Slip-sliding away...

Thomas Friedman in today's NYT:

On April 7, CNET News.com reported the following: 'The University of Illinois tied for 17th place in the world finals of the Association for Computing Machinery International Collegiate Programming Contest. ...

'That's the lowest ranking for the top-performing U.S. school in the 29-year history of the competition. Shanghai Jiao Tong University of China took top honors this year, followed by Moscow State University and the St. Petersburg Institute of Fine Mechanics and Optics. Those results continued a gradual ascendance of Asian and East European schools during the past decade or so. A U.S. school hasn't won the world championship since 1997, when students at Harvey Mudd College achieved the honor. 'The U.S. used to dominate these kinds of programming Olympics,' said David Patterson, president of the Association for Computing Machinery and a computer science professor at the University of California at Berkeley. 'Now we're sort of falling behind.''

Well, duh! When we have idiots on the Kansas Board of Education "retrying" (yeah, as if they hadn't made up their minds beforehand) Scopes v. the State of Tennessee, is it any wonder that we are falling behind?

Read this and think about it -- Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed .