In a drawer in a file box in the U.S. Patent Office in Washington, D.C., is a study in black ink on white paper, lines that resemble those images most of us have of the first Wright Bros. flyer, usually dubbed “Kittyhawk” after the place it first took to the air.
Drawing 1 from patent granted to Orville Wright for a flying machine
The patent was issued on May 22, 1906, to Orville Wright, Patent No. 821393, for a “flying machine.”
It makes more sense if you turn the drawing on its side.
Wright Bros. flying machine, from patent drawing
Why did it take three years to get the patent issued?
Texans, the information on finding your state representative and state senator are below — call them, today.
In a surprise move, the Senate has moved the nomination of Don McLeroy to the floor for an up-and-down vote.
McLeroy has ushered in a new era of bitter, partisan and divisive politics to the State Board of Education. In the past year he has insulted English teachers, citizens of Hispanic descent, unnecessarily gutted a good mathematics text from the approved list (just to show he can do it), and done his best to butcher science education standards for Texas. He suspended work on new social studies curricula because, in part, he doesn’t like the term “capitalism,” insisting on “free enterprise” instead, contrary to almost all scholarly writing on the topic.
The man is a menace to education. He uses wedge political issues to divide educators from parents, parents from schools, schools from the community, students from teachers, and education from propaganda.
In a surprise meeting on the Senate floor, the Senate Nominations Committee in Austin has just approved the appointment of Don McLeroy as chairman of the Texas State Board of Education. It appears that McLeroy’s supporters plan to bring his confirmation to the full Senate early next week. Confirmation will require a two-thirds vote.
Committee Chairman Mike Jackson, R-La Porte, had said he would not bring up McLeroy’s confirmation for a vote in committee unless he thought there were enough votes to get it in the full Senate. We don’t know at this point whether opposition from nearly all Democrats and some Republicans has softened, but the signs are alarming.
Texas Freedom Network President Kathy Miller has released the following statement:
“If the Texas Senate genuinely cares about quality public education, they will reject as state board chairman a man who apparently agrees that parents who want to teach their kids about evolution are monsters. And we’ll see whether senators really want a chairman who presides over a board that is so focused on ‘culture war’ battles that it has made Texas look like an educational backwater to the rest of the country.”
She’s being called Ida (EE-duh, to the Brits, EYE-duh to Bob Wills fans). How could you miss all the hype about her unveiling this week?
Science fans complain that the hype might be over done. Creationists appear a bit panicked by the developments.
Ida herself? She’s beautiful. Here’s an interview with Michael Novacek from the American Museum of Natural History in New York, carried on the public television news program World Focus.
Here’s a collection of British television stories on Ida, including David Attenborough’s animation of the reconstruction of her skeleton — some great graphics:
Evolution 2009 kicks off Wednesday, September 2, 2009 at the University of Nebraska atKearney.
In honor of Darwin’s birth bicentennial and the sesquicentennial of his most famous work, the program is dedicated to evolution in different fields of biology.
High school instructors can get in for $75. World class scientists like Jack Horner, Brad Davidson, Shannon Williamson and Randy Moore will present — along with world class evolution and legal evidence expert, Nick Matzke.
The main hotel will be the Ramada Inn in Kearney, where I spent a cold, snowy night in November 1979 after a kindly truck driver from Consolidated Freightways rescued me from certain hypothermia a few miles out of town, where my car had spun into nearly six feet of snow.
Now, can I find some excuse to get to the conference?
I predict: For the 21st consecutive year since the field of intelligent design was proposed, there will be no new research supporting intelligent design, even in the poster sessions. This is a science conference, and intelligent design supporters will quietly boycott the entire affair.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
If a day goes by that I don’t get a question about one of these sites, it’s a very slow day.
Those questions tell me something else: Students have genuine interests in geography, and in mysteries. Students will pay attention to lesson plans that include one or more of these sites in them, especially if you refer to the mystery.
How about just a geography search: How close is the closest site to you? Can students visit these sites on their summer vacations? What airport is closest for tourists? What arrangements need to be made to visit the place?
Wired.com provides the video — your students have the questions. Can you provide the answers, or lead them to the answers? How about listing your answers in comments?
No real Texan would ever entertain the slightest doubt about the accuracy of evolution theory, once that Texan understood how evolution helps fight the imported Argentine fire ant, Solenopsis invicta. And, who could invent flies that turn the tiny ants into zombies as their larva eat the brains of the ants?
Evolution theory suggests that predators, or at least a parasite, exists for almost every species on Earth. Fire ants, though seemingly invincible (hence the species name, invicta), also have predators and parasites. Control of the ants may be a function of finding the right natural enemy of the ant.
Caption from TAES: As the egg of a new type of phorid fly develops inside the heads of red imported fire ants, it takes over the control of the host, said Dr. Scott Ludwig, Texas AgriLife Extension Service integrated pest management specialist. Ludwig released fire ants infested with the parasite at the Texas AgriLife Research and Extension Center at Overton on April 29. (Texas AgriLife Extension photo by Robert Burns)
It sounds like something out of science fiction: zombie fire ants. But it’s all too real.
Fire ants wander aimlessly away from the mound.
Eventually their heads fall off, and they die.
The strange part is that researchers at the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M’s AgriLife Extension Service say making “zombies” out of fire ants is a good thing.
“It’s a tool — they’re not going to completely wipe out the fire ant, but it’s a way to control their population,” said Scott Ludwig, an integrated pest management specialist with the AgriLife Extension Service in Overton, in East Texas.
The tool is the tiny phorid fly, native to a region of South America where the fire ants in Texas originated. Researchers have learned that there are as many as 23 phorid species along with pathogens that attack fire ants to keep their population and movements under control.
CREDIT: Mauldin, Bill, artist. “Another such victory and I am undone” Copyright 1962, Field Enterprises, Inc. Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
President John F. Kennedy’s Science Advisory Council (PSAC) studied Rachel Carson’s best-selling book, Silent Spring, checking it for scientific accuracy. Kennedy read the book himself, but sought expert advice before doing anything. Meanwhile, DDT manufacturers bankrolled an extensive public relations campaign claiming DDT was safe, and suggesting Carson was less than a careful writer and scientist.
Reading Carson’s book changed many people’s ideas about the environment and inspired some to take action. People wrote to their representatives in congress and asked them to do something about the misuse of pesticides. When several senators created a committee to research environmental dangers, they asked Carson to speak to them about pesticides. Carson recommended that the government regulate and reduce pesticide use, and that it ban the most toxic pesticides. She said that a citizen of the United States had the right “to be secure in his own home against the intrusion of poisons applied by other persons.”
President Kennedy understood the importance of Carson’s book. He asked his Science Advisory Committee to research Carson’s claims in Silent Spring. In 1963 the Committee released a report called “The Uses of Pesticides.” It supported Silent Spring. Environmental activists continued to push the government to regulate pesticides. Changes in federal law in 1964 required companies to prove that something did not cause harm before they could sell it. In 1972, activists pushed for and won a ban on DDT, the pesticide that started Carson’s research for Silent Spring. And in 1970 the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was created “in response to the growing public demand for cleaner water, air and land.” Who knows what the world would be like today if Rachel Carson had not written Silent Spring?
Some radicals argue that Rachel Carson’s legacy is tarnished, that she was in error about DDT, and somehow that translates into many deaths as a result of malaria, as if DDT worked against malaria parasites themselves. With such a strong propaganda campaign of disinformation plaguing us today, we do well to pause and remember that Carson’s work was subjected to intense, careful scrutiny by scientists from the start. Carson’s reporting was accurate, and her legacy of environmental protection and saving lives should be celebrated.
But this day was different because a second year graduate student, Stanley Lloyd Miller, was speaking, and the room was full because the word had spread that something important was to be presented. In addition to the famous scientists and less famous but equally high-powered scientists was an undergraduate, Carl Sagan attending his first chemistry seminar. The topic was the synthesis of important biological compounds, using conditions thought to have existed on the primitive Earth.
Miller reported that by sending repeated electric sparks through a sealed flask containing a mixture of methane, ammonia, hydrogen, and water vapor, he had made some of the amino acids found in proteins. Perhaps, he suggested, this was how organic compounds were made on the ancient Earth before life existed.
While Miller was confident of his results, the rows of famous faces in his audience were, to say the least, intimidating. He was bombarded with questions. Were the analyses done correctly? Could there have been contamination? After the event, Miller thought that the questions had been constructive, but since the results were hard to believe, they had simply wanted to ensure that he had not made some mistake. However, Carl Sagan thought that Miller’s inquisitors seemed to be picky and did not appreciate the significance of the experiment. Even the relevance of Miller’s results to the origin of life were questioned. When someone asked Miller how he could really be sure this kind of process actually took place on the primitive Earth, Nobel Laureate Harold Urey, Miller’s research advisor, immediately interrupted, replying, “If God did not do it this way, then he missed a good bet.” The seminar ended amid the laughter, and the attendees filed out with some making complimentary remarks to Miller. Miller changed clothes, went back to the lab and started a paper chromatography run.
The events leading up to this dramatic seminar began two years earlier in October, 1951 when Urey presented the Chemistry Department seminar on the origin of the Solar system. In addition to the usual high powered scientists, the audience had contained the then first year graduate student, Stanley Miller.
Read “Prebiotic Soup—Revisiting the Miller Experiment” by Jeffrey Bada and Antonio Lazcano published in Science300 (2003) 745-726 in full text or as a PDF.
This is an abridged version of the Stanley Miller’s 70th Birthday published in Origins of Life and Evolution of the Biosphere30: 107-112, 2000 by Jeffrey Bada and Antonio Lazcano and The Spark of Life – Darwin and the Primeval Soup by Christopher Wills and Jeffrey Bada, Perseus Books, 2000.
More than 50 years ago scientists demonstrated that basic chemicals of life, thought previously by some to be too complex to arise naturally, could occur in nature spontaneously. Much of the misunderstanding and crank science behind creationism is devoted to hiding these facts.
Lift a glass to Stanley Miller and his experiment today, a toast to learning, a toast to the truth.
Table of contents for latest Origins of Life, a journal of ISSOL (there are more experiments reported in one issue of this nearing-40-years journal than there are in all of intelligent design/creationism — and this is not even in the realm of evolution theory yet)
House Bill 3 and Senate Bill 3, the two identical bills being considered in the Legislature now that will change Texas education laws for student assessment, tracking, documentation, and accountability, also affect high school graduation requirements. Unfortunately, anti-education lobbyists have been very successful and the HB3-SB3 bill as currently written delays the implementation of the 4×4 high school curriculum for many years. This will have a very deleterious effect on Texas science and math education, college readiness, allow continuation of the senior-year math and science layoff, and remove the need for a variety of 12th-grade capstone science and math courses.
Yes, you need to call your Texas representatives. Schafersman gives the numbers. Drop by his new blog, get details, get on the phone.
The teacher got into hot water because the creationism statement came outside the context of his AP European History class. In making the statement during a discussion of another teacher’s views on evolution, the court could not find any “legitimate secular purpose in [the] statement.”
However, Judge Selna found a second statement that Corbett made about creationism did not violate the student’s First Amendment rights, although it’s an equally pointed critique.
“Contrast that with creationists,” Corbett told his class. “They never try to disprove creationism. They’re all running around trying to prove it. That’s deduction. It’s not science. Scientifically, it’s nonsense.”
That statement was OK because it came in the context of a discussion of the history of ideas and religion. Thus, its primary purpose wasn’t just to express “affirmative disapproval” of religion, but rather to make the point that “generally accepted scientific principles do not logically lead to the theory of creationism.” One might expect that if creationism came up in the context of evolutionary biology, it would be similarly OK to say, “Scientifically, it’s nonsense.”
The nuanced decision prompted the judge to append an afterword. Selna explains his thinking a basic right is at issue, namely, “to be free of a government that directly expresses approval of religion.” Just as the government shouldn’t promote religion, he writes, the government shouldn’t actively disapprove of religion either.
It seems to me, still, that the instructor was well within legal bounds. For example, we would not ask a biology instructor to pay deference to the Christian Science view that disease is caused by falling away from God (sin), and not by germs, and consequently that prayer is effective therapy. As a pragmatic matter, Christian Scientists don’t demand that everybody else bow to their view; but in a legal suit, the evidence of Pasteur’s work and subsequent work on how microbes cause disease would trump any claim that Pasteur was “not religiously neutral.”
We still await word on whether the district and teacher will appeal the decision.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Here’s the Climate Denial Crock of the Week video on ocean levels, and the denial that they are rising — in line with my post a few hours ago about peoples in the South Pacific and in Alaska losing their homes to climate change:
(Teachers: Note most of these videos are around 5 minutes in length — more than suitable for classroom use, perhaps even as a bell ringer. Notice also that, if you don’t know how to make these videos, as I don’t, you’re behind the curve.)
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
The summit is taking place about 500 miles from the Alaskan village of Newtok, where intensifying river flow and melting permafrost are forcing 320 residents to resettle on a higher site some 9 miles away in a new consequence of climate change, known as climigration.
Newtok is the first official Arctic casualty of climate change. A U.S. Army Corps of Engineers study indicates 26 other Alaskan villages are in immediate danger, with an additional 60 considered under threat in the next decade, Cochran said.
Here’s how the warming denialists’ diary entries should run:
Or, until that account is unsuspended by the forces supporting Donald Trump: Follow @FillmoreWhite, the account of the Millard Fillmore White House Library
We've been soaking in the Bathtub for several months, long enough that some of the links we've used have gone to the Great Internet in the Sky.
If you find a dead link, please leave a comment to that post, and tell us what link has expired.
Thanks!
Retired teacher of law, economics, history, AP government, psychology and science. Former speechwriter, press guy and legislative aide in U.S. Senate. Former Department of Education. Former airline real estate, telecom towers, Big 6 (that old!) consultant. Lab and field research in air pollution control.
My blog, Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, is a continuing experiment to test how to use blogs to improve and speed up learning processes for students, perhaps by making some of the courses actually interesting. It is a blog for teachers, to see if we can use blogs. It is for people interested in social studies and social studies education, to see if we can learn to get it right. It's a blog for science fans, to promote good science and good science policy. It's a blog for people interested in good government and how to achieve it.
BS in Mass Communication, University of Utah
Graduate study in Rhetoric and Speech Communication, University of Arizona
JD from the National Law Center, George Washington University
Posted by Ed Darrell 
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 