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POPSMostly African American Children are Assaulted Legally in Schools
Just as slavery, Jim Crow laws and the subjugation of women in the USA are looked upon as primitive and embarrassing practices, I believe that corporal punishment in schools will someday be looked upon as a strange and inexplicably cruel practice. It will also be looked upon as another vehicle of racism as this study indicates. What will the conservative critics say in response? That African American children misbehave more in schools and, therefore, deserve the punishment? But isn't that what they say about higher incarceration rates for African Americans? So what is the picture that emerges from those who rationalize these institutional racist practices? In my view, it tells us that (their denials notwithstanding) conservatives believe that from childhood to adulthood African Americans are naturally more disposed to violate cultural norms, to act out in an anti-social manner. It's a racist orientation masquerading as a pro law and order stance. Corporal punish
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POPSInventions - the 19th Century Many of these seem so much part of life, others seem so primitive in comparison to our time, and yet they were invented not so long ago. A full list on source.
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POPSScience, faith and everyday miracles "An Einstein letter that sold at an auction in May leaves little doubt of his atheism. "The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish," he wrote in 1954, a year before his death." "And yet Einstein is famous for a number of teasingly "spiritual" quotations - "I cannot believe that God plays dice with the cosmos," for one - that suggest he is a theist. A growing body of Einsteinologists believes the physicist was using such God language metaphorically to express a human impulse for finding meaning and comfort in the clock-like workings of the universe. As he wrote in 1931:"
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POPSHistorian: Genocidal Napoleon was as barbaric as Hitler The Haitians fought to the death for independence, which they finally declared in 1804. Prisoners on both sides were regularly tortured and killed, and their heads were mounted on the walls of stockades or on spikes beside the roads. Non-combatants, too, were raped and slaughtered. According to contemporary accounts, the French used dogs to rip black prisoners to pieces before a crowd at an amphitheatre. Allegdly on Napoleon's orders, sulphur was extracted from Haitian volcanoes and burned to produce poisonous sulphur dioxide, which was then used to gas black Haitians in the holds of ships - more than 100,000 of them, according to records. The use of these primitive gas chambers was confirmed by contemporaries. Antoine Metral, who in 1825 published his history of the French expedition to Haiti, writes of piles of dead bodies everywhere, stacked in charnel-houses.
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POPS3D renderings of the human body Rather than imagine what goes on in the body, now CGI can create images that can seem almost as alive as we are .The technology used is only at a relatively primitive stage. Can't wait until they introduce holograms. It leaves 'Fantastic Voyage.' a cheap trick of the 1950s.
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POPSWill Our Future Brains Be Smaller? Why does the brain need these two decision-making areas? What benefit does the new cortex bring? After all, extra brain means extra weight and energy required to carry it around. Furthermore, is the older sub-cortical system now largely redundant? If so, could we expect it to atrophy in future humans so our brains become smaller? The results of their modelling showed that when the threat level is high, such as the risk of being attacked by a dangerous animal, it is very useful to have the fast-acting, if inaccurate, system. But when dealing with situations which don't occur very often, or complex scenarios with many conflicting cues such as social situations, the cortical system is of more use than the sub-cortical system.
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POPSHow The Greens Captured Energy Policy Other aspects of the Green argument have also collapsed. New discoveries off Brazil and in the Gulf of Mexico have nearly doubled international oil reserves, pushing backwards from the "peak oil" date. And global warming, that notorious by-product of "oil addiction," has faded to the point that its advocates are now reduced to threatening dissenters with prison. It has gone almost completely unacknowledged that with oil shale, offshore deposits, and new resources such as the hydrocarbon sludge deposits off B.C. and Alaska, the OPEC of the late 21st century is going to be right here. That's a goal worth working toward. Breaking the power of the Greens is yet another possible benefit. Energy reform is an egg and rock situation for the Democrats. From the old Irish proverb: "When the rock hits the egg, alas for the egg. When the egg hits the rock, alas for the egg."
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POPSMars Soil Resembles Veggie-Garden Dirt What kind of life can persist in the atmosphere thousand times less dense, planet-wide dust storms and average (!) temperature -63 grad.C? Primitive bacterial? As on Earth poles.
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POPSArtifacts and Human History Yet many other unearthed "out-of-place artifacts" create obvious contradictions to the conservative picture of antiquity. They don't fit the established pattern of prehistory, pointing back instead to the existence of advanced civilizations before any of the known ancient cultures came into being.
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POPSFossil fish reveals complex evolution One of the things about evolution, is that it keeps branching. Some of the missing links, are the common ancestors of various branches. Branches often splitting because of different threads finding different answers to the same problem. We wont find all of the threads, probably the best we can do is continue to review, and clarify the principal of adaptation. Perhaps the history of the earth's climate can be drawn from the adaptations that have resulted from change. There were millions no doubt billions of species for which there is no fossil record. Every species that exists has the potential to propagate a new split. Evolution continues today and will continue while the earth supports life.
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POPSArt and Body Enhancement Artists and designers experiment with the human body as a material for artistic creation. The results are anywhere between intriguing and odd.
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POPSAstronomical Alignments of Ancient Structures Whether one accepts conventional science's view of "primitive" man as an ape or not, there are volumes of evidence that cannot be explained away; that the ancients were anything but knuckle dragging near-beasts.
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