but I wish I had done it earlier, when Muhammad was able to talk better.

So here is how the fateful meeting came about. One of our school’s alums is a veep at the Muhammad Ali Center, right here in Louisville, Kentucky, and he gave our head the news that The Champ was going to be at the Center for photo shoots around noon. Olivia, our fitness teacher and field hockey coach, told her 9th graders she would escort them there, telling them they had to ask permission of their teachers to miss class.

One of my 9th grade physics classes meets just before lunch on Fridays, so a couple of the kids asked me ahead of time if they could go. Several more asked just as class started, and, shoot, I wanted to go, too. So we all signed out to take the downtown trolley (actually, it’s a bus dressed up like a trolley) to the Ali Center.

Except I didn’t quite get out the door with the rest of the group. Besides being the physics teacher, I’m also the technology coordinator, and one of our teachers was having a serious problem with a computer that I had to coordinate — right now. So I told Olivia I would catch up with them after I fixed the computer issue.

September 16th, 2006 | Tags: Education & schools | Category: General stuff | Comments (1)

Well, if PZ Myers can brag about his daughter, so can I. We put her on the plane on the 6th for a semester abroad in Strasbourg. Despite jet lag and lack of both time and internet connection, she has managed to compose fairly lengthy daily journals, which are available for your edification at darcyenfrance.livejournal.com. Darcy is staying with a great family there, who have two daughters roughly in her age bracket (20ish), and being kept very busy by the Centre College faculty.

Might I add that I am also green with envy, as well as proud. I wish I had done something that cool when I was 20ish.

September 13th, 2006 | Category: General stuff | Leave a comment

It’s old news now, but I haven’t had a chance to comment on this monumental change in our solar system’s family tree. The International Astronomical Union (IAU) this month demoted Pluto from planet to dwarf planet, supposedly removing it from the pantheon of bodies called planets.

I told my students I’m thinking of holding a wake in Pluto’s honor. Of course, it would just be an excuse to have a party. I’m not really all that upset. Science, after all, is all about change.

And what a tiny change, at that.

Here are the facts. Way back in the early part of the 20th century, Percival Lowell, who had some pretty odd ideas about the solar system and a lot of other things, insisted on the basis of those odd ideas that there had to be a ninth planet outside the orbit of Neptune, the so-called Planet X which fringers still talk about.

After Lowell died, Clyde Tombaugh in 1930, using a blink comparator, discovered a tiny speck on his photographic plates that was eventually identified as a new planet. (Tombaugh discovered 14 other tiny specks this way, all of them asteroids.) It was quite an achievement, given the tiny size and immense distance of Pluto from Earth, and its snail-like movement across the heavens.

August 29th, 2006 | Category: Astronomy, Commentary | Comments (3)

School started the 16th, and I hit the ground running. Once the dust settles, I have a few posts to put up. Please come again.

August 27th, 2006 | Category: General stuff | Comments (6)

School here starts Wednesday, so I am in the midst of preparing for that very important first day of class. This year, for the first time, we will be teaching physics in the 9th grade as part of our new sequence of science courses (phys-chem-bio), so not only do I have to worry about the first day of school, but also the first day of high school science for a bunch of impressionable freshmen. I don’t want to blow it, in other words.

So, my presence here will be limited this week. I will pop in (as I hope you will) to the now-lengthy discussion about “gravity deniers” here. We are getting into the real nitty-gritty of physics — and science in general — so take a look and comment if you have something to say.

Wish me luck!

August 14th, 2006 | Tags: Education & schools | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Brittany McComb, the Henderson, Nevada, valedictorian whose graduation address was censored by school officials, told the Los Angeles Times that she agreed to school officials’ editing of her speech only because she felt intimidated by them.

She and her parents attempted to forestall the editing out of McComb’s religious references, but could not contact lawyers to seek a solution, she said. Her parents were out of town, so she gave in when a school official insisted that she not deviate from the edited speech.

Instead, McComb gave her original address, resulting in school officials pulling the plug on her microphone in the middle of the valedictory. She has since filed a discrimination suit in federal districty court, alleging her rights of free speech and equal protection under the law were infringed, and asking for $1 in damages.

The conservative legal organization, the Rutherford Institute, is representing McComb in her suit.

In her interview with LA Times reporter Richard Abowitz, McComb comes off as an idealistic young woman who wanted to resist what she saw as censorship of her valedictory, but who lacked the resolve to stand up to school officials on her own.

Yes. The actual situation was that the my assistant principal confronted me in the hallway and demanded to know what I was going to do. My parents were out of town. We still had not contacted the lawyer. Everything was chaotic, and I was like “What am I going to do?” I had no idea. So I had to say something and I was at my wits end. I was very intimidated. So I kind-of said, “yes” and I regret it. I wish I had stood up right then for myself.

August 8th, 2006 | Tags: Education & schools, The media | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

My gloss on “gravity deniers” is in the latest Tangled Bank, number 59, now available for your enjoyment at Science and Reason. There’s a lot to read there, so prolific are we science bloggists. Maybe we need to develop a Tangled-Bank-on Tape product.

August 2nd, 2006 | Tags: Science, The media | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

After some tweaking of site permalink and URL settings, posting sitemaps to Google, and other such SEO tinkerings, I have managed to get my posts into Google’s search engine. Before, I had no luck finding my posts, no matter how specific I made the search terms.

Strangely (or maybe not), my stats plugin reported almost simultaneously a dramatic drop in daily unique hits, from the 180s to 2. Pretty depressing, until I realized those multiple hits were probably from the googlebot trying to index the site, failing, then trying again. [UPDATE (82/06): The stats plugin was not compatible with the upgraded version of WordPress. I caught on when I saw it had clocked absolutely zero hits right after one of my posts appeared in the latest Tangled Bank. My other site counters registered dozens of visits, so I realized the WP upgrade must have broken the stats plugin. There was an update available, so the plugin (ShortStat) works now.]

So, here is what I have learned. Plain text permalinks are best. Trailing slashes on site URLs are important, at least to the w3.org validator service computers. Getting a sitemap with those permalinks into Google’s hands is a good thing. Tweaking your .htaccess file to allow bots to index your site is necessary, especially if your site dwells in a subdirectory, as mine does, of a different domain. (www.wheatdogg.com is forwarded to the “real” location.) Clearing up your .htaccess file also seems to help people find the site, especially if it’s tucked in an obscure corner of your main domain. Adding tags helps you get onto Technorati’s radar screens, and thus Google’s. Putting Google Analytics code on your site helps give you a real sense of your traffic, and maybe it convinces Google’s computers to pay attention to you.

July 31st, 2006 | Tags: Technology | Category: General stuff | Leave a comment

Douglas Adams, in his Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books, once suggested that falling was akin to an ingrained habit. If you could just forget about falling, you could defy gravity and fly. It works as a joke, but in real life gravity is pretty unforgiving.

So you can imagine my surprise when I came across “gravity deniers” trolling at Tara Smith’s Aetiology blog. Tara was dumbfounded that anyone could deny the so-called “germ” theory of infectious disease, since there has been so much evidence since Louis Pasteur’s time that bacteria, viruses, and single-celled parasites cause a wide variety of illnesses. Yet, it seems, just as there are souls who deny the connection between HIV and AIDS or the validity of the theory of evolution, there are some who deny that “germs” cause disease.

Woof.

One of the commenters, jspreen, claimed that poverty caused disease, noting that poor people seem disproportionately more susceptible to infectious diseases than richer people. Someone else claimed that Pasteur had recanted his support of the germ theory on his deathbed. I commented that jspreen was confusing correlation with causation, and closed my comment with this snarky remark:

By the way, I heard that Newton confessed on his deathbed that gravity did not exist. He was dreadfully sorry he ever came up with the idea.

Little did I know that my snide remark would end up hijacking the thread. To wit, here is what a germ-denier named Wilhelm had to say:

July 29th, 2006 | Tags: Professional skeptic | Category: Physics | Comments (51)