JISHOU, HUNAN — The border police in Berkeley, California, must have been napping. A proselytizing teacher slipped into town long enough to traumatize her class of eight-year-olds.

She told them that Harry Potter, the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus were ALL fictional characters, and that God was the only thing they should believe in.

Nice. And I wonder what grade she got in ed psych?

She also reportedly told her third graders that she didn’t believe in evolution or the Big Bang either. I suppose none were able to shoot back a counter-argument, since they were all in tears about the Santa Claus/Easter Bunny revelation.

The teacher, a new hire over the summer, is now being investigated by the Berkeley Unified School District for possibly (!) violating laws against the separation of Church and State. The details are here.

I’m not sure which is worse, burning a cross onto a teenager’s arm with a Tesla coil or demolishing an eight-year-old’s belief in Santa and the Easter Bunny. Is the US this desperate for teachers?

Thanks for Pharyngula for this story.

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October 6th, 2008 | Tags: berkeley, creationism, God, john freshwater, santa claus | Category: Commentary, Schools, Science, Skepticism, teaching | Leave a comment

JISHOU, HUNAN — Is the McCain campaign (or Sarah Palin) getting background information from the World Net Daily? Or are they trying to rekindle the 1950s Red Scare witchhunts?

Back in bad old days of the 1950s, Sen. Joe McCarthy made a name for himself by labeling people as Communists because they associated with known Communists. The process was “guilt by association.”

This week, Palin accused Barack Obama of hanging out with terrorists on a daily basis because he once served on the same board as a former member of the 1970s Weather Underground. That same member, Bill Ayers, is now a university professor.

According to this logic, I am a supporter of oppressive, corrupt dictators. I was in the same yoga class in college with Imee Marcos, daughter of former Phillipine ruler Ferdinand Marcos and the shoe-loving Imelda Marcos.

Utter nonsense. (In case you’re wondering, though, Imee was — and probably still is — a really nice person. As for her parents, I can’t say. I never met them — two degrees of separation there. I’m still waiting for that country to oppress — my lifelong ambition.)

So I wondered where did Palin get her information to make this statement in Costa Mesa, California?

Obama “is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists who targeted their own country. This ladies and gentleman, is not the kind of change that I think we should be believing in.”

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October 6th, 2008 | Tags: Barack Obama, bill ayers, Sarah Palin, terrorists | Category: Commentary | Leave a comment

JISHOU, HUNAN — Here’s what I’ve been able to glean from the ‘Net about a few other school-related stories I have followed.

Brittany McComb — This Nevada high school senior defied school authorities in 2006 and gave a valedictory that mentioned not only her own Christian devotion but encouraged others to follow Christ too. School officials pulled the plug on her microphone, but she continued to deliver the address. With the support of the conservative Rutherford Institute, McComb filed a civil rights suit in US District Court that July against the school district and the individual school officials. She appeared on Hannity and Fox on cable TV, and ended up a darling of the Christian right. As of Dec. 2007, the case was stalled in the US Court of Appeals, so it may be a while before anything noteworthy happens. McComb is currently a student at Biola University, a Bible-based institution in California.

Tericka Dye — A much loved science teacher in western Kentucky, Dye lost her job in 2006 after it got out she had appeared in a few porn movies as “Rikki Andersin” more than decade before. She appealed her dismissal, but lost. She got her moments of fame when she appeared on Dr. Phil. Dye left the Paducah area, and at last report was working elsewhere under a different name.

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October 5th, 2008 | Tags: brittany mccomb, cocoa beach high school, Daphne Beasley, tericka dye | Category: Commentary, Schools | Leave a comment

JISHOU, HUNAN — Last spring, I was following the case of one John Freshwater, an Ohio science teacher accused of proselytizing his seventh-graders a little too zealously. Freshwater was relieved of his duties when an unnamed student and his parents filed suit, charging Freshwater with civil rights violations.

Freshwater allegedly burned a cross on the student’s arm with a Tesla coil, a common science lab demo device that generally should be kept far from human flesh. (I speak from personal experience.)

Anyway, this teacher, who subscribes to some kind of wacko right-wing Christianity, wants the names of the student and his parents made public. In a town where folks are already polarized over Freshwater’s “I will keep a Bible in the classroom no matter what” crusade, revealing the names of the family would be tantamount to inviting people to burn crosses in their front yard.

Yeah, it’s that bad in mid-Ohio. Land of the free, and all that.

Ed Brayton at Scienceblogs has the gory details.

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October 5th, 2008 | Tags: cross, john freshwater, lawsuit, tesla coil | Category: Civil liberties, Science, teaching | Leave a comment

JISHOU, HUNAN — This fairly quiet city made international headlines early last month when nearly a third of the population took to the streets to protest a massive real estate scheme that swindled them out of billions of dollars.

I have tried to piece together a more substantive review of the whole mess, which for good reason I have posted on The Daily Kos, after a commenter there encouraged me to do so.

China is famous for its “Great Firewall,” which prevents Internet users here from accessing sensitive websites. In order to gather information about the Jishou mess, I had to circumvent the firewall by relying on the Tor proxy network. I figure posting a frank review of the Jishou incidents here would result in my blog being firewalled, too, making it really hard to me to maintain it. Other bloggers in China have had similar problems.

So, if you want to read all about it, go to The Daily Kos. Leave some comments, too.

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October 5th, 2008 | Tags: China, daily kos, jishou, real estate swindle | Category: China, Commentary | Leave a comment

JISHOU, HUNAN — I’ve been busy with a web development project of my own device, so I haven’t taken out time to write anything. So here we go.

This week has been a holiday for many people in China. It commemorates the founding of the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) Oct. 1, 1949, their equivalent of the 4th of July. And like 4th of July weekend, good luck getting any action out of any government agency.

We turned in the paperwork for my residence permit the week before National Holiday, so as one might predict, I did not receive it before the week off started. That scotched my plans of visiting Zhangjiajie, where my friend Connie lives, and made me wary of venturing much beyond Jishou.

My liaison officer here, David, reassured me that I could in fact visit Fenghuang, a picturesque and very ancient town about an hour from here. It is within Xiangxi county, as in Jishou, so he said I could carry a copy of my passport and all would be well.

Maybe. I erred on the side of caution, and figured I could visit “Phoenix Town” when all my papers were in order and when it wasn’t mobbed by vacationing tourists.

Last Saturday and Sunday, we had classes, believe it or not, so that we would have exactly seven days off and not, heaven forbid, nine. Such a plan would not go over well at US colleges. Monday I spent lazing around the apartment, recovering from seven solid days of teaching.

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October 3rd, 2008 | Tags: China, kfc, mall, national day | Category: China | Leave a comment

JISHOU, HUNAN — Most of my posts lately have been about China, for obvious reasons, but it’s hard to abandon being a physics teacher. So, here’s a science post.

While humans have been flitting around in low-earth orbit, NASA-JPL’s Martian probes have been busy on the red planet. The arctic explorer, Phoenix, has discovered water ice in the soil and in the sky, detected snow falling from the clouds, and photographed the sun creeping up above the horizon as the martian winter approaches.

This sequence just fascinates me in particular. It shows clouds scooting through the sky, much as they would here in Earth. These are water-ice clouds, like the high-altitude cirrus clouds here.

Aside from practical issues like not having any oxygen to breath and sub-sub-zero temperatures, you could almost imagine yourself standing there watching the clouds go by.

Phoenix has been operating for more than four months, but the approaching martian winter solstice may kill the little fellow off. Temperatures are dropping to -120C (-184F), which is bad for its electronics and especially its solar panels. Carbon dioxide frost is forming on the solar panels, cutting down sunlight reaching the solar cells. And the sun itself, as it does in Earth’s arctic region, will soon dip below the horizon, not to return for three months.

So NASA-JPL scientists are trying to keep Phoenix busy every waking hour before it’s lights out for the probe. For details, visit the website.

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October 1st, 2008 | Tags: discoveries, MArs, NASA, probes, Science | Category: Astronomy, Commentary, Science | Leave a comment

JISHOU, HUNAN — Before I upgraded WordPress and trashed my MySpace layout overlay, I had a WP plugin that automatically inserted my posts into my MySpace page.

That plugin, MySpace Crossposter, doesn’t work anymore. The new code in WP 2.6 effectively killed it, and its developer (it seems) is not maintaining the plugin anymore.

What to do?

I rarely visit MySpace. I’m more a Facebook man. But I would like to advertise this blog on MySpace to get more readers, so I needed a replacement for the outmoded plugin. The solution is easy.

Use a widget to grab your WP blog’s (or any) RSS feed and insert it into your MySpace profile. I found a nice little news feed widget at SpringWidgets. Enter your blog’s RSS feed URL, customize the look of the widget, then copy and paste the code into your MySpace profile. No plugin woes!

Here’s what it looks like.

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September 29th, 2008 | Tags: crosspost, MySpace, widget, wordpress | Category: General stuff | Comments (2)

JISHOU, HUNAN — It’s been busy in space lately. First the Chinese succeed in their first orbital spacewalk, then businessman Elon Musk sends the Falcon 1 into orbit.

The Falcon 1 is the first privately developed and financed rocket to reach orbit. Three previous attempts failed.

Musk’s company, SpaceX, hopes to slash costs to low-earth orbit by a third, to approximately US$10 million. It also plans to develop heavier launch vehicles to ferry supplies to the International Space Station, and launch the company’s own astronauts into orbit.

Musk is the founder of PayPal, the Internet payment system. He sold it to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion, founding SpaceX the same year. He’s also the chairman of Tesla, an electric-car manufacturer in San Jose, California. (The car is pretty cool: a fast, sleek sports car. Jay Leno took it on a test drive and was impressed.)

Here’s a picture of the Falcon 1 rocket nozzle from orbit.

The private exploitation of space has so far been all talk and no show. SpaceX has a contract with NASA to supply the ISS once the venerable Space Shuttle fleet is mothballed in 2010, so it will have income — a necessary part of a good business plan. If SpaceX can find other customers, it might just make money.

Making money off space exploration is something countries seldom worry about. If return on investment is part of a national space agency’s plan, that ROI is extremely longterm and includes such intangibles as national pride, technological spinoffs and (usually unspoken) military advantage.

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September 29th, 2008 | Tags: elon musk, exploration, falcon 1, space | Category: Commentary, Science | Leave a comment