...no, I'm not advocating it. But it got your attention, right? Over on Thingbox we've been having a very long debate about how to tackle those problem children that Tony Blair is so worried about in an effort to distract attention away from his leaving office. So here's my position:

People are hard-wired to make babies, even if it’s not a very good idea.

People who are highly educated (regardless of financial status) tend to try and pick the best time to have kids, and so have fewer, but more successful children. People who are poorly educated show less planning, and have more kids, and those kids are less successful.

We as a society have taken the decision that we cannot let these poorly-planned kids starve to death (because their parents haven’t planned how to feed them) or kill themselves in any of a variety of ways. Instead, we want to try and help them succeed. That’s very noble of us.

One way to help these children succeed would be by helping them be planned children in the first place. This means giving their poorly-educated parents some incentive to think more carefully before having children. We’re already doing that, with mixed results.

Since poorly-educated people will nevertheless continue to have children by accident or through poor judgement, we must find ways to help the children themselves.

Another way to help them succeed is by giving them the same opportunities that better-planned children will get. Since these children are, on average, poorer, this tends to involve financial support, since most opportunities in this country are open to all comers, as long as they can pay.

Financial support is a good solution, and one we are already employing, though it remains to be seen how effective our implementation is.

These poorly-planned children are not, however, just missing out on opportunities. They are missing out on education that happens within the home. Levels of parental education are a good predictor of how educated children will be, even when controlling for financial status. So it’s important that their parents be educated, especially when it comes to teaching their kids.

A common response to this is "but there's no right way to teach children" or "you can't teach good parenting". On the contrary, there is a body of knowledge about parenting styles. And there is also research that shows what parenting style is most successful, where success is measured by the educational attainment of the children. At the very least, there are certainly a large number of easily-identified wrong ways to raise children.

This information about how to be a good important is important and valuable. So in addition to the other ways in which we help poorly-planned kids, we should also be teaching parents how to be good parents. This advice is not foolproof, and in certain living situations it’s not a great predictor of success, but it is better than nothing, which is all that can be said of the other two ways we’re trying to help these kids.

The question is not “is it possible to teach parenting?” or “is it a good idea to teach parenting?”, it’s “what is the best way to educate parents?”

And I don’t know the answer.

Written Friday, 1st September, 2006

The last 5 days have been some of the worst days of my life.

It all started with that incompetent dentist I've been whining about. As I've already mentioned, I had have an emergency root canal on Sunday morning to relieve the pain from an abscess under one of my teeth. With the treatment, I gratefully accepted a 3-day course of antibiotics to cure the infection that caused the abscess.

Grumpy, in pain, and exhausted from the lack of sleep, I did nothing at all on Sunday. I felt particularly annoyed because it was supposed to be the first day of my vacation proper, and I had planned to spend the days off happily coding away on one or another of various personal projects. But now I felt in no fit state to do so.

Over the next couple days, my mood did not improve. I stayed indoors, off instant messenger, doing nothing and talking to no-one except my flatmate when he came in. I declined offers of friends and family. None of this was really unusual; I occasionally do this kind of thing.

But I felt unwell. Obviously I was physically unwell with the pain in my teeth, but I also felt generally unwell and, well, grumpy. Upset. I chided myself for overreacting to a little pain and inconvenience and expense. "I've got nothing really to complain about, and it's all my own fault anyway," I though to myself, "don't go whining to everybody about how your teeth are making you depressed, they'll just joke about it and tell you to get a sense of perspective. Just avoid people until you get better."

So that's what I did. Except I *didn't* get better. My tooth got slowly better, but too slowly. It was now Tuesday and I was still in pain. Reading the directions that came with the antibiotics, they specified a 3-day course for "dental infection" and a 7-day course for "acute dental infection". Well, if this wasn't acute, I didn't know what was. I'd had an abscess and been on antibiotics for them before, and that course had been 5 days. So as I had the pills anyway, I decided to lengthen the dose, as I know that an insufficient dose of antibiotics is worse than none.

And my mood got worse. I lay around watching old science fiction tv and reading comic books -- my comfort actions, as any friend of mine will tell you. I achieved none of my personal projects, I just sat there, dwelling on the pain and expense of my teeth, and feeling overwhelmed at the futility of doing anything. I couldn't face seeing anybody or doing anything. The thought of returning to work made me cringe. I just wanted to hide in a dark hole somewhere forever, and have nobody bother me.

All of this was a total overreaction, obviously, to what had actually happened. In retrospect, I recognize those sorts of feelings. The last time I had them was when I was 16, when I used to cry myself to sleep to the sound of radiohead, unhappy with my sexuality. Back then I did any number of stupid online tests all of which said I was clinically depressed. Every little thing seemed like the straw to break the camel's back. Every little setback loomed huge. It happens to every teenager, and like every teenager, I grew out of it. I should have questioned why I was feeling this way now, but it didn't occur to me.

Back from work one of those evenings, my flatmate idly mentioned that a colleague of his had been late for work because someone had thrown themselves under a train at Clapham Junction. We joked at the general "tut-tut" response this elicts from most Londoners, annoyed at the delay to their journeys. But it set me off: for the first time since I was sixteen, I thought about suicide.

I thought a lot about suicide when I was fifteen and sixteen. I had planned to commit suicide on my 16th birthday. The property where we lived featured a very high cliff-like retaining wall ending in concrete, and my school had a fourth-floor classroom with (in one of those features only a third-world school could get away with) an entirely open balcony with a low wall, also conveniently over a concrete basketball court. No shortage of methods presented themselves; it would be easy. I even dropped hints of the plan to friends. There was no point to my life, I thought at the time. All nature designed me to do is reproduce, and I wasn't going to do that, so why bother?

On the actual day of my birthday, in typical teenage fashion, I was too distracted by birthday presents to even remember that I'd planned to do something. Subsequently, I came up with a pretty neat justification for my lack of action.

First, note that a big reason for my depression was that my discovery of my sexuality had radically altered my perception of my place in the world. I suddenly went from being the golden child to (in my mind; I'd not told anyone yet) the family outcast, and from being a fine upstanding member of society to a pervert (internalized homophobia; isn't it wonderful?).

So what I told myself was: okay, I did commit suicide. I'm dead now. Therefore, the yardstick to measure anything that happens after this time is not relative to the theoretical rich whiteboy I'd thought I was, but to zero. Relative to no life at all, any sort of life at all wasn't just acceptable, it was great. So it didn't matter how bad things got: they were still better than they'd been on my 16th birthday, when I died.

The same dark thoughts were still buzzing around in my head on Friday morning as I packed to go on vacation with the family, to Bilbao. Everything was incredibly frustrating to me now. I'd got the flight date wrong -- I was coming back Sunday, not Monday. I couldn't find my clothes. My tooth still hurt. I didn't have a bag the right size. I was broke from paying for the dentist. All these petty little things that ordinarily I would brush aside without a second thought seemed huge, unbearable. I considered cancelling, backing out of the vacation entirely. The only thing that stopped me was I couldn't think of a good reason to do so -- my tooth? Feeling anti-social? Pretty silly reasons to waste a couple hundred quid on cancelled flights and reservations. It would just be ridiculous.

As I walked down Clapham High Road to the tube, for the first time I thought: why am I so unhappy? Is it really just the dentistry? The money? Frustration at not having achieved anything in my week off? Was I not over my ex, who I'd unexpectedly bumped into a few weeks before? But that had seemed to go so well at the time, and was in any case weeks ago. What was making me unhappy now? I couldn't think of anything. It just seemed, even to me, that I was totally overreacting to minor setbacks. I continued to toy with backing out -- it was only a short trip, after all. I crossed the little triangular park outside Stockwell station and waited at the lights to cross.

The junction outside Stockwell tube always has heavy traffic, and is a major bus route, so the lights are quite a wait if you miss them. The first stream of traffic passed from the east, and I watched idly, thinking only how unable to face a vacation I felt. The ridiculousness of being "unable to face" a vacation didn't occur to me.

The lights changed, and there was that five second lull you get as the north-bound traffic accelerated away from the lights. I could see a double-decker in the queue. And the thought crossed my mind: by the time it passes here, it'll be going fast enough. It only take six steps to be out in front of it, and it'll all be over.

I closed my eyes, held my breath, and waited until I felt the rush of air as the bus went past.

At the airport, I mentioned to my mother how upset I'd been feeling. She suggested that perhaps my antibiotics were to blame.

What? How can a substance built to kill bacteria make you unhappy? But I pulled out my phone, and googled for something along the lines of "antibiotics that cause depression" (I can't remember the exact term now) and found a list of drugs suspected to cause depression. And there at the bottom of the list was metronidazole, what I'd been taking for the last five days.

So that's it? I nearly threw myself under a bus because I was taking some stupid orange pills? How fragile and subjective our grip on reality is.

I write this on Friday night. Tomorrow I may stop taking the pills. I'll write and tell you what happens.

Written Sunday, September 3rd.

Saturday things got steadily better -- I had a great morning and afternoon. Towards the evening I thought I could feel my tooth getting worse, so I chickened out and took the pills again, and my mood seemed reasonably unchanged, so I took another before bed (the stated dosage is 3 per day, so 2 should be okay). But this morning things seemed crap again, so I didn't take one this morning, and 15 hours after my last dose the world seems fine again.

It seems crazy to me now that I was thinking about suicide just two days ago. My life is great! What the hell was I complaining about? So that's why I wrote it down then, as I knew the memory would fade. But that seems to be the effect these drugs have on me. Metronidazole turns up repeatedly, along with other antibiotics on lists of drugs that cause depression, such as the antibiotics used to treat acne, which are being reviewed for public use because of the link to depression after even the manufacturers began to list depression as a possible side effect.

In the states metronidazole is sold as Flagyl, and depression is sometimes listed by the retailer as a side-effect, and sometimes not. The leaflet that came with my own dose certainly doesn't. But the link to metronidazole specifically turns up in at least two medical studies as well as (obviously anecdotal, but still not to be dismissed) voluntary reports by patients.

Of course, since my teeth were painful as well as infected, I was also taking nurofen. Ah, glorious nurofen. Everybody takes that. Except nurofen is ibuprofen, and also lists depression as a side effect. Now a little suspicious, I did some googling, but no, you can't just find crazy people on the Internet claiming everything causes depression -- neither aspirin nor piriton, which I've taken in the past for headaches and hayfever respectively, for example, show any such link.

This is me. I don't even drink alcohol because the whole concept of a substance altering my mental state is repulsive to me. To discover that I've been happily swallowing not one but two substances, at the same time, which had such a profound effect on my mental state is shocking to me. To have it laid so bare that our whole grasp of reality is so totally subjective is also deeply scary. To say nothing of annoying, since I've blown a week of vacation in a (prescription) drug-fueled haze of crushing depression.

So kids, what have we learned? Well, I think that "dentists don't ever know what the fuck they're doing" is probably a good one. "Don't exceed the stated dose" might also feature, except I was following the directions, they just failed to mention all the side-effects. The best one is probably "deeply question your mental state before doing anything significant", I think. But I'm back to normal now, so you don't have to worry about me holding up the traffic anytime soon.

We take a break from tales of suicide and woe to bring you the cutest couple in the universe. Seriously. These kids together are better than a roomful of baby pandas. Pandas holding kittens. And the kittens are wearing hats.

P.S.: Are we looking at a Maggie 2.0 here? My politico friends keep saying there's no chance he's leaving before the party conference but frankly I'm wondering if he'll make it to the end of the month.

The baby photo seen around the world:

This is an amazing photo. You can see why they picked it for the cover. In a single image it captures the entire story: Cruise, the proud father, crows over his latest acquisition while wrapping it protectively to his chest. The baby is almost obscured by the leather jacket Tom is wearing as a symbol of his masculinity, thus unintentionally emphasizing the baby's own status as a the same kind of symbol. Mother Katie, on the other hand, though obviously loving, has already been obviously literally and emotionally sidelined -- she has to crane her neck just to fit into the frame and Tom pays her no attention at all. This photo, and this marriage, are all about Tom, Tom, Tom, and that's exactly the way he wants it to be.

This photo is an absolute masterpiece.

Case A:

It's the late 90s. The DVD industry, worried about the security of their copyrights, creates a method of encrypting the movies on DVDs. Called CSS, this is supposed to prevent people copying DVDs. However, the industry still needs people to be able to play the DVDs in their legitimate players and on their DVD-equipped computers. Therefore, they have to give these very same people whom they don't trust not to violate copyrights the tools to unencrypt their encrypted copyrighted works.

Naturally, in reasonably short order, somebody reverse-engineers these tools and works out how to send the movies anywhere -- like another DVD, or their hard drive -- not just to the screen. Called DeCSS, this effectively ends any hope the industry has of technically restricting copyright violation, although they do briefly attempt legal restrictions, chiefly by making it illegal to use the software (or even link to it).

However, it is soon pointed out that the software is based on ideas so simple they can be expressed in any number of ways: a diagram, a movie, even an epic Haiku poem.

The DeCSS fiasco is rightfully viewed as one of the more outstanding moments in the recording and movie industry's long history of technological cluelessness.

Case B:

It's 2006. The airline industry, worried about airline security, creates a systems of checks and controls to prevent people with dangerous items boarding planes. However, they still want ordinary customers to be able to board planes without inconvenience. Therefore, they give these same possibly potentially terrorist passengers a list of rules about what items can and cannot make it onboard a plane, so they don't accidentally pack things in the wrong bag and create delays.

This is fundamentally the same problem. You cannot attempt to bar certain items from the plane if people are aware of the rules you use to determine what goes on board, the system you use to detect the items, and the methods you use to search. Therefore, it is only a matter of time before somebody works out a way of creating an explosive or other dangerous device that still fits within these rules.

It doesn't matter that we can't take suncream and toothpaste on board anymore. It makes us safer only for the couple of months it takes for some reasonably clever person somewhere to come up with a way of getting around the system.

Anybody fancy doing a photographic treasure hunt of West London tomorrow? One place left on the team, first come first served with frankly unfair exceptions made for cute people.

It was loads of fun. We wandered around new bits of London, had a nice pub lunch, played in the park, and took lots of photos, many involving a can of Baked Beans.

Roller Disco was every bit as fun as I remembered. Woohoo! I think I'm going to use some of my birthday money to buy a pair of proper roller skates -- one thing our neighbourhood does have is an awful lot of concrete, and it's probably good exercise or something, even if it is unspeakably gay.

Oh! And I got ID'ed. For age 18. At my 25th birthday party. I think that's the best present a boy could ask for.

I seem to have accidentally acquired a non-geeking, non-dancing hobby. It's even outdoors! I've never had one of them before.

P.S. Your joke for the day (mainly for M):
Q: Why do socialists all drink herbal teas?
A: Because all proper tea is theft.

I will give �10 to the first person who successfully works out what I saw on the Internet that eventually worked its way out of my subconscious as this word.

I may give hints later. Each hint will drop the prize by �1.