Slow News Day?

Well, with the announcement that the police were guilty of endangering the public over the death of Jean Charles de Menezes, you would expect a media frenzy. Calls for resignation, announcements of reform, all that sort of thing. That is happening, but you would expect it to be much more vocal, you would expect that the BBC News website would be full of new articles that are responding to the story, and that the general news-reading net citizen would be lapping it up.

Instead, just two minutes ago, the number one story read on the BBC News website for today was Excrement curry wife admonished. Now, don't get me wrong, I like to read stupid stories and read about the crazy ways that humans behave as much as the next person - but I'm amazed that this counts as news. What are we supposed to learn/get from this?

I had a meeting with my supervisor this morning, and barring a few cosmetic notation changes and corrections, and the inclusion of a small section on homomorphisms between certain rings of polynomials that chapter is done. I've started another one now, and so far this week I've expanded on the few notes that I had made to an 11 page document. It needs a lot of work, and I need to really define things more clearly, but the basic structure is there, so that's a start. I've got a bit of a cold today, so I'm giving the football a miss. I'll be playing badminton tomorrow afternoon though; my officemate and I used to play twice a week up until about six months ago, and this is the first time that either of us will have played in that time. When we stopped playing I had just got to the point where I could beat her, so here's hoping.

As I've said again and again this week, today is the start of National Novel Writing Month. When I go home tonight I will be sitting down at my computer, putting my writing glasses on and typing. I have a structure, I have a working title ("Who Killed Euler Smith?"), and I have a writing buddy at the university, which is pretty cool because I've never known anyone else who has gone for the challenge before. As challenges go it is fairly arbitrary, and the sense of achievement is fairly personal (no medals or ticker tape parade), but the feeling I got last year as I typed "THE END" was so good that I just knew I had to do it again this year.

I'll keep you posted on my progress.

So, so funny

In a break from the tutorial (more on that later, or possibly tomorrow), I just happened to see this article on BBC News, "Cheney, Obama 'distant cousins'".

Going back far enough of course, we're all distant cousins. I loved it for the following:

Mr Obama's spokesman, Bill Burton, responded to the news by saying: "Every family has a black sheep."

Genius.

Edit: that quote is supposed to be big and bold. Stupid blogger. (quite possibly stupid zero_zero_one...)

Titbits

I have a four hour computer tutorial to go and give in exactly twenty-three minutes, so I had better be quick about this. There are three things that I have seen on the Internet today that I thought I would share with you (well, there were other things too, but these were the three that piqued my interest).

Firstly, George Lucas has said that he has started work on the Star Wars live action series. I love Star Wars, I really do, but this is not news... OK, the fact that he has started work on it is news, but the actual article barely qualifies as news: there is virtually no new information that was not already known, the rest is just recycled or restated from other articles. I think that there should be some kind of filter against news like this, or some kind of pecking order so that it is automatically dropped down the news page (come on Web 2.0!).

Also on the BBC News website is news of a report that says obese people are not responsible for their obesity. I accept the argument that work in the "modern world" and processed energy rich foods are big factors, but you can still work against these factors. I even take on board the evidence that humans biologically store excess calories as fat with incredible efficiency, but that doesn't mean that we can't do something about it. What else does a government have to do in order to get the message through to people? Every other week a new report comes out that says "Guess what? People are fat!" but in our "It's not my fault" culture we're just passing the buck all the time. Face facts people: barring certain medical conditions, if you are obese it is because you have consumed more calories than your body could use for fuel, and you have done this often enough that it has made a visible impact on your body. YOU CAN DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS.

Finally this wonderful comic from Overcompensating has a punchline that really made me smile in a semi-horrified way:



Six minutes before the tutorial - I've even got time to get a drink and read through the problem sheet.

Cheerio for now!

A Question of Science, and Ethics

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An interesting news story that I read today ran with the almost gratuitous headline "Girl could give birth to sibling". Incest isn't the order of the day, rather we have a seven year old girl who has a genetic disorder which could (that's right, could) mean that she is infertile. Her mother wants her to lead as normal a life as possible, and to that end has made arrangements for some of her own eggs to be frozen so that if one day she decides to try to have children there are some eggs available which she can use for IVF if she chooses to (that's right, if she chooses to).

Thus, any resulting child would technically be the girl's half-sister.

Some ethics committees think that this is venturing into dangerous territory, and you can understand why in some ways. How should such a child be viewed? The girl's sister or her daughter? The mother's child or her grandchild? What will the child feel? What sense of identity will she have?

These are all important questions to be sure, and interesting ones, but aren't we forgetting the most important point: Aren't all these questions a bit premature? The fertility clinic that will store the eggs has already weighed the arguments on some of these issues and decided to store the eggs, so why is there a huge debate about it still?

Once again people point to science allowing "unnatural" situations, but is it so unnatural to want your children to have a family? We are not talking about a science fiction mad scientist, we are talking about a mother's love for her daughter.

What this all boils down to, surely, is that one day (years from now) if the daughter is infertile and if she decides to try to have a child then her mother has donated some eggs that she could use if she chooses, or she could simply use some other donor eggs. Those are three quite big ifs to be honest: it is possible that she could conceive naturally (Turner syndrome does not mean she will definitely be infertile, and despite some comments on a BBC forum it does not guarantee that she will have profound learning difficulties either); perhaps the daughter will decide that she doesn't want a family at all; maybe the daughter will decide to adopt in order to have a family.

Family. I think that is the most important thing here. The mother has made this provision, after much deliberation herself, because she loves her daughter and is thinking about her future happiness. There are other options if the girl one day wants to have a family, this is just one of them.