It’s a Mad, Mad World!

 

“I do not believe that this legislation changes the scientific standards that are taught in our schools or the curriculum that is used by our teachers.”

–TN Governor Bill Haslam on the new Tennessee law mandating creationism be taught in science curriculum.

This week, like so many, has been one of those crazy periods of unrelated and unrelenting randomness, occasionally punctuated with a few rays of sunlight amidst an otherwise unsettling and stressful Spring. Ok, what am I talking about? Well, rather than try and explain it all in a coherent way, let me offer you a random sample–a meze if you will, of my own personal News of the Weird for this week.

A quick note on the list below: I have a bad habit of finding oodles of interesting news stories without time to reflect on them. As I’m surfing the internets and come across an interesting story I dump the link into a draft blog post, with plans to come back later and write about it. This post was originally about the Anthropocene, a part 2 continuation, but as I added more related–or what I thought were related stories–the original Anthropocene thread got lost–don’t worry, I’ll write that post soon, in a future post. So here is this week’s News of the Weird, compiled from my web travails…

Tennessee passes creationism bill (today 4/11)

FDA contemplating stricter antibiotic regulations for animals (today 4/11)

Northeast US faces gas spike as more gas refineries close (4/10)

March weather breaks heat records in 15,000 US cities (4/9)

Honey bee deaths linked to corn pesticide produced by Bayer Pharmaceuticals (4/6)

I would have like to post a piece on all of these, but for now, I’ll just leave this post short, with these links serving as a fuller post. I’ll come back and revisit some of these in another post, and I just finished writing about the madness at U Pitt, which took most of my writing time for now.

Until next time…remember that creationism “doesn’t changes the scientific standards that are taught in our schools or the curriculum that is used by our teachers”. FTW?

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