Heartless and immoral doctors won a “victory” yesterday, preserving the decision in a court case that allows them to refuse to resuscitate a 22-month old baby who has serious lung, brain and kidney damage.[1] Even though the baby has progressed further and is doing better than the doctors and judges thought possible, still the justices rules that the original judge’s order stands. This further confirms the idea that doctors and the courts, and not the parents, have the final word in what happens to children. Increasingly, parents are being treated simply as unpaid care-takers, and not as parents. It is important to remember that parents, and not the courts, have the moral imperative to care for their children, and make decisions affecting their health and education. The courts should be stepping in only in the clearest cases where the parents have abdicated their responsibility, and then only with the greatest reluctance.

[1] BBC News. “Parents lose right-to-life appeal” BBC News World Edition (online) 2005-08-25 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/hampshire/4181172.stm

I need to read Deep Hot Biosphere[1] again. I no longer remember his ideas well enough to know how they would mesh with seismic evidence that the Earth’s core is rotating faster than the surface is.[2] This, and related research that shows that the mantle is also spinning faster, provides at least some proof for the plate tectonics theory that I dislike. It at very least demonstrates that there are three layers to the Earth’s structure, which is a prerequisite of plate tectonics. It does not, however, demonstrate that the crust is split into segments that move independently or semi-independently. It would, in fact, seem rather hard to make a categorical statement that the crust is rotating at any single speed, if different segments of it are in fact moving in different directions. This would, however, be dismissed as simply an average speed that averages out, necessarily, to a speed in the same direction the Earth rotates. Earthquakes and mid-plate faults remain the strongest flaw in plate tectonics.

[1] Gold, Thomas. Deep Hot Biosphere (Springer, 1998 ISBN: 038798546) Some information on this scientist can be found at the Wikipedia entry. The Web Archive fortunately preserves his home page here.
[2] Than, Ker. “Earth’s Core Rotates Faster than Surface, Study Confirms” Live Science (online). 2005-08-25 http://www.livescience.com/forcesofnature/050825_earthcore.html

The news today is in an uproar about a BBC report of some research that seems to indicate that men, after 14 or 15, tend to be more intelligent than women.[1] First of all, as a caveat, I am not at all sure how much good IQ tests are. That they have non-trivial flaws is obvious. Still, taking the research at face value, there are several note-worthy points.

• They focused on the high end of the IQ scale. Somewhere I read, but appear not to have written, about research indicating that women’s IQ test scores form a nice bell curve while men’s show a much straighter line, a distribution with more people at each extreme. Focusing on the high end of the scale would tend to ignore the possibility that there may be just as many men scoring just as significantly lower than the women’s average as there are men scoring above.
• The study finds no difference before age 14. This is incredibly counter-intuitive, but may be explained by my next item.
• The study finds that women “are able to achieve more than men” “at the same level of IQ” (I reversed the clauses of the sentence, hence two quotes).[2} This may explain the common impression, perhaps reality (I honestly do not know how much basis in fact it has) that girls are smarter than guys in grade school.

[1] BBC News. “‘Men cleverer than women’ claim” BBC News UK Edition (online). 2005-08-25 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/4183166.stm
[2] See above.

Reading one of Martin F. Krafft’s entries in Planet Debian,[1] I learned about an interesting format called “reStructuredText.”[2] At first glance, it appears to live up to its name as being simple and easy to use. It is somewhat related to the wiki formatting styles you commonly see, but not requiring the html input form, should prove more useful and more worth knowing (as each wiki seems to have its own rules, they are not in general worth learning).

[1] Krafft, Martin F. “Restructured text for the CV” untitled. 2005-08-25 http://blog.madduck.net/2005/08/26/2005.08.25-cv
[2] Docutils project. “reStructuredText” (online) 2005-06-16 http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html