This month's Popular Science Magazine has an interview with New Jersey Congressman Rush Holt in which he says, "If you don't fund research, you don't generate new ideas." Rush Holt is a former Physics teacher from Princeton, and has been struggling against an administration that values fanciful ideology over science, and punishes scientists for the honesty of their explorations. Many are hopeful that the American presidential election will portend the raw beginnings of the end of American idiocy.

My own take is that if we don't encourage children to be making things and exploring the relationships between tools and materials and their own potentials for growth and creativity, we are creating a bargain basement society of twerps and morons.