Terri Schiavo Update:

In a strongly worded ruling indicating he has run out of patience with the years of litigation over Terri Schiavo’s fate, the judge in the case said Friday her husband can remove the brain-damaged woman’s feeding tube at 1 p.m. March 18.

For those who find this sort of thing interesting, check out the stellar eclipse on March 3rd.

Drudge splashed this Variety.com article, which underscores what I’ve been harping on (off and on) on this blog. And that is that as parents, we have the responsibility to act like parents.

“It’s PG-13, my kids is 14, I’m sure it’s fine.”

Right.

The MPAA has just rated “Gunner Palace” PG-13, and it includes numerous instances of expletives (in a war zone), including FU**, SH** and A**HOLE. If that’s what you want burning into the permanent recording devices known as a child’s brain, fine, but at least pay attention to what they’re watching and doing.

And don’t trust any external regulatory or pseudo-self-regulating voluntary body with the welfare of your children.

The arguments in favor of the PG-13 rating are basically that it’s a reality-based documentary. The Daily Brief says:

To me, profanity in a documentary, particularly one about the military, is akin to full frontal nudity in National Geographic. Should we also be taking that out of children’s reach?

The problem is, it’s not that an R rating is a punishment, it’s supposed to give you an accurate representation of the content of the film. And while folks, such as WindOfChange, think it is absurd to rate this film R, the fact remains that if ratings are simply political, they may as well be thrown out.

MPAA says that an R rating means:

In the opinion of the Rating Board, this film definitely contains some adult material. Parents are strongly urged to find out more about this film before they allow their children to accompany them.

An R-rated film may include hard language, or tough violence, or nudity within sensual scenes, or drug abuse or other elements, or a combination of some of the above, so that parents are counseled, in advance, to take this advisory rating very seriously. Parents must find out more about an R-rated movie before they allow their teenagers to view it.

And a war film with lots of expletives surely falls into the category of “parents, you want to find out more about this movie before you allow your teenagers to view it.” And it may well be that the decision you make is that it is appropriate for your child. But the MPAA should not be making that decision for you.

UPDATE: On an almost related note, a school in the UK has banned kids from playing tag becuase it’s too dangerous:

A SCHOOL has banned children from playing tag — claiming it is too DANGEROUS.

Shocked parents were told pupils — aged from five to nine — must drop the centuries-old chase game.

The parents are up in arms, er, upset about it.

If you don’t know about the Lawrence Summers kerfuffle, there’s lots of background online. But basically he suggested:

that innate differences between the sexes could help explain why fewer women succeed in science and math careers.

Now the science:

The brains of men and women function in markedly different ways, which means they really do think differently, according to researchers from the University of California, Irvine and the University of New Mexico.

The human brain is composed of two types of tissue–gray matter and white matter. While men and women have about the same amount of gray matter and white matter, men appear to use more gray matter, while women use more white matter.

So I wonder if Nancy Hopkins of MIT has recovered from this reaction:

“I felt I was going to be sick,” … “My heart was pounding and my breath was shallow,” she said. “I was extremely upset.”

Via Captain Ed.

On a related note, about how the brain works… check out Jeff Hawkin’s book “On Intelligence” or read some of the reviews on it. He’s the guy who conceived the PalmPilot PDA and the Treo smartphone, but he’s been studying the neocortex for 25 years and has some interesting theories.

CNET Summarizes:

Hawkins says the main difference between his idea and others is that the other methods try to copy human behavior using the wrong notion of how the brain works. The brain doesn’t produce an output for every input, Hawkins says. Instead, it stores experiences and sequences and makes predictions based on those memories. Using that realization about intelligence as a starting point, scientists and inventors can create new and smarter machines, he says.

Ok, back to Lawrence Summers. EducationWonk has an interesting “Tale of Two Talkers.” He compares Summers’ comments and the reaction with Ward Churchill’s. DownWithBush offers this breaking news:

“Starting in the fall, Harvard will offer home economics for women who find economics too tricky,” said Mr. Summers, who called the move “long overdue.”

UPDATE: Via WSJ’s Best of the Web, here’s a suggestion :

To help attract female concentrators [in science], students suggested class activities such as an ice cream social for Chemistry 5 students.