My creative project has me looking into our solar system and terraforming. Along the way, to help me visualize things, I have run across multiple animations of our solar system at work as well as found some interesting resources on terraforming.

The first one is from Dynamic Diagrams (or try this) and is by far the most interesting (warning, if you’re at work turn off your speakers before going there). It’s by far the best done visually insofar as it looks pretty cool. Lain absolutely loves it. She’s transfixed by the planets spinning round and round. She likes to point at the moon on the lower left hand part. She’s also used to tablets where she can make things move with her fingers, so she tries to “catch” the planets to manipulate them. It has very limited options. You can either watch the planets go around the sun or use the old Earth-as-the-center model and watch the planets (and the sun) go around us. You can also speed up or slow down (or reverse) the process.

The second one, Solar System Scope, was actually more useful for my purposes because it showed the dwarf planets and their orbits that deviate from the elliptical plane. It also gives a better idea of the sorts of distances between planets we’re talking about. Though less pretty, it actually gave me more of the visualization that I needed. There are a lot of options. You can zoom in and out, change perspective, make the planets large or realistically proportioned, and add and remove orbits, object names, and so on. You can also, like the other one, speed things up and slow them down. You can also click on a planet and get more.

The third one, Solar System Visualizer, is the only one that includes Pluto as a planet. Either because it’s outdated or because they are conscientious objectors. The options are limited here to zooming in and out. For my interest in the non-planetary items it was pretty good. Specifically around the asteroid belt which the Scope more or less ignores.

The story I am drafting up in my mind involves the Solar System being terraformed by oddly benign aliens. They’re refugees from intergalactic wars and mostly want to settle on some place really far out of the way. Having had their own planets decimated, they actually (as far as we know) have little in the way of designs on us. They basically set up shop and start terraforming everything in site. This was supposed to be an oh-by-the-way aspect of the story, but it turns out there is a lot of information out there about terraforming and a lot of things to consider.

This is the most direct source with descriptions of the possibilities and what would be required in English that I can understand. I’m also using Wikipedia’s entry on rounded orbital objects to help me figure out where to look (since there are planets with 60+ moons, I can’t just up “moons”). Wikipedia’s entry on terraforming itself was interesting.

Facebook recommended to me someone who attended a school called “Georgian Technical University”

Which I kind of thought was a bogus school. Possibly a for-profit school trying to rip off the stature of the Georgia Institute of Technology, also known as Georgia Tech. Possibly an out-right degree-mill that awards degrees based on “life experience.” I mean, if an employer saw “Georgia Technical University” they might not even know that’s not Georgia Tech’s real name!

I didn’t see that there was an “n” on there. Of course, maybe that’s what they were counting on!

Come to find out, not only is it a real school, it’s a premier university in Georgia. Georgia as in the nation, of course, not the state.

Scott Sumner argues in favor of the Swedish model over the Finnish one:

I’ve often argued that the only reliable test of schools is the market test—which schools are more popular at a given price point. Tyler Cowen linked to a study that obliquely relates to this issue. It shows that South Korean students are the least happy students in the world. Finland’s students are near the bottom, and are the least happy of any Western European country. In contrast, South Korea usually scores at the top of “education rankings” based on test scores, and Finland is often in second place.

It’s interesting to compare Finland with its neighbor Sweden. Based on test scores Sweden has the worst schools in Western Europe, even worse than America’s K-12. Horrible schools. But their students are above average in happiness, far above Finland. What explains that difference?

We often think of Scandinavia as an “it” but there are actually some interesting contrasts within the region. Education is a good example. Though Sweden is often used as a liberal bat for liberal policies, there are some pokes for conservatives to hang their hat on, as well. Such as low-regulation and… education, which is highly voucherized. Finland, on the other hand, is exactly where liberals point to as the ideal setup: teachers are very well-paid (and respected), there is no school choice, and lots of money is spent.

But that’s kind of wear the political alignment ends. Then it starts to get weird. Because to follow what Sumner is saying, the virtues of the liberal system are demonstrated by the standardized tests that liberals loathe. The conservative system does very poorly on these tests, but produces happier students, which most conservatives would argue (in a vaccuum) is beside the point of the education system.

As always, I think it’s a mistake to look at Scandinavia and think “Our system should be more like theirs” (or less like theirs) based on the results there. Both can provide some insights, but not a template, really, unless you’re looking at a state like, well, Minnesota.

I am still a vouchers/charters guy. I square the circle in large part because, once choice has been entered into the equation, testing scores matter less. My support of standardized tests rests in good part on the premise that kids are stuck in the school systems they live in. If people would prefer to send their kids to some hippie-dippie schoolfield instead of a metrical killjoy academy, I am supportive of that. If a school wants to let teachers teach their own lesson plans in their own way regardless of what some bureaucrat in Washington or the state capital thinks, I think that’s cool. As long as parents can say “No way!” and send their kids somewhere else.

James Hanley says that he will not be voting for Chris Christie, on the basis of his lacking foreign policy experience. While I am a bit wary of Christie’s likely foreign policy, it’s the policy end that matters more to me than the experience. His foreign policy experience doesn’t, to me, seem notably deficient compared to five of our last six president. My main concern is that Christie is going to stake out the hawkish ground to differentiate himself from Ron Paul and Ted Cruz, combined with some… concerns… about his ability to effect diplomacy.

An interesting tidbit about Christie. As an undergraduate, he attended the University of Delaware, which is Vice President Biden’s alma mater as well. Which means that in the (relatively unlikely) event that Christie is our next president, that means that we will have a vice president followed by a president who attended the University of Delaware. Not exactly the school you would expect that from. That said, the University of Delaware has a very solid ranking with USNWR so we’re not talking about the University of Toledo here. Presidents that come from public colleges are, in general, pretty rare. The last elected one we’ve had was Lyndon Johnson, who attended Southwest Texas State Teachers College (now Texas State University, home of the Bobcats and not the Armadillos). Before that, I think you have to go all the way back to Benjamin before you find another state college graduate elected to the White House.

The specific phrasing excludes Ford who was not elected, Ike whose public school wasn’t a state one, and Wilson who didn’t graduate. Taft got his legal degree from a school that is now a state college, but wasn’t at the time. I’m not 100% positive that Harrison qualifies since I am not rock-solid sure that Miami University as a “state university” at the time. I count it because was founded in part by legislature action. James K. Polk is the last president prior to Harrison to qualify.

In all likelihood, though, our next president graduated from Wellesley and Yale.

Melinda Moyer talks kindergarten redshirting:

Perhaps it’s unsurprising, then, that an estimated 9 percent of parents don’t send their 5-year-olds to kindergarten anymore. They wait a year so that their savvy 6-year-olds can better handle the curriculum. This so-called “academic redshirting,” a nod to the practice of keeping young athletes on the bench until they are bigger and more skilled, is highly controversial. The National Association of Early Childhood Specialists and the National Association for the Education of Young Children fiercely oppose it, saying that redshirting “labels children as failures at the outset of their school experience.” Studies that have evaluated how well redshirted kids fare compared to their schooled-on-time peers conclude that redshirting provides no long-term academic or social advantages and can even put kids at a disadvantage.

The practice has become even more controversial in recent years over claims that some parents do it for the wrong reasons: They redshirt their kids not because their kids aren’t ready for school, but because, in the age of parenting as competitive sport, holding them out might give them an academic, social, and athletic edge over their peers. If little Delia is the star of kindergarten, they scheme, maybe she’ll ride the wave all the way to Harvard. Gaming the system this way, of course, puts other kids at a disadvantage.

I like to say that I failed Pre-K. The truth is that I was held back. Which was a bit confusing at the time, since my peers were going on to kindergarten while I wasn’t. It’s also the case that while I was academically held back, in most kiddie sports leagues I was not. So my sports teammates were one set of kids, while having another set in school.

The only exception to that was after I “retired” and was brought back, movie-style, when a team needed a player. So I was one of the oldest kids out there. It was, not coincidentally, the only year I made the league allstar team. Which may or may not be instructive. It was definitely to my advantage when I was the oldest kid, and my disadvantage when I was one of the youngest. I fixate on baseball because that’s where it was particularly pronounced. The allstar year, I was at the top of a two year age bracket* and even apart from my waived year, my batting average was reflective of whether I was on the upper grade or lower grade of the bracket.

Scholastically? I’m not sure whether it helped much or not. My graders in school were pretty lousy starting at around the third grade and ending in the sixth. The grades were okay before that, and good after that. Would it have been worse if I was a grade ahead? I’m not sure how much of a difference it made for me. My grades were largely a product of effort (or lack thereof).

It’s a tad frustrating to think of parents holding kids back for positional reasons.

If all this makes you think redshirting is a really bad idea, you’re not alone. Many articles, including a piece published here at Slate and a 2011 New York Times op-ed titled “Delay Kindergarten at Your Child’s Peril,” have deftly argued against the practice. Others point out that redshirting could be bad on a societal level, too: When lots of kids in school are redshirted, parents demand a more advanced curriculum—they often “argue that they have invested in a child’s education, and the school must now individualize to meet a 6-year-old’s needs,” says Beth Graue, a curriculum and instruction expert at the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Center for Education Research—and this could create a vicious cycle making kindergarten more and more challenging, encouraging more and more redshirting. And when redshirting is common, it can put young low-income children at a disadvantage, because these kids may not be ready for the curriculum, yet their parents often can’t afford to pay for an extra year of preschool.

It also may be ineffective:

Other research suggests that redshirted kids are less motivated and engaged than their younger peers in high school and that they are more likely to require special education services. And in a 2008 review, David Deming, an economist of education at Harvard University, and Susan Dynarski, an education and public policy expert at the University of Michigan, concluded that redshirted kids also tend to have lower IQs and earnings as adults. This latter finding is probably linked to the fact that redshirted teens are more likely to drop out of high school than non-redshirted teens. Redshirted kids tend to have lower lifetime earnings, too, because they enter the labor force a year later.

Given that boredom was an issue for me, maybe I would have done better. I do think I would have done better in honors classes than I did in regular for that reason.

As the article goes on to note, though, redshirted kids aren’t a random sample. I was held back because I was a borderline performer with learning issues. And so you would expect there to be more of such kids in special ed. I am sympathetic to the follow-up argument that often redshirting is a misdiagnosis and on that basis alone may do more harm than good.

* – The leagues were two grades, but the teams were one and elevated together. Meaning that 7th and 8th grade was the Tiger League, but the team I elevated with was full of seventh graders and me and a few other holdbacks. The next year almost all of the team was 8th graders but I was in the seventh and we were playing against 7th grade teams as well. The allstar year, I was old enough to be in the 9th grade, but was in the 8th grade and was playing against 7th and 8th graders. It was the only time I really had the age advantage.

Matt Bruenig wants you to know that education won’t reduce poverty and if you think otherwise you are an enemy of poor people.

Well, okay. I personally think we might have gotten the idea that education would reduce poverty from, well, liberals. Who argued for decades and decades that we had to spend more and more on education because education was the ticket out of poverty. Even now we hear about how important it is that everyone goes to college because it’s – taDA! – the ticket out of poverty.

But wait? You want to fire teachers? You want charter schools and voucher programs? What kind of poor-hating monster are you? It was obviously never about education, you dishonest fig.

For the most part, I think they were wrong then and are right now. I think a base-level education for most people is important, but everything else is trying to grab a bull by its pinkie toe. It just took change that meant something other than money to get some people to admit it.

I probably shouldn’t have made my first post a political one, but I just couldn’t resist the opportunity to point out that they’re starting to resemble the classic Onion article about hands up and hand outs.

Making the rounds has been the story out of Montana of a judge who found himself in hot water:

A Montana judge has come under fire after handing down a 30-day sentence to a former high school teacher convicted of raping a 14-year-old student and for making statements in court that the victim was “older than her chronological age” and “as much in control of the situation” as her teacher.

Outrage is particularly sharp in Billings, where the crime took place, because the girl committed suicide in 2010, just shy of her 17th birthday, as the criminal case was pending. A protest was planned for Thursday, and organizers have called on Montana District Judge G. Todd Baugh to resign.

The uproar began Monday when Baugh sentenced Stacey Dean Rambold, 54, to 15 years in prison on one count of sexual intercourse without consent, but then suspended all but 31 days and gave him credit for one day served. Prosecutors had asked for 20 years in prison, with 10 years suspended.

Both Dr. Phi and Mike Hunt Rice have taken issue with the press’s reference to the crime as “rape” without a qualifier. Having followed the issue, it’s something that I have noticed more generally. I don’t tend to believe that dropping the qualifier is “intellectually dishonest” as MHR put it, but I do understand the objection.

Is this rape? I am inclined to believe that it’s not, except in the statutory sense. Whether we believe such behavior should be legal or not, the differences between this and holding down a woman while forcing himself on her are manifest. Likewise, this doesn’t compare to a having sex with a woman who is drugged or drunk and unconscious or something close to it. On the other hand, I recently linked to a story in Louisiana about a guard and an inmate having sex, and I have very little difficulty calling that rape regardless of how much she (superficially) consented. There are circumstances in which I would consider consent to be impossible. I draw the line between Montana and Louisiana. Some draw it on the other side of Montana, while others draw it on the other side of Louisiana.

When “Nathan J.” was fifteen, he was legally raped. When the child of the rape was born, he was successfully sued for child support. The court ruled ‘The law should not except Nathaniel J. from this responsibility because he is not an innocent victim of Jones’s criminal acts.’

The Washington Post is calling for the judge’s resignation:

“I’m not sure just what I was attempting to say, but it did not come out correct,” the judge said in a mea culpa issued to the Billings Gazette on Wednesday. He said he would file an addendum to the court file to “hopefully better explain the sentence.” Actually, Montana residents, along with much of the nation, know all they need to know about this case and this judge. His parsing of the sexual exploitation of a troubled teenager by a teacher in a position of trust as not a “forcible, beat-up rape” — and his sentence of a mere 30 days — sent the message that this is a crime that is not to be taken all that seriously. Judge Baugh’s ignorant notions about rape and his insensitivity to victims are an absolute affront to justice, and he should immediately resign.

To their credit, though (both sides of the story and all that), they also ran this piece by Betsy Karasik, which argues that teacher-student sex shouldn’t be illegal and that it may have been the law, rather than the crime, that drove the victim to suicide:

I do think that teachers who engage in sex with students, no matter how consensual, should be removed from their jobs and barred from teaching unless they prove that they have completed rehabilitation. But the utter hysteria with which society responds to these situations does less to protect children than to assuage society’s need to feel that we are protecting them. I don’t know what triggered Morales’s suicide, but I find it tragic and deeply troubling that this occurred as the case against Rambold wound its way through the criminal justice system. One has to wonder whether the extreme pressure she must have felt from those circumstances played a role.

I’ve been a 14-year-old girl, and so have all of my female friends. When it comes to having sex on the brain, teenage boys got nothin’ on us. When I was growing up in the 1960s and ’70s, the sexual boundaries between teachers and students were much fuzzier. Throughout high school, college and law school, I knew students who had sexual relations with teachers. To the best of my knowledge, these situations were all consensual in every honest meaning of the word, even if society would like to embrace the fantasy that a high school student can’t consent to sex. Although some feelings probably got bruised, no one I knew was horribly damaged and certainly no one died.

Several years ago I read a book, the title of which I cannot recall (something about reading signs, there were signs on the cover), about early woman sexuality. It was mostly a descriptive book, the different approaches different young ladies take towards sex, though to the extent it had an “agenda” it tended towards being very supportive of girls taking control of their sexuality. It leaned considerably more towards the feminist direction than not. It had a chapter on young women and older men and was by and large supportive of the notion – or at least the right of women to explore the notion.

All of which drives at one of the complexities of the issue. Which is that it actually doesn’t fall strictly among ideological lines. There are liberal and feminist arguments in support of laws condemning this activity. Arguably, this may be where the framing of the issue as rape comes into play. Feminists would be hard-pressed to support anything that could be construed as supporting rape. At the same time, though, the counter-arguments are also quite feminist in nature. It involves young women taking ownership of their sexuality. Being allowed to decide not just to have sex, but who to have sex with. The notion that young women should be in control of their sexuality – including access to birth control and abortion – is mutually exclusive to the idea that they cannot consent to sex, or that they can only consent to sex with men (boys) roughly their own age.

Ultimately, though, I disagree with Karasik that I don’t think it should be legal, for a teacher, to sleep with a student who is fourteen. Or a non-teacher, for that matter, who is forty-something. I don’t believe in the unqualified sexual autonomy of children, which I consider a fourteen year old to be. Though I support a general loosening of our teenage sex regime, that’s a bridge further than I can go. And on top of that, I think that the power dynamics of teachers and students are, while not comparable to prisoner and guard, cause for potential criminal action in itself. But I don’t think it should live in the same tent as someone who holds a woman down and forces himself on her.

To open this book, and explore this issue, we would need a greater review of how we view teenage sexuality. The two things that shut down the debate are our cultural discomfort with the possibility of two people having sex, and a strong desire never to make excuses for anything that can be called rape. I am not holding by breath for reform.

Salary.com has the scoop. There aren’t any surprises, for those who pay attention to such things. It’s worth noting that the difference here actually has less to do with ROI and more to do with whether you attended public school or private. The “worst” degree, which is communications, still pays for itself 58% of the time for public schools. But less than 1-in-5 does private school do the same. Granted, private school degrees in certain tech fields probably beat that, but outside of a select few majors and a limited number of schools, I’d be willing to bet you fall below 58% relatively quickly.

Which is not to say that public schools are always a good investment. Forbes has a list of schools that arguably aren’t. A fair number of them are public schools. A fair percentage of that, of course, is attributable to student inputs rather than outputs.

Meanwhile, the return-on-investment for private school may not be as bad as previously thought:

“We find no statistically significant differential return to certificates or associates degrees between for-profits and not-for-profits,” they wrote in the paper, which was released last month.
Certificate holders from for-profits tended to fare slightly worse in the job market, according to the study, while associate degrees from for-profits were worth slightly more than those from nonprofit institutions. Hence no clear winner emerged.

The revised paper still included some worrisome findings about for-profits. Those colleges are typically more expensive than their nonprofit counterparts, particularly community colleges. For-profits charged an average of $6,300 more in annual tuition for certificate programs, according to the study’s sample, and $6,900 more per year for associate degrees.
“The return on investment is undoubtedly lower at for-profits,” the paper said.

However, the study’s most significant finding, its authors wrote, was the large variation in wages and labor market returns across majors and academic disciplines. Those program-specific comparisons are probably more valuable than comparing wage data at an institutionwide level.

That last part, of course, undermines the point that I just made. Or maybe it’s referring to outputs (wages) moreso than inputs, which vary an order of magnitude from one institution to another. On the other hand, wages are for life and college costs are fixed. So I’m not sure. I’d also like to know is that for-profits have higher aggregate costs than non-profits, but how does that work if you delineate between public non-profit and private non-profit. Of course community colleges are going to be cheap. But how does the University of Phoenix compare to the University of Tampa (a private institution)?

There’s something noteworthy about both of these articles, though. We hear a lot about how college tuitions are rising because state support is slipping*. Yet, despite all that, public schools still offer huge discounts over private schools. Even out-of-state tuition at public schools tends to beat the privates. The former suggests that there is more at work with escalating costs than falling state aid (and that, before we even talk about increasing state aid, we need to establish that it won’t be used to enable unnecessary spending elsewhere). On the other hand, the latter statistic suggests that state universities are still doing a decent job curbing costs because out-of-state tuition is at least theoretically non-subsidized. Or maybe not, since it’s commonly stated that advertised tuition rates are not usually paid.

Anyhow, when we talk about ROI, we should not just look at the cost to the student costs, but total cost. One of my complaints about the “make college affordable” debate is how focused it is on making it affordable to the student, rather than keeping total costs in check. It’s one of the reasons I am excited about the potential for genuinely low-cost college options. Which our current system provides so little incentive for.

* – Note, I cannot find good statistics on this, though. The oft-cited statistic, which is the percentage of cost covered by the state, is not particularly helpful. The per-student dollar amount is what I want. The reason being that colleges that jack up tuitions to build a new rec center end up costing the student more and lowering the percentage of cost supplied by the state, while a more financially prudent university looks like it’s being more generously supported by the state when it isn’t.

Much hay has been made out of this report, on the dreadful state of teacher education:

The National Council on Teacher Quality review is a scathing assessment of colleges’ education programs and their admission standards, training and value. The report, which drew immediate criticism, was designed to be provocative and urges leaders at teacher-training programs to rethink what skills would-be educators need to be taught to thrive in the classrooms of today and tomorrow.

“Through an exhaustive and unprecedented examination of how these schools operate, the review finds they have become an industry of mediocrity, churning out first-year teachers with classroom management skills and content knowledge inadequate to thrive in classrooms” with an ever-increasing diversity of ethnic and socioeconomic students, the report’s authors wrote.

“A vast majority of teacher preparation programs do not give aspiring teachers adequate return on their investment of time and tuition dollars,” the report said.

This was cited over on Unfogged (a very liberal blog), with some skepticism, only to have many of the commenters reply that yeah, a lot of it is really quite bad.

My experience with Southern Tech’s College of Education, where I was going to get my original minor, was out-and-out depressing. Do they not turn out teachers anymore like the ones I had? I wondered. Or were the teachers at my district – a fairly wealthy suburban one – really just that good?

But then I started substituting at Redstone – which is not wealthy – and I was rather impressed with the teachers I met at all levels. So what could be the disconnect? Could it be this…:

Some 239,000 teachers are trained each year and 98,000 are hired — meaning too many students are admitted and only a fraction find work.

That’s a truly astonishing number. Enough so that I am a little skeptical of it. What happens to all of the other trained teachers?

Over at The League, in a thread about evolution, Pierre Corneille said the following:

Speaking for myself, sometimes I actually kind of get a little chip-on-shoulder-y with the pro-teaching-evolution-in-school crowd because I detect sometimes a certain arrogance that annoys.

When deciding where I want my wife and I to land, I sometimes say “I don’t want to live in a place where I am the only vote on the school board in favor of teaching evolution.” I actually stand by the content of that comment, but it means something different to me now than it meant when I first made it. Now, more than anything, I understand it as a matter of culture. Namely, that I don’t want to live in a place that is not only highly religious, but sufficiently unified in their religiosity that they feel comfortable inserting that religion into the school curriculum. It’s not so much about the curriculum of science class per se (that can be taught at home), but rather the unified religiosity and the effects it is likely to have on culture that extend far beyond the classroom.

At some point, it dawned on me… do you know why I believe evolution? It’s because that’s what I was taught. I went to school five days a week, in an environment that taught it, and went to Sunday School only once a week in an environment that didn’t deny it. When I was a teenager, I started having serious questions about the veracity of the literal interpretation of the Bible. When I brought these concerns to my father, he basically said that I shouldn’t turn myself into a pretzel trying to verify what are often Very Important Stories and not necessarily a meticulous recording of events. And that the important parts of the Bible are not the recording of events at all.

That’s the sort of environment I was raised in. The results on my thinking of evolution are, by and large, a product of that raising. Because I am not a science-fiend. Science was easily my least favorite subject in school. I could spout off the answers to the questions, I could do the math parts really well, but I didn’t have the passion for it. At all. Unlike reading class, it wasn’t that I couldn’t do it. I just didn’t care. It was much, much easier for me to put my faith in what science people told me was true.

Now, I can list off a bunch of reasons as to why it is more practical to believe the White Coats over the White Robes, but it’s hard to ignore the fact that I was never really challenged on this front. To some extent, I believe the White Coats because that’s who I was told to believe and the White Robes were saying unrelated things that strained credibility. If I could lend credibility to the other things – the ones I went to my father about – then it would actually be a little bit tougher for me to say “Oh, yes, their views on the metaphysical being of humanity and existence are quite true, but their views on the origins of mankind and the planet are just nonsensical.” Not that it can’t be done, but it’s foolish to pretend that I came about my views objectively and intelligently while they didn’t when, for the most part, we are both just believing what we were told by the people we believe. People often reject what they are told to believe, but the same dynamics are there regardless “The White Robes were lying about this, therefore anybody and especially the White Coats are more credible on the whole creationism vs. evolution thing.”

The primary difference not necessarily being that one Cares About Science while the other Hates Science, but rather it revolves back to believing the people on your side of the line in the sand on other issues translating into belief of evolution.

Now, I speak mostly of people who are like myself in this regard. Who knows, I may be the only person in the entire universe who believes in evolution for relatively superficial reasons. But, I kind of doubt it. I’ve seen debates between creationists and evolution supporters wherein the former absolutely crushed the latter. The creationist was able to talk about micro-evolution and macro-evolution and something about the Grand Canyon that I forget and a whole host of reasons as to why they believe evolution – by which they really mean macro-evolution – is bunk. Meanwhile, the latter focuses scornfully on “That man in the sky” and “Republicans are stupid.”

Not that those arguments sway me to the creationist side. They don’t. Because, ultimately, I believe the White Coats. Mostly on faith and the reasoning of how they say they came about their views versus, ultimately, how I believe the other side came about theirs. Comparative credibility, when I am not really an objective party in any real sense.

I don’t mean to get all relativist here. I do genuinely believe in evolution and I don’t think the sides are really created equal here. What I am more leading to is this comment that I made, preceding Pierre’s:

I do want evolution taught in schools, and would vote on that basis, but a whole lot of very functional people – people in the medical profession, even – believe in creationism. It’s not the indicator of intelligence or competence that people make it out to be.

In addition to the above revelation, this is a product of being raised in the South as much as anything. Or any religious area, really. You meet and get to know a lot of really wicked-smart people that believe things that you believe completely and utterly defy common sense and credibility. And when you stop and think about it – if you stop and think about it – it really doesn’t make sense to really put people in one side or the other in the Smart Box and the Stupid Box. Republicans disproportionately believe in Creationism, and oppose AGW, but outside of that are not on average any more ignorant of SCIENCE! than are Democrats. It’s more about what I would consider to be blind spots than blindness.

It’s because of this that I am increasingly less patient with comments suggesting that creationists cannot be competent doctors, engineers, or so on. A part of my job description at an old job was to edit my boss’s religious tract. It was some 300 pages long, including quite a bit on evolution, wherein he came down pretty hard against. He was one of the most intelligent men I have ever known. He was a mechanical engineer, but if he’d chosen surgery or medicine instead, I would trust him with the care of my baby daughter. And I have virtually zero affection for the guy.

I still don’t understand it, to be perfectly honest. How smart people can believe these things that just seem so unbelievable to me. But ultimately, I have to consider that they got their views from a place not all that dissimilar from where I got mine, albeit from the opposite end. And as much as I am inclined to blame that on passivity, research on global warming has indicated that education mostly serves to harden views rather than lead everyone to the “right” one.