Some Guy With A Website:

Last week, the Canadian branch of Campbell’s Soup announced that they were making the horrific, outrageous decision to create a product that would appeal to tens of thousands of consumers. As you know, nothing gets in the way of capitalism so the right wing would be thrilled about this venture into oh man I almost had you there.

Fifteen percent of Americans are living in poverty, and there’s a call to stop eating soup because the company that makes it is trying to get more people to eat it. I’m worried about the death toll if someone ever declares that oxygen has a liberal bias.

This reminds me of the time back in the mid to late 80s when my mom suddenly couldn’t find her favorite hair color in stores because Clairol’s parent company at the time, Bristol Myers Squibb, made the horrible mistake of naming a Jewish CEO and/or manufacturing some of their products in Israel, so Kuwait halted all imports and outlawed Miss Clairol. America, please let’s get as dumb as the people we despise and see how far that takes us.

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No Halal Soup For You is just as nauseating as this asshole who openly proclaims that he hopes “the flag of Islam will fly over the White House.” And the nation’s loud and proud secularists blog/tweet/scream not a damned thing about it, while the Christian right comes back with, “Nuh uh, it will be our flag.” Before wingnuts of all stripes and their media lapdogs quickly warp this narrative into the Christian vs. Muslim domination of America (and you end up on a no-winning-side side of it), let us bring it back to what it ought to be – religious ideology vs. separation of church and state and future relevance of this nation – and fight from there.

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Data converging rapidly to show that each time someone writes HERE IN AMERICA WE SPEAK ENGLISH, their next sentence will be grossly misspelled. I kin speek Merkin.

The Art Institute of Chicago | October 2010

I love that tongue-in-cheek Magritte and how he forces us to keep looking.

It starts with education. We“re not inspiring children. Somewhere down the line we forgot that science and engineering were creative, exciting, and rewarding”that they could achieve the impossible and change the world. We need to look at how we teach, test, and challenge children. I can see why No Child Left Behind is increasingly coming under fire. While its intentions are admirable, standardized tests dampen enthusiasm for education, curb creativity, and put people off science and engineering.

— James “he of the Bagless Vacuum Cleaner and Bladeless Fan” Dyson on America’s School Science Crisis

This is a request for support for my efforts in the Science Bloggers for Students challenge, a friendly month-long competition (10/10/2010 through 11/9/2010) between science blogs to see which can do the most to help low-income American classrooms on DonorsChoose.org. Pick a classroom project at MY GIVING PAGE to support. And help me beat the other bloggers! Whatever little bit you give helps.

Public school teachers from every corner of America post classroom project requests on DonorsChoose.org. Requests range from pencils for a poetry writing unit, to violins for a school recital, to microscope slides for a biology class. DonorsChoose.org is a 501(c)3 charity incorporated in the State of New York. You will receive a gift receipt via email that can be used for your tax records.

Not surprisingly, I have signed up to help students in the area of Science and Mathematics. As Dyson points out above, it is pretty sad that our nation’s piddly education budget goes to propping up the administration of a glorified standardized testing system, a “one size fits all approach [which] is convenient but lazy.” This is not a substitute for actual teaching with proper resources on the part of qualified teachers and hands-on experimentation and creativity by students. Our future scientists and new ideas will not come from memorizing useless facts (and factoids) and sharpening #2 pencils for another standardized test, but from thinking free and taking risks under expert guidance.

Furthermore, it is beyond disheartening that teachers have to take the time out from teaching and their own personal lives to go online and reach out to us, i.e. neither the Department of Education nor parents of children in those specific schools, to beg for the most basic of teaching materials. I can’t tell you how mad I get when a state or local government’s first and immediate response to the threat of hard economic times is to slash school and library budgets, to the point of shutting these buildings down altogether. While that is a fight for another time, if you are as disgusted and worried as I am about America’s plummeting science rankings, please help out these kids. Please.

Here’s more incentive: HP has agreed to match all donations to Science Bloggers for Students up to $50,000. That’s right  every donation to my Giving Page will be doubled! And I won’t say anything bad about our HP color laser printer for a good long while!

So, what are you waiting for? Go HERE and give! And big ups to all those who have given already; thanks to you, Team Maitri has raised $316 (make that $316 x 2 = $632) before the official challenge has even begun. You rock!

The Art Institute of Chicago | October 2010

I could stare at this painting in its 96 x 72 in. glory for hours. So soft, three-dimensional in its transparency and layering, and mildly spooky, thus comforting.

The Earth may be a man, but which one? Read The Granite Controversy: Neptunism vs. Plutonism at David Bressan’s excellent History Of Geology blog.

An alternative, even contrasting theory to [Abraham Gottlob] Werner’s Neptunism was proposed by the English naturalist James Hutton: primordial rocks, and their exposure, are due the effect of magmatic intrusions and eruptions. This theory was named after the Roman god of the underworld Plutonism. The resulting conflict divided geologists and an intense research begun to solve the riddle of rock formation.