A quick note about using newer version of Ubuntu: From 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) on, Ubuntu doesn’t come with a g77 package. g77 is not used for GEANT4 specifically, but with CERN’s ROOT, which is an amazing statistical analysis package. You won’t NEED this for GEANT4, but it allows you to do some cool stuff.  Anyhow, instead of g77, Intrepid (8.10) comes with ‘gfortran’ which is not the same code, it seems.  Now, there are two ways on handling it.  I, personally, advise sticking to 8.04 and the g77 it comes with.  However, you can use a newer version of Ubuntu (or its variants) and either use Hardy packages or install from source.  Either way, it’s nice to have ROOT installed for statistical analysis.

As a side note, I’m hoping to (eventually) post a complete walkthrough of the process I go through when compiling CLHEP, GEANT4, and ROOT on a 8.04 machine.  It’ll probably be a while before I manage to get it written up, but it sure would be nice…

Quote from the Purdue News Service:

Purdue University on Friday (July 18) announced that an investigative committee with members from five institutions has concluded that two allegations against Rusi Taleyarkhan, a professor of nuclear engineering, constituted research misconduct.

I can’t really comment on this too terribly much as I’m a student in the School of Nuclear Engineering.  That being said, I hope that this doesn’t tarnish the reputation of Purdue or NE there–there is only so much they can do and they couldn’t be expected to do more than they already have.  So, that all being said, read up on it and see what you think.

Before I go on my rant about why this law is absolutely ridiculous, I feel that I should quote the parts of the law here that seem most inflammatory here.  Also, please note that a parish is the Louisiana equivalent of a county in the other US States.

Section B1:

The State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, upon request of a city, parish, or other local public school board, shall allow and assist teachers, principals, and other school administrators to create and foster an environment within public elementary and secondary schools that promotes critical thinking skills, logical analysis, and open and objective discussion of scientific theories being studied including, but not limited to, evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning.

Such assistance shall include support and guidance for teachers regarding effective ways to help students understand, analyze, critique, and objectively review scientific theories being studied, including those enumerated in Paragraph (1) of this Subsection. [The previous paragraph]

Section D:

This Section shall not be construed to promote any religious doctrine, promote discrimination for or against a particular set of religious beliefs, or promote discrimination for or against religion or nonreligion.

Okay, so, the groundwork of the law has been laid out.  There are a few interesting parts of this law to me.  Why did they choose to enumerate the specific topics they did?  Why did they choose such vague wording when describing the instruction of students?  Why in the hell can no one but scientists figure out what the word ‘theory’ in a scientific context means?  They’re so bent on promoting the ’scientific method’ with the damned hypothesis that you think they would use that word instead of theory.

A large problem with this law is that it puts certain ‘controversial’ topics into the law which, to be honest, is not necessary even if they’re trying to push the inclusion of creationism (or ID or whatever).  Why specify evolution, global warming, and human cloning?  As far as I know there is no ‘theory’ of human cloning.  It’s something we may or may not be trying to accomplish, but it’s not a theory.  Global Warming, as far as I know, doesn’t really have a theory attached, but I’ll let that one slide.  Evolution (and “the origins of life”) is a well established theory that, like any other theory, is subject to any new findings we happen to discover or develop on the subject.  Personally, I think that String Theory (once again, not an actual theory) is more controversial than Evolution–We have evidence of one and we have highly idealized, incomplete, mathematical models for the other.

The main problem with this law, however, is that this law puts the critiquing of well-established scientific theories into the hands of someone who may not even have a degree in their field!  A science education degree does not give a person the same amount of knowledge and authority on evolution as a degree in, say, Biology would.  Why are we allowing teachers to disagree with the scientific community at large?  Not only are they most likely wrong, but their own personal viewpoints are being pushed as facts to their students when they are, clearly, not.  There is a reason that scientific theories are scientific theories.  They have been vetted over a period of many years (usually decades) and have been proven to explain the natural actions of the universe.  It is ridiculous to think that a class of high school students could find a huge flaw in well-vetted scientific theories.  This point alone makes it very obvious what the legislators were going for.

I wish states would stop passing laws like this.  It always ends up the same way.  The law gets passed, a parent gets pissed, sues, wins.  What follows is a horribly drawn-out series of appeals in which, eventually, the parents wins out because the case finally hits a judge that realizes that ID is just repackaged creationism.  Then the school has to pay out a bunch of public tax money to lawyers, the parents, etc.  And we wonder why schools don’t have enough funding?  Oh well–now we just have to wait for the courts to overturn this and hope this doesn’t sway even more young people into believing religion because of lies marauding as science.