It was fun to squash the sod, with a nik nak paddywak …
A few days ago the press and leftie blogs were getting themselves all in a lather about a story which claimed that a quarter of Americans do not know the earth orbits the sun. Here’s the beginning of one report:
One in four Americans are completely unfamiliar with Nicolaus Copernicus’s 1543 theory that the Earth circles the Sun, according to a study by the National Science Foundation.
The survey, released on Friday at an annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, asked 2,200 people nine factual questions about physical and biological science, 46% responded with the average score being just 5.8 correct answers.
The question – “Does the Earth go around the Sun, or does the Sun go around the Earth” – was answered incorrectly by 26 per cent of respondents.(This is actually a misrepresentation, it was 26% of 46% – which tells you a lot about the people who organised the survey – Boggart Blog)
Fewer than half of the respondents – 48 per cent – are aware that humans evolved from earlier species of animals and just 39 percent answered correctly that “the universe began with a huge explosion”. (Erm – that’s not proved actually, what about the infinite universe theory?)
A total of 42 per cent of Americans said that astrology is either “very scientific” or “sort of scientific”.
I left a comment:
What always baffles me about this kind of article is why the authors and fellow travellers think it is so important that people are aware of a fact that makes no difference to their lives.
We can’t change how the clockwork of the solar system operates so the realationship with earth is really of little concern, it’s like asking “What is the capital of Mongolia?” People either know or they don’t.
The solar system, the galaxy and the universe work the way they do because that’s how they work. If they worked differently then we probably wouldn’t exist and nobody would be any wiser. Meanwhile whether you live in America, Europe, Asia or somewhere else there are plenty of practical problems right here on earth that need our urgent attention.
Although I think few British people would be unaware of our planet’s relationship with the sun, I would say not knowing how to fry an egg or cook some chips are actually more important.
Oldman replied:
I take it you are a teacher; probably the most stupid and uneducated people working in our vile public sector. Two thirds of teachers don’t know how to divide fractions. And they don’t care. They argue that if they don’t teach mathematics (we used to call it sums) they have no need to know.
To be properly educated we all need to know the basics: dividing fractions and knowing that the Earth moves around the sun.
For example if you don’t know about the sun and the Earth you won’t know about Galileo, the renaissance and the evils of religion – in this case the Catholic Church. Catholics were burned at the stake for promoting science and Galileo was threatened with torture and kept under house arrest for the rest of his life for stating that – the Earth goes around the sun.
The renaissance movement shifted to the north and the world was educated and reformed; democracy invented and the industrial revolution brought about by the work of northern Europeans while the south languished in backwardness and poverty.
Get it?
To which I had to respond:
No I don’t get it, I think you are a very confused person. And whatever gave you the idea I might be a teacher. BTW it was Copernicus who proposed the heliocentric solar system although it was known to those ignorant savages the Hellenes, Persians, Assyrians, Babylonians and north European Druids.
Until quite recently most people did not care whether the sun went round the earth, went to Scarborough for its summer break or voted for the Liberal Democrats. It did what it did and that’s the only thing that mattered.
Now I’m not in any way religious but I am tolerant and I think Oldman, your true nature is shown when you talk about the evils of religion.
You are one of those bigots who think we should impose your prejudices on everybody.
I’d say a pedantic boor like you is behaving much more like a teacher (aka pedagogue) than I do.
See Oldman’s problem there, apart from his obvious likeness to a human posterior body orifice, is that he assumes what he believes is important and what anybody else believes is irrelevant. I know the earth orbits the sun and it does not make any difference to me. (I can divide fractions too but can’t remember when I last needed to do it). I don’t know the times of trains from Preston to Machester but I don’t travel by train. To someone who lives in Preston and travels by train to work in Manchester each day it would be very important to know those train time, but knowing that the earth goes round the sun, while a ‘nice to have’ is not important as there is nothing they could do to change it.
Were I a third world subsistence farmer (there are more of them than of us so what they need to know is relevant) I may or may not know about the earth’s orbit and whether I did would be irrelevant to my efforts to scratch a living from a couple of acres of barren, rocky soil.
Nor would I give a flying fuck that democracy was invented in ancient Greece long before the renaissance, that Iceland can legitimately claim to be the world’s oldest democracy – their parliament, the Althing, is the oldest one to operate continuously, it was formed in 930 by Vikings. This was somewhat before the renaissance in what I’m sure Silly Oldman would call the dark ages although if we look north and east of the Mediterranean they weren’t that dark. In a short comment, for someone who acts so superior he was very wrong about very many things.
Far from developing a sense of wonder as they looked at the sun and stars the people of the far north “where the black rocks stand against the cold sea” (h/t Noggin The Nog) just made up some myths to explain things to curious children and got on with solving really important problems like how to cath more herring, make better cheese and brew better beer or forge sharper swords.
Want the final verdict on why you should ignore Silly Oldman? Today I saw him in another thread, grizzling about how David Cameron is unfit to be Prime Minister because he (Cammers) believes there is a God. Now Cammers may be unfit to be Prime Minister for many reasons, leaving his daughter behind in a pub and being cuckolded by Boris Johnson and supporting TTIP among them, but I would love to see Oldman trying to back up his assertion that there is no God with scientific proof. As scientific proof of a God already exists (see Godel’s Ontological Proof Of God, and was recenty verified by computer,) I say the pedantic science tit Oldman ought to shut the fuck up and leave the existentialist philosophy business to intelligent people.
Godel’s mathematical proof of God. Godel, a close friend of Einstein, was mad as a box of frogs but a genius at sums (source)
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