Wednesday, March 07, 2007
the truth won't set you free
"That man is anti-SUV, and he's pro-terrorist."
Not Even Wrong has reported that Billy Cottrell, a physicist from Caltech, is being mistreated in prison. He was arrested for acts of "ecoterrorism" in March 2004 after destroying SUV's and pulling various other pranks.
It's quite rare that a physicist gets arrested, so one would think that it would cause a stir in the physics community. Cottrell was actually arrested three years ago, but I didn't hear about this until today. The really bizarre (not to mention extremely unjust) thing about this is that he's not permitted to study physics or Chinese in prison, or even to teach the other prisoners calculus. Even Mumia Abu-Jamal was allowed to continue his education in prison, back when he was still on Death Row.
Apparently Cottrell has been victimized for years; he submitted a paper on quantum physics to his sixth-grade teacher but still got an F because the teacher thought it was plagiarized. He had a lot of other problems in high school as well. The cruelty and injustice done to him is unbelievable and unacceptable.
I think he did humankind a great service by destroying those SUV's. No one was inside them; it's not like he killed anyone. Effectively, he destroyed them so that their drivers wouldn't waste their money on those gas-guzzling tanks, or that they wouldn't die when the SUV's flipped over into a ditch.
Maybe it's just my anti-SUV bias...
Anyway, I'm going to explore the graduate physics department at Rutgers tomorrow (where the writer of The Reference Frame got his PhD). They must have an excellent high-energy/ string theory program if string theory's ultimate advocate came from there. ¶ 3:54 PM
Not Even Wrong has reported that Billy Cottrell, a physicist from Caltech, is being mistreated in prison. He was arrested for acts of "ecoterrorism" in March 2004 after destroying SUV's and pulling various other pranks.
It's quite rare that a physicist gets arrested, so one would think that it would cause a stir in the physics community. Cottrell was actually arrested three years ago, but I didn't hear about this until today. The really bizarre (not to mention extremely unjust) thing about this is that he's not permitted to study physics or Chinese in prison, or even to teach the other prisoners calculus. Even Mumia Abu-Jamal was allowed to continue his education in prison, back when he was still on Death Row.
Apparently Cottrell has been victimized for years; he submitted a paper on quantum physics to his sixth-grade teacher but still got an F because the teacher thought it was plagiarized. He had a lot of other problems in high school as well. The cruelty and injustice done to him is unbelievable and unacceptable.
I think he did humankind a great service by destroying those SUV's. No one was inside them; it's not like he killed anyone. Effectively, he destroyed them so that their drivers wouldn't waste their money on those gas-guzzling tanks, or that they wouldn't die when the SUV's flipped over into a ditch.
Maybe it's just my anti-SUV bias...
Anyway, I'm going to explore the graduate physics department at Rutgers tomorrow (where the writer of The Reference Frame got his PhD). They must have an excellent high-energy/ string theory program if string theory's ultimate advocate came from there. ¶ 3:54 PM
