How to make Carl Sagan (and most importantly yourself) proud:
— Train yourself with the art of baloney detection aka work that skepticism.
— That way you know what to put in your brain and what is useless to it.
— Reading books now becomes 100X more useful than if you were taking in just any kind of information.
— Feed your brain valuable data, arm your mind with the right tools to battle the tricksters.
Warning: This may cause a disruption in the status quo as well as constant refusals to obey authority when authority does not make sense.
P.S. Doesn’t matter in what form or media you acquire said valuable information so long as you know the difference between useless and usefulness.
“Everyone I know who says that going to Mars is a 'waste of resources' gives me too high a number for how much they think NASA is getting. I say, 'How much do you think they're getting on your tax dollar?' They say 10 percent, 15 percent. It's one-half of one penny (per taxpayer). And you're gonna attack NASA for its one-half of one penny, and say its 'spending it on the wrong things,' when NASA is a force of nature unto itself to inspire a generation to wanna become scientifically literate?! And one of the greatest problems this nation has today is the absence of science literacy!”
—Dr. NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON, responding to host Bill Maher saying that going to Mars is “a waste of resources,” on Real Time.
Fuck yeah.
“The most important feature is the analysis of information that comes your way. And that's what I don't see enough of in this world. There's a level of gullibility that leaves people susceptible to being taken advantage of. I see science literacy as a kind of vaccine against charlatans who would try to exploit your ignorance. ”
—Neil Degrasse Tyson
“[Science] is distrusted not because of what it can do, but because people don’t understand how it does what it can do — and that absence of understanding, or misunderstanding, of the power of science is what makes people afraid. … Just because you don’t understand it, doesn’t mean it’s bad for you — go figure out how it works! That’s why we need a scientifically literate electorate — so that when you go to the polls, you can make an informed judgment and you can draw your own conclusions rather than tune into a particular TV station to have your conclusions handed to you.”
—Neil Degrasse Tyson
Math and Science Educational Tip of the Week: Having Convos about STEM with your Child
Contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to be a STEM professional to have conversations about STEM with your child. STEM is all around us and is a part of our everyday lives, so it can be easy to have conversations about STEM. It can be as simple as talking about STEM in your home, from the electronic devices, electrical and plumbing systems, recycling and composting that may take place in your neighborhood. You can have great discussions about how things work in society such as cars, planes, bridges, weather, pollution etc. For all your kids, you can discuss things that happen in the news that may be related to STEM and read articles about STEM. For your older kids that are on social media, you can have them follow STEM related pages such as CDC, Scientific American, Engineering Go For It, among others and discuss what comes in their Facebook Feed and/or Twitter Timelines. Whether your child is interested in STEM or not, it is an important skill set for them to have the ability to be able to talk about STEM. The ability to talk about STEM is a key component of being scientifically literate.
