Don't tie gambling to anti-science.

In general gambling will promote the study of probability and chance amongst the layity to find a way to game the system.

Like any vice, gambling is a cheap affordable thrill to most practitioners of it's art. There are abuses of it, just as there are those who abuse alcahol and prescription drugs, and those who spend undue ammounts in their quest of sexual gratifacation.

Legalized gambling produces returns based on rigid probabilities that are enforced by the state. Compared to thos who try to second guess the shifting sands of the market, Vegas or the state lottery looks like quite a bargin, so long as you can control yourself.

For one dollar you have an astronomical chance at an astronomical return.

Most people just enjoy the idea of randomly winning, and see the loss of one dollar as the cost for the dream.

Those playing the slots or rolling dice are doing something similar, though admitadly occasionally with a greater initial investment (though invariably form cash on hand as opposed to credit).

Those who pick horses, or play cards are usually placing bets based on analysis of the facts evident to them and may have a slightly better return than those trading on random chance.

Everyone who says that "you won't win the lottery" overlooks the reality that invariably someone does. While the odds of any singled out person winning are astronomical, the chances that one in the pool in a given week will win are actually quite good.

Most people arent' losing their houses to gambling, and those that are are no more likely to do so than those who lose thier home to drink.

The state gives us vices and trusts us to know our limits. I'd rather not allow gambling to go back underground where the gangster give you a far less even break on the game.

Certainly the laws of physics would prevent the sorts of leaps we routinely see Mario and his brother Luigi accomplish, certainly this is a crushing blow to children's understandings of physics.

Comic books certainly are to blame as well, in fact I would say that we can blame everyone, except of course, tireless teachers who would like nothing more that to provide real education to children, if they didn't need to take three months off in the middle of the year.

O.k. that's a harsh dig at teachers and truthfully after enduring what passes for most science classes in the U.S. I doubt most kids would want to sit through three additional months of it.

All that said, science fiction is fiction first and foremost. There is bad fiction and there is good fiction, but even bad fiction can get a scientific mind working to find a solution.

Certainly, science fiction skips over important pieces of information, such as the amount of antimatter required for certain reactions described, and the relative durability of various objects (such as car doors) when compared to other objects (like bullets), but that little bit of artistic fancy isn't what harms scientific understanding in this country.

If you approach the teaching of science in the way you approach the teaching of cooking or history, you will have a population of persons with no clue what science is or isn't.

Science is not a collection of recopies, or even a collection of facts, but a method for divining the truth from observable phenomenon, and understanding that phenomenon on a basic level.

As such, you should scrap the study of biology and geology currently offered to young children, and replace it with a deeper study of physics, focusing on the fundamental forces of gravity, and electromagnetism. Combining such study with a more language based study of mathematics (treating mathematics as a language where each part building to a better understanding of the field) would allow student when they finally get to biology and geology in their junior high school years, to have the basic understanding to comprehend the complex systems they are studying, and will understand why a rock really does need to be a million years old to look as it does, and why a creature can't just sprout wings because it wants to.

As it is, we teach from a book to a mind, and give little or no differentiation from one book to another. As such, a child is just as likely to believe what they are taught from their history book, as their science book, as their religion book. Books are books, and without the critical tools of science, you shouldn't expect children to think that Dan Brown is any less an authority than Albert Einstein.

When a child is given critical thought, the problems posed by Mr. Brown’s stories are problems to be solved, not distractions that confuse the mind.

And in the end the problem is not in what is popular, but the very basis of our accepted Pedagoguery.