Taking aim at a longstanding rite of passage for 16-year-olds, an influential auto safety group is calling on states to raise the age for getting a driver’s license to 17 or even 18.

Adrian Lund, president of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a research group funded by the auto insurance industry, acknowledged the idea is “a tough sell,” but noted that car crashes are the leading cause of death among teenagers.

“The bottom line is that when we look at the research, raising the driving age saves lives,” Lund said.

I don’t doubt it. But why stop there?  Think of all the lives that could be saved if the driving age was raised to 50.  Do teenagers die on the road at greater rates than other age groups, or do they just have lower mortality from other causes?  Even if they do have a higher auto-death rate, what is the cause?  Inexperience on the road perhaps?  If the driving age was raised to 18, wouldn’t that then increase the number of fatalities in the now inexperienced 18-20 age group?

Spore is an epically conceived attempt to provide a game that lets you oversee your little creature from tidepool to galactic domination.  While this sounds like an educational game about evolution, this is not a science based game about evolution by natural selection.

It’s a game about intelligent design.  You have godlike powers over your creature’s abilities and appearance, and you can modify this to achieve your desired ends.  There is no random variation, all of your creatures are identical.  There is no selection, as death of your creature never affects the rest of the species.  If you notice there is fruit hanging high in a tree, you can stretch your creature’s neck in a Lamarckian fashion.

Also, contrary to what I first thought, modifying attributes like your creature’s gait doesn’t appear to change their ground speed.  That seems to be entirely dependent on whether they have +1 or +2 leg parts.  Also, adding a second set of horns doesn’t increase their charging ability.  Thus, most of the creature editor is aesthetic, and doesn’t affect the creature’s abilities other than as an inventory of parts.

To be fair it may be impossible to create a realistic evolution by natural selection game, by definition.  If there is nothing for the god-like player to tweak, it’s not going to be a very engaging game-play experience.

It seems we’re always on the lookout for a workable inline code documentation system.  The pros and cons of doing this are always fighting it out, with a significant con being that this tends towards overdocumentation.

At any rate, I just read that the Python documentation switched over from LaTeX to reStructuredText.   One of the common drawbacks of inline documentation is that some nasty tags are required to markup the text.  reStructuredText avoids this problem by using quite intuitive underlining, indentation and numeric lists, such that the documentation text is formatted essentially as one would format it for normal plaintext readability.

This is a sample python script documented with  reST. You can paste one of the docstrings into this online renderer to see the sample output.  Rendering would normally be done with Docutils.