I think what they mean is that you can jump six times as high on the Moon.

In case you were wondering, that’s because the surface gravity of the Moon is 1/6 that of the Earth’s. It’s not because the moon has 1/6 the mass or the diameter of the Earth, as you might suspect. In fact, as you can see here, the mass of the Moon is 1.23% of the Earth’s, and its radius is 27.25%.

Surface gravity can be expressed like so:

( Surface gravity of the Moon/Surface gravity of the Earth ) = ( Mass of Moon/Mass of the Earth ) / ( Radius of Moon / Radius of Earth ) 2

Plug in the numbers, and you get the following:

( Surface gravity of the Moon/Surface gravity of the Earth ) = ( 0.07349 x 1024 kg/5.9736 x 1024 kg ) / ( 1738.1 km / 6378.1 km ) 2

Which ends up as Surface gravity of the Moon/Surface gravity of the Earth = 0.1656 ~ 1/6

I happened to stumble (literally) across a website offering students essays for sale. Having taught at or been a teaching assistant at several universities, I know how seriously they take plagiarism: many schools will expel students caught turning in a paper not their own.

That’s why the this particular site, which claims to be among the “legitimate” essays companies, has guarantees that ring a little hollow: “Your Money Back And A Free Rewrite.” Right. You can mail in that rewrite to the degree mill you’ll be attending next. There’s dark humor about how this site touts its legitimacy and excellence, and indeed it is a slick site, with a video introduction and offers of live telephone support. There’s even a long section warning potential customers against their unscrupulous competition.

You should also be aware that some services also indulge in fraudulent activity. The main source of this problem is that some companies seem to take the attitude that their customers are cheats and that they deserve to be ripped off.

Message: we don’t rip off our cheats.

I imagine that turning in this kind of essay works only in classes where there are too few papers during the term to recognize a student’s style, or there are too many students for the professor and teaching assistants to keep up with. That’s because you would recognize a marked improvement in writing and investigate it more (plagiarism is to academia what terrorism is to airports).

Or maybe it works better than I think, as the time I caught plagiarism wasn’t even like that. The author of a paper I was grading had forgotten to remove another student’s name from the table of contents page. In another example a colleague showed me a plagiarized paper in which the student had left in the top margin the URL of his source. It makes me wonder how many smart plagiarizers actually get away with it.

The article alludes to a difference between Liberty’s debate program and Bob Jones University’s much smaller one—Liberty has debated at least one topic for which BJU decided it couldn’t argue both sides—but it doesn’t mention a fundamental difference. Bob Jones is a member of the National Educational Debate Association (NEDA), a small group that split from the Cross Examination Debate Association (CEDA) about ten years ago.

The Times reporter notices that

Quick speaking hardly captures the velocity of collegiate debate. . . . Only experienced judges — most of whom are coaches from neutral schools — can actually follow the argument. . . . Debaters gulp air like competitive swimmers.

That style of speaking is one of the principal reasons NEDA schools left CEDA. No doubt, being able to “argue” at air-gulping speeds involves skill and the development of certain abilities. However, it’s more of a game than anything resembling typical public discourse. And speed-talking debaters can easily adopt harmful habits, such as relying on jargon.

NEDA tournaments, on the other hand, require that half of their judges be laypeople. “Laypeople” doesn’t mean just anybody off the street; it often means college professors, lawyers, and other professionals. Convincing such an audience requires good reasoning—what Aristotle called logos in his Art of Rhetoric—but it also demands appropriately employed pathos and ethos. Those skills, valuable in professional and academic realms, are often not valued in auctioneer-style debate. No wonder Patrick Henry College, with its heavy student involvement in politics, is a member of NEDA. And it seems odd to me that head coach Brett O’Donnell, who has helped the Bush team prepare political debates, would train his debaters in a style far removed from that of public persuasion.

After hearing an interesting NPR interview with Christine Rosen, author of My Fundamentalist Education: A Memoir of a Divine Girlhood, I thought her book would describe why she left “fundamentalism.” Other books do that: Leaving the Fold is a collection of testimonies of former “fundamentalists” who end up everywhere from milquetoast Christianity to bizarre spiritualistic cults. What Leaving the Fold lacks and what I hoped to find in My Fundamentalist Education is a tempered view of fundamentalism that recognizes good among the bad. In that regard Rosen’s book seemed promising: to NPR she said that fundamentalism had encouraged her interest in reading and her curiosity about the world.

But Rosen’s book was disappointing. Not because she presents a lop-sided attack against fundamentalism–the opposite is the case; her childhood experience seems mostly positive, if quirky–but because she has almost no analysis at all. At the close of the last chapter, her parents are about to transfer the twelve-year-old to another, non-fundamentalist Christian school, and then we learn in the epilogue that today she no longer considers herself religious. That’s quite a change from the little girl who once memorized numerous Bible verses and wanted to save the souls of all her friends and family. What happened? Rosen doesn’t tell us.

Instead, we get over two hundred pages about life at Keswick Christian School in St. Petersburg, mixed with stories about visits every other weekend to “Biomom,” her term for her divorced mother. As someone who’s had a fundamentalist education, I think her portrayal of school sounds about right, and she makes an important distinction among evangelicals in general and fundamentalists and charismatics in particular (though without elaborating on the distinctions). Some descriptions seem exaggerated, such as her exceptional reverence for Jews (though I agree one is not likely to find antisemitism among evangelicals) and her classmates’ nightmares about the End Times. I credit most of those exaggerations to the perspective of a pre-teen.

Part-way through the book, the descriptions start to get tedious. I kept thinking: Rosen, we get it. You studied the Bible–a lot–and everyone at Keswick was at least a little weird; now draw some conclusions. For example, in a chapter titled “Here Comes the Son,” Rosen talks about fundamentalist eschatology, the study of the End Times. Rosen is a historian by training, so one might expect her to compare the theology of movies like A Thief in the Night, shown to her school, to the similar, recent best-selling Left Behind series. Or she might say something about Christian eschatology throughout history. She doesn’t. Also, Rosen notes the tension between the creationism Keswick taught and the theory of evolution, which she first learned about in a secular science camp. Why did the latter win out in her mind? We’re left wondering.

From clues scattered throughout the book, readers can speculate about the forces that brought about her conversion away from fundamentalism. For one thing, her father, step-mother and grandparents, seemingly not religious themselves, did not support her fundamentalist views. So perhaps they influenced her thinking. Also, Rosen hints that fundamentalists just aren’t very smart: reading a story about a fundamentalist trying to evangelize a doctor, the young Rosen thinks the doctor comes off looking intelligent and his would-be proselytizer, boorish. At another point her school librarian is befuddled at the mention of evolution. Maybe Rosen wants us to see her change as a matter of steadily increasing enlightenment.

Wall Street Journal reviewer Alan Crawford has another idea: class pride.

Twelve years old then but in her early 30s today, Ms. Rosen is a vivid writer with an enviable memory for the revealing detail. But what she remembers about her Keswick years suggests that her biggest objection to fundamentalism and fundamentalists was less moral and theological than aesthetic.

Keswick mothers, she writes, “were women with home permanents, not salon coiffures, and they wore vinyl mock-croc pumps and polyester-blend dresses from Sears.” Teachers, both male and female, were also partial to polyester. The female musicians who performed at the school smelled of Aqua Net, and the missionaries who came to share their stories invariably had “out-of-date clothes” and “badly cut hair.”

The pews in the school chapel were “upholstered in an unfortunate pea-green color,” and the Good News Bible Club that she joined met “in a musty, decaying house painted in a disturbing lime green color.” The “old, disheveled lady” who hosted the club “served stale cookies and tepid Juicy Juice.” This woman also “had the sort of girlish crush on Jesus that only a disappointed spinster who’d spent too many years leading children’s Bible studies could nourish.” She read to the children with her Bible balanced on her knees and her “thick socks rolling down her legs.”

Sometimes these unattractive and unsophisticated people could also be downright embarrassing. The local Jehovah’s Witness missionary had a “strange smell,” for example, and one of Keswick’s Bible teachers was a legless Vietnam veteran “whose biblical knowledge was impeccable, but his nonscriptural musings were infected with malapropisms.” He said “reprehend” when he meant “comprehend.”

Such descriptions may well be accurate, and they also betray the extent to which social class can influence religious beliefs–one’s own and one’s attitudes toward those of others. Only on the penultimate page of “My Fundamentalist Education” does Ms. Rosen acknowledge that her Keswick experience “gave me a profound respect for my fellow human beings”–not evident from her descriptions of them–and afforded her serious academic benefits. The peculiar rigor of the school’s approach, for example, “taught me the value of reading, the usefulness of memorization, and the importance of speaking and writing clearly.”

These are, of course, precisely the qualities that many public schools are struggling to inculcate in their students, all too often with little success. Had Ms. Rosen explored how Keswick managed to accomplish this considerable feat, and what it felt like to be a child learning to love the written word in this eccentric environment, she might have made a greater contribution to the literature of American education. She might also have offered a way for people on one side of the so-called culture war to better understand those on the other. As it is, “My Fundamentalist Education may be regarded, because of its unkind tone, as another salvo in that struggle, which is probably not what the author intended.

I think Crawford is about right: Rosen seems interested more in the trappings of fundamentalism than in being one herself. When she describes her religious experiences, it usually strikes me that she’s missing the point. For example, when she “hustled [herself] to the front of the chapel to join the many other ‘just-in-case’ supplicants at the altar” (p. 126), it was because she imagined that otherwise she’d suffer the fate of Patty, the decapitated protagonist of A Thief in the Night. The adventurous life of missionaries allured her, and she wanted to save friends and family from Hell, but as far as I know nowhere does young Rosen claim to have had faith in Christ herself. Even her repeated bathtub “baptisms” seem to have everything to do with Biomom’s superstitions. Other remarks are uncharacteristic of fundamentalists. For instance, she writes that “the only inclination to vice I could identify in myself was a longing for my own at-home video-game arcade” (p. 124). Part of being a fundamentalist involves expecting Christ to save you from your sins; that’s tough to do if you don’t think you are a sinner.

By excluding her analysis and leaving us to guess why she left fundamentalism (or whether she actually was a fundamentalist), Rosen left out much of what could have been the most interesting part of the book.

Welcome to the latest front in America’s culture wars. The Association of Christian Schools International (ACSI), the Calvary Chapel Schools and six Calvary Chapel students are suing the university, whose campuses include that traditional bastion of liberal thought, Berkeley, as well as the huge UCLA campus, for what they call “viewpoint discrimination”. The Christian schools add that the university is violating the students’ constitutional right to freedom of speech and religion. The university naturally denies the charges, and this week a federal judge in Los Angeles began considering the preliminary arguments of a contest which could eventually reach the Supreme Court.

. . .

UC denies it practices secular intolerance and “viewpoint discrimination”. It notes that it has approved plenty of courses at Christian schools and in the past four years has accepted 24 of the 32 applicants from the Murrieta school. And it says that if the courses had used these textbooks “as supplementary, rather than primary, texts, it is likely they would have been approved.”

What is really being challenged, says the university, is its right to set its own academic standards and admission requirements. In which case the question is what that right implies. The Christian plaintiffs say they have no objection to science students, for example, being taught conventional wisdom, but “their constitutional rights are abridged or discriminated against when they are told that the current interpretation of scientific method must be taught dogmatically, and must be accepted by students, to be eligible for admission to University of California institutions.” In other words, what the case involves is not so much the now-familiar tussle over intelligent design, but a student’s freedom of speech and thought.

The Economist thinks that this conflict will escalate until evangelicals play a greater role in higher education.

Fifty years ago there were only a handful of “megachurches”, drawing more than 2,000 each Sunday; today, there are more than 1,200 such churches, three of them with congregations of over 20,000. Not only is the nation’s president a born-again Christian, but so (according to the Pew Research Centre) are 54% of America’s Protestants, who are 30% of the population.

Will America’s public universities take on a similar tinge? To the extent that educational establishments reflect cultural reality, it may be inevitable. After all, before the liberal era of the 1960s, there were no such things as courses in “Women’s Studies” or “African-American Studies”. Now, no prudent American university would be without them. It would be odd if conservative Christians did not leave similar footprints on the syllabus.

I think the Economist is right on both counts: this issue is much larger than Calvary Chapel’s perceived lack of standards, and this kind of conflict is not likely to disappear.

I know nothing about Calvary Chapel’s quality of education in particular, but having some familiarity with the Christian school movement, I’m fairly confident that UC’s claims are not really about standards. Often, many students educated in the Christian school movement are better-prepared than their secular counterparts in this sense: they learn both the secular dogmas as well as the religious ones. For example, I’ll wager that a good student at Calvary Chapel would be able to explain the theory of evolution as well as creationism, whereas we would expect her public high school counterpart to know only about evolution.

The same is true of conservative students in general. Because those with liberal political views dominate the American higher education system, conservatives are forced to learn both languages. The UC officials should appreciate how that tension–between politically liberal educators’ beliefs and conservatives’ beliefs–actually offers some pedagogical advantages. For one thing, a somewhat adversarial position and skeptical mind on the part of the student further critical thinking skills. For another, the different beliefs and cultural background of conservatives further universities’ vaunted “diversity.”

However, the cynic in me suspects that the UC officials are less interested in improved critical thinking and cultural or viewpoint diversity than in hegemony over California’s secondary schools.

Pait acknowledges that students sometimes feel as though the school’s policies “cramp their style.” However, the university maintains an extremely strong retention rate; sometimes as high as 95 percent.

I think my freshman class had about 1500-2000 members, and I remember about five or six hundred graduating seniors.

Maybe he means for any given week, an average of 95% of the students come back the following week. Or maybe it’s that on average 95% of any given graduating senior has made it through college.

After Debbie and I married, I was still in college and we were dirt poor. We moved to the edge of a country town. There was an open field across the road and a railroad track ran for miles out of town. I bought a shotgun and began to hunt for rabbits, squirrels, and pheasants. That’s how we survived until I graduated.

I’ve seen wild turkeys in my Boston neighborhood, so maybe this has potential. But there’s probably some law or another banning hunting in the city.

As part of Men’s Fitness’ first annual collegiate survey, the magazine ranked Boston University the third-fittest student body nationwide in their October issue after surveying more than 650 schools.

BU came in behind only Brigham Young University, the country’s fittest campus, and the University of California-Santa Barbara, whose state-of-the-art Recreation Center (RecCen) opened in 1995.

I’m surprised, not because I think BU students are more out of shape than others, but I’d expect all of the top spots to be filled by universities in more temperate climates, such as BYU and UC-Santa Barbara.

I don’t see many runners out with me after the snow has set in, but they do seem to come out in full force when spring rolls around. So either everyone makes up for winter lethargy during warmer months or they’ve found someplace indoors to exercise, like our new fitness center.

I once worked with a professor who exploited this for his own amusement and the class’s education. He’d offer to make a wager with someone from the lecture hall of sixty students: if there were no two people with the same birthday, he’d give that person the course textbook (an over $100 value), but if there were, that person would have to give him $10.

Someone always took him up on it, and as far as I know, he never had to give away his book (but he also didn’t accept the $10, either), because the probability for sixty people is around 95%, if I remember correctly.

Now if only I could keep that same excitement into early November, when papers will really start weighing down on me. I guess nothing gold can stay.