Other things about radiation that I take for granted that shock many lay persons:
[ul]
[li]There are radioactive isotopes in almost everything. Everything.[/li][li]Bananas, for example, can be detected after you eat them.[/li][li]Exposure to radioactive materials does not make for Skippy the Super Germ. Mostly it just makes things dead. [/li][li]Tanning beds are radiation baths.[/li][li]Exposing food to radiation isn’t going to make it toxic, poisonous, or The Swamp Thing[sup]TM[/sup]![/li][li]Water and air filters in houses are full of radioactive isotopes after they’ve been used, because they concentrate the natually occurring isotopes in air and water. By any reasonable standard for most medical radioactive waste, these items, too, should be treated as RAM waste.[/li][/ul]
And, my personal favorite answer to the question I get everytime I mention having worked in nuclear power: “Nope. I was never scared of the reactor. The steam plant terrified me, however. After all, I was active duty when the Iwo Jima had that TG steam valve blow open.”
It was Socrates, not Aristotle, who was condemned to drink hemlock. And his “crime” was encouraging people to question authority not claiming the Earth was round.
IANAD, but it is my understanding that everyone in the medical profession knows that the widespread use of antibiotics is leading us towards a crisis. But the general public refuses to acknowledge this and continues to overuse antibiotics.
I’m a gymnastics coach. Yes, I have a 7 year old who can do 40 pushups in a row. No, I am not a sadist. Yes, I have an 8 year old who can do splits with her foot on a 20cm block. No, I am not a sadist.
How about the generally accepted theory that citing the entire OP for no apparent reason is uncool? (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)
OK, real answers:
People who merely speak a different dialect from yours are not thereby violating the rules of English grammar.
Appearing in a dictionary is not the criterion for status as a “real word”.
The English language did not stop evolving when you learned your gradeschool vocabulary.
No language has ever devolved into meaningless babble, and no language ever will.
The Bible was not written in English, and is not one coherent book, but rather a collection of various kinds of “books”, each with its own complex history, and often contradicting one another or containing internal contradictions.
There is no single behind-the-scenes “meaning” lurking inside a poem.
Shakespeare was Shakespeare.
Pure immersion methods of ESL instruction are not the best investment of education funding.
I have a good one. I am a former student of a Ph.D. program in behavioral neuroscience with a focus of sexual differentiation of the brain (didn’t complete my dissertation). There is a whole subfield of scientists working to understand where sex differences in the brain are, how they develop, and what effect they have on behavior. Somehow, the question of whether there are sex differences in the brain at all is still a loud and heated debate in the general public. They are everywhere in the brain. People get really touchy when you start to talk about brain differences at all. Male and female sex hormones are what largely cause sexual differentiation of the brain with a type of default being generally in the female pattern. There are some obvious examples that you can explain to people that they cannot deny. For example, female menstrual cycles are regulated in the brain and the male hardware in those areas is different. They will usually give you that but deny that there are others. The differences go from large to tiny to microscopic but they are certainly there.
Along those lines, the research on the neurobiology of homosexuality is much futher along than most people think. Animal models for homosexuality have been around since the 1970’s. It is not difficult to create a rat that displays homosexual behaviors using in vitro and in vivo injections of sex hormones at different times. Research has also been done in monkeys with the same results. I have done some of this myself and it is measurable and obvious. I am certain that it could be replicated in a human if it weren’t for the obvious reasons.
The misguidedness of the notion that crumbling to social pressures is responsible for the onset of anorexia nervosa, in the face of a 0.7 MZ twin concordance rate.
Even the toughest copy protection system is still just an exercise in reducing the temptation for unsophisticated consumers. The only truly uncopyable product is an unwatchable, unplayable, unusable product.
Using your credit card online is no less safe than using it in a store.
HTML is not programming.
Hologram is not pronounced like “holler gram”. The fact that a product has a hologram on it doesn’t mean it’s genuine; it only means that a lot of effort was put into making it. Most of the information that really lets you tell an original hologram from a fake is invisible to the naked eye.
Ditto that. Used to have to do that in a prior gig. One of the most frazzling parts of the job was having my boss come in with a request from his boss that So-and-So was speaking to group Such-and-Such tomorrow afternoon and he wanted something to show how the State was doing good things on a topic they’d be interested in. Never mind that he was speaking to a local garden club, or that the people who had the details and results on any projects whose outcomes they’d care about were wonks who couldn’t speak plain English if their lives depended on it. If the ladies in the garden club (or their spouses) were key constituents, there had to be some feel-good copy in that man’s hand by morning.
My mom insists on buying them in Mexico, even though I tell her that there is a reason that is quite good that those items aren’t over-the-counter in the US.
I see people do stupid stuff with antibiotics all the time, too. Especially, (1) stopping the antibiotics when they feel better but before they’ve completed the prescription, and (2) using someone else’s leftovers when they get sick.
I also have read doctors’ complaints that their patients demand antibiotics, especially for their kids, even after being given explanations of why it’s not a good idea to overuse them.
I suspect that most laypeople – at least, the kind of reasonably intelligent laypeople who read Jared Diamond – have at least some grasp of this. When an astrophysicist states that the Sun will blow up and destroy the Earth X billion years from now, or when a biochemist mentions the fact that substance Y is carciogenic, everybody understands that they are talking about things as they are, not as they should be.
What’s more likely is that many people, rightly or wrongly, do not consider psychology and sociobiology (the examples you were referring to) to be as ‘hard’ a science as physics or chemistry. Unlike physicists, a psychologist will often be suspected of going into the field with certain preconceived biases, and then setting up the experiments in such a way that the desired outcome will result. Especially when it comes to race- and gender-based differences in mental functioning, the popular perception is that there is not so much a scientific consensus, as there are different groups trying to find evidence supporting their ideological views. And that scientific consensus, in so far as it exists at all in those fields, is more influenced by the views of society than the other way around.
So when a scientist claims that there exists overwhelming evidence for the claim that men tend to be better at mathematics than women, people are going to assume that he is a member of the camp which wants to believe such differences exist – if they didn’t, they would have ignored the experiments which suggest such evidence, and concentrated on the ones which do not.
That’s right, Martin. That’s why we need an Academic Bill of Rights, to ensure that both sides of the issue get heard when we’re dealing with the humanities, the social sciences, and the arts. And after all, won’t the classroom be a much funner place for learning when it becomes more like Hardball?
Disclaimer: Not intended as a dig at Martin or his post.
Not all kids are going to become doctors or lawyers or even teachers, or are even very academically minded.
Passing new laws about the credentialing of teachers isn’t going to help very much. The moon landing program was put together by people taught by teachers with lifetime credentials who were able to teach anything at any time with no more academic upkeep.
Demanding that minorities “get equal access” to advanced science classes isn’t going to mean that these kids pass the science classes. You’re demanding that everyone in a high school not in Special Day Class eventually take chemistry? Do you know what my fail rate is going to go to? As it is, every year we drop a 2-3 from a class at the semester.
I think this is a poor example. He wasn’t talking about better average performance, he was speaking to a group of women and addressed the issue of the lack of women in higher areas of science and math. I recall a female mathematician appearing on CNN and saying that Sommers (who is the President of Harvard) cited SAT scores in his comments.
Moving along, I think the most obvious thing in my field that is controversial to the public is that journalists aren’t evil. We also, generally, do not have agendas we set out to prove and don’t set out to ‘get’ people. Of course, I’m speaking only of print journalists here.
Meant to add about the SAT thing: the idea was that when you’re talking about the most advanced fields in mathematics, average performance by gender isn’t relevant.
(Sorry, couldn’t resist.)
