Hot on the heels of the media melee about the Nevada valedictorian’s contionabundus interruptus, two conservative legal firms are encouraging the student, Brittany McComb, to file suit against her high school.

School officials pulled the plug on McComb’s microphone during her graduation ceremony when she persisted in using her original valedictory, after officials had edited out several references to God, Jesus and Biblical quotations.

McComb, a bright, photogenic Christian, quickly became a media “star,” especially on conservative websites, blogs and talk shows. She even appeared on the Fox News talkie, Hannity & Colmes. Both pundits agreed that McComb should have been allowed to speak her mind, with Hannity taking special pleasure in citing the whole affair as an example of the “war on Christianity.”

Predictably, those lawyers with an axe to grind came out of their dens to throw their support behind McComb.

The first wolf out of the den was Mat Staver, founder and chairman of the Florida-based pro-family Liberty Counsel. Staver contends the school violated McComb’s First Amendment rights when it prevented her from speaking about how important Jesus and God were in her life.

It’s a tack that Staver has taken before, in 2005.

One of Liberty Counsel’s most famous, and unsuccessful, Constitutional cases was McCreary County, Kentucky, et al. v. ACLU of Kentucky, et al., in which Staver argued before the US Supreme Court that a display of the Ten Commandments in the McCreary and Pulask icounty courthouses was constitutional.

June 25th, 2006 | Tags: The media | Category: Commentary | Leave a comment

That’s what I tell my students each year: matter is mostly empty space. The concept is hard to accept, especially if you have ever hit your head on something, but nonetheless true.

As an analogy, I have used a scale model for the hydrogen atom I picked up from somewhere now forgotten. Place an ant on the 50-yard line in a football stadium. The atom represents the proton. The electron is just outside the stadium, in the parking lot. In between electron and proton is space.

Now I have a new scale model to use. It’s online, to appeal to the digital generation. The creator has represented the electron as a one-pixel speck on the webpage, and far, far away the proton as a much larger ball.  The distance and sizes of the particles are on the same scale.

The model, of course, is not to be taken literally. Atoms are not really miniature versions of solar systems. Electrons are strictly speaking  not little specks traveling in neat little orbits around a spherical proton (or nucleus) that looks like Neptune. That conception (minus the Neptune part) dates back almost 100 years.

Time was, scientists did conceive of the atom as a solid ball. That picture changed in 1897, when J. J. Thomson identified the electon and proposed that it was part of the atom, rather than separate from it. He proposed a “plum pudding” model, in which the negatively charged electrons were embedded in a positively charged matrix.
In 1911, Ernest Rutherford tested this model with his famous gold foil experiment. Briefly, Rutherford bombarded an extremely thin sheet of gold foil with positively charged alpha particles, expecting that most would just pass through the “squishy” pudding.

June 23rd, 2006 | Tags: Technology | Category: Physics | Leave a comment

This post contains just a few off-the-cuff observations. I hope to develop it into a more elaborate analysis after some more research.

Once upon a time, proponents of intelligent design (ID) argued that ID was scientifically based, and with sufficient maturation would develop into a scientific theory as robust as the theory of evolution. Their lobbying against the exclusive teaching of evolution in biology classrooms focused in part on what they called “teach the controversy” — that evolution (in their words) was a controversial theory and not accepted by all biologists.

Basically, their arguments centered around ID as science. That was before Dover.

US District Court John E. Jones III ruled in Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District that ID was in fact not science, but in effect a religious belief. I quote, “The overwhelming evidence at trial established that ID is a religious view, a mere re-labeling of creationism, and not a scientific theory.” (page 43)

That Jones was a Bush appointee — no wild liberal he — only rubbed salt in the IDists’ wounds.

Following Jones’ fairly detailed fisking of the “ID is science” contention, the ID crowd has adapted a different strategy: equate acceptance of evolution with religious belief or cultic faith. In other words, the new meme is “evolution isn’t science at all.”

Desperate, no?

Assisting in the spread of this latest argument is the rightwing polemicist Ann Coulter, who has devoted a significant section of her new book to blast evolution as a “discredited mystery religion of the 19th century.”

June 22nd, 2006 | Tags: Professional skeptic | Category: Commentary | Comments (1)

The Bluegrass Report, one of the best sources for progressive political news in our fair Commonwealth, is apparently not welcome on the state-owned computers in Frankfort. Nor apparently are other liberal sites, according to The Daily Kos.

State employees apparently lose their First Amendment rights once they enter their office doors. Shameful, but not all that surprising, considering who’s in office.

June 21st, 2006 | Tags: Technology, The media | Category: Random rants | Leave a comment

The latest compendium of science bloggers’ biweekly musings is at Centrerion, a Canadian political blog. I’m in there twice this time, since I missed the last Tangled Bank, but of course there are a ton of other posts to read, too.

June 21st, 2006 | Tags: Science | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

As the news coverage of Brittany McComb’s defiance of school authority spreads across the ‘net, I have been able to get a fuller picture of this young woman and a better idea of her motivations.

For one thing, it is clear that McComb (pictured at right, Photo by K.M. Cannon, (c) 2006 Las Vegas Review Journal) is deeply religious and devoted to her Lord and Savior. For another, it is also clear that the school administration told her that, if she defied their censoring of her valedictory, they would cut off her mike. I base my conclusions on her own MySpace page and on a report on the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Now the issue with her address is that the officials of Foothill HIgh School of Henderson, Nevada, believed her speech was overly religious, to the point of proselytizing. They edited out several references to God, Jesus and Biblical quotations, fearing that the speech as written would run the school afoul of the separation of church and state (the establishment clause).

According to the Review Journal, they advised McComb that if she read her original, unedited speech, they would cut her speech short. If she acknowledged that advice, she was in effect complying with a “gentleman’s agreement” to comply with the officials’ decisions.

Well, in fact, she did not comply, and gave her speech as she had written it, prompting the now famous decision of the school to cut off her mike, causing a public outcry from the graduation assembly and a subsequent media storm. The result was an amplification of what the school officials had feared originally, and the creation of a new darling of the religious right.

June 20th, 2006 | Category: Commentary, General stuff | Leave a comment

This tempest is not a local one, but from a school district near Las Vegas, Nevada. Class valedictorian Brittany McComb wanted to thank her Lord and Savior in her speech, but school administrators censored her text. McComb, believing she was protected by the First Amendment, gave the valedictory as she had originally intended, Biblical references and all. The administration cut her mike off partway through the valedictory.

As best I can tell from the sketchy news reports about the incident, McComb wanted to witness to her faith. According to the school district’s own rules, such professions are permissible, as reported in the Las Vegas Sun. She was not intending, she says, to proselytize.

The administration, for its part, did not want to appear to be favoring any one religion, and tried to censor the controversial parts out. School officials apparently did not consider McCombs to be a particularly spunky individual, or they might have expected her reaction.

Church ministers and youth leaders encourage teenagers to speak about their faith, to witness to the unconverted. So McComb had that motivation. She is also a teenager, with the usual adolescent resentment of authority. The school’s decision to censor her text was, in these contexts, ill-advised.

The American Civil Liberties Union is siding with the school on this one, believe it or not. Here is where I have to disagree with the ACLU. As long as McComb was not preaching or proselytizing, she was protected by the First Amendment and the school’s own rules. The school’s and ACLU’s contention that the valedictory address constitutes a school-sponsored medium, and therefore implies unconstitutional school support of McComb’s Christian faith, is bogus, IMHO. They, however, cite legal precedents in US Circuit Court cases.

June 19th, 2006 | Category: Commentary, General stuff | Leave a comment

Renowned theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking caused a bit of a stir this week when he suggested during a talk in Hong Kong that humans need to get off the earth and colonize space.

“It is important for the human race to spread out into space for the survival of the species,” Hawking said. “Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of.”

He predicted we will colonize the moon within 20 years and Mars within 40 years, assuming we don’t self-destruct in the meantime.

Reactions to Hawking’s rather off-the-cuff remarks have been mixed. Advocates of human space exploration predictably loved the media coverage, while more pessimistic types scoffed at the notion.

Actually, Hawking’s notions are not original or even ground-breaking. Even Pres. George W. Bush, in a lame imitation of JFK’s famous 1962 challenge to land a man on the moon by the end of the decade, has made human missions to the moon and Mars as a goal of the US space program. NASA developed — on paper anyway — lunar colonies back in the 60s and orbiting space colonies in the 70s. And of course science fiction writers have been kicking around the idea for more than 100 years.

So, is Hawking off his rocker, or is there some merit in putting humans in space?

June 16th, 2006 | Tags: Technology | Category: Commentary | Comments (2)

I’ve been off doing other things than blogging this past week, since the Muse has not visited me of late, but this latest Internet fad is just too good to pass up commenting on.

To pevent their teachers from hearing their cell phones announce calls and messages, students are downloading a high frequency ringtone (about 17,000 Hertz) that the average adult cannot hear. The news has spread all over the ‘net and the news agencies so I won’t bother reviewing the story.

I will gloss on the meaning of “average,” though. The 17kHz (that’s kiloHertz, folks) tone cannot be heard by the average adult, since as we grow older, we lose sensitivity to the higher frequency range of the human ear (20 Hz - 20kHz). But average, by definition, is a measure of the middle of a set of data. So, some adults (like me!) can in fact hear those high frequency tones. (I can also sometimes hear the high frequency whine of TV and computer cathode-ray monitors, which use a high frequency oscillator to “draw” the picture.)

So, kiddoes, if you want to be absolutely sure your teacher cannot hear your pesky cell phone, try the “vibrate” feature and keep the phone off the desk.

June 12th, 2006 | Tags: Technology | Category: Random rants | Comments (2)