October snow in PA

3 Replies

Enjoyed Christmas music on the way back from the barn today.  Saw 3 accidents, 2 of them fresh.  All SUVs, a trend that doesn’t seem to be rare and thus begs an explanation.  Do bad drivers tend to buy SUVs?  They’re certainly often the most aggressive, pass-on-the-right kind of vehicles, but you’d think they wouldn’t spin off into the snow at such a high rate.  I didn’t see the drivers, though…might all have been teenage boys, or the elderly (the two highest risk drivers, I’ve heard). Or is it just a consequence of more SUVs on the road when weather gets bad?

 

Textbook disclaimers

Here are some warning labels for books that you can print onto sticker paper. The text of the top left one is from an actual sticker used in Cobb County, Georgia. Creationist parents had pressured the school board to paste it into a biology textbook that contained chapters on evolution. When I first heard about this in the news I was outraged, but it also made me laugh. So I decided to waste an entire afternoon creating similar stickers based on the same silly logic, then sent them to the lawyer in Georgia who was involved in getting the sticker removed. The lawyer had them printed up as huge posters and then used as courtroom props (the judge liked them a lot, I was told). I keep the stickers on the internet so that they can be used whenever pitchfork-wielding parents try something similar. Just download the PDF and get yourself some sticker paper. Then give them to your kids. They’ll know what to do.

Here‘s the version that ran in The New York Times.