In his typical way, Walter Williams has given one of the best refutations of the whole mess surrounding the president of Harvard saying that there may be innate differences between men and women that may account for the discrepancy in their math and science scores. In “Anti-intellectualism among the academic elite,” he compares this to the disparities that follow race lines in health and athletics; how sickle cell anemia occurs mostly in black people, Tay-Sachs disease mostly in easter European Jews. He goes on to use swimming and running in the Olympics to hammer home his point. Really people, do we need to let politics and ideology get in the way of realizing the truth that people are different and that there is nothing wrong with that, it doesn’t take away from their humanity or dignity, we just need to accept it, adjust to it, and move on.

Anyone who follows gaim development is almost certainly never going to find this. But anyone who has found this, likely knows how much time I spend thinking about gaim. Currently we are in a huge quandary over where to draw the line between being reasonably featureful and offering users choices, and keeping the user interface simple enough for the “average” user to comprehend. “Edging Toward the Ninety/Ten” adds to this debate, being waged in one for or another across the open source world. It does however make some mistakes: it assumes that every user wants the same 10% of options and features. If that were the case, you wouldn’t see migration costs moving from MacOS®; to Windows®; or vice versa. One would be easier to use, and there would be a one way learning curve. Really, good UI means “doing what people expect,” and then realizing that people expect different things depending on their background. Options should be just barely available enough to compensate for different backgrounds, or else you get the kind of UI that causes Joel On Software to become very popular writing about software development.

While it is interesting to see a theory get challenged, in this case the solar system formation theory that we all learned in grade school or high school, there is something even more interesting in “ Meteorite gives clues to Sun birth.” What strikes me as more interesting is that even when they are challenging a theory, they are utterly certain that they know what’s going on.

Also in science today, “ Life flourishes at crushing depth” documents the discovery of life at previously unexplored depths. This reminds me of some of Dr. Thomas Gold’s writings.

“ Sex and the single robot” is really disturbing. Robots with personalities and emotions? The mind boggles. This will decidedly blur the distinction between what is life and what is not. Asimov’s robot stories come to mind.

Next, “Scientists Find Missing Matter” reports on the discovery of at least some of the “dark matter” that has been theorized for ages. Found it by noticing that some intergalactic cloud was absorbing more than it should. Neat.

Taking organ doning to the next logical level, “ Living donor diabetes transplant” reports on progress towards transplanting cells, in this case insulin producing cells to treat Type 1 diabetes.

How much control over your property should the federal government have? In “High Court Review of Wetland Case Sought,” the Supreme Court is being asked to look at a case in which a man as been sentenced to time in prison for filling in some wetlands he owns. Two concerns here, 1)does the 1972 Clean Water Act protect wet lands that are unconnected to navigable water, and 2)should the federal government be involved in this at all? Conservation is all well and good, we are called to exercise responsibility in our use of the world and its resources, not to wantonly destroy it. Thus many times, conservationists are raising legitimate points along with utter nonsense. The trick is to figure out where the nonsense starts (and ends), and what role the federal government can and should have in preventing extremes on both ends from happening. I’m tempted to say that the federal government does have some say in this, as watershed areas, rivers, and such often extend beyond the bounds of a state, much less a local government. Still, I do not like to see the federal government deciding that you can’t use land you own. If they are going to declare it unusable land, there should be some offer to make it a park or preserve involved. On the other hand, part of me thinks that we’ll end up where the only parks will be the unusable lands, as larger and larger areas are pushing for development.

Update: 12:22
“The mud puddle preservation plan, by Terence Jeffrey, gives another view of this same issue, that exposes just how far this can go, and how rediculous it can get.

Two related doses of common sense are available in Babies ‘overfed on formula milk’. First, some study has looked at formula fed babies versus breast fed babies, and found that the growth tables, based nearly exclusively on formula fed babies, was wrong, it was expecting too much growth. This in turn caused some doctors to recommend mothers supplement breast feeding with formula, or not breast feed at all. Dr Mecedes de Onis comes out with the oh so surprising statement that “Breast fed infants are the biological norm.” How could it be otherwise? Without getting into whether or not parents should choose one or the other, after all, its nice for the moms to let the dads do some of the night feeding, surely we can realize that whether you believe in God or evolution, both would tend towards that “discovery.”

The second item of “news” is that your energy needs vary with your exercise level, and thus a one-size-fits-all recommendation of 2,000 calories for women and 2,500 for men is too high for some people and too low for others. Wow, I never would have guessed.