Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

The teaser headline said “Disgraced Scientist Sells Nobel Prize.”  I think “controversial” might have been a more accurate word than  “disgraced.”  Sure, there are certainly some people  who  don’t like him.  One scientist who knows him and has worked with  him referred to him as “the  most obnoxious  person alive.”  I don’t know  about that.  Never met the guy.  And, I’ve known plenty of obnoxious  people in my life who turned out to be decent folks when the test came.

James Watson

Feminists hate him because they think he stole the credit  for  discovering DNA.  There’s a case to be made.  He  certainly built heavily on Rosalind Franklin’s research, some of which he’d obtained against her will, by skullduggery, but he and  Crick were really the ones to put  it all together.  But it’s not his fault she didn’t get a share in the Nobel.  The Nobel’s rules say  prize winners must  still be alive, and  she’d died (cancer) 4 years before  the prize  was awarded.

He has made negative comments about fat people (“I always feel bad when I interview fat people, because I know  I’m not going to hire them.”), and a lot of people think his  comments about  stupidity and ugliness (according to Watson, conditions which  could be cured by genetics) were  a bit insensitive, and the LGBT community was a little bit incensed by his suggestion that, if we discover a gay gene and can detect it in  unborn children, it would be a valid reason for an abortion.

But, it was his comments about race (Latinos are horny all the time, and Black  people  aren’t very bright) that really  got him into trouble.  He even  admitted that giving a couple of million to charity after selling off his prize is an attempt to get back in the public’s good graces.  It worked for Bill Gates.

I’m  sure what he said could have been  phrased more elegantly,  but his essential point was that different races have different characteristics, and it goes somewhat deeper than skin color.  Asians are superior at math and engineering, apparently, Black people dominate in sports and are also way over-represented  on the music  circuit.

These aren’t absolutes.  We are all individuals, and deserve to be treated as such.   There are black people  who don’t play basketball.  There are, no doubt, Asians who suck at math.  There  are Latino males with erectile dysfunction.  And there are lots and lots  of  stupid  white people.  But Jim Watson isn’t one of them.

I always look forward to the weekend, which starts at 4 o’clock Friday after two classes with little kids, as a long period in which I’ll be able to get a lot done, particularly writing, but when reality meets fantasy, reality always wins, at least  in the present.

I always forget about my weekend classes when I calculate how much I’m going to get done on the weekend.  It’s one girl, 11 years old, a one hour class but counting travel time and a cup of tea with the parents afterwards, it’s about a 3 hour chunk out of the day.

Got home about 11:30 and did actually do a bit of writing, this damned book, so close but yet so far from finishing and my plan was to have the rough draft completed by the end of this weekend, but unless I have a miraculous burst of  words pour forth tomorrow, it ain’t gonna happen, but I will hit my secondary goal of having it done by Tuesday.

Then, we took Isabel to her birthday party at McDonald’s, Sam had taken off to the mall with some friends and was going to meet us there.  Well, it was a very nice party, I was a bit surprised at how it worked, the adults weren’t even in the room, we could see them through the glass, there was just one employee there and she entertained them very well.  I’d seen the girls before, when I pick Isabel up from school, and she talks about them all the time, but this was the first time I really got to view the  group dynamic and it was beautiful, the way they all laugh at once.

We called Sam and he had some story about how his hat had been stolen and something about keys and we thought he was just making up an excuse, because he’s done that before, but when we were on our way home we called him again and he was at the police station so now we were worried, but he was telling the truth, somebody’d snatched his hat  and run, and we went home.

I did a bit more writing, I’ve got the last chapter done (in my head, but  it’s short),  and I may just get my miracle day tomorrow.

I’m not even recommending that you click on the link I’m providing here, unless you’re seriously into that thing, and you might be, I don’t know, but to me it seems like an over-rated line of speculation.

Of course, it’s science, and every new bit of knowledge helps us to put together the whole puzzle, so I am glad scientists are exploring that  angle, but the way it gets reported, every couple of weeks it seems, is as if it will have a huge psychological impact on  mankind to find out that there was life on Mars 100 million years ago.

It won’t.  If it happened,  it happened a hundred million years ago.  There is no current  civilization on Mars, there are no people we can talk to.  When we say we are searching for life in the universe, we do not mean some place that had it once upona  time, we aren’t talking about bacteria embedded in  comets, we are talking about  bipedal creatures with huge eyes, slick  skin and  no  genitalia.  Aliens.

There are some who theorize that  all life on Earth originated from bacteria or  something that  was comet-borne.  That is even less  relevant.   We are primates, descended from primates, but we keep other  primates in zoos.  If  we’re not even treating our nearest co-descendants as equals, imagine how much less people  are going  to care if it is proven that  life  on Earth  originated off  Earth. That was microscopic life, that life  had no  connection  with  our life, seemingly.

What’s important is that that life, this life that we are blessed with, evolved on Earth, in symbiosis with this planet.  We are earthlings.  Whatever our origin.

I think I’m a pretty good  teacher; better than average, anyway.  But, I sure had a humbling experience today.  My early morning class is routine, an adult student who is very  easy to talk to.  She’s got two young boys so we talk about  kids a lot.  My four gymnasium classes went smoothly.  Even the bad class wasn’t too bad.

Then I had (as I have every Thursday) my German pre-schoolers.  I’ve been teaching them since the beginning of October, so I’ve had eight lessons with them so far this year.  There are only 4 kids in the class, and I had  3 of them last year as well.  Some days there are only 3, some days only two.

There are a lot of things I do over and over again.  I read to them, Dr. Seuss mostly.  We go through some flash cards, and a couple of them can be very  competitive.  I do the color game, where I shout out a color and the kids have to run and touch something of that color.  They like anything that involves running.  Head and Shoulders, Knees and Toes is a favorite game.  They don’t have enough patience for The eensy-weensy spider.

Anyway, I just had two students today.  One boy, who is a bit of a brat but actually fairly smart and knows a lot of words in  English.  And one girl, the one I didn’t  teach last year.  The thing is, I realized today, what I should have realized two months ago, that she doesn’t know anything at all in English.  I tried to get her to count to 10.  She couldn’t.  I tried to get her to recite the alphabet.  She couldn’t.  I tried playing Head and  Shoulders, Knees and Toes.  She didn’t have a clue what I was saying.

We played the color game.  She was totally watching the boy and waiting for cues.  She didn’t know brown, yellow, green, blue or red.  I tried animals and animal sounds.  Nothing.

For the last two months, she’s just been watching the other kids, mouthing the words without  actually saying anything, and getting through the hour just by being cute,  and me not being smart enough to figure it out.

Oh, well.  She’s only four.  Still plenty of time to learn.  I’ll have to pay a bit  more attention to her in future, though.

It’s happened again.  The police officer who choked the man  to death  in  New York  won’t go to trial.  Grand Jury decided.

I don’t know what will happen.  I don’t expect the massive protest like we’ve seen in Ferguson.  The case just hasn’t drawn the same amount of attention.  I don’t know why.

I don’t know why there hasn’t been massive public outrage over the  guy who was shot dead while he was standing in the toy department at Wal-Mart, holding a toy gun, perhaps contemplating buying it, when one of the customers called police, said they saw a suspicious character, and the police rushed in and shot him dead, on suspicion of being suspicious.

I don’t think there’s near enough outrage in the case of Tamir Rice, who was killed by a police  officer who’s seen  too many cop shows on TV.  His partner pulled up at high  speed, and he leaped from the car, gun blazing, and  killed little Tamir, 12 years old, playing with a plastic gun.  I’m sure they realized their mistake immediately, but they waited 4 minutes before they called an ambulance.

This one is scary.  White kids play with toy guns in the park, too.

Maybe there will be some action taken into the case of a man who was shot in New York City because he was mistaken for a suspect in a robbery.  In fact, he was a police officer himself, in pursuit of aforementioned suspect, but he happened to be black.  Will the police investigate the death of one of their own?  We’ll see.  I wouldn’t bet on it.

Michael Brown has, for some reason, become the flashpoint, the episode that everyone has focused on, but incidents like this are happening every few days, it seems like.

A pattern is emerging.