Physics for Future Presidents

... that's the name of a course my daughter is taking this semester at Berkeley to fulfull her science requirements. She feels they aren't learning anything of substance. They sit around and discuss how the internal combustion engine works - she was surprised to realize that air is mixed in there to create explosions... - how a nuclear bomb works, that in Hiroshima about 100,000 people were incinerated immediately by the bomb, only about 2,000 died from the after-effects of radiation. That it's almost impossible to assess the health effects of the radiation from the Chernobyl reactor on its neighbouring population, because the effect is so small relative to the normal incidence of cancers. Useful stuff. I'm serious.