Silly season strikes Florida ....

[unixronin]

Florida just passed a bill in committee (specifically, the House Choice and Innovation Committee) that would allow students to sue "dictator" professors for telling them, for example, that the sun does not revolve around the Earth, or that the Earth does not float in a bowl of water balanced on the backs of four elephants standing on the back of a giant turtle, or that the Universe was not created out of nothingness at 9am on the morning of September 23, 4004.  Professors could also be sued for the "leftist totalitarianism" of imposing their "biased view" by requiring students who believe that such claptrap is valid, scientifically defensible alternative theory to, well ... scientifically defend it, and the bill in fact could be used to require professors to teach such "alternative theories" themselves.

In the words of Dave Barry, "I'm not making this up."

The bill hasn't passed the full House yet, and has two more committees to pass before it gets there; with luck, sanity will prevail and it won't.  But in this political climate, who knows?  When I see nonsense like this, I can't help but remember the professor who got a bill introduced in (Indiana, I think?) to define the value of pi as 3, just to point out how patently absurd such ideas were, and then had to fight tooth and nail to prevent the bill from passing.

What I wanna know is .... if the act of creation took place on September 23, 4004 BC, then, like ...  why was it September 23?  What happened to September 22, and September 21, and so on?  Why wasn't that day January 1?

Comments

Snopes is your friend ...

[rain-manpnw.livejournal.com]

This is an urban legend ...

http://www.snopes.com/religion/pi.htm

Re: Snopes is your friend ...

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

(a) I wasn't talking about Alabama; I can probably find you references with some searching. I know it was a more northern state, but I don't recall for certain which one. The story in question was not a claim that such a bill had passed, but that a mathematics professor has made the suggestion in order to show the foolishness of such things, and then had his work cut out to keep the legislature from actually trying to pass a bill to that effect. I'm thinking it was one or another of Iowa, Ohio or Illinois, but I can't remember which. It was NOT actually passed (or purported to be), and it was NOT Alabama.

(b) WTF?!? Snopes tried to feed Firefox three popups, and succeeded with one of them. If they keep that shit up, snopes.com is going on my permanent blackhole list.