We were geeky growing up, and still are. Really geeky. Our favorite toys growing up were a telescope (“Holy crap! Look at the moon!”), a toy microscope (“Holy crap! Look at that bug!”), a 500-in-1 electronics project kit (“Holy crap! Why’s that resister smoking?”), and the ubiquitous chemistry set (at least before we got a computer, anyway).

Sure, giving an alcohol burner to a 12-year-old may seem like a bad idea, but the value of the open-ended exploration a real chemistry set provides is hard to underestimate. But it’s got fire in it, and the tablespoons of various and sundry scary-sounding substances in there makes people in a post-9/11 world freak all out (not to mention the safety hysteria), so now it’s pretty much impossible to buy a real chemistry set — and never mind that the crap under your sink is way scarier in the right hands.

It’s not just the administration that’s anti-science; it’s the whole damn country that’s intellectually incurious.