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In This Issue

• Dino-Battle Site Un-Earthed on Philosophy Lawn
• Columbia Bioengineers Make Über-Children for a Brighter West Harlem
• How Thinking Hurts America
• Columbia Makes Valuable Contributions to World
• Letters to the Editor
• North Korea: Major Source of Diabetes
• Frontiers of Soul-Crushing Disappointment... and Science
• If I Don't Get Good Housing, People Are Going to Die
• CS Class For The English Lass
• Science Update
• Poetry 4 Physicists
• Porn Older Than Nana
• Fed Science Fair: Cigarettes Are Bad for Kids and Animals
• Wacky Fun Whitey!
• How Many Licks...
• How to: E-Z Bake Thermonuclear Warhead
• Variations of a Sheep
• Marauding Interviewer
• How Many Licks, Vol. II
• The Staff of 20.6
• THEY Watch

Ted Holden

Call me stupid, but I'm an optimist. When the registrar told me I was taking "Frontiers of Science" this semester, I felt elation. I am a mid-eighties child of indoctrination through televised edutainment. I imagined Frontiers of Science being a whirlwind tour of lasers, antimatter and robots, a chance to debunk Intelligent Design, to prove global warming, and to unravel the deeper mysteries of the human mind.

Picture a kid who's waited all year for Christmas for a brand new iPod. Now picture the same kid on Christmas morning. There's a conspicuously iPod-shaped box under the tree... but when he tears open the wrapping, a bear trap inside rips his tiny frame in half. That's pretty much how I feel about Frontiers of Science.

To their credit, the Frontiers folks tried. The "required reading" was written in a no-nonsense style, but it didn't deal with much beyond, say, high school statistics. But, you see, I was under the impression that this course was called "Frontiers of Science," not "Frontiers of Statistics." I don't feel any sort of scientific thrill when I'm asked to calculate a regression line for actual data - golly, Mr. Wizard, what'll we do next?

But all this I can stand, you say, provided they at least talk about science in the lectures, right? Well, Timmy, this is where the bear trap really severs your spine. Recently, we were treated to a lecture on the ever-important topic of global warming. "I'm going to give you the facts," said the lecturing scientist. "I'm going to give you all the tools you need to win a dinner-table conversation about global warming." Sounds great, right? Well, what followed was fifty minutes of talking about what global warming wasn't, ten minutes of graphs with admittedly huge margins of error, a dodgy declaration that the earth was heating for a reason he refused to identify, a trailer for The Day After Tomorrow, a jab at some crackpot society that thinks a warm planet is good, and a farewell exhortation to go out and be good little fonts of information.

What's this? I go in expecting clever arguments for global warming and get a movie trailer for some crap-tastic summer blockbuster? Oh, but this is only the tip of the globally-toasty iceberg. When I next sauntered half-heartedly into the discussion section, they passed out a map of the world, with little dots on it. "The dots represent the net climate change in those various areas over the specific amount of time," the leader said. "Red means warming, blue means cooling. Can you fit a curve for this data?" We all looked at it for a good five minutes. "We could," someone finally said, "but this is a black-and-white copy."

When the topic of evolution came up, I braced myself, raised my hand, and asked a question. "Why did we just dismiss Intelligent Design with a laugh in the lecture instead of actually scientifically refuting it?" I pointed out an editorial in that morning's paper from the leading scholar on Intelligent Design. "Isn't this the frontier of science?" My discussion leader, who's a smart and nice guy trapped in this position, smiled sadly and said "Well, I think there's a discussion on that at the Veritas forum tonight," before launching into yet another display of standard deviations. Gosh, we sure are cutting the edge of margin-of-error studies!

Finally, this past week, we got into serious intense science in the lecture. Some thickly-accented physicist hopped up on stage and talked about quantum mechanics and made big equations fairly comprehensible. Unfortunately, this was merely baiting the bear trap. At the end of the day, our handlers rushed to assure us not to worry, that the bad science would be going away shortly and we'd be returning to your regularly scheduled programming. I think the actual excuse was "the next lecture will be more warm and cuddly." Phew! Glad we're not going to be forced to actually learn science here! I'm sure the guy who gave that lecture was shuttled off to a padded cell and tickled with feathers for his crimes - "More cuddly! Less science! Next time you try teaching applicable information, we will hit you with pillows!"

The problem with Frontiers of Science is that the powers-that-be of our dear Alma Mater, the same brilliant minds that brought us Lerner Hall and that nice faux 250th celebration cake, thought we non-SEAS kids would balk at hard science but, for some reason, didn't want us using just "Groups and Symmetry" to fulfill our requirements. So they built a course that calls itself "science" but lacks... well... you know... science.

It's pretty sad that as a child of that aforementioned bygone era of edutainment that my love of nifty-cool scientific discoveries is being so thoroughly exterminated by a course that calls itself "Frontiers of Science." I came in bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and ready to learn, but they're trying as hard as they can to keep me from any sort of education. I complained about this to some engineers, but they just laughed that soulless laugh of theirs. "You think that's bad?" they said. "At least you're not taking Gateway."