Today the Enlightenment and Thomas Jefferson were disappeared from Texas.

Here’s a live blog from this morning’s hearings at the Texas State Board of Education. (Emphasis mine.)

9:30 – Board member Cynthia Dunbar wants to change a standard having students study the impact of Enlightenment ideas on political revolutions from 1750 to the present. She wants to drop the reference to Enlightenment ideas (replacing with “the writings of”) and to Thomas Jefferson. She adds Thomas Aquinas and others. Jefferson’s ideas, she argues, were based on other political philosophers listed in the standards. We don’t buy her argument at all. Board member Bob Craig of Lubbock points out that the curriculum writers clearly wanted to students to study Enlightenment ideas and Jefferson. Could Dunbar’s problem be that Jefferson was a Deist? The board approves the amendment, taking Thomas Jefferson OUT of the world history standards.

9:40 – We’re just picking ourselves up off the floor. The board’s far-right faction has spent months now proclaiming the importance of emphasizing America’s exceptionalism in social studies classrooms. But today they voted to remove one of the greatest of America’s Founders, Thomas Jefferson, from a standard about the influence of great political philosophers on political revolutions from 1750 to today.

9:45 – Here’s the amendment Dunbar changed: “explain the impact of Enlightenment ideas from John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, Charles de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Thomas Jefferson on political revolutions from 1750 to the present.” Here’s Dunbar’s replacement standard, which passed: “explain the impact of the writings of John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, Charles de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and Sir William Blackstone.” Not only does Dunbar’s amendment completely change the thrust of the standard. It also appalling drops one of the most influential political philosophers in American history — Thomas Jefferson.

Incidentally, Thomas Jefferson was arguably America’s first paleontologist. Which certainly didn’t help his case in Texas.

Here’s a message from Radiolab to my tattoo’d readers (you know who you are):

Hi, all, I’m with the National Public Radio-syndicated science show ‘Radiolab,’ that has a large national and international following (http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/). Mr. Zimmer appeared on our show last season, in the ‘Parasites’ episode.

I’m in search of people who have tattoos of extinct species of plant or animal, ideally people in the greater New York City area. We’re trying to gauge the feasibility of doing a video piece on this subject for Radiolab. Please let us know via radiolab@wnyc.org if you are itching to share your extinct species tattoo story with our funky radio show!

Perhaps we’ll be calling it VideoLab soon?

Update: Be sure to send a copy to me, too, for the Tattoo Emporium.

Via Emily at the Planetary Society blog comes this amazing animation, a three-dimensional flyover of Candor Chasma on Mars generated using HiRISE data.

Holy cow. And the timing of this video… will some kid in middle school watch this video, wonder what it would be like to really do this, and then, in 25 more years, be sitting at the stick of a Martian flyer?

A radar survey finds glacial ice (shown in blue) at mid-latitudes on Mars. The colors are explained below. Image: MRO

The MRO radar spots what is apparently  glacial ice on Mars at the mid-latitudes.   The site doesn’t give the timeline for the radar survey, I’d like to know if the ice persists during the Martian summer, since they call it glacial I can only assume it does. Yeah, I know where assuming gets me.  Pretty interesting none-the-less.

From the MRO site:

A radar on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has detected widespread deposits of glacial ice in the mid-latitudes of Mars.

This map of a region known as Deuteronilus Mensae, in the northern hemisphere, shows locations of the detected ice deposits in blue. The yellow lines indicate ground tracks of the radar observations from multiple orbits of the spacecraft.

The ice, up to 1 kilometer (0.6 mile) thick, is found adjacent to steep cliffs and hillsides, where rocky debris from slopes covers and protects the ice from sublimation into the atmosphere.

The base map of this image is shaded relief topography obtained by the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter on NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor. The image is centered at 42.2 degrees north latitude and 24.7 degrees east longitude. It covers an area 1050 kilometers by 775 kilometers (650 miles by 481 miles).

The Shallow Radar instrument on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter was provided by the Italian Space Agency. Its operations are led by the University of Rome and its data are analyzed by a joint U.S.-Italian science team. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter for the NASA Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, is the spacecraft development and integration contractor for the project and built the spacecraft.

I’ve just been checking out one of the oldest pieces of sculpture made by humans. The Smithsonian Institution has set up a major web site on human evolution. There’s lots of stuff worth exploring on the site, although there are still some bugs and some of the stuff is unnecessarily obscure for a site intended for us non-paleoanthropologists. I’m particularly fond at the moment of the 3-D scans of ancient artifacts that you can rotate around on your computer. Check out the lion-man, for starters.

[Image: Wikipedia]

Pluto’s declassification as a planet may have drawn some disappointed murmurs from the grown-ups, but the pain is apparently even more real for a bunch of little school kids.

In his book, “The Pluto Files,” celebrity astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson showcases his collection of hate mail from third graders who were disappointed at Pluto’s reclassification in 2006 to a dwarf planet. The little Pluto fans demanded the immediate reinstatement of their beloved chunk of rock back into the official roster of the solar system’s planets.

The letters start as far back as 2000, when Tyson, as director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, New York, omitted Pluto from a new solar system exhibit because he didn’t consider it a planet.

Seven-year-old Will Gamot immediately noticed the missing exhibit and shot the director a letter with a helpful illustration (see below). Gamot wrote: “You are missing planet Pluto. Please make a model of it. This is what it looks like. It is a planet.”

In 2006, The International Astronomical Union endorsed Tyson’s position and yanked Pluto’s title as the solar system’s ninth planet. Scientists had realized that the distant Kuiper belt where Pluto resides probably has dozens of large icy objects, some of which may rival Pluto in size; rather than adding more and more planets to our list, researchers opted to create the dwarf planet category. This prompted howls of protest from other kids.

In her letter to Tyson, Madeline Trost of Plantation, Florida worried: “Do people live on Pluto? If there are people who live there they won’t exist.” She then demands a response from Tyson. “Please write back,” she implores. “But not in cursive because I can’t read in cursive.”

You can browse through an entire sideshow of what the kids had to say here; but here’s a sampling of their irritation at the whole affair.

Related Content:
The Intersection: That Mean, Mean Anti-Pluto Guy
DISCOVER: A Death in the Solar System
Bad Astronomy: Pluto’s big Hill to climb
Bad Astronomy: The Moon that went up a Hill but came down a planet

Image: The Pluto Files