Yep. It means the school will now probably be obligated to double check all the wiring in the room just to cover their butts with respect to electrical code in case of future fire, etc.

...only 5% of said science teachers have *any* post-secondary science education...

Pardon me, it's 'less than 10% have any physical science major or certification.'

And who exactly is supposed to popularize science at the middle-school level when only 5% of said science teachers have *any* post-secondary science education. Science needs to be popularized from every avenue possible. If that means having a handful of prominent scientists giving up research time to helping steer the next generation towards science, then so be it.

Pfft.. why must you always think you're the center of the Universe.

The problem with questioning scientific theories in grade school is that the foundations that support the theories (and that refute the "controversies") are typically interdisciplinary, and likely far beyond the introductory level. The teachers themselves are hardly qualified to do this in a classroom setting, even if they're objective and not actively trying to steer the kids astray. Good luck getting into worthwhile debates of Mitochondrial DNA, radiometric dating, fossil records and continental drift. More time would need to be spent teaching those things than actually teaching Evolution.

I remember Dr. Krauss bandying about a statistic that more than 90% of middle school science teachers in the US have never taken a post-secondary science class. Now considering the general state of the US public school system and their obvious inconsistent ability to teach Evolution in the first place, I'm not sure how a teacher can critique something they've never even been exposed to properly.

If the problem with the prequels were length or pacing then editing them down would help. The problem though is that the screenplay is so weak in characters. If you don't value the friendship or love story, then you can't feel the emotional pay offs to any degree. Editing alone definitely can't fix that. It pretty much needs a top to bottom rewrite.

The uncanny valley probably has as much to do with art as it does technical, considering that even in offline rendered images the examples are pretty few where the valley is crossed. For actual moving video/animation, I'm not sure if there's even a single example?

I'm pretty sure that the self-publishing movement of existing authors has had the breaks put on it by the publishers.

Non-compete clauses and so forth.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/18/publishing-perils-in-the-digital-age/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Yep, and it's tough to put equal value to something that you know is costing the publisher virtually $0 (after ebook publishing costs are divided up among many tens of thousands of copies sold.) I was ready to purchase my first couple e-books from Amazon about a month ago, had my wallet out and everything, and then saw that they were $3 *more* than the hard covers. I didn't want to buy and wait a week for a hard covers, and I didn't want to feel ripped off by buying the e-books. Ended up buying neither. Great books, btw.

It's possible they could mark or imprint something on the DVD so that you simply can't exchange the same disk between a group of people.

"Dark matter" isn't simply regular matter/particles that we just can't see due to not emitting light. We may not know quite what it is, but we have a pretty good idea about what it is not, and that's regular matter as we know it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ImvlS8PLIo#t=1582s Worth watching the whole thing, but this portion briefly addresses gravitational lensing.

Tablets and smartphones are held much closer to the face than laptop screens tend to be. Your ~125 PPI screen is probably adequate at 24" from your face, but at 12", it's probably not so great.

They should ban the ingesting of the Eucharist as the science is still not settled on the effects of transubstantiation.

Would you agree there would be something that we could constitute as a form of evidence to objectively decide whether stoning women for reading is "good" or "bad"? If we were to perform a study on two otherwise identical cultures and find that either a stoning or non-stoning resulted in a greater average level of prosperity or happiness among the group, would that constitute evidence? Even without that hypothetical study having been done, would it not be reasonable to assume that either one or the other would probably produce a different level of prosperity, and hence be reasonable to assume that there are likely to be objectively better/worse modes of morality?