It did not come as a surprise to me because the TP folks that I know, all are very informed on the topics of interest. I found to a much hire degree than their more liberal, highly educated, Progressive counterparts of which my family has many.

It is generally arrogance by the "educated" brie eating, chardonay swilling, elitists that don't get this fact. In any argument between TP and these folks usually end up with the Progressives resorting to foul language and name calling because their arguments are so shallow and of little substance.

Take away the 30 second soundbite and these folks (including the left-wing college professors) are woefully under-educated, and it shows!

what do you have against brie and chardonnay? ;)

Me neither.

my mom had a big bottle of it for experiments in her 5th grade classroom. I don't remember getting to do any experiments with mercury at my school.

So did I. My sisters busted a glass thermometer to get it out so we could play with it...let it roll around the palms of our hands. I was like 5 at the time and all really remember is hearing "DON'T DROP IT!...DON'T EAT IT! WASH YOUR HANDS!" It kind of took the fun out of it to be honest. Hmmm I wonder where are parents were at the time... maybe church.

Democrats are the dumbest of all. Voting for the worthless Obama twice, THAT is stupid. Plus gong around chanting, Obama……Obama….Obama he is the one, like a bunch of brain washed morons that they are!

I have no problem being confrontational with a democrat these days, I am sick and tired of listening to them shoot off their mouths that are controlled by their brain washed ignorant minds!

good questions

She was actually fair and maybe even slightly sympathetic.

Questions like:
what does the movement represent to us?
what are the concerns which motivate us to be active?

I did play with mercury. not daily though

Probably "did you eat a lot of lead paint as a child?" "Did you play with mercury daily?" "Did any of your ancestors ever marry outside of the immediate family?"

interesting
but we're some sort of sociological anomaly? what kinds of questions did the student ask?

His excuse that he does not know anyone in the Tea Party is a thin one.

My wife and I have been interviewed on two separate occasions, as have other local Tea Party people, by a Yale sociology grad student who is doing her doctoral thesis on the Tea Party.

I agree that intelligence is rewarded to a point, but I tend to disagree with the last. In my experience, algebra through calculus, up to and including differential equations, were taught in such a way as to promote a real understanding of the subjects, and were, in fact, much easier to grasp with a real understanding in place. This all ended with boundary value problems, where you were lucky to even have a professor that truly understood the subject and was capable of teaching it to more than a handful of the handful of students who came out of differential equations with something more than plug and chug ability. I witnessed a similar line in physics somewhere in the middle of thermodynamics. Correct answers to 5 of 10 problems earned A's in higher level courses- very few, if any, students left these courses with a true understanding of the problems.

Materials (vital to civil engineering) was an interesting intersection of chemistry, physics, and mathematics. A practicing civil engineer need not know much about bonding angles and alloy composition when the problem before him is simply a question of compressive or tensile forces. He can follow traditional construction standards, or consult a database of materials by desired property to choose appropriate materials.

Far too many of my fellow students in Materials earned passing grades without any real comprehension of the subject. It would be frightening to contemplate how many are now practicing civil, mechanical, and even aerospace engineers, if not for the reality that, in industry, they mostly take a free ride on the backs of the true geniuses that came before them.

It doesn't surprise me at all that Tea Party-goers would demonstrate higher scientific comprehension. Having read Andrew Breitbart's description of Tea Parties from the inside (in Righteous Indignation), they sound like the only kind of party worth going to. They seem to be a sanctuary from the sort of irrational and unsubstantiated criticisms that cause great thinkers to abstain from vocalizing their opinions in polite PC company. A safe haven for earnest rational debate and discussion without the intrusion of the smoke and mirrors of charismatic liberals who shamelessly excel at the art of subtle subversion of credibility by implying that one might be a touch racist or a tad bit sexist or mildly homophobic or unconsciously Islamaphobic.

Optics has a major boom in the last 90s, but the bust was worse than the bust in everything else.

My masters focused on communication theory. A lot is happening in that area b/c there's an explosion of mobile wireless.

I went to the IB, which was a great program: http://www.ibo.org/diploma/.

Then I went to a state college, where I coasted for two years and developed lazy habits.

It led me to think one of the biggest problems in education is quantifying it. All high schools are no the same, so there should be some way of quantifying where you are so you get into the right place at the next step.

his real interest was optics and EM. and he was tired of control system kinds of things. he would have liked communication theory stuff and coding, since that is what he ended up doing mostly. maybe it's because I grew up in a rural area, but I am unfamiliar with high schools in the US focusing on liberal arts vs sciences. did you go to private school? my high school was even that way. and I was lucky to have some great teachers. I especially loved my calculus class.

I suspect a good scientist would run his experiment without preconceived ideas and let the data answer the question. I did statistical analysis on failures in a product we manufacture. As the technician who tested these units I believed the white ones failed more than the yellow ones; I looked for that result. They had the same failure rate, I was wrong. True to myself I had to be careful in the future about being biased. I reported the results but couldn’t help but wonder if the yellow ones actually failed more because I was focused on the white ones? Since this man had a preconceived idea Tea Partiers are possibly more scientifically literate than his results. The most significant point to me was he didn’t open his mind as a result, but would continue watching MSLSD.
“"Of course, I still subscribe to my various political and moral assessments--all very negative-- of what I understand the "Tea Party movement" to stand for.”
What’s with the of course? How about reconsider your position and do some more experiments?

Ivory towers...

I am right with you mer. it's like the tea party is a super villain ready to blow up the subway system or rob banks or any number of terrorist activities usually attributed to the radical left.

I agree with this, although you could put it positively by saying engineers maximize knowledge efficiency. Efficiency = value of problem solved / amt of complicated knowledge required. They want to increase that ratio by generating more value or by generating the same value with less complex knowledge.

It has been my experience that Tea Party people run the gamut culturally and intellectually. The biggest difference that I can see is that by and large they are more respectful of other people and groups and as a result are less confrontational in getting their points across. In my opinion, any resort to the use of force, whether it is physical or verbal (except for self-defense) negates any assertion of the user of such coercion.

In pre-school every week during art time I would paint a large X. After several weeks my parents told me I must paint something besides an X. The following week I painted a huge O. When they asked me why I did this I said the only instruction was to paint something that uses the whole page. I have only the vaguest memories of this.

I went to a high school focused on liberal arts. I was disappointed there wasn't an engineering-focused high school. I never thought I would use writing. Now I sometimes earn more per hour writing than engineering.

I wanted to study physics, but I was afraid it wouldn't be as useful. It was my first choice if earning money didn't matter. EE was my second choice, so I got BS and MS in EE.

I knew there was a disconnect when they pushed Obama, apx. IQ 117, as a genius. Tea Party participants are looking at various sources, and sharing information with others, as intelligent people do. My daughter and I have IQs in the top 2% of the country, so we knew their study was bogus.One thing about liberals, they love "talking points", and you just cannot get them beyond those to real thinking. Does this guy even realize Al Gore has no real science education?
Did he actually read Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals" to see what Obama was about - or Hillary's 92-page thesis glorifying Alinsky? Does he know about UN Agenda 21, and the pseudo-science in it which will be used to end property rights in the US - with Obama behind it. Get out of the Ivory Tower bud, and check out some facts, that is what Tea Party participants are doing.

I am having a problem with the media thinking the TEA party has a lot of issues like abortion and gun control, the TEA party is a one issue party. It says it in its name. Taxed Enough Already that is it, end of subject, one issue. Therefore anyone that does not think this way is missing a few screws. Those of us that identify with the TEA party are obviously in the know, others not so much.