When chemistry is outlawed, only outlaws will do chemistry

Hank Fox has brought a significant problem to my attention, one that I’ve addressed before: one of the consequences of growing American cowardice and these trumped-up Wars on Terror and Drugs (let’s call them what they are: a War on Civil Liberties) is that science and science education are collateral damage. Memepunks has an excellent post on this subject:

In an attempt to curb the production of crystal meth, more than 30 states have now outlawed or require registration for common lab equipment. In Texas, you need to register the purchase of Erlenmeyer flasks or three-necked beakers. The same state where I do not have to register a handgun, forces me to register a glass beaker. In Portland, Oregon, even pH strips are suspect. Modern off the shelf “chemistry” sets are sold without any of the questionable chemicals or equipment. For example, when a current company tried re releasing a kit based on the one marketed by Mr. Wizard himself back in the 1950s, they found that they could only include five of the original chemicals in the set. The rest of the items were replaced with inane things like super balls and balloons. Even a non neutered modern chemistry set like the C3000 from Thames and Kosmos is forced to ship without many key chemicals, suggesting to their customers that they acquire the missing ingredients elsewhere.

In the name of child safety, in order to inhibit drug peddlers, because we don’t want to make things easy for terrorists, we have put up bureaucratic barriers to the purchase of laboratory glassware — while encouraging unimpaired, unchecked access to guns.

Is this a screwed-up country, or what?

The memepunks site has some suggestions for getting around the restrictions.

But there are some lights shinning in the darkness of this situation. Companies like United Nuclear, which continue to sell chemicals and lab equipment despite legal problems, and websites that support chemistry hobbyists. Like Readily Available Chemicals, which maintains a list of places where one can make an end run around the restrictions and purchase chemicals or lab ware. Or The Nitrogen Order, who provides a how to on building your own chemistry set, and provides lessons and experiments. And Science Madness who’s forums give hobbyists a place to meet, compare notes, and exchange secrets of the trade anonymously. One of my favorites is the Society for Amateur Scientists, which just began a LABRats program, to match up youngsters that are interested in science with mentors that are practicing scientists.

That’s right, people, this is what it is coming down to: you need to break the law to do science. We’re criminalizing nerds.

At least making science dangerous and illicit and illegal ought to make us romantic outlaws look cool.

Ewww E-cards

E-cards are annoying. Now what if you had e-cards that looked like they’d been drawn by a first-grader, that contain extraordinarily cheesy tinky-boop music that sounds like it came off a first generation Nintendo, and that recited hokey lies at you? You’d have Christian evolution e-cards. These are guaranteed to turn your brain to mush with prolonged exposure. The lack of talent and stupidity on display will make you sorrow for your impoverished Christian brethren, as well.

Don’t miss the marriage e-cards, especially the one about how wives must submit!

(If you are thinking about sending any of these e-cards to me, don’t bother: the source is already in my junk mail filter.)

(Blame Narciblog)

Steal this post

There’s a minor contretemps going on at scienceblogs — a few of our Original Content Providers are a bit peeved at certain abysmally uncreative sites that think they can get rich by collecting rss feeds and putting them on a site with google ads, while adding no original content of their own. I don’t mind the rss parasites trying that at all — if it’s in my syndication, it’s out there and you can jiggle it around however you want — but it’s such a stupid, mindless strategy. Who’s going to regularly read a site that just repackages other people’s work, when the originals are easily and freely available? And if they stumble across something I wrote on another site, as long as it has a link back here, I really don’t care; it just means they’re doing some half-assed, clumsy advertising for me, for free.

So I’m not joining in the complaints. However, I do think this great comment from a Technorati rep at Bora’s is an optimal way to handle it.

Thanks for bringing that to our attention, ny articles won’t be getting indexed by us. We try to index only original sources and to avoid aggregator/planet sites; we definitely don’t want mechanical feedscrape-and-adsense sites.
cheers,
-Ian (from Technorati)

A parasitic clone-dump really represents minor damage, in the form of inefficiency, on the internet — it’s nice to see that it’s also seen that way by at least one of the network aggregating services, and that they are going to detour around it.

Now for the philosophical dilemma: are Technorati and Google also mechanical scrapers of the original content on the web? Should we be irritated that Google keeps copies of our web pages on its servers?

Rip-off artist catch-and-release

Here’s a nice story about a woman striking back at identity theft. She was robbed of $9,000 in 3 days (with even more long term grief) by a sleazoid who got financial information by breaking into her mail — and then she spotted the thief (recognized from a security camera photo) and got her arrested after chasing her on foot. A happy ending!

Happy, that is, until you learn the conclusion of the court trial. The thief was given probation. She’d perpetrated her crimes while on probation, so this seems like a particularly futile sentence.

It’s not an entirely pleasant prospect. Read the article for some common-sense suggestions at the end on how to avoid identity theft in the first place.

(via De Rerum Natura)

Show Phil some godless love

Don’t even try to tell me that science and religion are compatible — Phil has just encountered a perfect example of why they aren’t. He’s irritated that the jury at a trial used prayer to help them come to a decision, and he comes right out and says it: prayer doesn’t work. That’s an empirical and logical conclusion, and the efficacy of prayer is something that has constantly failed any test, and further, has been the subject of some egregiously bad testing. Prayer is an excellent example of religion trying to claim their metaphysic has real world consequences, and it has been consistently slapped down as nonsense.

Now the sad part: a number of his readers are very upset that he dared to criticize a religious concept (this is probably not the subset of readers we share; I drove those blitherers away screaming, long ago) and some are even saying they won’t read the Bad Astronomy blog any more. You know me, always kind and generous and helpful, and willing to encourage infidelity wherever I see it, so I’ll just step in and urge any of the readers here who aren’t regulars at Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy blog to head on over there and fill in the gaps left by the few fleeing Christians. It’s worth it for the science, and no, Phil doesn’t impose any doctrinal demands on you, so you can read it if you’re a rational Christian too.

(Why do I feel a little bit like the Wicked Witch urging my minions to “fly, my pretties, fly!” as I do this?)

A Cincinnati local paper reacts to Ken Ham’s Folly

A Cincinnati news weekly, the City Beat, has weighed in on the Creation “Museum”. They don’t seem to like it.

Here are some of the good quotes from the article.

Gene Kritsky, biologist:

it’s almost like intellectual molestation.

Not only is it bad science, it is filled with bad religion, and it’s also bad sociology and bad history, too.

Lawrence Krauss, physicist:

This is an institution designed to mis-educate children.

This is nothing but an institutionalized lie and a scientific fraud.

Edwin Kagin, lawyer:

What they are doing is no less an attack on the very way that science and enlightened thought works to produce the modern world. They want to substitute mythology for knowledge. Ignorance is a form of terrorism.

The local paper, The Cincinnati Post:

Frankly, we wish the Genesis museum had been built somewhere else. We wish the 250,000 men, women and especially children expected to visit this year were getting a view of science that comports with what science really knows about the world. Why? Because Greater Cincinnati is trying so hard to market itself, nationally and internationally as a hospitable home for a knowledge economy.

At least, I get the impression it’s not a favorable review. Maybe I need to read between the lines a little more carefully.