Oh American darlings …

[blamebrampton]

I do feel for you. I have met so many smart, serious and intellectually curious citizens of the United States, and yet your political climate is so filled with people just like this one:

Suddenly the abject lunacy that surrounds health and science debates in your country has a whole new layer of horror attached. And thanks to Jeph Jacques of Questionable Content for the URL.

I'm off to see whether having a sore knee is a good enough excuse for wagging work now that hideous deadline has passed. A few laps of the hall ought to settle my conscience one way or the other.

Comments

[hitsuzen-hime.livejournal.com]

In response to many posters questions 'Where was this woman during her science classes.'

Please bear in mind that in the US schools are largely locally funded, which is to say that if you live in a low income area you go to a school with probably enough money to teach reading at a middle school level, the historical curriculum required by state law (which could probably be adequately covered by fortune cookies) and maths to a level of basic algebra with perhaps some geometry thrown in.

Required education in the upper levels DOES NOT require any sciences beyond what is covered in the basic health and human nutrition courses.

Light refraction is typically covered in introductory Physics, which for many schools is not even offered as an elective course due to a lack of funding. Where would she have learned about light refraction? Unless it's covered as a side note on some American sitcom, it's highly unlikely that she would. Many students make it all the way through Uni in the US without having to sit for more than one quarter or semester of sciences and many choose Geology or Food Science and Human Nutrition as the 'soft option'.

My own mother spent four hours on the phone when CERN fired up the particle accelerator while I tried to convince her that Dark Matter is not in fact the devils work and the size of black hole created by dark matter is not going to exceed the mass of the planet and swallow us all up. And she's got a BA and a MA in Cultural Anthropology!

My best friend has three degrees in computer sciences and electrical engineering and he was never required to sit a single sciences class his entire education. He has taken them of course, but on his own. So you see, in America, natural sciences are left out in the cold in even the highest levels of the education system. As Brammers pointed out thats one of the reasons the debates on health and sciences get so scary in our country. Even the well educated folks are operating at a fourth grade level in that particular part of their education.

[blamebrampton.livejournal.com]

That's so not good ...

The thing that astonished me about her, though, was her insistence that this never used to happen. What has she been doing for the last 20 years that she's never noticed refraction? Are there parts of the desert that have had no rain and water restrictions for that long?

[hitsuzen-hime.livejournal.com]

No, but there are large large swaths of urban zones in California where you would not have grass or any sort of outdoor plantings which would require watering. Water for irrigation is something of a luxury in California, which gets most of it's water supply from two states away via a canal. Also the air in various parts of California is hazy with pollutants and that's been getting better but it's been pretty bad. I'm not sure how much haze you have to have to block light refraction but it might have been enough. She talks about a rainbow effect around the moon and that is typically caused by light refraction of particle matter which is usually pollution in Cali as the water vapor content is so low.

Alternatively she might just be really really unobservant.