Advocacy: A discouraging conversation

[Alexander Henry]

All,

Having a little more time on my hands, I recently picked up this  
discussion.

Regarding Bills of Rights...  Rights themselves are inalienable, but the  
document is a formal acknowledgement that they will be respected, and  
legal teeth will enforce it.  Everyone in North Korea and Cambodia has  
these rights too, but their government doesn't choose to draft a document  
to formally say they respect those rights, so they get violated.   
Americans have always had to fight for their rights.  Heck, both the Bill  
of Rights and slavery were law from 1791 through 1865.

Regarding general ignorance about computers, knowhow, math...  Anyone ever  
watch The Simpsons?  :D

http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20060610/bob8.asp

Did you know almost everyone on their writing staff holds a doctorate or  
masters degree in hard science and math?  They routinely tickle math fans  
with obscure tidbits here and there.  Once when Homer stumbled into the  
third dimension, the equation 1782^12 + 1841^12 = 1922^12 was floating  
about in threespace.  Plug this into a calculator or a 32-bit computer,  
and it appears to be true, disproving Fermat's last theorem.  But it's  
only true given a computer's roundoff error.  Fans responded quite well to  
this obscure joke.  The Simpsons also loves to make fun of people's  
ineptitude with math and education in general, I'm sure everyone here  
remembers something.  The article above mentions an episode where the  
school gets divided into girl's and boy's classes, so girls can learn math  
without obnoxious boys; but then to Lisa's horror they were teaching,  
"What does a plus sign smell like? Is the number 7 odd or just  
different?".  Lisa then dresses in drag and sneaks into the boy's school  
to learn real math.

Just fight the good fight a little bit at a time.  Talk to those who  
listen, give nothing more than your forty-second elevator speech to  
everyone else.  Society wasn't built overnight.  The Simpson's writers are  
doing it their own way, and that's all we can do ourselves, our way, with  
our own power and nothing more.  In the end, it's our own experience that  
matters most, that's all we're on this planet for.

-- 
Alexander