BartHumphries

I'm really not following you, shortridge, why would anyone expect you to pay for patches in any way? Last I checked, National made a profit off of every patch sold in any Scout shop, except the World Scout patch or whatever it's called now. I have this AT&T BSA "Don't text and drive" temporary patch from that AT&T Facebook thing a while ago and I'm willing to be dollars to donuts as they say that National made money off of those patches. Usually, it seems like National either charges a hefty flat licensing fee or a small percentage of each patch sold or both.

Perhaps Irving didn't do anything with the Methodists in 2010 because the Methodists didn't care enough to bother doing anything for it? My dad's red wool jacket has a big "75 years of LDS Scouting - Scoutmaster" patch on the back. The patch features a big Baden-Powell portrait. I wonder if any similar patches will be made by anyone for the 100th anniversary.

As to whether we'll keep celebrating the past 100 years for the next 100 years, well, why not? As Clemlaw pointed out, that's not so unusual for other organizations. Popular Science magazine, for instance, has a similar feature in every issue.

We make all sorts of oaths all over in Scouting. "I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America..." Then there's the Boy Scout "On my honor, I will do my best to..." And the Cub Scout version of that, "I promise to do my best to..."

As far as "nondisclosure" goes, I can't even begin to tell you how many nondisclosure forms I've signed with various companies. "But those are for work and this is a leisure activity." So what? Besides, the OA really isn't secret. The official BSA store sells the OA Handbook for only $2.99 and it has the Promise and Obligation in it. There's really nothing to be concerned about: http://www.scoutstuff.org/order-of-the-arrow-handbook.html

You can't have an apostrophe in the Subject line.

I don't believe so. Apparently the Hong Kong and Macao Scouts are separate organizations from the regular Chinese Scouts, although the Hong Kong Oath (what they call Promise) was changed to "my country" instead of "Hong Kong", the Chinese flag is emphasized instead of the British flag, etc. Apparently, according to the Sino-British Joint Declaration, signed in 1984, Scouting is part of the regular way of life in Hong Kong and protected there like most of the rest of the regular way of life in Hong Kong for 50 years after Hong Kong was handed back to China. So, it seems like Hong Kong Scouting will be around as long as democracy in Hong Kong, until at least the year 2047.

Well, yeah, you aren't "required" to support the World Scouting movement. You "may" wear the patch. But do you really want to give the impression that you're "not" supporting the World Scouting movement, that you're metaphorically giving the finger to Scouts in the rest of the world. Just wear the patch.

We accept you, one of us. We accept you, one of us. Gooble gobble, gooble gobble.

There's a National Camping School section for every Boy Scout Area Director position. Is there basically nothing for Cub Scout camp staff except the Camp/Program Director (which is being folded this year into one superginormous "Cub/Boy/Team/Crew Camp Director or Program Director" section)?

Yes, it's basically a do rag, although it can also be worn around the neck as a thick scarf. For those "hats" and garrison caps, it seems that by offering no shade for either your ears or your eyes, it would just make your head hotter in the sun. While a garrison cap might be useful in England or somewhere else where it tends to be fairly cold most of the time, the buff cap would be too thin to make a difference in the cold (and would still be hotter in the sun).

Those of our boys who are 14 or older are part of a Venturing crew whose uniform is the brown Scout shirt with jean pants. Presto, no longer are they in "half/pseudo" uniform, they are now in full uniform. The younger boys are still generally in "half" uniform.

Thanks.

Black ice is also when enough cars have gone over it that it's become a dirty black from the exhaust, so the road there just looks dirty -- noting in passing that the road in general doesn't really look clean since some dirt always down onto the road and you get mud splashing up everywhere as cars drive down the road. The week after a good snow, our cars look as though they've been driven around in a coal mine (or at least the bottom half of the car looks that way).

trainerlady, will you post the requirements, please? They still aren't posted yet at http://www.scouting.org/scoutsource/BoyScouts/AdvancementandAwards/MeritBadges.aspx

Oak Tree, in November they said that Welding would "debut in the next month or two": http://blog.scoutingmagazine.org/2011/11/16/next-up-welding-merit-badge/ Also, I don't know about that York place but http://www.scouting.org/jamboree/journal/hometownnews/wolfe.aspx says that Welding is the favorite merit badge of the "two millionth Eagle Scout" who is also the "Scouts Youth Ambassador", so apparently someone else somewhere else was already doing it (unless the person who wrote the article misinterpreted what the kid said).

I didn't say adults should step in and do things for boys, I said boys either need older boys or adult leaders to model. If the hands-off adults are doing the right things and modeling correct behavior, then the boys will follow that lead. Citizenship doesn't develop in a vacuum.

Hiking around in the backwoods doesn't teach character. Camping for a week out there, making pioneering projects, etc., none of that on its own teaches character. The book Lord of the Flies, after all, described a group of kids living outdoors and doing all sorts of Scoutcraft-like things.

Character is learned when things get tough and there's some sort of standard to adhere to -- do you cut corners, do you buckle down and keep at it, do you blame others for your mistakes, etc. This generally requires role models who show boys how it should be done -- whether older boys or adult leaders, boys need someone to model. Generally this needs to be explained to boys because most of them just won't get it on their own.

That being said, there's really nothing to model when you're standing there lecturing in a classroom-like setting, which is why Scoutcraft is necessary. Not to mention, it can all be really fun, which is why boys will want to go do it.(This message has been edited by BartHumphries)

There won't be a Nail Gun merit badge, it'll be a Framing/Rough Carpentry merit badge that requires Scouts to correctly frame a 10' high structure that has a solid foundation that casts at least a "10'x10' horizontal shadow" (so either built on a concrete pad or built on concrete posts in the ground). Nail guns will be prohibited and Scouts will have to hammer in everything with a hammer and cut all the studs with a hand saw. Screws may be used, but holes need to be predrilled with a hand drill so that a hand screwdriver can be used to drive the screws in. A ratcheting or double ratcheting screwdriver may be used, but only by Varsity/Venturing Scouts (who are at least 14 years of age). Only the Amish Boy Scouts will end up earning the merit badge.

That being said, I still don't see anything which prohibits all Scouts of every type from using any power tools.(This message has been edited by BartHumphries)

The Patrol Leaders Handbook (well, the original one, which you can find online -- I don't know about the current one from the store) has a lovely story which basically says that the point of having a Scoutmaster is to keep the law away -- to make sure the kids don't run off too quickly and do something that'll get them arrested.

Anyone know what the requirements are? We're exploring our options to see if this is a feasible merit badge for returning summer camp people (who normally do Climbing, Metalworking, etc.) Does a person have to weld with both gas and electricity or just know about both and use one (i.e. would we have to worry about storage of oxygen/acetylene, or can we just use a MIG welder or what)?

Except Boy Scouts can't do paintball at all and can't do laser tag unless the lasers are "Star Trek phasers" or some other "obviously non-gun" thing. I'm glad I at least got to do those things as a youth before they were taken away.

My District caps merit badges at five for a given counselor. You can choose whatever merit badges you want (subject to those that require some cert), until you hit five at which point your applications will be denied, unless you agree to drop one or more.

http://www.scouting.org/jamboree/journal/hometownnews/wolfe.aspx says that the favorite merit badge of the "two millionth Eagle Scout" who is also the "Scouts Youth Ambassador" is Welding. How can this be if the merit badge isn't out yet?

Is that really what he said or has someone been doctoring what he said (or perhaps misinterpreted by a clueless person)? Perhaps he was asked what his favorite merit badge is and he said something like "I'm really excited about this new Welding merit badge" and somebody wrote down that Welding is his favorite, even though it isn't his favorite yet, just one that he's really excited about. Who knows.

I can't edit that last post, but some people point to the "Age-Appropriate

Guidelines for Scouting Activities" found at http://www.scouting.org/filestore/pdf/ageguides.pdf which explicitly says that "hand tools" are appropriate for all categories of Scouts, down to Tiger Cubs. "Power Tools" do not appear on that list and thus are not appropriate for any ages, these people say. I disagree with them.

By the way, is Welding out yet? Did I miss something?

Most people aren't interested in recreation that imperils their health...if that weren't the case, we'd all drive muscle cars and own jet skis and parachutes.

I think the numbers of people who engage in those activities would be far higher if the entry requirements weren't so incredibly expensive. That airplane fuel (and everything else) for multiple jumps to get some experience so that you can call yourself a real skyjumper isn't cheap. The cost of a jet skis, transportation costs, storage space, heck up here in Lake Arrowhead many of the docks in the lake are actually worth more (in this housing economy) than the houses that the docks are "attached" to (not physically attached, but legally).

Bart, I'm still playing you-know-who's advocate....

All you've shown is that your system seems to work better than the alternative. But did you really give the alternative a fair chance? Shouldn't the alternative be taught alongside 'conventional' gravitational theory in physics classes, in order for the students to make up their own minds?

The alternative is already taught in school and students are already encouraged to make up their own minds (at least at the schools that I've gone to, even going back to elementary school). That's why I was already aware of the evidence supporting the current theory of gravity (and aware of some of the things that we don't understand about it currently). The best teachers ask questions, provide information, etc., while helping students learn things themselves. The best people continue to be lifelong learners (about whatever it is they're learning over their lifetime).

Some students do get more of an indoctrination than other students and you can't teach everything in a single class. You've no doubt heard the adage that you can tell what year (Freshman-Senior) a Philosophy-major student is by what their current beliefs are that semester? But eventually a person starts to be able to investigate and discover things for themselves.

Granted, some schools are not as good as others.

Thanks, packsaddle. Henry Cavendish did a very famous experiment (which now has his name: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavendish_experiment ) which basically took two massive automobile-sized balls of metal carefully hung on a rotating pivot, which was then slowly (very, very, very slowly) rotated nearer and farther and nearer two other much smaller balls on the outside of the rotating area and we were actually able to see (and measure) the attraction of the small balls to the mass of the large balls. Just like pretty much all famous experiments, it's been repeated over the years with greater and greater precision. So gravity itself is pretty much agreed upon. How exactly it works, we're not really sure -- gravitons or whatever, who knows, there are some good explanations (some of which are, admittedly, better than the other good explanations) for different ways that this can happen. Point is, there isn't a force coming downwards that causes things to fall. It's because of the weight of the objects because we can measure this force due to gravity very very exactly. EDIT: I just went to the Wikipedia article and it appears that the balls used originally were actually fairly small -- I guess it's just nowdays that people are hanging "cars" to test this out.

There's also astronomy. We can measure and record where things are in the sky very exactly and we can deduce the masses of things because we know how gravity works on Earth. We can then take those calculated masses and use that to compare how things "should" move if that is correct and these calculations are always correct. This is not circular reasoning -- let me explain. For instance, there were some slight anomalies in the orbits of Uranus, Saturn, and Jupiter. Neptune was found and that pretty much solved the case, except for some even slighter anomalies that still persisted. Some people who were good with math and tedious fiddley stuff calculated roughly where some sort of planety thing would have to be in order to cause these anomalies and after almost a hundred years Pluto was discovered (give them a break, Pluto is incredibly small and difficult to make out, and easy to miss). There's all the comets, etc., there aren't really any surprises in this realm, except a few which I'll get to in a moment.

Then there are the satellites. We have some extraordinarily sensitive and complicated satellites orbiting Earth right now. We all know about leap days, extra days sometimes inserted into the calendar to make the years match up because the number of days in a year don't quite exactly match up with the season lengths. Well, there are also actually leap seconds because the Earth is moving slower or faster at any given moment (see Kepler's Second Law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler's_laws_of_planetary_motion#Second_law and the fascinating animated gif there) and thus the number of seconds in a day is constantly changing. Because basically nothing natural, anywhere, exactly matches up with any sort of strict bookkeeping, we can't predict leap seconds for more than about six months in advance. That's not usually a big problem as it would normally take thousands of years to be off by even a minute or so. It does become a problem, though, because we know that Einstein was right, there is a time dilation as an objects speed increases. Remember those incredibly sensitive satellites? Well, they move really fast and we can measure their time dilation very exactly, especially since we constantly have to communicate with them to update how many leap seconds will need to be added at any given moment, because we have to maintain strict time synchronization for so many things to work. We can also use these satellites to test our theory of gravity and everything just works spot on.

We're also pretty sure that there's no ether (or air or waves pushing on anything or something like that out in space), because of these satellites and our measurements of flying foreign bodies (like comets). Everything holds together and everything seems to add up neatly enough that nobody really has a problem with gravity, except for a few things, like the Voyager distance anomalies, the speed of the outer edges of rotating galaxies, etc., but most of these are explained away by something else or another. I could go on about the things that we don't really understand and that are troubling to the theory of gravity, but the point is that we can be fairly certain that there are no phlogy-whatevers coming from anywhere and pushing on anything. It's just not happening or satellites and comets wouldn't work like they do (since they're falling in constant circles and even if you tried to go by the vast weight of space pushing down and being opposed by the slight distance between the Earth and a satellite, then just like the rays of the setting/rising sun, some of the phlogys would be skimming along the surface of the earth and opposing/helping the forward motion of the satellite and these forces wouldn't exactly cancel in all directions including downwards because the satellite is moving in a circle and we see no evidence that this is happening, so it's most likely not happening).

That's why we're pretty sure we know what gravity is and what it does (although how it does it can be somewhat up for debate, but it is definitely related to the mass of objects and it's a pull, not a push), so there are quite likely no phlogy-whatevers.

Also, Santa Claus was real, it's all explained in the book by L. Frank Baum, the guy who wrote The Wizard of Oz. See, Santa actually lives in the Enchanted Valley (not the North Pole -- we've flown there and there's nothing there) and he flies through the air by... (This message has been edited by BartHumphries)

Does the "land of snow and ice" require that its Scouts wear helmets when they go sledding? I believe ours does now for winter camps.