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from the the-scientists-of-tomorrow-are-thwarted dept.
According to a petition at change.org
At first glance, Greg Schiller looks like a mad scientist taken straight out of a Hollywood film. His infamous moustache has more fans and followers than the dodgers on a good day. He coaches fencing and occasionally appears in school talent shows. Heck! Mr. Schiller is in fact anything but ordinary. He is teacher, role model and friend.
He is also suspended from teaching, coaching, and acting as union rep for his school.
Schiller was ordered to report daily to a district administrative office pending an investigation after two students turned in science-fair projects that were designed to shoot small projectiles.
One project used compressed air to propel a small object but it was not connected to a source of air pressure, so it could not have been fired. (In 2012, President Obama tried out a more powerful air-pressure device at a White House Science Fair that could launch a marshmallow 175 feet.)
Another project used the power from an AA battery to charge a tube surrounded by a coil. When the ninth-grader proposed it, Schiller told him to be more scientific, to construct and test different coils and to draw graphs and conduct additional analysis, said his parents, who also are Los Angeles teachers.
A school employee saw the air-pressure project and raised concerns about what looked to her like a weapon, according to the teachers union and supporters.
Shooting objects through tubes has a long tradition, and the idea of moving things with coils has been around a long time (I dimly recall articles about coast-to-coast coil trains from old mouldy Popular Science mags).
If you support freedom of scientific thought in our schools you might want to stop by change.org and sign the petition.
(Score: 1) by johaquila on Friday April 11 2014, @11:35AM
I am not really interested in the welfare of the US and its people. My friends there are intelligent enough to leave the country when necessary. It's what the US is doing to the rest of the world that matters to me. The sooner the US sinks into total idiocy, the sooner it will stop fucking around with all of us.
The Chinese are likely to take over the role that the US still has. Probably not much better, but certainly better. The only problem I have with this personally is that I have invested so much time into speaking English perfectly, but only speak a few words of Mandarin yet.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 11 2014, @02:10PM
Uh, yeah. Good luck with that... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_prot ests_of_1989 [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by johaquila on Friday April 11 2014, @10:38PM
Tiananmen Square? Pretty bad, but nothing in comparison to the terrorism hysteria.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday April 11 2014, @02:41PM
Considering the way the Chinese are devastating the environment, I wouldn't say they'd do a better job at all, in fact they're much worse. It's bad enough that the US pumps out so many greenhouse gases and there's a lot of climate change deniers there, but they pale in comparison to what's going on in China.
(Score: 2) by khallow on Friday April 11 2014, @04:59PM
Sounds like you should be more concerned about where you come from. If they came up with you and your masterful reasoning skills, then they have real problems.
The Chinese are likely to take over the role that the US still has. Probably not much better, but certainly better.
This is idiot-speak for "Thank you, sir. May I have another?"
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday April 11 2014, @07:52PM
I think you need to study a bit of history.
The US has been acting abominably, but...as top nations go we've been surprisingly moderate and generous. This has been steadily declining as year follows year, and now that the US is on the downhill side can be expected to get worse quickly. (This is the normal pattern.) Also all of the contenders for replacing the US as "top nation" look better than they would act were they in the same position. This is typical. It's a lot less expensive to be a "challenger for top nation" than to be a "top nation". I suspect that China is too wise to try to hold the role, and would prefer to continue to be a challenger (with economic dominance). But that leaves the question of who would replace the US. It would be nice if it were the EU, possibly with Russia as a member, and one of the reasons that that would be nice is that the replacement could happen via economic strife rather than actual warfare. (Those are the two most common ways in which a "top nation" is replaced. Sometimes they are combined, as when the US replaced Britain.)
I feel that the US has been on the declining curve of dominance ever since the collapse of Soviet Russia. Possibly since slightly before then, but that was when I started being certain that I was seeing the signs. OTOH, I was seeing signs that I suspected meant that the collapse had started perhaps 15 years earlier.
Don't hope for a quick transition, though. That could be devastating. Hope for a smooth transition. That has happened before. It's less common throughout history, but during most of history wars were profitable (to the victor). Now they cost more than even the victor can recoup, but people still don't realize that emotionally. And they're also incredibly dangerous, as wars frequently flare out of control in unexpected ways. Improved speed of communications and transport, and odd weapons (biological, nuclear, ?) make for unpredictable dangers. A country may not have a nuclear weapon, but it certainly will have fermentation vats, etc. There's a serious danger of "If you threaten me with a weapon I can't match, I'll attack you with a weapon you can't see coming, and can't prove where it came from.", that the attacker won't be able to control the weapon after it's launched is the only real deterrence.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.