Rich Seymour's stochastic statements.

You should read this great opinion piece here (select.nytimes.com/2005/12/06/opinion/06kristof.html). Oh, wait, you can’t. At least without some fiddling, it is nearly impossible. If you are at a .edu, like myself, you can go read it by a rather simple search on Lexis Nexis. Don’t worry, all you will learn is some lukewarm statistics on how bad Americans are at math and how much Americans lauds scholars of the humanities.

News flash, people hate scholars of the humanities, perhaps more than they hate scientists and engineers. Lumping in lawyers with humanities scholars (as the article does), you have right there one of the most hated groups around… here is an informal list picked off of a BBC website:

A Member of Parliament was voted as the least respected profession followed by estate agent, government minister and lawyer respectively. Journalist was the fifth least respected profession in the top ten followed by footballer.

Ok, so maybe Real estate agents aren’t the most humanities versed people in the world (sorry to my friends who do that), but whatever, no one respects those people.

Just because the populus as a whole is generally ignorant of science doesn’t bother me too much, but I do worry about getting kids interested and not scaring them away (speaking as a PhD student in the Materials Science). I’ve found the easiest way to not be scared away is just to not listen to people who say you can’t do it. Somehow Kristof’s metric seemed to miss at least one famous physicist (unless he was counted among the doctors) Rush Holt in our house of representatives. Now on that tip, as a semi-rabid anti-last-5-years of U.S. Federal Government direction, one might want to go through the executive summary and see how well the recently enacted ‘no child left behind act’ and other such education legislation has followed the “National Commission on Mathematics and Science Teaching for the 21st Century” recommendations. Well?

Much love to my humanities studying friends out there, I know for the most part many of you have all sorts of science skills and at least some respect for those of us that pretend to (aka me) Ethan, a classics major, has been known to titrate at work.

So to sum up, I’m still not happy about the Times Select thing and I think science gets a fair amount of respect in spite of the rhetoric of intelligent design and the ignorance of those who either didn’t pay attention in school or didn’t have a chance to (there’s many in the second category).