caliarch.net

Just…wow.

At least it’s not the worn out religious line about how premarital sex is a sin. And it IS great that kids can feel empowered and supported to make the lifestyle choice they want.

But.

Fundamentally, it still feels like a group of people trying to convince everyone else that the choice they feel is right for them is the right choice for everyone (thereby removing any real concept of choice at all, if we’re going to do the math). And using bad data to boot.

And that’s the main point, I think (or, at the very least, it’s my point): what’s “right” is different for everyone, and the best thing anyone concerned with sex education can do is (shockingly) educate, educate, educate on biology, psychology, history, politics, human relations. The absolute bottom line is that people have to be empowered to make their own thoughtful, well-informed choices.

[This is where the rant about sexual politics would go, but I’m tired. :/]

In May 2008, CERN will begin operating its new Large Hadron Collider, which will be the world’s largest and highest-energy particle accelerator.

Its mission statement?

“To smash protons moving at 99.999999% of the speed of light into each other and so recreate conditions a fraction of a second after the big bang.”

Sweet!

Among the crazy little gizmos that the LHC might spit out are strangelets, micro black holes, magnetic monopoles and supersymmetric particles. Oh yeah, and dragons. (We’ll get to that in a moment.)

It turns out that a group of individuals has filed a complaint in US District Court of Hawaii this month requesting an injunction against the LHC’s startup, on the basis of two concerns. The first is that the micro black holes might conspire against us and form a giant black hole that eats up the Earth (and then the universe). The second is that any strangelets produced could set off a chain reaction (a la ice-nine) that will ultimately convert all the nuclei in the Earth to strange matter (ie, a great dead lump of quarks).

Is there some tiny possibility that these things could happen? Sure. But then again, as Dr. Frank Close, an Oxford physicist, reminds us, “The chance of this happening is like you winning the major prize on the lottery 3 weeks in succession; the problem is that people believe it is possible to win the lottery 3 weeks in succession.” And as Dr. Nima Arkani-Hamed, a Princeton particle theorist, puts it, due to the probabilistic nature of quantum physics, “There is some minuscule probability that the Large Hadron Collider might make dragons that might eat us up.”

He doesn’t sound worried.

(But really — how freaking awesome would it be to make dragons in a particle accelerator, even if only by accident???)

The idea is to make Chess a standard part of the 2nd & 3rd grade curriculum.  I kind of like this idea, because one of the main things that kids can’t do that holds them back is the kind of complex problem solving that requires looking at a situation, thinking about the goal, coming up with a bunch of different multi-step strategies for achieving the goal, thinking through each one and its possible consequences, and then putting one into practice.  I’ll be curious to see how it pans out.

…depending on your perspective.  (Referring to the first two articles on this page.  If your interest hasn’t been piqued yet, they are about mind reading computers and the correlation between childhood spanking & masochistic / coercive / unprotected sex, respectively.)

“Are DBQs enough for you, or do you warrant some love from the frontier?” ~ Maura

[Inspired by an equally amusing quote, “Are x and y enough for you, or do you warrant some love from the z-axis?”

For the record, I admittedly don’t know a lot about the frontier, but I’m always up for some z-axis love.  It’s just who I am. ]