Daily Archives: December 23, 2005

Have daughter, will travel left

Posted on by

This must be the oddest story the Guardian‘s political editor, Michael White, ever wrote.

Forget about the conventional wisdom that parents influence the way their children vote. A new paper by two British academics yesterday upturned a longstanding western idea to suggest that it was the other way around. What’s more, daughters make families vote Labour or Lib Dem.

“This paper provides evidence that daughters make people more leftwing. Having sons, by contrast, makes them more rightwing … the paper ends with a conjecture: leftwing individuals are people who comes from families into which, over recent past generations, many females have been born.”

Small mercies, no. 2

Posted on by

A US judge has banned so-called ‘intelligent design’ from being taught in science lessons in a Pennsylvania school district. Report from this week’s EducationGuardian:

A courtroom battle seen as a test case for the teaching of science in America ended in a decisive victory for evolution yesterday when a federal judge in Pennsylvania ruled that it was unconstitutional to teach “intelligent design” in biology class.

In a 139-page decision that was scathing about the area school district and dismissive of the science of “intelligent design”, US district judge John Jones III ruled that the school district of Dover, Pennsylvania, had violated the constitution by ordering teachers to read a statement which challenged Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Yesterday’s verdict concludes a trial that was seen as the most important legal review of science and religion since the 1920s. It arrives at a time when the teaching of evolution is under attack in school districts from Georgia to Kansas and when the school district in Dover was seen as the cutting edge of a new effort by the religious right to inject its views into America’s state school system.

Needless to say, the ID nutters are not deterred. This one will run and run, but the careful nature of the judgment suggests to me that they are on a hiding to nothing. The US may currently be run by religious maniacs, but the Constititution firmly separates religion and state and I can’t see even a Bush-packed Supreme Court changing that.

Small mercies

Posted on by

We must always be grateful for them. For example, this report in the Guardian.

Monaco has declared Sir Mark Thatcher persona non grata because Prince Albert wants to shake off its reputation as a haven for shady businessmen.

Margaret Thatcher’s 52-year-old son has fallen victim to the attempts by the mini-state’s authorities to put “ethics at the centre of life” there and has been asked to leave when his temporary residency card expires in just over six months’ time.The decision has dashed Sir Mark’s hopes of settling permanently in Monaco. It is the result of a determined effort by the recently enthroned Prince Albert to clean up the principality’s reputation.

Sir Mark is said to be on a list of undesirables who include money launderers, tax dodgers, drug dealers and the mafia.

Hmmm… If I were a money launderer, drug dealer or mafia boss I would be contemplating suing for defamation on the grounds that one’s reputation would never recover from being publicly associated with Thatcher fils. In the meantime, given that he has been refused permission to settle in the US, he will just have to live in the UK and pay tax like the rest of us.

Hackers download pirate movies onto compromised PCs

Posted on by

From The Register…

Hackers have developed a sneaky technique for installing pirated movie files on Windows PCs infected with the lockx.exe rootkit. Doctored copies of BitTorrent are loaded on infected machines and used to download Disney movies or the film version of Mr. Bean.

The motive for the bizarre (and short-lived) attack, linked to a Middle East-based group in control of the network of infected machines – remains unclear. FaceTime Communications, the firm which uncovered the attack, reckons the assault is an experiment which might be applied to far more malign purposes in future. The trick creates a scenario where an infected users might be accused of sharing copyright-protected contact without ever using file sharing software.

Tut, tut. A useful way of blackmailing someone, though. Another reason for avoiding Windows boxes.