* The changing shape of US law on sexual harassment in the workplace. US law, but universal issues.

* A history of child prodigies over the centuries – it seems it is not just Hollywood child actors who have problems.

* Of course you can’t take this sort of thing too seriously, but the latest Prospect list of the world’s 100 top intellectuals contains 10 women. Slightly better than the world leader’s count then.

* News you can use: a list of tips for getting the best out of Gmail. Now if only they wouldn’t call the delete bin “trash” …

* The internet as the new Samizdat. Contains lots of American newspaper/magazine gossip and this lovely critique of copy-editors (sub-editors):

“Written by Thomas Farragher, my colleague at The Boston Globe, it reproduced the Gettysburg Address as if the speech had had to pass through the meat grinder of the Globe’s main copy desk. I’d just had one of my own harrowing experiences with those ferocious editors, and the parody rang true.

Fourscore and seven years ago (can’t we just make it 87 years ago?) our fathers (WHO ARE THEY?? Any mothers???) brought forth on this continent (North America?? Northern Hemisphere??) a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men (people, men and women, what???) are created equal. (Why don’t we just say they founded the United States and leave it at that? Pacing’s better.)”

Like most good satire, it has an element of truth about it.

One of my favourite themes is how there is no such thing as the “good old days” – senior members of society have been complaining about the manners of youth not being up to their standards ever since the first Homo sapiens sapiens thought she could turn a strip of leather into a neat little bikini.

So some suggestions on behaviour on a bus:

“* Sit with your limbs straight, and do not with your legs describe an angle of 45, thereby occupying the room of two persons.

* Do not spit on the straw. You are not in a hogsty but in an omnibus travelling in a country which boasts of its refinement.

* Behave respectfully to females and put not an upprotected lass to the blush, because she cannot escape from your brutality.

* If you bring a dog, let him be small and be confined by a string.”

Want to guess the date?

From The Times of January 30 1826, via Time Out magazine.

I find the class issues of this interesting, given the source. Did readers of The Times, or at least those assumed to read The Times travel on omnibuses at all? And wouldn’t they have been assumed to know how to behave? Was this perhaps meant for the servants? Not having the original context there’s no way of knowing.

History

For the first time a giant squid, inhabitant of the ocean depth, has been filmed, the BBC reports. And it looks like the horror movie people might have been right about its hunting methods, and the scientists wrong.

And reality is also getting a little closer to the SF writers – particularly Kim Stanley Robinson of the Mars trilogy fame (although I don’t know if he invented the idea) – wiith a successful experiment on the quest to build a space elevator – which if it ever came off, would get rid of all those messy, dangerous rocket engines. (Via Instapundit.)

Tony Blair’s speech to the Labour conference:

For eight years I have battered the criminal justice system to get it to change. And it was only when we started to introduce special ASB laws, we really made a difference. And I now understand why: the system itself is the problem. We are trying to fight 21st-century crime – ASB, drug-dealing, binge-drinking, organised crime – with 19th-century methods, as if we still lived in the time of Dickens.

The whole of our system starts from the proposition that its duty is to protect the innocent from being wrongly convicted. Don’t misunderstand me: that must be the duty of any criminal justice system. But surely our primary duty should be to allow law-abiding people to live in safety.It means a complete change of thinking. It doesn’t mean abandoning human rights; it means deciding whose come first.

“Batter”, such a nice choice of verb, don’t you think? And he wants a “complete change of thinking from innocent until proven guilty”.

Mr Blair wants “victim’s rights” to come first – so if she or he gets up in court and puts on a really strong performance, the crim gets an extra couple of years in jail. (Heading fast towards Hammurabi’s “eye for an eye” – back to the 1700s, that’s BC, of course.)

So today, the mother of the innocent Brazilian electrician shot dead by police on the London Tube says Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, must resign.

Mr Blair?

Like most people who’ve studied philosophy, I went through a period of wrestling with the issue of cultural relativism: how can I say my cultural norms are good, and your cultural norms are repugnant?

A brief study of the issue of female genital mutilation resolved that problem for me comfortably – there are cultural practices that are simply indefensible and should be stamped out by all means possible, just like a species’ general right to exist can be waived in a case such as smallpox.

And for all their faults – and Third World criticisms about their lack of attention to rights such as food and housing are legitimate – the United Nations human rights framework is a pretty good place to start in making value judgments.

But cultural relativism has taken hold in surprising quarters, including it would seem, the Northern Territory in Australia, where a 55-year-old tribal elder who anally raped and bashed a 14-year-old girl, who had been “promised” to him when she was just four years old, was given a jail term of one month. (Although the fact that the Territory’s white culture is extremely masculo-centric might also, I can’t but feel, have something to do with this.)

This was on the grounds that he apparently didn’t know he was doing anything wrong under Australian law, and was merely following cultural norms.

Some of the background to this, as I understand it. A number of the tribal groups in the Territory have a tradition of very young girls being promised as wives to senior men in the tribe, and given to them at a very young age. I’ve seen explanations for this along the lines that this was a harsh, arid, unforgiving environment, and only experienced hunters were likely to be able to support a family. Maybe that was true, maybe it wasn’t. It is not, of course, true now.

The only good news is that someone has stepped in as the poor girl’s advocate and is trying to have the sentence increased, the Sydney Morning Herald reports.