So the next time someone says that private schools seem to have a lower average cost per student (and they must therefore be running much more efficiently as a result), remember that they’re educating different students. They simply don’t take the more costly students!
Here in South Carolina, we’ve got a bunch of small private fundamentalist religious schools. The Department of Education report breaks these apart from private schools in general in a few places. Here’s the money quote:
For math scores,
the initial difference between Conservative Christian schools and all public schools was substantially smaller (5.1 points) and not significant. The average difference in adjusted school means between Conservative Christian schools and all public schools was -7.6 points (i.e., a higher average school mean for public schools) and was significantly different from zero.
In other words, fundamentalist schools don’t do a significantly better job at educating students in math even if you don’t recognize the fact that they don’t have as many LD/ELL students. When you do account for student factors, you see that these fundamentalist schools do demonstrably worse than the public schools.
So why is it that we want vouchers here in South Carolina, again?
Public schools are evil?
Monday, July 24th, 2006The internet’s certainly a crazy place. I’m not entirely certain what chain of clicks led me there, but I ran across fundamentaltop500.com, a site that is supposed to “help people find fundamental Baptist, KJV web sites, and to help these web sites get more traffic.”
For some as-yet-unexplained reason, I clicked on the site ranked 14th, which was this one: www.jesus-is-savior.com.
Now I’ve seen some strange stuff on the internet in my lifetime, but jesus-is-savior.com site ranks up there with timecube for sheer weirdness. Assuming it’s not a parody, the site really makes you think. What it makes you think is this: Can anyone actually believe all this stuff and stay sane? I’ll leave that for y’all to judge.
If you manage to survive the visual onslaught of simply looking at the page, there’s a link near the top – Public Schools are Evil! – which promises to be a fun read. Boy, is it ever!
Right from the beginning, you are treated with an image of the devil carving “666” into a kid reading a Harry Potter book. This, presumably, is site author David J. Stewart’s view of the public schools. Why does he hate the public schools so much?
The public school system produces educated heathen fools. Young children who should be taught about God are instead brainwashed with evolution and worldly philosophies. […] You can’t teach a child at home that God created all people, and then expect that child to go learn from some heathen teacher that we all evolved from a lower life-form of life, without there being confusion and spiritual conflict.
He seems to be afraid that kids might learn something.
Later on, he brings out his trump card:
In case you didn’t know, the 10th Plank of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto called for a “public school system.”
I love the logic here. Let me try it. “In case you didn’t know, the tenth plank of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto called for the abolition of factory labor for children.” And, by golly, Karl Marx was rumored to breathe oxygen! So all you oxygen-breathing child-labor-abolishing folks out there are GODLESS COMMIES!
The public school system is EVIL! it is evil in so many ways. The teaching of evolution is evil, it is a deliberate attempt to shake the faith of young people in a Living and Holy God. Teaching young people that they are animals (mammals) is evil. […] Deliberately educating young people without including God is evil.
Yup. He’s definitely afraid the kids might learn something. I wonder if this guy thinks that testing of medicines on animals is pointless because he thinks humans are not animals?
Why, though, does his rant remind me of this very, very serious picture from The Onion?
The page goes on (and on, and on, and eventually ends up somehow as “Doctors against vaccines”), but that’s quite enough for one sitting.
(And I really hope deep down that jesus-is-savior.com is satire and I just missed it. I do admit that I’ve heard elsewhere every argument about public schools that this guy makes – from people who WERE being serious)
Friday cat – How to flush?
Friday, July 21st, 2006![[Rusty]](http://whenchemistsattack.com/blogfiles/howtoflush_1024x768.jpg)
Rusty: I think I’ve got the hang of this “toilet” thing! Now if I could only figure out how to flush!
(Click to enlarge)
Funneling students and money to private schools – why?
Friday, July 21st, 2006There’s a new Senate bill generating some buzz on the news: S.3682, sponsored by Alexander Lamar from TN (search for it at thomas.loc.gov or try clicking here). The bill looks like it’ll provide vouchers for “low-income” kids to go to private schools – presumably on the basis that transferring poor kids from public school to private school will help them do better.
This premise appears to be flawed. The National Center for Education Statistics has released a report that says sometihng like this. While private schools appear at first glance to produce students who score better on assessments of reading and math than public school students, this difference disappears (and even reverses in some cases), when differences among ethnicity, family income, etc. are taken into account. In other words, it’s not that private schools are necessarily better at educating, it’s that they can and do select their own students.
I fail to see the great need to funnel students out of public schools (which are accountable on some level to taxpayers) to private schools (which are largely unaccountable to taxpayers), when it does not appear that the private schools will do any better a job at educating these students than the public schools do.
But even if you accept that school vouchers are a good idea, if you are into quality science education this little provision in S.3682 should give you a bit of indigestion. While schools
participating in a project under this Act shall not discriminate against an individual participant in, or an individual applicant to participate in, the project on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin
, all bets seem to be off if the school is a religious school. In particular,
if a school […] receives funds made available under this Act for an eligible student as a result of a choice made by the student’s parent, the receipt of the funds shall not, consistent with the first amendment of the Constitution–
(A) necessitate any change in the school’s teaching mission;
. So, while public schools are required (for good reason) to teach accepted science, the fundamentalist religious schools can slurp up those sweet, sweet taxpayer dollars while teaching kids nonsense like creation science on religious grounds.
(Edited – fixed thomas link and corrected bill number)
Friends don’t let friends use catnip
Wednesday, July 19th, 2006Here’s another public service announcement from whenchemistsattack.com:
![[Crazy tom]](http://whenchemistsattack.com/blogfiles/crazytom_1024x768.jpg)
Friends don’t let friends use catnip
(Click to enlarge to 1024×768)
Kids being kids
Wednesday, July 19th, 2006Slashdot links to this article in Advertising Age about Wal-Mart trying to cash in on the success of Myspace, the home of approximately 6.022×1023 teen-to-twenties angst blogs.
Wal-Mart is launching a highly sanitized, controlled and rather unhip site at walmart.com/schoolyourway. Teens are invited to create their own page, “show it to the world and win some fab prizes,” including a chance to have their videos appear in a Wal-Mart TV commercial.
Isn’t that what any teen is just dying to do? Get into a Wal-Mart commercial?
The site is an attempt at closing the trend gap Wal-Mart now faces as Target wins more teen-apparel dollars.
Have people that do Wal-Mart’s advertising actually been in a Wal-Mart store? It probably isn’t lack of trendiness that keeps teens out of Wal-Mart. it’s that Wal-Mart stores are only slightly more filthy and poorly arranged than a flea market. (I will give them this – their stores are on average cleaner than the HTML markup on most myspace pages.)
“Over the last year, we have been getting increasingly bad feedback from teen girls about Wal-Mart in contrast to Target — especially Wal-Mart’s apparent lack of cleanliness, messy layout and lack of stylish attire. This attempt at ‘we media’ is terrific. We’ll have to wait and see if it’s enough to overcome in-store issues.”
My guess is “no, it won’t overcome in-store issues”. Whatever junk they put on the web won’t change the fact that the stores are hell to shop in.
But that Wal-Mart site ought to be good for some cheap laughs.
For example, to participate in Wal-Mart’s content, you have to agree to this:
I represent that my Entry is my original creation and hereby grant to Sponsor the copyright and all other rights now known or hereafter existing to use my Entry throughout the universe, in perpetuity, in whole or in part, in edited, unedited or distorted form, in connection with this Contest, for any trade, advertising, or promotional purpose whatsoever, without review, approval, notification or payment from or to any person or entity, in all media now known or hereafter discovered. I understand and agree that Sponsor shall be entitled to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, license, create derivative works from and distribute or incorporate Entries into any form, medium, or technology now known or later developed throughout the universe, for any purpose whatsoever.
(emphasis mine)
And you say Wal-Mart wants global domination. Pah! They will stop at nothing short of dominating the entire universe!
A public service announcement
Tuesday, July 18th, 2006If you’re ever passing through Florence, SC on your way to Myrtle Beach (lots of Ohio folks do this), here’s a bit of advice. You might drive past a restaurant called International Buffet. An inviting sign like this may lure you in to eat.
![[International Buffet]](http://whenchemistsattack.com/blogfiles/ib_crableggs.jpg)
Snow!! Crab Legg’s
(What … you mean you didn’t want to eat pantyhose for dinner?)
Whatever you do, do not stop! Drive on, and eat somewhere far away. You have been warned.
Should you decide to ignore my warning, you will come face-to-face with strange foods like “Cheese Cnabmeaf” which actually taste worse than they sound. Don’t believe me? See for yourself.
![[International Buffet]](http://whenchemistsattack.com/blogfiles/ib_cnabmeaf.jpg)
Cheese Cnabmeaf
For my money, there’s nothing like a good Chinese buffet. Unfortunately, International Buffet is nothing like a good Chinese buffet. The little card I picked up advertises “over 300 items” on the buffet. You might get to 300 if you count each piece of cnabmeaf as a separate item. Otherwise, you’ll fall about 225 items short. To be fair to International Buffet, this might be because they’re obviously a new restaurant.
Newness might excuse a lack of variety, but it does not excuse lousy food. We went at dinnertime – when you’d expect for there to be piping hot food on the buffet. International Buffet’s food had apparently sat on the bar for hours and was only lukewarm. By the time I managed to get back to my table with a plate of food, it had cooled to only slightly above room temperature. Politeness prevented me from doing this, but I briefly considered asking the waitress for a microwave. Cold Tso chicken is not very good. Cold cnabmeaf in melted-then-resolidified cheese is inedible.
International Buffet is located at 260 West Palmetto Street in Florence, SC. I advise planning your dining well clear of this address.