Britain

The Trivialization of Science Teaching

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A U.K. physics teacher writes about the destruction of his subject by the new government-estabished syllabus.

(via the excellent Natalie Solent)

See my related post from 2005, Skipping Science Class.

SECOND UPDATE: An interesting collision between science and “Theory,” as the latter is practiced in many university humanities departments, can be seen in the episode known as The Sokal Hoax. (More here.)

Also, these books are relevant to this discussion: Higher Superstition and Fashionable Nonsense.

FIRST UPDATE: From the Telegraph:

The curriculum in state schools in England has been stripped of its content and corrupted by political interference, according to a damning report by an influential, independent think-tank…No major subject area has escaped the blight of political interference, according to the report published by Civitas.

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“Is London’s future Islamic?”

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Via Rand Simberg comes this essay by Michael Hodges.

I can’t tell if the Hodges piece is parody. If not, he reminds me of a leftist anti-Semitic high-school history teacher I had. He too used that “people of the book” line, to knock Christendom for being more hostile to Jews than Islam is and to explain away Muslim mistreatment of Jews.

In fact the Muslim record, particularly the recent Arab-Muslim record, only looks good in isolated cases or by comparison with the worst abuses of old Christendom. The modern Christian world is astonishingly tolerant by historical standards. Christian institutions have shrunk away from national government while radical Islam seeks to perpetuate Islam’s historical political totalism.

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So farewell then, Tony Blair

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Tony Blair’s so-called resignation was possibly the most inelegant exit made by any British Prime Minister. By no means the first leader to go before his term was up (of the post war ones Churchill, Eden, Macmillan, Wilson, Thatcher did), his was most the most prolonged and agonizingly dull. By yesterday morning, when the BBC Russian Service called to ask if I would take part in a discussion to be broadcast that afternoon, all I could do was to groan. Hasn’t he gone yet? We are waiting for the announcement, chuckled the producer.

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Genes and Culture

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This is, in part, a review of Saxons, Vikings, and Celts: The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland (hereafter SV&C), which I am carelessly posting here without even checking to see whether actual smart people, notably the ones over at Albion’s Seedlings (to say nothing of Gene Expression), have already written it up, mainly because they’ll have done a better job than me. Notice: “in part.” The book doesn’t take long to summarize, so after the genetics I’ll wander off into culture, including but not limited to linguistics.

Warning: spoilers. SV&C is, in a sense, a series of cliffhangers, and I’m going to reveal the ending.

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IEDs, Back in the Day

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Everything old is new again. Via Richard North comes this interesting discussion of innovative mine-detection and -clearing techniques used by the white Rhodesians against Mugabe’s insurgents.

See also this post and this post for an insightful and much broader discussion of British military capabilities and political/military errors in the Iraq war. (These posts are not recent but remain highly relevant.)