Profile

unixronin: Galen the technomage, from Babylon 5: Crusade (Default)
Unixronin

December 2012

S M T W T F S
      1
2345678
9101112131415
16171819202122
23242526272829
3031     

Most Popular Tags

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

March 25th, 2005

unixronin: Galen the technomage, from Babylon 5: Crusade (Default)
Friday, March 25th, 2005 10:16 am

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?