This school does not approve of scienceyness. Avoid all the trappings of science, which are dressed up as the creatures from Jabberwocky.
This is literature, not science, and a science class would not tell you to shun peer review. I assume this has something to do with someone somewhere claiming that science classes shouldn’t be required (even though I see no reason why the elective wouldn’t be real science). But has that actually been a thing?
Some people feel science to be less “best method for finding truth ever invented by man” and more “giant conspiracy of mostly foreigners to end American greatness”, along with a dash of “all I need to know about the world I learned in Sunday School”.
So, to a portion of the population, science is just a bunch of words, lots of which just sound made-up. Evolution? Climate change? Hogwash!
The most recent trend has been to dress up some decidedly non-science ideas with the thinnest possible veneer of science, and then pretend that this “science” is just as valid as any other science, and should be taught in school. So geology will just have to adjust to accommodate a 6,000-year-old Earth, and biology to species that are eternal and unchanging, and so on.
Nicely put, James. I always ask such folks if htey “believe” in the science that makes their cellphones work; never get anything more substantive than a blank stare in response, alas.
Phil: The problem with that sort of argument is that no one actually says they don’t believe in science. Science has such prestige and an obvious track record of success that pretty much everyone agrees that science works. It’s just that there’s real science, that produces nice things like cellphones and penicillin, and fake science, that’s only makes stuff up about evolution and climate change, because it’s run by atheists at the Weather Channel or something.
(Now why people who happily admit to being baffled by how their cell phone works feel, suddenly feel qualified to review the latest climate change research papers, well that’s another question. . .)
It’s not the latest trend; people have been doing it more or less as long as “science” has been a thing. See for example “scientific socialism”.
I’m baffled too, but my guess is that this is literature being presented as science to satisfy an elective requirement—like the courses they called Rocks for Jocks and Physics for Poets when I was in college?
I recently read that back when the phenomenon of extinction was first discovered, some Christians denied that it was possible, on the grounds that God wouldn’t create a species just to let it disappear. You don’t hear that argument anymore. I predict climate change denial and our other current antiscience flavors of the month will go the same way—it’s just a question of how much dry land will be left by the time they do.
Okay, so in an example of synchronicity so bizarre that it made me question whether coincidence even truly exists…
About an hour after this went live, I was doing some research on Julie Newmar (long story), and I came across some YouTube videos of a 1960s television show she was in (My Living Doll, in which she played a sexy robot who for some reason was living with a bachelor scientist). Since watching a video is always preferable to actually working, I chose one at random.
An episode in which the robot developed a malfunction and could do nothing but recite lines from… you guessed it, Jabberwocky.
Too true, James. WW’s observation also rings true. They pooh-pooh specific areas of science, but then say they don’t hate Science.
Bill, you are evil. I vaguely remember watching My Living Doll, and now I’ve taken up too much time in watching YouTube clips of it.
As I have wasted too much of my life interacting with stupid people on the web, let me all save you some time: if you ask them why their phone works if science doesn’t work, they’ll say that that is ENGINEERING, not SCIENCE.
Asking them what the difference is is like asking a creationist to explain what the heck they mean by “microevolution vs macroevolution”. Or why a flat earther thinks that gravity doesn’t exist, and it’s just all about density. It’s just not worth it.
There are people who honestly believe that endeavoring to understand the universe is incompatible with religious faith. Whether this flows from a poor understanding of science or a poor understanding of religion (or both), the result is a bunch of people who believe they can make facts go away by shouting “it isn’t so!” at anyone attempting rational discourse. Yes, they get proven wrong in the long run, but they can cause much annoyance in the short.
James Pollock, In Genesis 2:17, God gave Man one and only one command: “But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it; for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.”
That is why, to some in the Judeo-Christian tradition, knowledge is incompatible with faith.
As I said, whether the problem is a misunderstanding of science or faith, the result is the same.
I agree that James P has a good explanation.
And, Bill, no need to explain why you were “doing research” on Julie Newmar.😉 It certainly is interesting that the clip you chose at random was this one. I don’t think I’d ever heard of this TV show.
“Now get this thru your computers…”
I don’t remember if we have ever established a CIDU community shorthand for this effect (well maybe in terms of a certain squirrel), but a fairly frequent criticism has been when a cartoonist seems to be making a secondary or afterthought joke as well as the original or main one, and somehow loses sight of which one counts, or how the two may distract or detract from each other.
Okay, and I suggest that’s going on here. One gag is “science as an elective” – – which is unfunny since if your school offers any science classes beyond the required core, they ARE electives. The other apparently was the tag about “peer review” added on to the Jabberwock quotation – – which is hard to process as a gag because it doesn’t mean what somebody else here seems to think it does (whether that be the cartoonist, or the teacher, or the author of the book).
After reading this today at work, I drove past the backlit box sign in front of the Burlington Mall in Burlington, MA. The sign, on the top. larger-lettered line, was promoting its “Unbirthday Party” event.
Julie Newmar and a “magic fingers” bed. Num, num, num, num. And if I’m going that far, then throw in Juliet Prowse. My god, how old am I?
” if you ask them why their phone works if science doesn’t work, they’ll say that that is ENGINEERING, not SCIENCE.”
But you know creation “scientists”? The actual organization, the “Institute of Creation Research” does require a Master’s or better in a field of science for membership, and the vast majority are engineers. It was founded by a hydraulic engineer.
Bill – I remember “My Living Doll” and loved it.
Husband recently bought Roku boxes? sticks? (not sure what they are called) as our cable co dropped Starz and he could not bear to miss “Outlander”. Since then we got Starz back,but he kept the original Roku he bought and added two more to our collection so all the TVs have them. He loves watching old television shows on Roku. He gets to watch the British show “Danger Man” or as some of you may remember it – “Secret Agent Man”. There is some variety show from the 1950s (I presume) that has Abbott and Costello doing routines on it, as well as trio of “girl singers” singing gospel songs -including Jane Russell and I forget who the other two, fairly well know singers are. He watches them every day when he wakes up before me (well, I wake up then too – but reset the alarm and go back to sleep). I have to wonder if it gets “My Living Doll” also.
Arg, I forgot the original subject. One problem is that the teacher looks like an English teacher and does not look like a science teacher at all.
Comics I Don't Understand 
This school does not approve of scienceyness. Avoid all the trappings of science, which are dressed up as the creatures from Jabberwocky.
This is literature, not science, and a science class would not tell you to shun peer review. I assume this has something to do with someone somewhere claiming that science classes shouldn’t be required (even though I see no reason why the elective wouldn’t be real science). But has that actually been a thing?
Some people feel science to be less “best method for finding truth ever invented by man” and more “giant conspiracy of mostly foreigners to end American greatness”, along with a dash of “all I need to know about the world I learned in Sunday School”.
So, to a portion of the population, science is just a bunch of words, lots of which just sound made-up. Evolution? Climate change? Hogwash!
The most recent trend has been to dress up some decidedly non-science ideas with the thinnest possible veneer of science, and then pretend that this “science” is just as valid as any other science, and should be taught in school. So geology will just have to adjust to accommodate a 6,000-year-old Earth, and biology to species that are eternal and unchanging, and so on.
Nicely put, James. I always ask such folks if htey “believe” in the science that makes their cellphones work; never get anything more substantive than a blank stare in response, alas.
Phil: The problem with that sort of argument is that no one actually says they don’t believe in science. Science has such prestige and an obvious track record of success that pretty much everyone agrees that science works. It’s just that there’s real science, that produces nice things like cellphones and penicillin, and fake science, that’s only makes stuff up about evolution and climate change, because it’s run by atheists at the Weather Channel or something.
(Now why people who happily admit to being baffled by how their cell phone works feel, suddenly feel qualified to review the latest climate change research papers, well that’s another question. . .)
It’s not the latest trend; people have been doing it more or less as long as “science” has been a thing. See for example “scientific socialism”.
I’m baffled too, but my guess is that this is literature being presented as science to satisfy an elective requirement—like the courses they called Rocks for Jocks and Physics for Poets when I was in college?
I recently read that back when the phenomenon of extinction was first discovered, some Christians denied that it was possible, on the grounds that God wouldn’t create a species just to let it disappear. You don’t hear that argument anymore. I predict climate change denial and our other current antiscience flavors of the month will go the same way—it’s just a question of how much dry land will be left by the time they do.
Okay, so in an example of synchronicity so bizarre that it made me question whether coincidence even truly exists…
About an hour after this went live, I was doing some research on Julie Newmar (long story), and I came across some YouTube videos of a 1960s television show she was in (My Living Doll, in which she played a sexy robot who for some reason was living with a bachelor scientist). Since watching a video is always preferable to actually working, I chose one at random.
An episode in which the robot developed a malfunction and could do nothing but recite lines from… you guessed it, Jabberwocky.
Too true, James. WW’s observation also rings true. They pooh-pooh specific areas of science, but then say they don’t hate Science.
Bill, you are evil. I vaguely remember watching My Living Doll, and now I’ve taken up too much time in watching YouTube clips of it.
As I have wasted too much of my life interacting with stupid people on the web, let me all save you some time: if you ask them why their phone works if science doesn’t work, they’ll say that that is ENGINEERING, not SCIENCE.
Asking them what the difference is is like asking a creationist to explain what the heck they mean by “microevolution vs macroevolution”. Or why a flat earther thinks that gravity doesn’t exist, and it’s just all about density. It’s just not worth it.
There are people who honestly believe that endeavoring to understand the universe is incompatible with religious faith. Whether this flows from a poor understanding of science or a poor understanding of religion (or both), the result is a bunch of people who believe they can make facts go away by shouting “it isn’t so!” at anyone attempting rational discourse. Yes, they get proven wrong in the long run, but they can cause much annoyance in the short.
James Pollock, In Genesis 2:17, God gave Man one and only one command: “But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it; for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.”
That is why, to some in the Judeo-Christian tradition, knowledge is incompatible with faith.
As I said, whether the problem is a misunderstanding of science or faith, the result is the same.
I agree that James P has a good explanation.
And, Bill, no need to explain why you were “doing research” on Julie Newmar.😉 It certainly is interesting that the clip you chose at random was this one. I don’t think I’d ever heard of this TV show.
“Now get this thru your computers…”
I don’t remember if we have ever established a CIDU community shorthand for this effect (well maybe in terms of a certain squirrel), but a fairly frequent criticism has been when a cartoonist seems to be making a secondary or afterthought joke as well as the original or main one, and somehow loses sight of which one counts, or how the two may distract or detract from each other.
Okay, and I suggest that’s going on here. One gag is “science as an elective” – – which is unfunny since if your school offers any science classes beyond the required core, they ARE electives. The other apparently was the tag about “peer review” added on to the Jabberwock quotation – – which is hard to process as a gag because it doesn’t mean what somebody else here seems to think it does (whether that be the cartoonist, or the teacher, or the author of the book).
After reading this today at work, I drove past the backlit box sign in front of the Burlington Mall in Burlington, MA. The sign, on the top. larger-lettered line, was promoting its “Unbirthday Party” event.
Julie Newmar and a “magic fingers” bed. Num, num, num, num. And if I’m going that far, then throw in Juliet Prowse. My god, how old am I?
” if you ask them why their phone works if science doesn’t work, they’ll say that that is ENGINEERING, not SCIENCE.”
But you know creation “scientists”? The actual organization, the “Institute of Creation Research” does require a Master’s or better in a field of science for membership, and the vast majority are engineers. It was founded by a hydraulic engineer.
Bill – I remember “My Living Doll” and loved it.
Husband recently bought Roku boxes? sticks? (not sure what they are called) as our cable co dropped Starz and he could not bear to miss “Outlander”. Since then we got Starz back,but he kept the original Roku he bought and added two more to our collection so all the TVs have them. He loves watching old television shows on Roku. He gets to watch the British show “Danger Man” or as some of you may remember it – “Secret Agent Man”. There is some variety show from the 1950s (I presume) that has Abbott and Costello doing routines on it, as well as trio of “girl singers” singing gospel songs -including Jane Russell and I forget who the other two, fairly well know singers are. He watches them every day when he wakes up before me (well, I wake up then too – but reset the alarm and go back to sleep). I have to wonder if it gets “My Living Doll” also.
Arg, I forgot the original subject. One problem is that the teacher looks like an English teacher and does not look like a science teacher at all.