a little science

central park in winter
Originally uploaded by atb20.

perhaps i should just stop reading. that might be good. then i might not be so worried about the direction in which our country creeps a little more every day. i could maintain a steady diet of fox news and remain blissfully unaware that children are dying in darfur and diplomacy is losing what little foothold it had in the middle east. i could think that all muslims are bad and good teenagers never have sex. it would be so much easier.

unfortunately, it's difficult to unlearn how to read. i'd have to give up dan brown along with the new york times, and chances are i'd still occasionally flip past bbc world news and accidentally get real news. not to mention what would happen to my job... i don't think they hire too many illiterate research assistants.

so today i learned that nasa is editing their press release about a white dwarf star so as not to frighten people about the eventual demise of our sun -- hundreds of billions of years from now. that's a wee bit disconcerting, but what was even more so was that kansas school board removed the big bang from their science curriculum in 1999, and i don't remember hearing so much as a peep about it! it's these little things that get buried in the 5th page of the newspaper that scare me... its the little things that change a country, not the big things. and i think bush et al. are happy to have us duke it out over roe v. wade while they surreptitiously change educational curricula and fund abstinence only "education." so far it seems to be working...

btw, happy valentine's day!