We Americans don’t get enough. So here’s one to help us do better in our modern, digital world. Disclaimer: You might want to take it easy on this one at first, then do it faster as you become more proficient. It may be too strenuous for some.
Always consult your doctor before starting any exercise program. OK, here we go:
SCROLL DOWN…
NOW SCROLL UP…
That’s enough for the first day. Have some chocolate.
The British newspaper The Sun ran this interesting article the other day. It seems the Brits have found a way to make petrol—gasoline to us colonials—from thin air.
[Air Fuel Synthesis] from the north of England has developed “air capture” technology which creates synthetic petrol with only air and electricity.
The technology was presented to a London engineering conference this week.
It mixes sodium hydroxide with carbon dioxide before zapping the resulting sodium carbonate with electricity, to form pure carbon dioxide.
At the same time, hydrogen is produced by electrolysing water vapour captured with a dehumidifier.
The carbon dioxide and hydrogen are then used to produce methanol which in turn is passed through a gasoline fuel reactor, creating petrol.
Wait, what?
This process works on air, but it adds sodium hydroxide to the mix? But that’s minor; it’s not at all unusual to identify a process with a primary source, while adding additional chemicals along the way.
The really confusing part, to me, is this. This process takes CO2 as an input and then messes with it to get, as a goal, CO2 as an output? And then, to get the hydrogen, the process captures water vapor from the air and electrolyzes that? I confess, I don’t understand.
Aside from processing carbon dioxide to get carbon dioxide, unless things have changed a bit since I took high school chemistry, reacting sodium hydroxide (NaOH) with carbon dioxide (CO2) generally produces “the resulting sodium carbonate” (Na2CO3) and…wait for it…water. No need to collect water vapor with a dehumidifier. Unless they wanted more water than that reaction would produce. But that reaction produces a lot of water.
I’m no engineer, but a “breakthrough” isn’t what I see here.
Do the Brits do April Fool’s in mid-October?
Florida’s Department of Education has set race-based goals for its K-12 students (the Florida’s DoE Strategic Plan can be found here and here. For reading, these goals are
The math goals are
These are not trivial differences. Education Sector’s Director of Strategic Communications, Kristen Amundson, notes
I understand that this is recognition that students are beginning at different places—and that’s honest—but I think it is, at best, ill-advised to set different learning standards for students based on the color of their skin.
She’s being generous. This is a blatantly racist program, and it harkens back to Woodrow Wilson’s paternalistic racism. Some races, the Florida DoE seems to be suggesting, are just inherently inferior to others, and so they should not be held to the same standards.
Adding failure to injury, while this…policy…correctly recognizes that some groups of children start from different—lower—bases than others, it does absolutely nothing to correct those differences—which are educational, not innate capability. Recognizing that these kids start out at different levels of preparation for school, and that much of these differences correlate with race (they also correlate with a host of socioeconomic factors—family income, family stability, and so on; these factors subsume race into them, so there’s a bit of double-counting here), makes for a useful start point. But the Florida DoE is telling these kids that nothing will be done to help them finish school on a more-or-less equal footing with their peers. “There’s no point in teaching you to do better. You just can’t catch up.”
Yet the Florida School Board Association Executive Director, Dr Wayne Blanton, said this—and he was serious:
The message could have been portrayed a little clearer, but as far as racism, I see nothing in wanting to raise test scores that would be racist. You’re trying to raise all test scores, not just in one particular group.
No, doctor, the message was portrayed quite clearly. As clearly as your own disingenuousness. No one is suggesting Florida is trying to raise test scores only in “one particular group.” That’s just a cynical red herring. What Florida is doing is providing drinking fountains, or bathrooms, to all groups—but some will be better maintained than others.
Bill Powers, President of the University of Texas at Austin, put an op-ed into The Wall Street Journal in which he attempts to defend a particular version of “affirmative” action for admission to that university. The case on which he commented is Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, which is before the Supreme Court this term. In this case, a young woman was denied admission in favor of a less qualified black student because, she argues, she’s white.
The subtitle for Powers’ piece is this:
My university once kept blacks out. Now at Texas we ensure that their grandchildren can enter.
But what he omitted to say there is that UTA once kept blacks out for purely racial reasons. Now UTA “ensures that their grandchildren can enter” also on racial grounds.
Before I expand on that, though, a couple of smaller points. Powers wrote,
UT finds itself back in court superficially for the same reason—considering race in admissions—but with just the opposite motivation.
No motive can justify racism. Woodrow Wilson’s racism was for lofty motives—poor, inferior blacks needed the protections of segregation. Nor do the basest of motives justify it, as the Jim Crow laws demonstrated. Racism is…racist.
Powers also wrote
[T]he fiction that will be dispelled by Fisher is that minority students are being admitted at the expense of more-qualified white students. There are no unqualified students admitted to UT[.]
This is nothing but a non sequitur. Admitting less qualified students at the expense of more qualified students in no way implies that unqualified students are being admitted. Nor is this the argument Ms Fisher is making: she’s averring that race played the role, not qualifications.
But from his flawed logic, as illustrated by these minor nits, flows the larger problem. Powers made his case thusly:
[D]iversity isn’t only acceptable but desirable in all aspects of life, especially education. In my 38 years in the classroom, I often have seen how a diverse classroom enriches discussion, provides valuable insights and offers a deeper learning experience.
And
[W]e employ an entirely holistic review in which race is one of many factors along with leadership, extracurricular activities, awards, work experience, family-income level and community service.
With this argument, he’s demonstrated the bankruptcy of his race-based (however diffuse) admission policy. That breadth of diversity for which he seeks—leadership, extracurricular activities, awards, work experience, family-income level, and community service—already is wide. Moreover, those last two, family income and community service (which carry within them the diversity of communities in which his applicants live, that income is earned, and that service is performed), are alone richly diverse, and they contain ethnicity and race within them. With that broad diversity built into his selection paradigm, there’s no need to consider race separately. Doing so is just separate but equal papered over.
What diversity actually would accomplish, were it not for Powers’ double counting of race in it, would be to give all disadvantaged applicants equal opportunities for access, rather than giving superior access to those belonging to Powers’ favored race. Giving preference to race—regardless of the strength of that preference—is to give preference to race. There’s no amount of lipstick that can be smeared on this bigotry by those who should know better that can disguise that.
I had some words about this earlier. Now the sports authorities have weighed in.
The NCAA has penalized Penn State with the following primary sanctions:
The Big 10 has added (while reserving the possibility of adding further penalties) a ban on sharing in post season (bowl) revenues for four years, with an expected cost to Penn State of $13 billion.
On the whole, I agree with these. A ban on football altogether for a year—the so-called death penalty—would have punished the player-students, who had nothing to do with their coaches’, Athletic Department, or University leadership failures.
However, I would have preferred additional sanctions: 100% termination of the remaining football coaching staff who were on the payroll last November; 100% termination of all Athletic Director staff associated in any way with the Penn State football function (including athletics, financial support functions, player recruitment (beyond the football coaching staff’s involvement), alumni relations as these apply to Penn State football, and so on); and termination of the Penn State University President, Vice President, and Chief of Operations, and their operational (as opposed to administrative) staffs—just clean house altogether.
Whether or not these people had anything directly to do with Sandusky’s behavior, their oversight was wholly inadequate: Sandusky could not have gone on as long as he did, nor could the cover-up of Sandusky’s behavior have gone on as long as it did, without a significant fraction of these staffs functionally condoning the behavior and cover-up through their own inaction. Just generally require a wholesale house-cleaning.