“Striking many” and “wishing death to some” still allows time for plenty of math and science

Mathematicians and scientists are often undeservedly assigned nerdy, frail, reputations, and I fear that this perception may steer some students away from these disciplines in school. As a teacher, it is my job to ensure that math and science are celebrated to the same degree as the arts, if not more. If we want to produce more mathematicians and scientists in this country, we must find ways of letting students know that the sciences are not reserved for quiet, studious, industrious children.

Enter Lists of Note, one of my favorite new websites. Last week they posted a list of Isaac Newton’s sins that will serve to assure students that mathematicians and scientists come in many forms:

In 1662, at which point he was a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, 19-year-old Isaac Newton wrote, in his notebook, the following list of 57 sins he had recently committed — 48 before Whitsunday, and 9 since. It makes for fascinating reading.

I’ll leave you to visit the site and peruse the list yourself, but here are a few of my favorites that will convince even the most rough-and-tumble boys that discovering the secrets of the universe is not beyond their grasp.

Threatning my father and mother Smith to burne them and the house over them

Wishing death and hoping it to some

Striking many

Stealing cherry cobs from Eduard Storer and denying that I did so

Punching my sister

Beating Arthur Storer.

Apparently Newton has a serious beef with the Storer family.

I can only hope that my students were playing videogames or watching TV or playing with fire when Rick Santorum was speaking.

One of the most important lessons I try to teach my students is the importance of admitting a mistake and possessing the moral integrity to apologize and make it right. Ask any one of my students, past or present, how I feel about mistakes, and they will tell you that the first, best and most important step in getting out of trouble with me is admitting to the error, apologizing for the action, and executing a course to correct the error and avoid repeating it again.

This is so hard for some students, and it is understandable. They are ten years old. Their egos are fragile. They have much to learn.    

It is equally difficult for many adults, and this is a lot less understandable. I have watched colleagues, spouses, friends and relatives refuse to admit error and apologize, even when the person who they have so clearly wronged is someone they respect and love.

I have many, many faults.  In fact, I once listed them in a post and added an addendum a few days later. I should probably update that list soon. But an inability to admit fault and apologize is not one of them. I am an expert at admitting that I was wrong. I am the king of culpability. I admit fault and apologize even when I am not quite certain that I did anything wrong.

I do not support the requested or demanded apology, for reasons outlined here (and possibly also because of my oppositional nature), but otherwise, I am an expert at both making mistakes and apologizing for them.   

Admitting fault should not be difficult.

Apologizing should not be hard.

It is almost always the right thing, and yet for so many, it is so difficult. 

Case in point:

The idiocy of Rick Santorum, who said this in regards to apologies yesterday:

GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum on Sunday criticized President Obama for apologizing to Afghans this week for the burning of Qurans by NATO forces at a U.S. military base. “There was nothing deliberately done wrong here. This was something that happened as a mistake. Killing Americans in uniform is not a mistake,” Santorum said during ABC’s This Week. “Say it’s unfortunate … but to apologize for something that was not an intentional act is something that the president of the United States in my opinion should not have done ... I think it shows weakness.”

I had to read this three times, because I have listened to ten year old students say almost these exact words.

“Yes, I ran into her on the playground, but it was an accident. I didn’t mean to hurt her. So why should I say I’m sorry?”

Seriously. These are the kinds of things that my students say. Sadly, they are also the kinds of things less enlightened adults who wish to become leaders of the free world say.

I didn’t mean it.

I didn’t do it intentionally.

It was an accident.

It’s not as bad as what she did.

I shouldn’t have to apologize for an honest mistake.

These are the comments of a person with a weak mind.

I cannot believe that I live in a world in which politicians criticize leaders for apologizing for mistakes. I cannot believe I live in a world in which the willingness to apologize is considered a weakness to some.

I can only hope that my students were not listening to this nonsense. I can only hope they they were playing videogames or watching cartoons or playing with fire when Santorum was being stupid, because even videogames and cartoons and pyromania would be better than listening to this lunacy. 

Every day I try to instill a foundation of moral integrity and a strong sense of self in my students. I try to teach them that the easiest way to forgiveness is through truth and sincerity. I try to make them understand that apologizing does not make you look weak. It demonstrates your strength of character.

Then an idiot like Rick Santorum comes along and tries to undo everything that I have tried so hard to teach my kids. 

Someone please tell that man to shut the hell up.

Jesus Christ and these capital letters do not belong

This card has become the source of amusement for many because of Rick Santorum’s decision to quote Jesus Christ and the New Testament on a Hanukkah message designed for Jews. Then again, only about 0.3 percent of the South Carolinian population is Jewish, so maybe he was hoping that no one would notice.

Yes, this was a strange and fairly stupid decision.

And yes, I acknowledge that it is highly unlikely that Santorum played a hands-on role in the design of the actual card. But gaffs like this serve as an indication as to the quality of the organization that the candidate has built and is leading.

But I think an even more egregious error exists in the message at the bottom of the card:

May Your Hanukkah be bright. Peace to you this Holiday Season

Nothing annoys me more than random and improper capitalization.

While the words May, Hanukkah and Peace should be capitalized for obvious reasons, there is no reason to capitalize You, Holiday and Season. These words are seemingly capitalized at random, with no identifiable reason or purpose.

Furthermore, the first sentence ends with a period but the second does not.

More inconsistency.

Yes, it’s true that the use of a quote by Jesus Christ on a card directed to Jews makes no sense and is especially stupid in light of the Christian tone that Santorum strikes in his campaign, but the absence of basic copyediting demonstrates, at least to me, a lack of attention to detail that I find even more disturbing.

Then again, I am an author and not very religious, so perhaps I am sensitive in ways different than most.

Delaying what is inevitable and right

When my daughter is my age, she will find it inconceivable that she was born into a country that did not allow for gay marriage, much the same way people from my generation wonder how separate but equal was ever thought to be a reasonable compromise to institutional racism.

I take great comfort in this thought in a time when bigotry has masked itself as a plank on a political campaign.      

Are these Republican candidates incapable of seeing that it is only a matter of time before this country allows any two people to marry, regardless of sex?  They remind me of the little boy who sticks his finger in the dike, hoping to hold back the oncoming flood.

Their institutional bigotry is coming to an end.  Can’t they see that?

They stand against the inevitable. 

They stand against righteousness.

They stand against my daughter’s future.

And I just wish they would get the hell out of the way so we can usher in the future a little sooner.  

Lowering the bar for husbands everywhere

It’s always refreshing to see a husband be so inexplicably unsupportive of his wife as Marcus Bachmann apparently was during his wife’s final day of campaigning in Iowa. As she and their daughters were visiting businesses up and down Main Street, campaigning for votes in the Iowa caucuses, he was busy buying doggie sunglasses.

Doggie sunglasses. You can’t make this stuff up.

And before you tell me that his unusual shopping excursion was probably part of the campaign, watch his reaction when Michele Bachmann reveals this bit of news.

That is not the reaction of an innocent man.

He looks like a five-year old who just got caught stealing cookies from the cookie jar. Literally.

But that’s okay. When men are tragically unsupportive of their wives in a time of need and on such a grand stage, it makes it a little easier for us moderately supportive husbands to look pretty damn impressive for folding the laundry or scraping the frost of the wife’s car in the morning.

Both of which I did today.

White people choose Presidential candidates

Iowa and New Hampshire, with their early caucuses and primaries, often play enormous roles in determining our Presidential candidates (as you probably know). Many a Presidential hopeful has resigned after failing to perform well in one of these two states. The demographics of the two states, according to the 2010 census, are thus:

Iowa is 92% white, 3% black and 5% Hispanic.

New Hampshire is 94% white, 1% black and 2% Hispanic.

Nationally, the United States is about 72 % white, 13% black and 16% Hispanic.

The next Republican primary state is Wyoming. It’s demographics are 90% white, less than 1% black and 8% Hispanic.

Food for thought in terms of the representative nature of these critical states in the primary process.

His position on same sex marriage is abhorrent, but credit him for his civility and willing to engage

This is a fascinating exchange. As much as I think Mitt Romney’s position on same sex marriage is ludicrous and reprehensible, he handles a potentially volatile situation rather well.

He unknowingly steps into a potential lion’s den and emerges relatively unscathed.

And the Vietnam veteran who challenges Romney on same sex marriage also conducts himself exceptionally well. While he finds Romney’s position on same sex marriage equally reprehensible, he credits the GOP candidate for engaging honestly in the discussion.

It’s not often that you see two men with completely divergent thoughts engage in civil, reasoned discourse in front of the cameras during a political campaign.

It was refreshing.

2011

Worth watching.

You just lost a customer, Lowes

Check it out. I’m exceedingly pleased, and perhaps even proud, of one of Connecticut’s US congressmen. 

With Congress’ approval rating close to single digits, that doesn’t happen often.

And thought I’ve never been a Home Depot loyalist, it turns out that I am now.

The United States is comprised of exactly 50 states? I don't believe it.

I don’t trust even numbers. I assume that every Top 10 list either contains one too many entries or is missing one or two deserving entries that were axed in order to keep the list at a conventionally round number.

I have never liked the emphasis placed on round numbers in sports, such as the prestige attached to 100 yards of rushing in an NFL game. Is 100 yards of rushing really any more representative of excellence than 95 or 98 yards?

I don’t think so.

Yet just this week, I heard an NFL analyst say that a team is struggling to run the ball based upon the fact that no player on the team had rushed for 100 yards since the beginning of the season.

I was left wondering how the team had performed in terms of rushing the football since week 5.

Was the team using a running-back-by-committee approach, in which the ball is shared by several players in order to avoid wearing out any one player?

Or was there a player on the team consistently rushing for 80-90 yards per game, and if so, is this really an indicator that the team can’t effectively run the ball?

I don’t think so.

Yet this round number has come to symbolize effectiveness in terms of rushing the football, even though it is often statistically irrelevant.

With this in mind, I am fascinated that after 235 years of nationhood, the United States ended up with the conveniently round number of fifty states.

Fifty.

Not forty or sixty. The delightfully satisfying round number of fifty.

It makes me wonder if Puerto Rico might have already become a state had Hawaii been our 49th state instead of our 50th state.

Or if the District of Columbia might have been granted statehood in order to achieve the round number.

I also wonder if perhaps our round number of states has helped prevent Puerto Rico from becoming a state?

After all, who wants fifty-one states when we can have a number like fifty?

See what I mean? Fifty seems too convenient. Too round.

And history is a messy piece of business. There are too many people with too many motivating factors involved in decision making over too long a period of time to believe that we carved up enormous portions of the North American continent into separate political entities over a period of more than 150 years, then tacked on two non-contiguous territories and just happened to arrive at the number fifty.

Fifty.  It’s too damn round for me.

I don’t trust it.

Could someone please tell Michele Bachmann that whining about the source of your apology is not exactly Presidential

Over the past three years, I have been extremely critical of people who demand apologies, more so than I ever even realized. In February of 2010, I was critical of a parent who demanded that a teacher apologize to her daughter for doing something exceptionally stupid.

In July of 2010, I commented on this favorite quote of mine by P.G. Wodehouse:

It is a good rule in life never to apologize. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them.

In March of 2011, I posted my own quote about apologies:

The need for a thank you and/or the request for an apology is a clear indication of a person’s likelihood to be eaten first in a zombie apocalypse. That is, if the zombies can stomach their degree of self-importance.

In April of 2011, I commented on NATO’s refusal to apologize for bombing rebel targets in Libya.

In October of 2011, I commented on how the request for an apology is often a signal of a lack of self confidence.

Please don’t get me wrong. I don’t think there is anything wrong with an apology, and I often counsel colleagues and students to simply apologize for their mistakes rather than trying to explain or defend them.

It’s a strategy I employ quite often.

My complaint is when people feel the need to demand an apology, as if doing so will somehow improve their position or make them feel better.

The only kind of apology that anyone should desire is the unforced, unrequested kind.

Otherwise an apology is nothing more than an assemblage of meaningless words.

Which brings me to my latest apology criticism, this time leveled at GOP candidate Michele Bachmann, who announced that she is dissatisfied with the apology she received from NBC after she was introduced on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon with the song “Lyin’ Ass Bitch.”

From The Daily Beast:

After NBC’s senior vice president for special programs sent Bachmann a written letter of apology, Bachmann said, "Of course I accept the apology, but my guess is that it would have been the president of the NBC that would have been apologizing not a senior vice president," if the same thing had happened to a liberal candidate.

Seriously? The network apologizes for what amounts to a tasteless joke on a late night comedy program and you feel the need to complain about the source of the apology?

Jimmy Fallon, the person actually responsible for the choice of song, has already apologized to her.

This should’ve been enough.

Now the senior vice president of NBC has now apologized as well.  In writing.

This really should be enough.

The woman is campaigning to become President of the United States and leader of the free world, and yet she finds it necessary to whine that the source of her apology isn’t important enough?

Wodehouse was right.

The wrong sort of people take mean advantage of apologies.

And I was right, too.

If these are the things that concern Michele Bachmann in the middle of a Presidential race, she would likely end up as an appetizer in a zombie apocalypse.

500 years ago was not that appealing

You have to wonder what someone from the fourteenth or fifteenth century might think if he was to discover that people in the twenty-first century were spending their weekends at outdoor fairs designed to recreate the spirit of the Renaissance.

Sure, it was a time of enlightenment, but it was also the time of the Plague.

It was an age absent of penicillin, electricity and indoor plumbing.

The life expectancy at the time was about 30 years.

If you weren’t born wealthy and male and white, you had almost no say in what your future would hold.

In comparison to today, it was not a great time to be a human being.

Sure, everyone loves a good funnel cake and a nifty crossbow demonstration, but I have to think that a person who actually lived through the Renaissance would think it slightly odd, if not altogether stupid, to relive such a base time in human history.

Martin Cooper kicked Alexander Graham Bell’s ass

One of my favorite people in all of human history is Martin Cooper. Ever heard of him?

Cooper was a member of the Motorola team that invented the first cellular telephone back in 1973.

While I am immensely appreciative of the convenience and joy that my iPhone provides on a daily basis, it is not Cooper’s inventiveness that I admire most.

It was the choice he made when deciding upon who to call first.

For his first public cellular phone call in human history, Cooper took to the New York City streets and called his rivals at AT&T and inform them that they had lost the race to build the first functioning cell phone.

The combination of New York’s busy street sounds and Cooper’s voice told the engineers at AT&T that they had been bested.

Now that was one hell of a phone call.

The perfect combination of comeuppance, spite, humor, and bravado.

The inventor’s version of my four favorite words:

I told you so.

Can you even imagine a better phone call?

Contrast this to Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, whose first call was to his assistant in the other room:

"Mr. Watson—Come here—I want to see you.”

Alexander Graham Bell might have been a great inventor, but he sucked at understanding the importance of the moment.

"Mr. Watson—Come here—I want to see you.”

Is that the best he could do?

It makes me wish someone a little wittier, a little meaner or someone with a greater flair for the dramatic had invented the first telephone.

Someone like the great Martin Cooper.

Eerily accurate…

So I guess it wasn’t so unexpected after all.

The moral high ground

From The Daily Beast:

President Obama bashed the Republican presidential candidates for not speaking out against the booing of a gay soldier during a recent televised debate. Obama said he did not believe in the "smallness" that's allowing major political leaders to be silent when an American soldier is booed.

"You want to be commander in chief? You can start by standing up for the men and women who wear the uniform of the United States, even when it's not politically convenient."

Is this a sign that my President is finally going to stand up and hit back?

I hope so.

I don’t agree with him, but I can respect his answer

Did I just hear an Evangelical Republican candidate admit that he does not know if the Bible should be taken literally?

Did I just hear him say that the seven days of Creation might represent different periods of history rather than seven rotations of the planet? 

Did he just acknowledge that metaphor may have existed in Biblical times?

I still think it’s narrow-minded to reject the overwhelming scientific evidence that supports evolution, and I still would not vote for the man, but that doesn’t mean I can’t respect him.

And with this intellectually honest answer, Mike Huckabee has earned my respect.  

Heroes of 9/11 whose names should be better known

Have you heard about the heroism of F-16 pilots Lt. Heather Penney and Commander Marc H. Sasserville? They were the USAF pilots who were ready to sacrifice their lives to bring down the hijacked United Airlines Flight 93 on September 11, 2001.

From The Daily Beast:

Armed jets weren't kept on standby at the time, so Penney and her commanding officer, Marc H. Sasseville, had only their planes to use against the hijacked airliner. Three planes had already hit the towers and the Pentagon when they were told her to scramble their planes.

“I’m going to go for the cockpit,” Sasseville said.

“I’ll take the tail,” replied Penny, a rookie at the time.

They didn't have to, because the passengers on the flight brought the plane down themselves. “I genuinely believed that was going to be the last time I took off,” Penny says. “If we did it right, this would be it.”

The bravery of these two pilots is extraordinary. Let us not forget them.

Overwhelming evidence of insanity

I am not the first person to question out-of-context quotations. Having been victimized by the deliberate mis-characterization and outright altering of written statements, I know how easy it is to paint an inaccurate and unfair image of a person simply based upon out-of-context statements that a person has made. But there comes a time when the ludicrous, inane and frightening statements become so numerous that you can’t help but wonder what the hell is wrong with this person.

Michele Bachman has just about reached that point for me.

And while her defenders may say that any political figure can be caught off guard and misspeak when communicating to the degree that someone like Bachman does, there simply aren’t the enormous number of blunders coming from the mouths of politicians like President Obama and John McCain and Nancy Pelosi and Mitt Romney.

Yes, they misspeak. Yes, they flip-flop on positions. Yes, they pick and choose the facts that best suit their argument.

But I’m talking outright stupidity and insanity.

Bachman has it. These other do not.

Here are just three of the quotes that I have seen recently that have given me great pause.

PASSIVE AGGRESSIVE, CONSPIRACY THEORY BASED LEADERSHIP "I find it interesting that it was back in the 1970s that the swine flu broke out then under another Democrat president Jimmy Carter. And I'm not blaming this on President Obama, I just think it's an interesting coincidence."

PARANOID, HOMOPHOBIC DELUSION "Normalization of gayness through desensitization. Very effective way to do this with a bunch of second graders is take a picture of 'The Lion King' for instance, and a teacher might say, 'Do you know that the music for this movie was written by a gay man?' The message is: 'I'm better at what I do, because I'm gay.'"

FAILURE TO UNDERSTAND BASIC US HISTORY "But we also know that the very founders that wrote those documents worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States."

I am a small and insignificant person by comparison

It’s important, I think, to reflect back on your accomplishments from time to time as a means of motivating yourself for future success. It’s easy to forget the hurdles you have crossed, the challenges you’ve overcome, and the ways in which you and your life are separate from the crowd. But knowing these things is important.  By reflecting back upon them and reliving these moments in our minds, we find the strength and the willingness to accomplish more.

I was feeling pretty good about my life, feeling like I had accomplished much and overcome even more, when I read the most remarkable obituary in all of human history and realized that I have done nothing by comparison.

Nancy Wake, the White Mouse of World War II.

One of the most remarkable people on the planet and my new hero.

Just a few of her accomplishments from the obituary (you should read the entire obituary) include:

She hid downed Allied servicemen at her home and led them over the Pyrenees to the safety of neutral Spain. She later helped organize thousands of French resistance fighters known as the Maquis, by meeting Allied arms drops, distributing weapons and training 7,000 partisans in preparation for the Normandy invasion.

As her involvement in the war deepened, Ms. Wake was trained by the British to kill with her bare hands (she delivered a fatal karate chop to a sentry at an arms factory), parachute into enemy-held territory and work a machine gun.

With her highly motivated force, Ms. Wake planned and executed a successful raid on a Gestapo garrison and an arms factory in central France in 1944.

I suddenly feel like I have a lot more to do.

Bachmann’s latest history lesson. This time on slavery.

From a piece in The Daily Beast:

Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum apparently aren’t close readers, having signed a pledge from a Christian group in Iowa that said black families were stronger under slavery.

“A child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the U.S.A.'s first African-American President," read the offending passage, which has since been removed.

Bachmann tried to distance herself by saying she supported only the “candidate’s vow” section of the pledge, which her spokeswoman says she still supports.

So either she:

A.  Signs things without bothering to read them

B.  Believes that you can sign a document even though parts of it are so offensive that you must eventually demand that they be removed

C.  She just did what her husband told her to do.

It’s getting to the point that you can’t make this stuff up. 

First she adds a nine-year old to our list of Founding Fathers, and now this.

Honestly, I feel like Bachmann’s campaign would be better off if she just stopped talking for at least a month.