... & I get totally ignored, on Christmas Day too! cheesy
Gunsmith, I'm sincerely sorry for my omission. I read and appreciated your post, and really intended to acknowledge your kind words. Call it brain flatulence. I just spaced it.
Scout, thanks also for the welcome.
G'ster, my friend, thanks much for the lengthy PM clarifying your position. I appreciate your candor and your clarification of your position.
G'98, I accept your criticism of my attitude in my first post above.
APS is what you make of it - remember that.
Point well taken. So far, I'll admit that I was wrong about what's going on at APS. My experience a couple of years ago was sufficiently negative that it (probably unfairly) colored my expectations. (You should know that I'm not the only THR person that had negative experiences and hasn't been back since.) I confess I came in dragging an attitude and unfairly laid out expectations.
I apologize for that. Clearly the staff and membership have done a great job of ... um, improving the tone of the space. (I've been discussing that a bit with Cosine via PM.) I'm impressed and encouraged.
And, yes, I'll confess, I've developed a flinch from being jumped on vehemently so often when taking the position that I do on this issue. It will affect one after a while, despite best intentions.
And please understand, I'm trying deliberately not to paint with a broad brush about "flat earthers". I don't put all who disagree with the theory into that category, although there are some (not necessarily here) who deserve the label. (Maybe another day, I'll try to explain my position on that.)
CSDaddy, yes, I am an educator, and I make no apologies for it.
However, I'm confident that GB Shaw would not lump me in his disdained group of that profession, particularly given that I agree with this statement by him which I assume is the one to which you were referring:
Simply because our education is not controversial, which means that as it is a hundred years out of date on all open questions, reforms have to come from the uneducated who suffer from the facts and know nothing of the books.
The only word I'd quibble with is "uneducated". There is an important distinction between "uneducated" and "self-educated". Some of the most brilliant & knowledgeable people I've ever known have been self-educated.
I have
major issues with mainstream science and mathematics education in the US, from secondary to grad schools. Much of what they teach IS at least decades out of date. (Don't get me started.) Which is precisely why I'm NOT part of mainstream ed system any longer, but am an independent educator teaching cutting edge stuff (almost all Nobel laureate driven), much of which I've
taught myself after 20 years of being force fed the standard science dogma. In that regard, I, too, am self-educated.
Of course, the benefit of having been fed a steady diet of standard dogma for decades prior to now is that I am better able to understand the flaws in the old models, and to therefore better understand why the IPCC continues to underestimate the severity of the issue at hand: the vast majority of those IPCC scientists are trained in the classical science approaches with roots in the 19th and early 20th century that are now known to be incorrect, and that lead to a picture of nature as relatively tame and controllable. It is not.
The new models that have been emerging for the past several decades - the ones that have not yet filtered down into the undergraduate curriculum, let alone high school - paints a very different picture of how nature works with which I suspect Shaw would have resonated.
But that's a conversation for another day.
_____________
I hope you are all warm & dry, and I thank you for your hospitality, and your invitation to hang out a while.
I'll try my best to be respectful despite my punk genes.
Right now, it's dinner time.
Nem
