ot about science

The topper so far was when some self-proclaimed experts said the rigidity of math is racist or some such stupid statement. If that nonsense ever influences the curriculum us guys would have work for the next 100 years to come and could charge whatever we wanted for it. Except we don't live that long :-(

It certainly does influence curriculum.

Far more kids are going to college than ever before, and most are emerging stupid and useless. They should have gone to a trade school.

The few smart, independent thinkers are probably about as frequent as they ever have been.

We should teach them what we know, if we can find them.

Write a book!

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Oh, grumble, OK.

Speaking of book, we haven't heard from Win lately.

It's been quite a while. Hope things are okay.

His last post was a year and 3 days ago.

Assuming this is the same fellow, he still seems active:

John :-#)#

Except that you quoted a snippet out of context. A more complete quote is " "often reveal themselves to be more sophisticated in their understanding of how scientific knowledge is socially constructed than their ideological adversaries".

This is text-chopping. It also reflects your pig-ignorance. Science is a social activity - scientists publish papers which read are read and cited or criticised by other scientist, influencing the next generation of papers. This is a very social activity.

You seem to think that successful scientific theories are handed down by prophets with authority - and it can look a bit that way from time to time - but in reality even the most revered prophet-like figure - Einstein comes to mind - can't get an unpopular theory accepted, or prevent the acceptance of a theory they don't like.

Not yet anyway.

It has been going up rapidly for about the last century (though not so much in the US recently). The US does seem to contain a lot of people who pay attention to nonsense claims - or as John Larkin has done here - nonsense claims created by text-chopping, and that may get in the way of applying the mass of new scientific information being put together by the increasing number of scientists collaborating around the world.

John Larkin created his own stupid statement by chopping a text-string and presenting the fragment of text he created out of context.

Not in the US, where scientific knowledge is regularly ignored by people who don't like the message - as with John Larkin and anthropogenioc gloabal warming.

Cite?

Or at least unwilling to praise John Larkin as fulsomely as he thinks he deserves.

Apprenticeships do provide plenty of opportunity for the apprentice to learn the practical advantages of buttering up the master-craftsman to whom you are apprenticed.

Not that John Larkijn shows any sign of having the capacity to recognise any of them.

Ask any egomaniac. I'm convinced that some of the stuff I know is worth teaching to other people, but I'm also aware that some of it isn't - I've been lucky here in finding people to tell me when I've got stuff wrong. John Larkin seems to be less appreciative of that sort of constructive criticism.