As IF Times

link Worlds sixth mass extinction may be underway: study – Yahoo! News.

Who pays for these studies?  When you are drawn in  by the hysterical headline, you naturally look to see how much time humankind has left.  Is it weeks? Months? Years? Should we put off buying that place in the Desert? Forget about college for the kids?  It turns out that you’d better not stop brushing your teeth.   It’s a wee  bit beyond human years.  Nothing wrong with being prepared, but the best estimates are between 3 and 22 centuries from now. 

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As in 300 to 2200 years.  Sadly, the idiots who did this study won’t be around to smack when their predictions are wrong.  They would have been paid their $$$ to come up with this brilliant study and then be off studying some other urgent calamity, like the sun running out of rays.  But let’s suspend our rationality for a moment and say we believe the results of their thorough and likely expensive study.  The question is, so what?  Do we leave messages in bottles for the great, great, great, great grand kids instructing them that buying real estate is not a good bet?  Should man start funding science programs to escape earth?

On the other hand, if mass extinction is in the cards anyway and mankind is doomed to extinction like dinosaurs and girl bands, then why are we spending any time, money and effort at all on the global warming industry?  Why should western society submit to self flagellation on the behest of those who transparently want a wealth transfer from a gullible society into their sanctimonious control?  How is this different from wise shamans of the ancient Mayan civiliation who believed that human sacrifices would somehow benefit their society?  I’m sure even the sacrificees believed so at the time.  I’ll bet they would be annoyed to learn that their self  sacrifice really didn’t achieve what was promised considering all the convincing rhetoric at the time.  Of course, back in their day, there wasn’t a lot of discourse on what would please the gods.  Somebody said it was so and that was that. 

Try as they might to emulate that kind of blind devotion, the global warming crowd today haven’t quite been able to achieve this, though they’ve come close.  Most rational people have caught on to the charade, but devotees still abound, similar to the faith of the Mayan sacrificees.  Most of these people are east to spot since they all subscribe to ‘the green’ look.  For some reason, a common feature is the crazed, wall eyed look, a la Marty Feldman.  In addition, beards and uncombed hair are also part of the appearance requirements.  The men are even worse.  It’s as if David Suzuki opened a costume shop. 

As the fervor dies down on this mania, we’ll keep an eye out for the next big calamity which will devastate mankind if we don’t tax more to prevent it.  But as the study above shows, we know the big day is really a few hundred or a few thousand years off.

link News from The Associated Press.

Here’s another anecdotal piece of evidence that America’s education standards are slipping badly.  Over 40 years ago, NASA was able to do the math, fine tune the engineering and manage the logistics of not only sending men to the moon and then also bring them back.   You would think that in the ensuing years since then, the technique of doing this kind of stuff would be pretty much nailed down.

This is not to denigrate the work and knowledge required to do this kind of thing, after all, launching something into orbit isn’t exactly as easy as turning  an ignition key.  It does however give hope to the skeptics who always thought the moon landing was created on a Hollywood sound stage.  It appears that NASA has failed in two consecutive attempts to launch and keep a satellite in orbit.  Huh? Haven’t they been launching satellites into orbit by the trainload for the past 50 years?  Most banana republics have been sending up their own satellites, so the science must be pretty routine.

This may have a link to America’s educational standards.  We’re all aware of the stories of college grads who can’t read or “write good”.  Maybe the approach of ‘whole learning’ is not as effective as specific learning.  In the old days, when asked to do a math problem, we had to get the right answer on the button.  Nowadays, when you say that pi is about 3 and a bit, that’s close enough.   After all, it’s not about the answer, it’s how you arrived at it.  It’s the academic equivalent of, it’s not the destination, it’s the journey. 

Of course one may argue that things were simpler back in the day.  Arguably true.  Back then, most boys would be somewhat familiar with the mechanical workings of a car.  You could fix almost anything with a screwdriver and a pair of pliers.  Nowadays, most boys couldn’t tell a dipstick from a pogo stick.  In our modern times, the mechanics of cars are so tied into computer technology, you’d have to be an expert in Windows to diagnose one.  Still, you’d think that the body of knowledge of things would be a platform upon which  to build further knowledge. 

The evolution of not just what but whom is being taught in school today certainly has an impact on the resulting workforce.  For instance, it’s been known that students of foreign backgrounds are more likely to populate the hard science and math classes than domestic students who veer into the social sciences.  From the website, Universities in the USA.com  we get the following statistics:

While overall international enrollment in U.S. universities and colleges increased by 3% in fall 2009, science and engineering (S&E) showed a rise of 4% (259,000 students). The increase in S&E enrollment accounted for a steady 44% of total international enrollment.

Notable increases in other fields are:

1. Mathematics – 10.3%
2. Economics – 9.3%
3. Engineering – 6.5%
4. Business – 2.8%
5. Computer Sciences – 2.6%

In addition, another interesting statistic:

The top 10 countries of citizenship for international students in US universities both in science and engineering and non-S&E fields are:

1st – India

2nd – China

3rd – South Korea

4th – Saudi Arabia

5th – Nepal

6th – Japan

7th – Turkey

8th – Mexico

9th – Canada

10th – Taiwan

Overall, the enrollment of international science and engineering students increased from China, India, the Middle East, and Africa. Two countries-India, with 68,000 S&E students, and China, with 54,000-accounted for almost half (47%) of all foreign S&E students in the United States in December 2009.

Maybe the U.S. has gone too far in the pursuit of developing the next hot consumer app for smart phones.  Maybe they need to reacquaint themselves with excellence in other areas of science and industry.  It’s possible that we’ve swung too far from formerly being a production and innovation society towards being  a massive consumer society.  That may partly explain the decline of U.S. industrial output.  If we have to one day go to some banana republic and ask, “how do you get a satellite into orbit again?” it would be a tad embarrassing.