I can’t believe Sarah Palin hasn’t tweeted about this yet:
The backstory is that the NASA administrator was interviewed on Al Jazeera and said this:
When I became the NASA Administrator – before I became the NASA Administrator – he charged me with three things: One was that he wanted me to re-inspire children to want to get into science and math, that he wanted me to expand our international relationships, and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with predominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering.”
Question: Are you in some sort of diplomatic role .. to win hearts and minds?
Bolden: NO NO, not at all. Its not a diplomatic anything. What it is – is that it is trying to expand our outreach so that we get more people who can contribute to the things that we do – the international Space Station is as great as it is because we have a conglomerate of about 15 plus nations who have contributed something to that partnership that has made it what it is today …”
If the International Space Station is good for anything, it’s outreach and other associated “feel good” bullshit, but FSM help us if Muslims take part in that.
Bill E Pilgrim
If you knew what “poutrage” means in French you’d never say that.
Lysana
@Bill E Pilgrim:
A beamed ceiling?
Here I was hoping it was dirty.
Ash Can
Let’s see — an initiative involving science, the Islamic Middle East, and historical fact. Yep, that ought to be a HUGE hit with the right wing…
Scott
When the only trick in your hat is hating brown people, I guess that means everything that happens gets forced through the filter of hating brown people…
Bill E Pilgrim
@Lysana: Rats you found me out.
Yes it would be “timbering” basically. Beams are poutres, so an assembly of beams, beam-work.
It sounds like something worse though doesn’t it?
If you Google “poutrage charpentier” you get pictures of half-timbered buildings. Half-timbering sounds about right for false outrage.
middlewest
I see the American right still hasn’t forgiven the Middle East for inventing math.
steviez314
Will astronauts have to remove their space suit shoes before boarding the shuttle to the space station?
Kobie
Off topic …
IT IS SO FUCKING HOT HERE.
How do people in the south and southwest live like this?
Lysana
@middlewest:
Algebra is clearly a Muslim plot. Introduces impressionable young minds to concepts like variables. Complex equations. Makes them have to use logic. It’s a scandalous thing.
PeakVT
he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with predominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering.
I don’t disagree with the goal of improving scientific discourse with the Muslim world (if it is indeed limited at this point), but stating it in this way was incredibly tacky.
Sly
Its not just math. Without the various caliphates in the ME and North Africa, and the Persian dynasties, a hell of a lot of Greek manuscripts would have been lost. Just as an example, Europeans had access to (if I remember correctly) one book of the Corpus Aristotelicum translated into Latin from the Romans (the Organon, Aristotle’s manuscript on Logic). The rest they got from Muslim scholars in places like Toledo in the 12th and 13th centuries. The spread of these writings in the subsequent decades is, essentially, what sparked the Renaissance.
SteveinSC
@middlewest: Let us also contemplate the math of the Sign of the Beast. I.e. “666”. Now during the time of Christ, no such symbology could have existed, since the A-rabs were still fucking goats in the sands of A-rab-ia. We must appeal to the Romans for help on the source of “666” as a symbol. E.g. converting “666” to Roman numerals one gets DCLXVI, or (other than M) one has all the Roman numbers in descending order and each used only once. Thus we cannot give credit to the A-rabs for the math behind this symbol. Can any of the BJ cognoscenti shed light on this historical curiosity?
DBrown
See! The rise of science to undermine God given stupidity was an Islamic plot!
The West was forced by these devious Muslims to rapidly advance in science and technology allowing it to dominate the world making us be hated when we use our technology to create massive military systems that we then use to kill Muslims at wedding parties … next to never get into a land war in Asia, this is the next greatest mistake.
Those clever Muslims created this terrible plot seven hundred years ago and we have fallen right into it, dman! Those lucky ducky Islamic bastards who died by the hundreds of thousands in Iraq where really just suckering us into that same plot and went for it!
WereBear
By hunkering down in air conditioning. Prior to that, it was mint juleps & suffering.
MikeJ
@Kobie:
They go crazy and vote for Republicans.
Bill E Pilgrim
Robert Reich calling it for a double-dip recession or reasonable facsimile, at one point he writes:
Funny that he considers this “irony”.
Yes, if we hadn’t just bailed out the rich people and left everyone else to rot, then the rich wouldn’t barrel on getting rich again and disregarding everyone else who are left to rot.
How, er, ironic.
And now in fact by all accounts they’re pissed that anyone is asking for any regulation of them so they won’t gamble the whole thing off a cliff again.
I remember a Peanuts strip of Charlie Brown banging his head against a tree. That was a good cartoon.
Alex S.
Well I knew that the real Amurican and the muslim community are light-years apart, but I’d prefer if the NASA leaves politics out of spaceflight.
Mike in NC
I have an elderly uncle in central Florida. I’m told he doesn’t venture outdoors for weeks at a time. Must have a well-stocked freezer in his condo.
SpotWeld
I’ll give the guy a little credit for shading his message to match his audience. But, yeah, that could have been worded better.
RSR
Nobody tell them our number system is based on the Arabic system…
Comrade Dread
AAAAHHHH!!! Space Terrorists! RUN!!!
The only thing worse would be if they teamed up with Space Nazis and Dracula with his Moon Laser.
Hob
@SteveinSC: Sorry to be a party-picking nit-pooper, but that’s not much of a revelation, so to speak.
In the crazy-ass allegory of that book, the big villains are the Romans. A leading theory for the meaning of 666 is that it was a numerical reference to Nero’s name, based on the number values of Hebrew letters.
But 666 turns up in the Old Testament too– from back when everyone was fucking goats. Everyone except the ancient Babylonians used some form of base-ten counting (including the Romans, who just had a less efficient take on it) so it’s kind of unsurprising that when you come up with a cool-sounding repeating digit pattern in one system, it makes a pattern in another system too.
No, I don’t really have a point.