Sauntering

Lennon's Loss

2010-12-08T11:21:00.000-08:00

I'll admit that I'm a sappy, emotional guy. Once in a while, I'll settle into work, only to stumble across something on the web that hits me like an emotional ton of bricks.

This short New York Times piece on the 30th anniversary of John Lennon's death is not memorable for its contents — it's memorable for the hundreds of reader comments that follow the piece. It's page after page of short, detailed remembrances, each intimate and sketching a scene of shared yet private grief at the loss of this light.

I was 4 in 1980, so my grief at Lennon's loss wouldn't come until later.

Dried flowers from the funeral of Abraham Lincoln.

Ford's Theatre National Historic Site, Washington, D.C.

Flags & Poppies

2010-11-11T08:37:00.001-08:00

Today's Google Doodle, customized locally in recognition of Veterans/Remembrance/Armistice Day, provides a brief, wordless comparison of the difference in how service and sacrifice are remembered on both sides of the Atlantic.

Whoa! Was That a Hiatus?

2010-09-22T22:05:00.000-07:00

Not sure how that happened — a blog gets published at least one per month for more than 7 years, then takes a 6-month hiatus.

I'm happy to report that there's no dramatic or dangerous set of events that have led to this blog running silent for all spring and all summer. If anything is the root cause of Sauntering going without a voice, it's the combination of a wonder-if-this-is-sustainable pace at work combined with becoming the father of two kids.

I'm negatively correlated with blogging!

This task remains rewarding, and I hope to return to it with greater gusto soon.

Double Helix Sunrise

2010-03-21T14:10:00.000-07:00

Lately/Unfortunately, I've found that my days are much more manageable if I start work before 7 a.m. (My favorite aspect of this schedule is speaking with East Coasters who are calling me early in the hopes of getting my voicemail.)

As I discovered last spring, the sun aligns with the orientation of the hallways in our building during the spring, causing light to ricochet down the halls in unexpected ways that I find quite beautiful:

Who Dat? Not A Saintly Cheer

2010-01-23T11:49:00.001-08:00

The New Orleans Saints are very much the feel-good story of the NFL these days. Displaced by Hurricane Katrina just four years ago, their place atop the standings this season symbolizes the resiliency of their great city.

But as Andy pointed out to me the other day, Saints' fans' cheer of choice symbolizes something quite different. To those unfamiliar, Who Dat? might sound like a southern take on the common Whose House? cheer. It isn't. It is a line popularly used in minstrel shows. (If you think minstrel shows have something to do with nomadic lute players of yore, do some Googling to learn about the minstrel shows popular from the mid-19th to mid-20th century.) Although minstrel shows were popular across the U.S. and, indeed, Europe, they marketed a southern image, presumably for "authenticity." Claiming a connection to New Orleans was, perhaps, the most popular technique.

This is not a legacy anyone should be cheering. The claim that the cheer "celebrates" New Orleans is no more persuasive than the claim that the confederate flag can be used to celebrate southern pride without celebrating slavery and racism. The confederate flag represents the South because it evokes the decision by the southern states to secede in an attempt to perpetuate slavery. Similarly, Who Dat? represents New Orleans because it evokes the city's historic ties to minstrel shows. In either case, you can't reach the ultimate conclusion without the intervening racist imagery.

Think back to the tomahawk chop, as utilized by fans of any number of teams, but particularly the Atlanta Braves. The tomahawk chop is obviously problematic because of the unmistakable connection between the mascot of these teams and the deeply racist image of Native Americans as savages. No matter how sincerely the fans believe they hold no racial animus, the act alone perpetuates a racist caricature.

Who Dat? is no better, and perhaps worse. Although the connection between the cheer and its minstrel roots may be less obvious to the general public than that between the tomahawk chop and a Native American mascot, this only serves to illustrate the intentional selection of the cheer because of its unmistakeable connection to New Orleans; it can't be coopted by another team in another city. Who Dat? is the Saints' cheer because New Orleans has a uniquely strong association with the minstrel shows that popularized the cheer originally.

Saints' fans are rightfully proud their team, but they should not be proud of this cheer. As the Saints march on toward the Super Bowl, more and more people will hear the cheer and wonder what it means. If they take the time to find out, I hope they will justifiably be embarrassed for the Saints.

A sad thought at a time when we should be so proud New Orleans, its people, and its football team.

You're Such a Joker — Playing Cards as Wine Charms

2010-01-18T20:43:00.000-08:00

It's been quite a while since I've posted an art & crafts project. Not counting reminisces on spring sunsets, I think it hasn't been since Summer 2007 and turning rejection letters into grocery lists. We're due.

Steph & I (& our guests) seem to have completely lost our ability to keep track of our wine glasses at our dinner parties of late. I'm drinking out of Steph's glass. Steph's drinking out of her friend's glass. It's unsanitary and, frankly, it makes these soirées sound boozier than they really are.

So there we were, shopping on Amazon.com for wine charms, those little things that dangle off your wine glass and tip you off that it's yours and not someone else's. We were searching for them and being shocked at how chintzy the charms all looked. If you want Ole Miss wine charms, they've got them for you.

Frugality and anti-chintziness being the mother of invention, we had an insight. Convert a deck of playing cards into wine charms.

My parents are the Johnny Appleseeds of playing cards. Every time they visit, they seem to deposit a new deck at our house. Thus, we were easily able to retire the most dog-eared deck to glory.

To employ this method, following these steps:

Start by cutting the card in half horizontally.
Punch a hole. A standard hole punch should be able to reach to the middle of the half-card. The hole will need to be wider than a single hole punch to accommodate the glass stem, so I recommend making a small clover leaf composed of multiple punches.
Use scissors to cut a slit from the cut side to the punched hole.
Round the corners on the cut side and viola! You're done. You just saved $15 by not buying from Amazon, proved that you can recycle your current possessions, and will finally stop drinking out of your Uncle Frank's glass. He's the king of clubs. You're the jack of diamonds, friend.

Welcoming Anne

2009-10-28T06:32:00.000-07:00

Anne joined our family on 10/22/09 @ 1:27 AM Pacific, about 30 minutes after we checked into the hospital. Once the time came to be born, she was in a hurry.

Anne @ Almost One Day Old

All are well and at home as Anne approaches one week old. 2½ year old big sister Katie has reacted predictably to this addition, with equal measures of cuteness and chaos.

Whereas shock and life-changing awe was the initial reaction to Katie's arrival back in 2007, Anne's arrival has been one juxtaposition after another:

It's the stark contrast between the needs of a newborn and the needs of a preschooler.

It's remembering how nervous we were when Katie wouldn't sleep or eat or was fussy versus our expectation now that these situations will pass, then return, only to pass again.

It's the suburban California setting that Anne has entered compared to the urban New York world that first greeted Katie.

The things that haven't changed?

Yep, we're still naming our daughters as if we have the full expectation that they may need to someday serve as the Queen of England (Anne Charlotte, meet Catherine Emily. I assure you that, should we someday have a boy, Æthelred is definitely a strong candidate for his name).

Yep, the flood of emotion at greeting a new life is unchanged. In addition to in love, in awe, overjoyed, enamored, and profoundly satisfied, I propose we coin a term to describe the emotional state of the parent of a newborn — Darwinish. "Oh very little one, I long to take care of you so that you might grow, thrive, and – should you so choose – someday pass on your (and my) heritable traits."

Yep, some part of me is still shocked that the 80+% of the human population that reproduces is largely able to cope with the demands of these little things. Looking at a newborn, you're immediately reminded of the frailty of human life. Looking at all the former newborns walking around you each day, you're constantly reminded that we are a resilient species.

Awwwkward

2009-10-06T14:59:00.000-07:00

I once had a boss who occasionally asked us to do things that we'd really rather not do. For example, he once asked my co-worker to fight a parking ticket for him.

I was reminded of this by a copyright case in which the Supreme Court will hear oral argument tomorrow, Reed Elsevier Inc., et al., v. Muchnik, et al. (08-103). As happens occasionally, the Court rejected the issues presented by the petition for certiorari and wrote its own instead. What is far more curious, however: all the parties are on the same side of the issue the Court decided to hear — they are all against the Second Circuit's ruling on it.

So the Court got Ohio State law professor Deborah Jones Merritt to argue that side. I can just imagine that phone call:

PROF. MERRITT: Hello?

C.J. ROBERTS: Howdy Professor, this is John Roberts!

PROF. MERRITT: The Chief Justice?

C.J. ROBERTS: That's the one.

PROF. MERRITT: Oh, um, ah, hello your Honor. How may I help you?

C.J. ROBERTS: Well, see, we've got this case. We're thinking about granting a writ of certiorari, but, I'll be honest, these guys kinda missed the boat with their petition.

PROF. MERRITT: I see . . . . I don't want to tell you how to do your job, but couldn't you just deny the petition?

C.J. ROBERTS: Welllll, yeeaaaah, I suppose. But the case implicates a pretty important question they didn't raise.

PROF. MERRITT: That makes sense. Well, you're the Supreme Court! You can write the question yourselves, right?

C.J. ROBERTS: Exactly! That's what I keep telling everybody.

PROF. MERRITT: So what's the problem?

C.J. ROBERTS: Well, don't tell anyone, but we kinda want to reverse the Second Circuit.

PROF. MERRITT: So?

C.J. ROBERTS: The problem is, all the parties want us to reverse the Second Circuit on our question, too.

PROF. MERRITT: Oh, that is tricky.

C.J. ROBERTS: So . . .

PROF. MERRITT: Yes?

C.J. ROBERTS: Wouldja mind arguing the other side?

Just like my co-worker, who dutifully fought our boss's parking ticket, Professor Merritt couldn't bring herself to say no.

Good luck tomorrow, Professor!

What I'll Miss About New York: #10 — Columbia University

2009-09-25T23:47:00.000-07:00

In their Pulitzer Prize-winning book Gotham, Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace note that the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum was – in 1821 – "a rustic seventy-seven acre plot several miles north of town." By the 1890's Bloomingdale was no more and Columbia University – a school that had existed in New York since it was founded as King's College in 1754 – moved to occupy this seemingly remote location in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan.

Columbia University circa 1895, from roughly 115^th & Amsterdam Avenue

Today, this spot could be considered rustic and rural relative only to Times Square, and Columbia University is seated in a neighborhood of multi-story buildings that sit shoulder-to-shoulder alongside Broadway and Amsterdam. Still, in the imagination of many New Yorkers I've met, there's a sense that this school is somehow apart from and other than the rest of Manhattan.

Columbia's too far north. For an island that extends to 220th Street, it's a little surprising when you first notice that the maps affixed to the taxi cab partitions don't extend north of 125th Street. Though Robert Moses failed to divide the island with his Lower Manhattan Expressway, Manhattanites incurious about the goings-on above Columbus Circle succeeded in creating two islands where God only created one.

It's the wrong side of the island, too far from the locales of Project Runway and Gossip Girl, north of celebrities walking their dogs or strolling their babies. I'd meet someone at a party downtown and let them know that I studied at Columbia and more often than not their reaction was something along the lines of, "Welcome back from the provinces, country cousin! Will you be in the Big City very long, or is it back to the farm with you?"

Columbia is a bookish place. A place of athletic teams that haven't been competitive since Lou Gehrig. A place that plays social second fiddle to the tragically hip university located in the beating heart of Greenwich Village.

And I miss this place, this place that is the geographic opposite of the serene and almost sleepy school where I obtained my undergraduate degree.

Columbia reminds me that there is a history to this country that I barely know. A 19th century American listener would recognize the name of this school as being a synonym for the United States and the New World, generally.

Since its erection in 1886, the Statue of Liberty has come to represent this country, personified. But before that statue's erection, this country's feminine form was Columbia. Where the Statue of Liberty evokes within us thoughts of this country as a City upon a Hill, Columbia's general evocation of progress and modernity is less of a burden for us to shoulder. Where the Statute of Liberty demands that we shine a light to illuminate the world, Columbia signifies the unrealized promise of a country that is a new arrival on the global scene.

As this country releases its hold on the mantle of global hegemon, maybe we'll see a return to the image of Columbia. The US will have to learn to live with the idea that we can't be the new colossus, unilaterally addressing the world's problems. But we can be Columbia.

What's this? After living in New York City for three years, I'm returning to California. These are the parts of my New York experience that I'll miss the most.

The Coolest 9 Minutes and 35 Seconds Ever Broadcast?

2009-08-09T08:23:00.000-07:00

A little more than 49 years ago, on July 21, 1960, CBS broadcast "The Sound of Miles Davis" on an episode of Robert Herridge Theater. The show featured a set recorded on April 2, 1959.

At the top of the program, the Miles Davis Quintet (including John Coltrane on tenor) launched into a soulful, stunning rendition of So What, the studio version of which was laid down one month earlier on March 2, 1959. For the millions of fans of jazz music who have memorized the studio version, the CBS version opens a window into how the song evolved in the months following its famous recording.

Since So What is the most memorable track on Kind of Blue, the most famous jazz album of all time, I think you're forced to conclude that these are the coolest 9 minutes, 35 seconds in the history of broadcast television.
Update (8/17): Kind of Blue was released fifty years ago today.

What I'll Miss About New York: #11 — Our Building

2009-08-01T22:57:00.000-07:00

You can tell two different sets of stories about our old building in New York.

The first set of stories concerns the structure itself. 216 W. 89^th Street is a few years shy of 100, and it shows. Compared to its nearly identical sister building to the south, it wears a far darker hue of grime.

Making your way up to our apartment meant squeezing into our undersized elevator. When riding in the elevator by myself, I'd think of it as a kind of elevator version of the 7½ floor from Being John Malkovich. When riding with several others, I thought of those grainy black and white pictures of showing laughing 1950's types packing a phone booth.

The normal-sized service elevator next to the passenger elevator offers a clue to the building's former glory. Today, it looks like the service elevator for any number of old New York buildings: accordion gate, manual operation, worn wood slats covering the floor. A closer look shows its former life. On the faded walls of the elevator are beautiful faceted mirrors . Scrolled iron rims the ceiling of the elevator, and marble surrounds its entrance in the lobby. As originally laid out at the turn of the last century, each apartment in the building had servant's quarters, and I'm convinced that the elevator that I rode every day was the servants' elevator, with today's service elevator transporting the residents of yesteryear.

The second story worth telling about our building is the story of the people who live there. Living in an urban setting means a degree of engagement with the lives of others completely unlike the set of interactions a suburbanite has with his neighbors.

The slow awakening of relationships after umpteen elevator rides together. The fights of spouses heard in the hallway or echoing across the alley. The tenants on rent control and the younger tenants paying market rate. The physical closeness of knowing that someone else lives behind that wall.

The family of four in the one bedroom apartment (both kids approaching high school age). The person who made everyone's business her business. The addict. Some of our best friends moving into the building. The octogenarian tenants who have lived their whole lives in the building. The building super straight out of central casting. The simplicity of a dozen relationships where all you know about the people is that they have kind faces and say hello when you see them around the neighborhood.

Despite all the people in Manhattan, New York is a lonely place, you'll hear. In a sea of anonymous faces, my building was an island, a group of smiling, friendly, welcoming people who melted any preconceptions I had about New Yorkers. They made the city a smaller, friendlier place. They were fleeting family to me — I miss them and think of them fondly.

What's this? After living in New York City for three years, I'm returning to California. These are the parts of my New York experience that I'll miss the most.

Turn Yourself Around

2009-07-18T22:03:00.000-07:00

Now that Katie is about 2½, we've been singing a lot of the Hokey Pokey lately. Although some version of this song has been around since the mid-19th century, I was aware that the version of the song you and I recognize was not some traditional version, but rather a chart topper from the early 1950's recorded by bandleader Ray Anthony.

Amused that a song with all the complexity of a nursery rhyme could attain national popularity, I took a look at the list of mid-century chart toppers to get an idea of how many goofball songs made their way to the top of the list.

Although the Macarena, which surged to the top of the global charts in 1995 and 1996, proves that novelty songs can still sit at #1 inside and outside the U.S., the occasional rise of a goofball single over the past couple decades pales in comparison to the number of novelty songs that sat atop the U.S. Best Sellers in Stores charts during the late 40's and early 50's:

Song	First Week @ #1	Weeks @ #1
Let it Snow! Let it Snow! Let it Snow!	January 26, 1946	5 weeks
Open the Door, Richard	February 22, 1947	1
Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (That Cigarette)	August 9, 1947	6
I'm Looking Over a Four Leaf Clover	February 21, 1948	3
Woody Woodpecker	July 3, 1948	6
All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth	January 8, 1949	1
Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer	January 7, 1950	1
I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus	December 27, 1952	2
(How Much is) That Doggie in the Window?	March 21, 1953	8

After this flurry of Christmas-themed #1 hits, no holiday songs have returned to the #1 perch.

The dawn of rock and roll largely kept novelty songs away from the #1 spot until the mid-1970's when Kung Fu Fighting and Disco Duck (Part 1) each found their way to #1 in 1974 and 1976, respectively. Of course, these tunes were just paving the way for the Star Wars Theme/Cantina Band by Meco, a disco version of the movie's theme that topped the charts for two weeks starting on October 1, 1978.

Sequence MY Genome. Now.

2009-07-08T14:34:00.001-07:00

Its almost certainly a coincidence, given the authors' affiliations, but I did a double take when seeing this article published.

Skype: Connecting Robots With Robot Grandparents Since 2009

2009-06-28T08:45:00.000-07:00

When Katie was 2 months old, I marveled on this site at Skype's video conferencing software, software allowed us to stay in close visual touch with relatives thousands of miles away.

I'm happy to report that now, as Katie is about 2½ years old, Skype's video conferencing abilities have expanded beyond what they were in 2007. If you look in the bottom left corner of the laptop screen, you'll notice a robot (one wearing a diaper box and a bowl as a "robot hat"). Yep, Skype circa 2009 allows robots to connect with robot grandparents across the miles.

Can A Blog Win a Pulitzer Prize?

2009-06-15T11:38:00.000-07:00

Like many of you, I suspect, I've been glued to every possible source of coverage of the current unrest in Iran (perhaps more so....sick days haven't been the same since the invention of the internets). I've looked at bunch of sites, but no single site has impressed me more than Andrew Sullivan's. Like many people, I think that Twitter is, with the possible exception of Facebook's new you-take-a-quiz-I-tell-everyone-what-friggin'-80s-pop-icon-you-are, just about the worst invention in the history of human speech.

But in the past few days, Twitter feeds have provided amazing insights into what's happening on the ground in Iran. The central government has shut down many of the major news outlets, websites, and cell phone networks, but through VPN connections and other tricks I don't understand, tiny Tweets have made their way across the world and are being used to coordinate everything from protests to denial of service attacks.

Sullivan has been compiling many of these Twitter feeds on his blog with the result that we here in the US can feel the full strength of the fear, the anger, and, yes, the hope in Iran in a way I've simply never experienced with any form of media before. Go read it.

Katie Discovers a Windows Feature — dıןɟ uǝǝɹɔs

2009-06-09T23:08:00.000-07:00

While we were banging our hands on the keyboard, watching a web video of a piano virtuoso playing Flight of the Bumblebee, Katie unintentionally discovered a Windows feature that all should know.

If you are using a Windows machine, hit the following key combination:

Ctrl + Alt + Down Arrow

ʍoɹɹɐ dn + ʇןɐ + ןɹʇɔ

:uoıʇɐuıqɯoɔ ʎǝʞ sıɥʇ ʇıɥ 'pıp ʇsnɾ noʎ ʇɐɥʍ opun oʇ

Armed with this knowledge, my unsuspecting coworkers will soon know my upside down terror! Mwahahahaha!

Update (6/11): Unfortunately, it appears that the availability of the screen flip feature appears to depend on the video driver for your particular Windows system. Although the feature worked on my old Dell Latitude D610, it does not work on our systems at work. Curses!

O Court, Please Leave Room for Great Use

2009-06-08T21:26:00.000-07:00

It's been a long time since I've ruminated on the fair use copyright standard for video sharing websites, but whatever standard the court settles on, I hope they make room for fan-made music videos that I find amazing:

Adblock

Death Cab for Cutie - Little Bribes from Ross Ching on Vimeo.

MOMA — I See

2009-05-16T12:33:00.000-07:00

After experiencing the Met and MOMA both with and without audio tours, I'm now of the opinion that going to an art museum without a good audio tour or an informed guide borders on a waste of time.

MOMA's new short film does a good job of summing up the difference in your appreciation when you can approach a piece on a more than aesthetic level:

Gadget Girl's Self-Portraiture

2009-05-04T07:40:00.000-07:00

Katie was born into a wired world, and I find her ability to interact with gadgets a little dazzling.

Whereas I was probably fumbling with a rotary telephone dial when I was her age back in 1978, Katie knows how to turn on an iPhone, pressing the button at the bottom of the device and then sliding the virtual slider that appears on the screen. She can scroll through the application trays on the device, flicking her finger laterally until she finds the bubble wrap application or Brian Eno's Bloom application, or some other program she likes.

She's also something of a photo buff. A few months back, she learned that a digital camera displays the captured image on an LCD screen on the back. Now she says "See dat. See dat." in a patient monotone after you've taken her picture, kindly requesting to stare at the small version of herself on the camera's back.

We hit a new gadget milestone this weekend, when she obtained our friend's camera and proceeded to turn the camera towards herself, saying "cheese!" and taking her own portrait:

Quebexas

2009-04-24T07:01:00.000-07:00

Given all the Texas secession talk since Tax Day, the term Quebexas came to mind this morning as I was making the coffee.

Seems like there are more than a few parallels here:

Claims to a culture distinct from the rest of the country
Country-esque size (Quebec = 595,391 sq mi (larger than Madagascar), Texas = 268,820 sq mi (larger than the UK)]
Linguistic uniqueness

Any others that leap to mind?

Zigzag Sunset

2009-04-21T08:03:00.000-07:00

There are few benefits to working until sundown on a beautiful spring day. I was surprised last night to learn that one of those benefits is the way that the sunset bounces in a zigzag pattern down my hall.

Things Learned @ Starbucks @ 6 AM

2009-03-10T07:04:00.000-07:00

Should you find yourself at Starbucks ordering a triple venti latte to try to wake up for your 10^th 16-hour day in a row while working on some work emergency, here's a heart attack of a tip:

At least at my local Starbucks, the button that permits the barrista to make an odd number of shots is broken. They can only draw espresso shots in twos. Thus, be friendly and your sympathetic server will ask you if you want that extra shot.

Lest you think that four shots of espresso is just too much caffeine, it's still less than the Starbucks brewed grande coffee.

Get Rich! Just Like Me!

2009-02-17T22:06:00.000-08:00

Facebook ads were strange and are just getting stranger.

Based on the pattern on this fellow's collar – which looks an awful lot like the military's new MARPAT camouflage pattern – I suspect this fellow is a member of the U.S. military holding up some Iraq or Afghanistan reconstruction money, not some entrepreneur showing off his hard-won earnings:

As our country spindles downwards into economic darkness, I feel like I've noticed a trend whereby the claims of internet advertising have become more ambitious and outlandish. As our lives get plainer, ads promise only more luxury.

Today, we're all suddenly focused on living within our means, we wonder how we'd manage if that job disappeared, we know that our current shared struggle was hatched from the simultaneous failure of our fellow countrymen's fatally flawed get-rich-quick schemes.

Yet we're still not attentive enough to notice that the image of the fellow holding tens of thousands of dollars in his hand is a ploy, a lie in plain sight. That money is not his and it's not yours, but maybe you're more likely to click the ad today than you were a year ago, because just for a second, you want to believe that you can succeed economically without wait or effort. Just for that moment, you look at the image without seeing, hoping for the chance to get rich because you're sick of a world that says you're lucky to get by.

Yet Another Sign that the Economy is in Dire Straits

2009-02-07T07:34:00.000-08:00

The number of people arriving at this blog after searching for something like Find Velveeta in Grocery Store has skyrocketed since the start of the year.

11/10/04: Find the Velveeta

Bûche de Lardon

2009-02-03T22:30:00.000-08:00

Speaking through his character Lord Henry Wotton in The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde remarked that "The one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties." Softy that I am, I disagree. However, there's no denying that your spouse being away awakens a part of your personality that slumbers when they're around. Guy Time is what happens when my family is out of town, and as my friends get married off, I find it's the same with them.

Take Dan, for example. My friend Dan is married to a wonderful woman named Sita who is a professional raw vegan chef. Dan is an amazing combination, equal parts hippie and South Philadelphia, and he is the kind of guy who I imagine gladly gobbles the awesome and healthy cuisine that is a part of the daily life of someone who lives in a raw vegan household.

Still, I know that Dan wasn't raised on nut milk and cashew cheez, so the following IM exchange last Thursday came as no surprise to me:

Dan: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/28/dining/28bacon.html
Me: Tempted. You?
Dan: I think maybe its important that we try it just once
Me: I think your spouse would have a hard time being present.
Dan: She's gone saturday ... ...

(. . . many instant messages and roughly 7 hours later)

Me: Operation Bacon Log is a go.

And so it came to pass that Dan and I cooked a Bacon Log (or, across the pond, perhaps a Bûche de Lardon) this Saturday. For those of you who are as yet uninitiated, the Bacon Log (called by some The Bacon Explosion) is a veritable pigstravaganza. It is all the swine you would ever want to eat . . . in convenient log form. But why simply describe Bacon Log when we have pictures? Gaze upon the glory:

Bacon Weave
The log starts with a tightly woven mat of raw bacon. I swear I couldn't have gotten these any tighter if I was using a loom. I'm confident this mat could have held water. Those sprinkles are a garlic & onion rub.

The Enbaconing
Atop the bacon weave, you place a roughly 1" thick layer of sausage. On top of this sausage, you sprinkle some crisp cooked bacon — the delicious innards of the log. This crispy bacon will absorb the "juice" as the Log cooks. Yeah. It's "juice."

Pig Sushi (in a way)
Dan has completed the initial roll, trapping the crispy bacon in the middle of a raw sausage roll. Note that the bacon weave is still flat. At this point, it occurred to us that this is a lot like rolling a giant sushi. A GIANT SUSHI FULL OF SWINY GOODNESS, THAT IS!

Initial Roll
Dan is preparing to roll the sausage back over the bacon mat. Tip for those of you keeping score at home: Use aluminum foil, like we did. It'll make if vastly easier to get the bacon to wrap tightly around the sausage without any unaesthetic slippage. No one wants bacon slippage. No one.

The Completed Log
Dan applies the finishing touches to the log, preparing it for the long journey that awaits it.

The Baking
Ever wonder why they call it bacon when it's almost never baked? Well, at this moment Wikipedia tells me that bacon "is derived from the Old High German bacho, meaning 'back', 'ham', or 'bacon'." So bacon is derived from another word that also means bacon? I must say that I'm shocked.

2 HOURS CRAWL BY

Fresh from the Oven
If you look closely, the juice is attempting to escape from the log. The orange hue of the juice indicates that it is laden with Vitamin C. Yep. You heard it here first. The Bacon Log is loaded with all the nutrients and minerals that a growing body needs. My sources tell me that it contains enough Vitamin C to last a normal adult a full year.

Still Life with Bacon Log
This is the finest picture ever taken by a camera. Go ahead. Let the tears come. It's hard to be in the presence of such greatness.

The Carving
Dan carved the log with all the care of a vascular surgeon. I think all these years of living with a vegan has made him more sympathetic to the plight of those animals that become our food. His careful carving honored the pig(s) that had become this feast.

Oh, in the back of the picture you'll see a flask of "juice." I'd like to tell you we each did a shot of this. We did not. Well, there's always next time.

Plated with Salad
It was delectable. I scarfed down my plate and a second, and contemplated a third.

We brought the ample leftovers back to my house, where Steph's mom shared some with me the next day. She was awed at how tasty it was, especially with a baguette (as, I'm told, they eat the bûche in the old country). We agreed that it was perhaps the perfect food for watching a brunch-time football game on a fall day.

Dan had to ventilate the apartment before Sita returned, but I doubt he's in trouble for introducing such a quantity of swine into their abode. After all, she got that cooking sheet specifically for him to cook bacon on. See, Mr. Wilde, it's no life of mutual deception after all. Even the raw vegan chef knows that sometimes her man must answer the primal call of Bûche de Lardon, The Bacon Log.

I Can't Believe That Today Has Come

2009-01-20T06:50:00.000-08:00

I'm a fan of the alternate history genre of fiction, because it forces us to look at history as a malleable and flexible thing. Sure, this country averted disaster when the Cuban Missile Crisis was resolved, but what would have happened if it had not been resolved? What would have happened to the world if World War II had resulted in a different outcome, or if the U.S. Civil War had turned out differently?

Looking at major world events and the aftermath they wrought, it is clear that history is a close question. The world that we know is the result of individual conversations that happened (or didn't happen) between people whose actions determined the shape of our reality. Things could very easily have gone another way.

I'm reminded that I think that our world could easily be a vastly different place today because today is the inauguration of Barack Hussein Obama as the 44^th President of the United States. I simply cannot believe that this day has come.

It's as if we've been suddenly pulled into an amateur alternate history that defies all belief. We have, apparently, elected the right person for the right time — a professorial, wise individual with a complex worldview for complicated times. Yet, more amazingly, we have elected an African-American man whose mother was only 18 when he was born, a man whose father was Kenyan and left his mother, a man whose first and last names are so unique to an American ear that Al Sharpton mispronounced them during the 2004 Democratic National Convention, and a man whose middle name evokes fears about a recent U.S. enemy.

I cannot believe today has come.
I cannot believe today has come.
I cannot believe today has come.

And it is wonderful.

Biology Dreams

2009-01-11T07:24:00.000-08:00

We've been a busy lot here at Sauntering, what with the lawyering and the child-rearing and the generation of sanctified knowledge and all that. I've been meaning for some time to write a post talking about what it is that motivates scientists to do what it is we do. I was going to say something about the nobility of the pursuit of knowledge and the inability to shake that lie we were given in grade school that the world really *needs* more scientists. But I realized I was wrong. This post from xkcd pretty much sums up why I became a biologist.

You Can Take It With You

2008-12-15T06:19:00.001-08:00

Last week, Blogger – the Google-owned entity that runs blogspot.com – announced an enlightened feature. Writers can now export their blogs in toto. As a result, bloggers can easily backup their writing or move their blogs to a different location, hosted by different vendors.

Such a feature is unfortunately rare for Web 2.0 applications, even as they grow into maturity. (One might ask, Where is the export button for Facebook?)

The addition of this feature settles a lingering doubt that I've had while I add to this blog: What should come of all this writing if Blogger decided one day to suddenly close its doors? Now that I can easily export and backup the entire blog, I have one less worry.

Thanks, Blogger.

Bonus? Don't Mind If I Do!

2008-12-09T04:56:00.000-08:00

The New York Times presents this little gem of an article on Wall Street bonuses. The gist of the article is this: After a year of record losses where the only profit on the books is likely to be in the form of government bail-out funds, the banks are taking steps to restrict their year-end bonuses.

Restrict their bonuses?

I thought the whole point of bonuses was to reward a job well done with a share of the profits that you helped to generate. And now? It appears bonuses are being given out to those employees (which is apparently most of them?) who have sucked the least.

The article is a great source of drunken rants. I'm sure I'll give it good use this weekend. But I worry that it encodes a real, and very dangerous, fact about the ways in which salaries are dictated in this country. It is now an expectation that you will receive a bonus at many of these Wall Street firms, not because you have done an especially good job, but because you have managed to show up for the terrible hours the job demands to accomplish nothing.

This week, three members of my graduate class over on the Cell and Molecular Biology end of the world (these are the people researching your pharmaceuticals) left the program for...you guessed it....Wall Street! The government has been making a lot of lip movements recently about the need to recruit more researchers into science and industries that actually produce things. I have news for them. Researchers are people too. They will not work for carrots. If the government wants to do something about failing technology industries in this country, it should take a serious look at the financial incentives it gives for going into research.

What I'll Miss About New York: #12 — Dogwalkers

2008-11-26T21:55:00.000-08:00

When we moved from California to New York in 2005, I was worried that leaving the suburbs for the city would mean that our dogs' quality of life would plummet. Gone were California's shirt-sleeve winters, here were New York's ice & snow, congestion & concrete.

How wrong I was to worry about Maggie and Molly! Their quality of life has never been better than those days in New York, and we have two people to thank above all for their joy: Marco & Marlon Araujo. These Brazilian brothers and their cousins were M&M's dogwalkers during our three years in the Big Apple, and their care meant that Maggie and Molly lived the good life.

5 days a week, Maggie and Molly spent 2 hours at the local dog run in Morningside Park with Marco and/or Marlon, with Maggie repetitively chasing tennis balls like an OCDog and Molly trying and failing through her incessant barking to maintain order amongst the assembled mutts.

Now that we've returned to California and a stand-alone home, the girls have a yard and the ability to show themselves out through their own dog door. Though they can venture out into the gentle California weather whenever they like (no more brushing snow from their paws), I'm too lazy/buzy/occupied to walk them ~~at all~~ in the same manner that they were walked in New York. They don't have Marco & Marlon out here, and I like to think that somewhere in their doggie minds they miss the smelly streets of New York and straining with a brace of other hounds as they pulled their way to their daily dog run.

Update: As I look back on some short videos I took of the dogs during the snowiest single day in New York City history, I'm reminded that beagles like wintry weather just fine:

What's this? After living in New York City for three years, I'm returning to California. These are the parts of my New York experience that I'll miss the most.

Toddler Audibles

2008-11-11T21:58:00.000-08:00

Every Saturday and Sunday during the fall and winter, American TV sets feature quarterbacks changing the play at the line of scrimmage. "Blue 42!" or something similar, they bark out, changing the play for their teammates.

I'm reminded of this phenomenon when I hear Katie learning to count out loud. As she reaches the limit of what she remembers, she gets creative.

"Five . . . Six . . . Yellow. . ."

It's a Good Day to be an Obama Geek

2008-11-05T12:52:00.000-08:00

If it's not illegal in California to take pictures with your iPhone while driving your car, it should be. Still, I couldn't let this shot pass me by during my commute this morning:

Those are Obama/Biden '08 stickers in the middle of the W00T!

The Poor Voter on Election Day

2008-11-04T01:00:00.000-08:00

As with the past two federal elections, a poem to remind you to get out and vote:

The Poor Voter on Election Day
by John Greenleaf Whittier
December 23, 1852

The proudest now is but my peer
The highest not more high.
Today, of all the weary year,
A king of men am I!

Today alike are great and small,
The nameless and the known.
My place is the people's hall,
The ballot box my throne.

Who serves today upon the list
Beside the served shall stand;
Alike the brown and wrinkled fist,
The gloved and dainty hand!

The rich is level with the poor,
The weak is strong today.
And sleekest broadcloth counts no more
Than homespun frock of gray.

Today let pomp and vain pretence
My stubborn right abide.
I set a plain man's common sense
Against the pedant's pride.

Today shall simple manhood try
The strength of gold and land;
The wide world has not wealth to buy
The power in my right hand.

While there's a grief to seek redress
Or balance to adjust,
Where weighs our living manhood less
Than Mammon's vilest dust -

While there's a right to need my vote
A wrong to sweep away,
Up! Clouted knee and ragged coat -
A man's a man today!

Election 2008: Thank God These Months of Massively Reduced Productivity are Finally Over

2008-11-02T23:11:00.000-08:00

Back in 2006, the consulting firm with the strangest name of all last-name-based business entities – Challenger, Gray & Christmas – reported that the dollar value of the worker productivity lost due to the NCAA men's basketball tournament was somewhere in the neighborhood $3.8 billion. That number makes sense. For that first Thursday of the NCAA tournament, offices everywhere are paralyzed with worker bees refreshing webpages in the vain hopes that they are still competitive in the office pool.

$3.8 billion in lost productivity due to 63 basketball games may sound like a big number, but it's nothing when you think about the nonstop distraction that is a presidential election during the internet era. This appropriately (and profanely) named website sums it up well: This election feels like it began when God was a Boy and will continue at least until the next phase in human evolution.

If you're like me, your initial temptation when faced with the firehose of useful and useless, meaningful and meaningless information generated by this election is to attempt to drink it all up.

You load every webpage, thrice per hour. By the time you get to Political News & Commentary Website #8, enough time has passed that you decide you should probably restart the cycle of information consumption by returning to Political News & Commentary Website #1. You repeat this cycle during all waking hours, breaking only for the restroom, eating, sleeping... and for occasionally talking to your spouse, minimally tending to your dogs, attempting to contribute to your child's upbringing, or actually doing your job.

I feared the above condition this time around, and in January I wrote that I was hoping for strength to deal with this election year. Well, Election 2008 is almost over and I've survived. And I've got some people to thank.

Now, these people played almost no role in shaping my views about the content of the election. They did not shape my view on either of the general election presidential candidates or any of the stable of primary election candidates. What they did do was save me time and trouble, enabling me to spend less time following the election and more time doing everything else in my life.

Thank you, Nate Silver.
Nate Silver is easily the media darling of the pundit class for this election cycle. Silver is a statistician whose previous claim to something approximating fame was as an expert on baseball's sabermetrics, a movement within the culture of baseball statistics that questions whether traditional measures of baseball greatness (home runs, runs batted in, etc.) are actually the best measures of determining which baseball players were of the greatest value to their respective teams. This movement created a new generation of statistical measures like value over replacement player that effected big changes to major league rosters.

This March (only this March!) Silver started a website called FiveThirtyEight.com (538 being a reference to the total size of the electoral college). On his site, Silver created a clearinghouse for state and national polls, handicapping the performance of polls against primary results, generally talking about polling methodology and why the methodology underlying some polls may be suspect.

Silver's site saved me from clicking all over the internet in search of which way public opinion was blowing in the states that will be determinative in the election this coming Tuesday. I went to 538 and felt like I knew what was going on. And I stopped surfing. Thanks, Nate.

Thank you, Jason Linkins.
I have a problem. I like the information conveyed on the Sunday morning political talk shows but I find all of them completely unwatchable.

Time and again, important news breaks on these shows, as policymakers, politicians, and wonks let slip something that hadn't really hit the airwaves before. Still, the valuable information that can occasionally be gleaned from these shows is outweighed in my eyes by the need to be exposed to so much hackery and blather. Plus, the shows take forever to watch.

This is where Jason Linkins comes in. Linkins, a contributor to the Huffington Post website/growing empire, TiVo's (TiVos? TiVoes?) each of the Sunday morning talk shows and summarizes the discussion for you. He watches the shows so you don't have to. This guy deserves a medal.

This would be a valuable service even if Linkens were submitting little more than Cliffnotes of the various shows, but Linkens is funny. I mean, really funny. Like, I-think-I-need-to-go-get-my-inhaler funny. I was pleased to see that Comedy Central recognized him as the funniest political blogger, speculating that he might be the funniest writer alive. I'm putting him in the same category as Greg Giraldo. That's some rarified funny air, if you ask me.

Linkens's yeoman's work on Sunday morning saved me time and frustration this election cycle. As Comedy Central noted, "he’s the only person in this campaign who’s ever really fought for you." Thanks, Jason.

The Chicago Tribune's Crystal Ballcirca January 2005

2008-10-30T21:46:00.000-07:00

On January 20, 2005, Chicago Tribune writer Eric Zorn penned a blog post entitled '08 reasons why Obama will run for president in 2008.

Looking ahead almost 4 years, Zorn observes:

"Sure, Obama is a huge celebrity now" but his star might fade
Democrats would not choose Clinton due to her status as a "poisonously polarizing figure"
Senator John McCain will be too old to run for President in 2008
"Obama is the Midas of fundraisers" because he had $600k in his campaign fund (Obama's campaign raised $150 million September 2008 alone)

He ends the article with the following:

[Then Obama spokesman Robert] Gibbs denied again Wednesday that Obama will run in 2008.
Don't you believe it.

Thanks, Ryan!

Voting in North Carolina

2008-10-25T15:37:00.001-07:00

Today, thanks to the wonder that is early voting, I voted in my first presidential election since moving South.

I have to say, it was a simply wonderful experience. Though the electoral equivalent of the Battle of Gettysburg may be raging in the state as a whole, the contest here in Durham is more like Picacho Pass. There's some blustering, and burning of hay, but the casualties are minor. Durham, simply put, is as blue as it gets. Still, it has been an interesting electoral experience for a number of reasons.

1) The battle-fury of the state has inspired people here. Each time a new voter cast his or her ballot into the electronic-era's version of a marble jar, the room erupted into a huge cheer. It was wonderful, this feeling that our votes matter. Most of these new voters were African American or hispanic. The election volunteers were almost exclusively white and over 65, and it was these volunteers that cheered louder than anyone. If that doesn't stand as an example of just how far we've come as a city in mending the terrible legacy of race relations in North Carolina, I don't know what does.

2) As I stood in line, car after car arrived driven by volunteers working to take those with limited transportation to the polls. One of my favorite moments was the Prius that arrived decked out in Obama stickers to deliver an elderly woman in a wheel-chair wearing a McCain-Palin button. The line of voters (mostly wearing Obama t-shirts) moved her right to the front of the line.

These were my favorite things. But I noticed something else too, something that made me thankful that, for all the partisan bickering of the last few weeks/months/years, it really is nice to have a 2 party system, and it'd be even better to have a few more parties in the dance hall. In local elections here, many candidates run unopposed. Pragmatically, this is a wise move for the state GOP. Republicans have a snow-ball's chance in hell of getting elected in Durham, and it's better to spend what funds haven't been allocated to Nieman-Marcus to run candidates in Raleigh. But in more than a few races for local attorney and judge positions, the unopposed candidates are, well, douche-bags, a fact I was made aware of not by local news coverage (reporters pretty much leave uncontested offices alone in their endorsements and review) but by bar-room chat with the progressive lawyers I drink with. It gives me a sense of understanding about why people in Kansas vote the way they do. When everyone you interact with and every local media outlet you have access to has the same political view you do, its just about impossible even for an educated voter to have a grasp of just how weak their party's position may be on some issues.

For now, I'll give these local candidates the benefit of the doubt, but one need look no farther than our former DA to see what happens when candidates are allowed to pander only to their base. Don't get me wrong. I'm thrilled with the very real possibility that my state will elect a Democrat for president and that the long reign of Libby Dole may at last come to an end. But it is worth remembering that a little bit of The olde Venice Treacle, while bad for fevers, is good medicine for politics.

Alden Clarke — Painting Samsara

2008-10-24T21:05:00.001-07:00

Alden Clarke is a friend, a co-conspirator, a physicist and an artist. Some of his painted work is now available online and I find it stunning.

When did Welfare Become a Dirty Word?

2008-10-15T07:37:00.000-07:00

[This post is a part of Blog Action Day 2008 – Poverty.]

wel•fare. n. The good fortune, health, happiness, prosperity, etc., of a person, group, or organization; well-being.

The title of this post is a bit misleading—I’m pretty sure I know when welfare became a dirty word: ending welfare was a plank of the Reagan platform (“Welfare’s purpose should be to eliminate, as far as possible, the need for its own existence.”). But it got really dirty in the 1990s, when President Clinton promised in his 1993 State of the Union address to “end welfare as we know it”:

Later this year, we will offer a plan to end welfare as we know it. I have worked on this issue for the better part of a decade. And I know from personal conversations with many people that no one, no one wants to change the welfare system as badly as those who are trapped in it. I want to offer the people on welfare the education, the training, the child care, the health care they need to get back on their feet, but say after 2 years they must get back to work, too, in private business if possible, in public service if necessary. We have to end welfare as a way of life and make it a path to independence and dignity.

A year later, House Republicans and Republican candidates signed the “Contract with America,” the third tenet of which was:

3. THE PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY ACT: Discourage illegitimacy and teen pregnancy by prohibiting welfare to minor mothers and denying increased [Aid to Families with Dependent Children] for additional children while on welfare, cut spending for welfare programs, and enact a tough two-years-and-out provision with work requirements to promote individual responsibility.

Finally, in 1996, Congress passed Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, replacing the Aid to Families with Dependent Children Program that had been in place since 1935. (PRWORA actually expired in 2002, but Congress has continued to fund it in the absence of a replacement program.)

The question really is, then, should welfare be a dirty word? Current events provide decent context for answering the question.

Welfare in the United States began with the Aid to Dependent Children program as a part of the original Social Security Act of 1935 (it was later renamed Aid to Families with Dependent Children for obvious political reasons). It helped fund state programs that, in essence, provided financial assistance to single mothers (later revised to cover any single parent). The general idea, it seems to me, was that children should not suffer because their remaining parent cannot bring in sufficient income to support them. This was obviously a serious concern during the Great Depression, but, in fact, many of the state programs were started much earlier in the century.

In this context, it makes sense that the 1990s saw the culmination of the backlash against welfare. Reagan Republicanism created the belief that welfare was a “reward” for not working. The flush economy of the 1990s reinforced the impression that not working was a “choice.” And, of course, the characterizations of “welfare queens” by the media had become the image of welfare.

But, of course, single parenthood didn’t go anywhere. Just the opposite. Divorce rates continue to climb at the same time that most states have eliminated alimony (child support remains, but is notoriously insufficient). The drug war has broken up millions of families, particularly those of color. And abortion has become a scarce commodity in many communities.

And now the economy, for lack of a better word, sucks. Commercial paper is the foundation for most large companies’ payrolls. The lack of credit will make it increasingly difficult for parents to house and clothe their children during gaps in employment. And, god forbid, should the equity injection prove insufficient or overseas investors start calling in debts, the federal government will have little choice but to print more money—read, inflation—making it next to impossible to pay for everyday goods.

In 1929, our generation’s grandparents were teenagers. Most came out the other side of the Great Depression able to house, feed, and educate our parents, making them most prosperous generation in history.

Don’t we want good fortune, health, happiness, and prosperity for the children of 2008?

Smart Folks Talk Economics

2008-10-02T17:22:00.000-07:00

Periodically, among friends and occasional blog readers, I have expressed some reservations about the motives of the Southern Institute of Higher Learning at which I am employed, but yesterday it did good. Real good.

Duke for all its odd politics and the occasional "southern charm" of its administrators, is one of the most open places I have ever been to. I mean that literally. There are no locks on the library (open 24 hours a day), and the pianos in the music department are for use by anyone in the community. The parking still sucks, the public transit is non-existent, and we have an honest-to-goodness coal plant in the middle of campus, but I will forgive them all that for today for putting together such an interesting panel of experts to discuss the recent financial crisis.

Now I don't agree with everything these folks say, but this is the first time I've had access to a real candid discussion about what the recent proposals on the Hill are supposed to do. If you're at all curious about the details that have been left out the stories politicians have been telling us of late, I encourage you to take a look/listen. The video is a little long, and gets dull at times, but its a good way to pass an evening paying bills or folding laundry or what not.

That is unless you are playing Palin-Biden debate Bingo tonight. That should take priority.

Snow Falling on Mars

2008-09-29T18:47:00.000-07:00

I'd love to be able to write something cogent about the happenings on Capital Hill. But I'm just plain too frustrated. I'm frustrated that the vote today came down to petty politics of the worst sort. And I'm even more frustrated that NOBODY on the Hill has bothered to tell me just how the current plan is supposed to work, or what these so-called "alternatives" that have captured the minds of the Republican party are. If there's one thing that pisses me off more than anything as a voter, its that the politicos don't have the backbone to explain to me, uncertainties, warts, and all, what's doing on.

But I can't write that post. Because I'm angry. So instead, I've been watching clouds move on mars, and thinking of snow falling on another planet. Its a nice reminder of what we, as a people, can do. And that there are some really beautiful things out there.

Thanks, Tyler, for the link.

Oktoberfest Parenting FAIL

2008-09-25T21:49:00.000-07:00

Sauntering field operative Johnrob reports from Munich, where Oktoberfest is still in full swing:

My buddies and I were enjoying our umpteenth liter at Oktoberfest when an attractive young hat saleswoman approached our table. After some humorous banter, the young lady claimed that she could pound an entire liter of beer — because she was, you see, a real Bavarian woman. Sadly, she could not demonstrate while on the job, so we had to settle for her word.

Later that afternoon, we arrived at our reserved table a little early. While waiting for the previous seating to clear out, we saw just how these Bavarian women hone their drinking skills...

What I'll Miss About New York: #13 — Escape from the City

2008-09-23T22:23:00.000-07:00

Manhattan. Sometimes from beyond the skyscrapers,
across the hundreds of thousands of high walls,
the cry of a tugboat finds you in your insomnia
in the middle of the night,
and you remember that this desert of
iron and cement is an island.
Desert Island (New York), Albert Camus, 1946

I'm not too concerned whether New York is the financial and cultural capital of the world, or whether that title should belong to London or Paris, Tokyo or Hong Kong. All I know is that the city is a strong taste, and there's a certain kind of relief I get when I get a break from that taste.

As wonderful as it is to go weeks on end without setting foot inside a car, there's a certain kind of relief that I feel when I step into a cab to race to the airport or rent a car to flee the island.

"When was the last time you left the island of Manhattan?" I used to ask Steph as we'd head toward the airport. It always surprised me that we could months on end without leaving our 23-square mile island home.

One trip away from New York stands out from among the rest. It was a trip to attend a good friend's wedding a few months after we'd moved to the city. I woke up early in New York, went to the airport, sped to California, and before I knew it I was on Ocean Drive in Carmel, CA. To go from the din of New York – the ambulances and the unending human motion – to this, the hushed motion of the waves, was a shock to the system.

What's this? After living in New York City for three years, I'm returning to California. These are the parts of my New York experience that I'll miss the most.

What I'll I Continue to Miss About New York

2008-09-23T22:02:00.004-07:00

I thought I would probably wrap up these What I'll Miss posts prior to leaving New York at the end of August. Yeah, that didn't work out.

I still plan on finishing these posts during the next few weeks and months though I've been in Palo Alto, California for more than a week now.

What's this? After living in New York City for three years, I'm returning to California. These are the parts of my New York experience that I'll miss the most.

The Toilet Won't Stop Running. Consider Yourself Sued.

2008-09-23T21:18:00.003-07:00

After Kramarsky v. Stahl Management, 92 Misc.2d 1030, 401 N.Y.S.2d 943 (N.Y.Sup. 1977) – where a landlord refused to rent to a woman because she was a lawyer – New York City amended its landlord/tenant law to prohibit discrimination on the basis of a "lawful occupation."

California has no such bar on discriminating on the basis of a "lawful occupation." Of the roughly 10 places we applied to before finally signing a lease for a house last night, fully a third of them expressed reservations to renting to a couple where both people were lawyers.

Why were they so worried? We should sue them. ALL OF THEM.

Less porn? No, just really bad statistics.

2008-09-16T06:41:00.019-07:00

Reuters is running a story, Porn passed over as Web users become social, based on book by and interview with Bill Tancer, general manager of global research at Hitwise, an Internet tracking company. Obviously, I had to read the piece (I get Reuters for the porn) to see if this shocking revelation could possibly be true.

Thankfully, my worldview remained intact—porn isn't going anywhere. The relevant part of the article:

Tancer . . . said one of the major shifts in Internet use in the past decade had been the fall off in interest in pornography or adult entertainment sites.

He said surfing for porn had dropped to about 10 percent of searches from 20 percent a decade ago, and the hottest Internet searches now are for social networking sites.

"As social networking traffic has increased, visits to porn sites have decreased," said Tancer, indicated that the 18-24 year old age group particularly was searching less for porn.

"My theory is that young users spend so much time on social networks that they don't have time to look at adult sites."

I haven't taken stats in at least twelve years, but I'm pretty sure I've spotted a hole in Mr. Tancer's theory.

According to comScore, one of the more reputable Internet-use tracking firms, who started tracking search in 2003 (which makes me suspicious of claims of reliable search statistics from 10 years ago), search has been growing exponentially, as anyone with a pulse and an Internet connection already knows. For example:

North Americans conducted approximately 4.2 billion searches in March 2004 (source: http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=458).
North Americans conducted approximately 16 billion searches in August 2007 (source: http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=1802).

Now, I'm not very good at math, but even I can calculate 20% of 4.2 billion—840 million—and 10% of 16 billion—1.6 billion.

Even if we give Mr. Tancer the completely unreasonable benefit of assuming that there was no search growth from 1998 to 2004, and none again since 2007, the past ten years have seen the number of searches for porn double, not drop off. Young people aren't spending any less time searching for porn, they're just spending that much more time on the Internet.

Phew. Although I don't think I'll be hiring Hitwise any time soon.

McCain Campaign Now Officially a Joke (Albeit a Dangerous One)

2008-09-14T07:38:00.004-07:00

Steve Harvey's comedy routine from a few years back contained a commentary on communications between men and women. In his routine, Harvey famously concluded that men lie when the truth will do.

As the past two weeks have revealed, the same is true of the McCain campaign. They will lie when the truth will do. There's no shame in saying that Sarah Palin visited Alaska National Guard troops when they were stationed in Kuwait, but that – apparently – is not sexy enough. So they said she visited them in Iraq. She has not been to Iraq.

They've become so comfortable lying, the McCain campaign now lies when the truth will do.

My Little Dermatologist

2008-09-12T11:42:00.003-07:00

Katie, what's this? Nose. (in truth, she says noe.)
Katie, what's this? Teeth. (tee)
What's this? Eyebrow. (eye-bow)
What's this? Mole. (moe)

Yes, somewhere down the line my 19-month old daughter learned to identify moles on necks and faces. This perceptive ability has yet to offend anyone who holds her, but I suspect that her observations and someone's sensibilities will collide sometime soon.

This Day in History

2008-09-06T14:18:00.002-07:00

Its been a slow few weeks here at Sauntering. But we're still here for you, and most importantly, here for your education.

This Day in History is one of a small abundance of websites that allow you to see what other events happened on on days like your birthday, or other memorable dates. For instance, the day of my first kiss falls on the anniversary of the first day of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Those who know me know that I have exceptionally bad luck on the timing of life's little milestones.

..But I digress. The real point is this; it appears that the people who run This Day in History are not with out a sense of humor. See if you can find the odd-ball in this list of events for September 6th.

394 Battle of the Frigidus: The Christian Roman Emperor Theodosius I defeats and kills the pagan usurper Eugenius and his Frankish magister militum Arbogast.

1522 The Victoria, one of the surviving ships of Ferdinand Magellan's expedition, returns to Sanlcar de Barrameda in Spain, becoming the first ship to circumnavigate the world.

1620 The Pilgrims sail from Plymouth, England, on the Mayflower to settle in North America.

1628 Puritans land at Salem, from Mass Bay Colony, witches soon to settle

1669The siege of Candia ends with the Venetian fortress surrendering to the Ottomans

1776 Hurricane hits Guadeloupe, killing more than 6000.

1781 The Battle of Groton Heights takes place, resulting a British victory.

1839 Great fire in NY

Also, our editor in chief was born. Happy Birthday, Andy.

The Scene of the Crime Rovers

2008-08-26T19:36:00.005-07:00

When I'm not doing science, I play music. Sometimes with real bands, and sometimes with this one. If you've any interest in seeing some really weird stuff, I encourage you to check out my new little blog on this music side-show. Hey, I'm not above e-busking.

Image courtesy of the News and Observer

Facebook: Easier than Spying on Your Neighbors

2008-08-18T10:17:00.006-07:00

Dearest Facebook,

I love how you make it easy to keep up with people. Until the day comes when you're no longer a popular destination on the web, I don't need to update people's contact information once I'm their "friend" on your site. People keep their own contact information current.

I hate how you make it easy to keep up with people in the most voyeuristic way possible. Just glancing at your landing page exposes me to a psychodrama that I sometimes wish I could unsee.

Great Moments in Toddler Language

2008-08-17T05:26:00.006-07:00

To Katie, fruits are either blueberries (actually blueberries), pronounced "baa", bananas (actually bananas), pronounced "na-na", or apples (everything but blueberries and bananas), pronounced "app-ah".

This morning Katie pointed to this picture in a book, looked at me, and said "Mama":

I'm working on "Dada":

What I'll Miss About New York: #14 — The Center of it All

2008-08-17T03:37:00.006-07:00

About ten minutes after the hour, the announcer on NY1, New York's own 24-hour, low-budget, local news CNN-clone, says "...and now for a look at the news from the world outside New York." When I hear this, I usually imagine a hypothetical New Yorker responding "Wait — there's a world outside New York?"

As Saul Steinberg's famous New Yorker cover makes clear, the prototypical New York view of the world is one where you're either in New York, you're in the provinces, or you're in some bizarre hinterland. Without so much as an iota of self-consciousness, most New Yorkers consider their city to be the financial, political, and cultural capital of the world, a place of unparalleled cultural diversity unlike the rest of the United States or anywhere else. (Every decade or so, a handful of New Yorkers reignite the New York City secession movement, a project that illustrates the degree to which residents of this city feeling that they are also unlike residents of their own state.)

There's little I could add to the well-worn discussion of New Yorkers' fascination with themselves, so I'll be brief. I'll miss living in a place where such a large percentage of residents are convinced that they live in the center of the universe. Granted, denizens of the Bay Area are more than enthusiastic about their home, convinced that they lead the way culturally and technologically for the rest of the world (More than one person has told me there's a reason that Star Trek located Starfleet's headquarters near the Golden Gate Bridge). Yet, few people in the Bay Area would claim that their area is the epicenter of the world's attention. To me, it seems most New Yorkers would make that claim.

What's this? After living in New York City for three years, I'm returning to California. These are the parts of my New York experience that I'll miss the most.

2 Trains are for Babies

2008-08-16T11:45:00.003-07:00

Like many New Yorkers, I'm a big fan of the subway. In fact, enough New Yorkers are big fans of the subway system that the MTA maintains a store where you can buy all manner of subway-themed merchandise, permitting you to flaunt your mass transit ardor to the world through bags, pencil holders and the like. Advertisements for these items are occasionally placed in the cars, and one caught my eye last month as I was studying for the bar exam.

You see, the typical subway rider is attached to one train above all others, as you generally enter the subway on the line nearest your home. For me, that means that I ride the 1 train more than any other. Appealing to this single-train affection, the MTA sells t-shirts for adults and toddlers, permitting subway patriots to tout their favored lines.

The MTA does not offer t-shirts for all 23 subway lines. What's strange about this whole effort is that the selection of shirts offered to toddlers differs from the selection available to adults.

Toddlers can proclaim their love of 9 subway lines: 1, 2, 3, 4, A, E, F, G, and J.

Adults have the option to promote 15 lines: 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, A, D, E, F, G, J, L, N, R, and S.

Based on the selected lines, it appears to me that no one likes the 5, B, C, M, Q, V, W, or Z trains — or at least would not attest to this affection in public via a garment. Moreover, certain trains are adults only. Hold up there, little feller! Them 6, 7, L, N, R, S trains? They ain't for kids!

Conversely, the 2 train shirt is toddler only. In a perfect world, maybe the 2 train would be toddler-sized. It'd be a kids train with stops at every playground and F.A.O. Schwartz.

Finally, I'm stunned they left out any line and yet still included a shirt in honor of the S line. I wonder if they've sold any to people who aren't conductors or engineers on this train? You see, there are three trains designated as S, and they do nothing more than ferry people between two to five stations that would otherwise be unconnected in the system. Getting fired up about the S train is a little like getting excited about the shuttle train at an airport.

What I'll Miss About New York: #15 — City Kid

2008-08-16T11:00:00.000-07:00

Steph and I joke that in 2020, our then 13-year old daughter Kate will attempt to pass herself off to her friends as some kind of sophisticate. "You know, I was born in New York City. That's why I have such a good sense of style," she'll say, ignoring the fact that she moved from New York when she was 18 months old.

Once we found out that we'd be having a child during our time in New York, I suspected that we'd want to race out of the city. I thought that the oddities of Manhattan life – the expense, the carlessness, the feeling that you lack room to move – would propel us away. I was wrong.

Sending Kate to daycare for the past year has meant that we've met the parents of her classmates. These families are similarly situated to us, with similar experiences and jobs — and they're not leaving New York any time soon. Moreover, we've met the families that live in our building, with children now heading to college who have lived their whole lives here on 89^th street. They're not racing to get out of the city.

All of this is not to say that it's easy to raise kids in Manhattan. You need only look at the expense of Manhattan living to grasp the challenge of raising a family here. Money magazine's online cost of living calculator indicates that someone earning $50,000 in Hastings, Nebraska (just down the road from my hometown), would need to make $119,397.45 to maintain the same standard of living if they settled on the island of Manhattan.

Some examples will help illustrate why my gut thinks the Manhattan number above is on the low side, at least for our neighborhood. First, the annualized cost for Kate's daycare is on par with what my parents paid to send me to Stanford in 1995 (we paid 3x what our friends in Dallas, Texas paid for comparable care). Second, as we look to rent a home in the SF Bay Area (where Money says you must earn $94,771.31 to approximate that Nebraskan $50k), we find that the same price we currently pay for a 1-bedroom apartment in Manhattan gets you a 3-bedroom house in the nicer parts of Silicon Valley.

Despite the expense, despite the concrete and the pace, despite the pollution and the claustrophobia of being in a city without owning a getaway car, we could live here. We could stay. Kate could grow up here. Granted, we'd probably move to Park Slope in Brooklyn, participating in a yuppie migration as predictable as a seasonal bird migration, but we'd still be in New York City.

But we're not staying here. We're leaving New York. It's impossible to know what the future holds, but it looks like Kate's not going to grow up here. She's not going to grow up as a city kid.

And that makes me a little sad.

What's this? After living in New York City for three years, I'm returning to California. These are the parts of my New York experience that I'll miss the most.

Michael Phelps v. Mark Spitz

2008-08-15T19:37:00.006-07:00

Tonight, Michael Phelps equaled Mark Spitz's 1972 record for Olympic productivity, winning his seventh medal of these Olympic games.

Of course, it's unfair to compare Spitz's performances to those of today's Olympians. Spitz was forced to swim through water as viscous as an oil slick wearing a 3-piece woolen suit, and today's Olympians swim downhill both ways and have suits made of fish scales.

Still, it bears noting that Spitz's gold medal winning times would barely win the women's events today.

Race	Spitz's Time	Current Women's World Record	Current Men's World Record
100m freestyle	51.22	Libby Trickett 52.88	Eamon Sullivan 47.05
200m freestyle	1:52	Federica Pellegrini 1:54.82	Michael Phelps 1:42.96
100m butterfly	54.27	Inge de Bruijn 56.61	Ian Crocker 50.40
200m butterfly	2:00.70	Zige Liu 2:04.18	Michael Phelps 1:52.03
4×100m freestyle relay	3:26.42	Netherlands 3:33.62	US 3:08.24
4×200m freestyle relay	7:35.78	Australia 7:44.31	US 6:58.56
4×100m medley relay	3:48.16	Australia 3:55.74	US 3:30.68

What I'll Miss About New York: #16 — The Urban Life

2008-08-14T11:00:00.000-07:00

At the risk of sounding like a complete Scaredy Cat, I have to confess that I did not ride the subway the first time I visited New York in 2003. I was a mere babe of 27 at the time.

I knew that New York had experienced a stunning decrease in crime during the Giuliani and Bloomberg eras. Only a year later, in 2004, New York would be named the safest large city in the United States. Still, the subway seemed dangerous to me during that first visit. Some irrational part of me suspected at the time that stepping underground meant that I'd be easy prey for dangers lurking around every darkened corner. I'd be as good as dead.

At Steph's insistence (and mild taunting), I succumbed to reason on Visit to New York #2 and discovered by personal experience that entering the New York subway system did not mean certain death. Indeed, I soon learned that nearly 7 million people survive the subway system each workday. 9-year olds even manage to survive it on their own. Since that first courageous day, I bet I've survived the trip 800 times.

Having moved here from the SF Bay Area, I'd lived in a major metropolitan area before; however, I'd never experienced anything like what it means to live in New York. Attending Stanford and living in the surrounding communities thereafter meant living in a socio-economically segregated setting — a state of affairs that is not unique to the Bay Area, but miles away from life in New York City.

Changing coasts and moving to the most populous city in the country combined my fear of the unknown with my unease with urban poverty. It's easy to have a noblesse oblige attitude about social class when you can remain safely ensconced in the familiar and safe, yet moving to New York reminds you that whatever fear you have of urban violence is built on a foundation of fear about poverty and the fruit of desperation.

The daily demands of living here quickly started the process of exposing and eroding defenses that I didn't know I had, yet this process continues as Katie's dad. Toddlers reach out to people, and people reach back. On a recent trip on the subway, Katie wouldn't stop staring at the brightly dressed person on the other side of the car. Clad from head-to-toe in black & gold, the guy was obviously a member or aficionado of the Latin Kings. No matter for Katie — she had soon melted him into making faces across the subway car in an attempt to make her laugh.

Of course, this brief time in New York has not inoculated me from a fear of the dark or the unknown, but I like to think that this experience has helped me acknowledge some of the roots of whatever unease I feel when faced with a landscape far removed from the Nebraska of my youth. Next month, I'll start a chapter of my life that's much more white picket fence than these past three years have been. Here's hoping that the lessons of New York's urban life are lasting ones.

What's this? After living in New York City for three years, I'm returning to California. These are the parts of my New York experience that I'll miss the most.

Poor, Desperate Souls — Click Here!

2008-08-09T06:16:00.003-07:00

When I made my Facebook account, I gave the website my age; therefore, I'm not bothered just because Facebook occasionally reminds me of my age when it serves ads on the pages I load.

Still, something about this ad is beyond creepy.

This Way to the Bar Exam

2008-08-09T05:00:00.007-07:00

Google Maps driving directions to the bar exam from my father-in-law's house.

"The bar exam is a complete waste of time and resources," a fellow student said to me while we both were studying for last week's terminal law exam. "It's a drag on the economy." A law graduate's time was better spent, he said, on something – anything – other than a test that required each graduate to review the basic framework of so many areas of the law. (In California, an applicant can be tested on 17 subjects. In New York, it's 21.)

Critics of the bar exam see it as little more than a protectionist measure. By forcing new lawyers to jump through a challenging set of hoops, the state bar accomplishes two goals. First, it limits the number of new lawyers, thereby hampering competition and raising prices. Second, the bar uses the exam (and other legal entrance requirements) to deflect criticism without actually improving the profession. Want to make lawyers more ethical? Well, one way to try to do so is to raise the lowest acceptable score on the MPRE (the Multistate Professional Responsibility Exam, a pre-bar exam test for law students), as California did this January. Because, of course, unethical students couldn't learn legal ethics for the purposes of a multiple choice exam. Of course they couldn't.

I've taken a lot of standardized tests in my day: LSATs, SATs, ACTs, an AP exam or two. The bar exam was the first such test I've taken where the body giving the test makes it abundantly clear that they are NOT on your side. The bar exam is inflicted on would-be lawyers by current lawyers, with all the care of a fraternity paddling.

You hear stories of the guy who forgot to turn off his cell phone and was bounced out of the test. The chief proctor remains you again and again that various minor misdeeds – for example, getting up to go to the bathroom during the last 5 minutes of any of the six 3-hour sessions – will result in the administration an Orwellian sounding Rule 12 Violation. The test is capricious, spiteful, and arbitrary, and it's a damn shame that it has such a profound negative economic effect on so many people who graduate law school only to struggle to pass the bar.

Yet, the bar is a necessary evil on two fronts.

1) It's good to force every lawyer to look deeply into a varied set of subjects. Out of the subjects that could have been tested last week, I knew practically nothing about criminal procedure, wills, trusts, community property, or partnerships prior to studying for the exam. Beyond these unknown areas, most of the other subject areas were topics that I'd studied during the first year of law school, only to never think about again.

I'm joining a law firm this fall that has a narrow and specialized practice, focusing exclusively on securities work and other corporate matters for start-up companies and venture capitalists. Of the 17 areas I studied like mad for the bar exam, only three (contracts, corporate law, and partnerships) will be applicable in the job that I'm about to begin.

Yet who knows what the future holds for my (or any one else's) legal career? Much as I think I'll enjoy this new job, I may someday find myself doing divorces, handling real estate transactions, helping someone plan their estate, or arguing a constitutional claim. Who knows?

What's for sure is that my friends will know that I'm a lawyer and, in a pinch, they're not going to care what kind of law I practice. They'll want me to provide them 30 seconds of counsel regarding their divorce, their home purchase, their arrest. And even though the best advice I could give them would be to usher them toward someone who is experienced in their particular problem area, it'll be helpful for me to have at least a baseline understanding of what they're facing.

Does the bar need to make the exam so onerous to accomplish the goal of making sure each lawyer has a sufficiently broad understanding of the law? No — they could make the second year curriculum as rigid as the first year, insuring that each student took the bar exam courses, even at the cost of studying areas of the law they find interesting. But a softer test with more required courses is not going to happen because of the next point.

2) Law schools – at least my law school – are rather lax about quality control. I went to law school with some of the most intelligent, hard-working people I've ever met. I also went to law school with some of the most unrepentant slackers I'll ever hope to meet.

As I noted a few months back, if you make it to the final semester of 3L at my school, you're practically guaranteed to graduate. Even prior to passing this graduation event horizon, the degree to which people ~~skate by~~, er... customize law school to their own needs is really amazing.

To pick one area where people are permitted to graduate while phoning it in, let's look at lecture attendance. Sure, the ABA paternalistically requires perfect attendance from law school students. Yet, (in my experience) such a rule is only enforced by hollow threats and mock professorial scorn. The Socratic method means calling on students each class, and there were a set of names that I got used to hearing in law school that just weren't connected to people. Listening to the optimistic and naive professor calling their names reminds me of the words of the great philosopher Mitch Hedberg:

When you go to a restaurant on the weekends and it's busy, they start a waiting list. They start calling out names, they say "Dufrane, party of two. Dufrane, party of two." And if no one answers they'll say their name again. "Dufrane, party of two, Dufrane, party of two." But then if no one answers they'll just go right on to the next name. "Bush, party of three."

Yeah, but what happened to the Dufranes? No one seems to give a shit. Who can eat at a time like this — people are missing. You fuckers are selfish... the Dufranes are in someone's trunk right now, with duct tape over their mouths. And they're hungry! That's a double whammy.

We need help. Bush, search party of three! You can eat when you find the Dufranes.

Granted, having attended almost all the assigned classes during law school, I can see why people don't come. On occasion, class took on the feel of oral argument before the Supreme Court: It was an exercise that is just for show, because the result is determined on the basis of other factors. Just as the justices make up their minds on the briefs, if you've already made you mind up regarding a case's holding after reading it, class just might confuse you.

Naturally, the basic problem with the I-don't-need-to-go-to-class attitude is that you are never the problem, it's always the other guy. They might need to go to class to really master the material, but you're past that. You get it. It's not your problem.

It's the reliance on donations – donations that come from graduates, not drop-outs – that provides the systematic impetus for pushing people through law school who are incapable or uninterested in pulling themselves through. Yet, the bar exam doesn't have any such conflict. It's not going to cut you any slack, applicant.

The bar exam is a train wreck, and the test could be administered far more equitably. If the goal of the exam is to insure lawyers have at least a basic level of knowledge in the tested areas, I'd prefer that they test ALL the areas every year, instead of only rotating through essay topics, thereby testing a fraction of what you've studied and forcing you into the dangerous game of guessing the content of this year's test.

I disagree with my fellow classmate who saw the exam as little more than a waste of time. Despite the frailties of the test itself , the sixty day frantic review that precedes it produces social value by creating more generalists and offering law school slackers a chance at redemption.

"The bar exam only tests one thing," a future co-worker of mine said earlier this summer. "It tests whether you can set aside your regular life in the service of a big project." That's about right.

This Would Be Kind of Cute...

2008-07-11T16:46:00.001-07:00

....if it weren't so scary. See the rest of the pictures here .

Some Heroic Moments for this Independence Day

2008-07-04T04:54:00.013-07:00

At some point, our society began holding lawyers in low regard. This cultural contempt goes beyond despising the relatively more affluent or detesting ambulance chasers.

As I navigated my way through law school, it occurred to me that one of the primary sources of frustration against lawyers is our frustration with society itself. Our society – like any developed society – can be a morass of regulations and requirements, limitations that are (at least in theory) designed to protect us from ourselves and others. Since we can't lash out against this faceless system, we choose to vent our frustration at those who seem to guard the gates to this machine.

Although going to law school means choosing to become one of these social pariahs, most (many?) would say it was worth it. On this Independence Day, I want to celebrate a hidden benefit of law school. Although law school's tour of legal history reveals more than a few legal villains, it also uncovers a number of legal heroes.

Here are a couple lawyerly actions that I first learned about in law school and which make me proud to be an American today. The first is heroic for its effect, if not its intent. The latter, for both.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower on September 8, 1953: Chief Justice Fred Vinson died on September 8, 1953, after the rehearing of Brown v. Board of Education had been reordered but not heard.

Had Vinson survived to rule on Brown's rehearing, Justice Felix Frankfurter believed there would have been 4 dissenters. According to legal legend, Frankfurter remarked that Vinson's death was "the only evidence I have ever had for the existence of God," for it permitted the nomination of Earl Warren to replace him on the bench.

At Vinson's death, Eisenhower kept a promise to then California governor Earl Warren to nominate him to the first available seat on the Supreme Court. With Warren at the helm, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Brown's rehearing that separate but equal facilities were unconstitutional.

Though Eisenhower would go on to consider his nomination of Warren to be a mistake, Eisenhower's promise to Warren led to the creation of the Warren Court and the dramatic expansion of civil rights in the decades that followed.

Senator Clair Engle on June 10, 1964: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was filibustered in the Senate for 57 days and its passage looked uncertain.

California Senator Engle, who had been struggling with brain cancer since 1963, returned to the Senate floor on June 10, 1964, to participate in the vote to end debate. Unable to speak due to his advanced cancer, Senator Engle pointed to his eye to indicate "aye" as his name was called in the roll-call vote. Engle's vote ultimately was one of the deciding votes, as cloture was met, ending the filibuster and permitting the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to become law.

Clair Engle died one month later.

Personally, I Prefer "S/H/It" or "S/H/Its"

2008-07-03T11:35:00.007-07:00

Much as I dislike Facebook's use of the singular they throughout the site, today's change to its mini-feed is bound to aggravate someone.

Facebook has a tough time with the basics of language. Last year, it caved into user demands to remove "is" from its status message template, permitting a user to have a status outside the third-person singular present tense. Daring!

Modern Women's World Records vs. Historical Men's World Records — Part II

2008-06-29T05:00:00.001-07:00

Following up on last week's post comparing current women's world records in track & field with historical men's world records, here's a graph to illustrate what I see as a trend (To get a larger version, click on the image):

The y axis is the year that the historical men's record eclipsed the current women's record. The x axis is a logarithmic scale showing the distance of the various events in meters. I'm no statistician, but I see a clear trend here.

Simply, the longer the event, the more impressive the women's best is relative to men's historical performances. Whereas the world's fastest men have been running faster than Florence Griffith Joyner's (somewhat disputed) 10.49s in the 100m since Charlie Paddock ran 10.4s in 1921, it took until 1958 for the world's fastest male marathon runner to go any faster than Paula Radcliffe's current world best of 2:15:25.

Why might this be the case? I can think of a few reasons.

First, the longer distance events – and the training required to excel at them – appear to have not been taken very seriously by athletes at the dawn of the last century. Wikipedia notes that the winner of the first modern Olympic marathon in 1896 thought it wise to stop at an inn for a glass of wine mid-race.

Second, it may be that whatever athletic advantage men have due to human sexual dimorphism, this advantage is reduced when it comes to the traits that make for successful long distance runners. Men may have an insurmountable advantage over women in the creation of fast twitch muscle fibers that make for successful sprinters, but may have a much smaller (or nonexistent) advantage in the development of slow twitch muscle fibers and cardiovascular fitness that make for excellent marathoners.

Previously:
Modern Women's World Records vs. Historical Men's World Records

See Also:
Michael Phelps v. Mark Spitz (comparing Spitz's performance against today's female records)

Modern Women's World Records vs. Historical Men's World Records

2008-06-22T06:48:00.021-07:00

Unable to find a webpage that had all this material easily available, I decided to make one.

The table below contains track & field world record information taken from Wikipedia. On the left is the current women's world record. On the right is the first historical men's world record that surpassed today's best female performance. (The list is limited to those events that have a world record progression page on Wikipedia.)

Current Women's Record		Historical Men's Record
100m Florence Griffith Joyner 10.49	1988	Charlie Paddock 10.4	1921
4 x 100m East Germany 41.37	1985	United States 41.0	1924
800m Jarmila Kratochvílová 1:53.28	1983	Ted Meredith 1:51.9	1912*
1500m Qu Yunxia 3:50.46	1993	Jules Ladoumegue 3:49.2	1930
1 Mile Svetlana Masterkova 4:12.56	1996	Paavo Nurmi 4:10.4	1923
3000m Wang Junxia 8:06:11	1993	Gunder Hägg 8:01.2	1942
5000m Tirunesh Dibaba 14:11.15	2008	Taisto Maki 14:08.8	1939
10000m Wang Junxia 29:31.78	1993	Emil Zátopek 29:28.2	1949
Marathon Paula Radcliffe 2:15:25	2003	Sergey Popov 2:15:17	1958
High Jump Stefka Kostadinova 2.09m	1987	Lester Steers 2.10m	1941
Long Jump Galina Chistyakova 7.52m	1988	Peter O'Connor 7.61m	1901*
Triple Jump Inessa Kravets 15.50m	1995	Daniel Ahearn 15.52m	1911
Pole Vault Yelena Isinbayeva 5.01m	2005	John Pennel 5.05m	1963

* There is no men's record on the Wikipedia world record progression page that would be defeated by today's female world record holder. The entry listed is the first world record recognized in the world record progression page.

Subsequently:
Modern Women's World Records vs. Historical Men's World Records — Part II

See Also:
Michael Phelps v. Mark Spitz (comparing Spitz's performance against today's female records)

Unequal Amendments

2008-06-18T10:46:00.005-07:00

All men may be created equal—but not all laws are.

Since the ratification of the U.S. Constitution in 1787–90, the venerable document has been amended 27 times, but from a legal point of view not all of these amendments are equally important. Some amendments, such as the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech, come up again and again in judicial opinions and legal scholarship. Other amendments, such as setting January 20 as the date of presidential inaugurations (the Twentieth Amendment), have rarely come up in litigation or commentary.

Having just graduated from law school, we here at Sauntering decided to produce a visual representation of the vast differences in relative importance of the amendments. What follows is a picture of all amendments written out in a font size corresponding to the relative citation frequency in Supreme Court and federal appellate court opinions. (To get a larger version, click on the image.)

Bill of Rights (First 10 Amendments)

All 27 Amendments

Our Methodology

To get the number of citations of each amendment, we searched AltLaw for “First [Second, etc.] Amendment” and “1st [2nd, etc.] Amendment.” This strategy means that we missed citations to “Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments,” etc.

Furthermore, although AltLaw’s database contains all U.S. Supreme Court opinions back to 1791, it contains only those U.S. Court of Appeals opinions published since 1950. Therefore, we have attempted to account for this by adjusting the citation numbers for the post-1950 amendments.

To deemphasize the immense citation difference between the major and minor amendments, we made the font sizes proportional to the square roots of the citation numbers.

For those readers with more than a passing interest in this little project, feel free to check out our raw data [Google Doc].

A final note: Although I came up with the idea of representing the amendments with font sizes, Sauntering founder and co-blogger Andy did the heavy lifting to research the amendment frequencies and come up with the visual display. Kudos to Andy!

Goodnight nobody Goodnight mush

2008-06-10T13:26:00.011-07:00

I think it's my current familiarity with the original that makes this parody seem so entertaining. There's a look-inside preview of the book on the site and they've done a good job of copying the meter and the imagery of the children's classic.

This book appears to skirt the unprotected realm of satire, and I'm not sure that a suit on the book would come out differently than Dr. Seuss Enterprises v. Penguin Books, 109 F.3d 1394 (9th Cir. 1997), where the court found that a book using the imagery of Dr. Seuss to riff on the O.J. Simpson trial constituted copyright and trademark infringement. Alternatively, a court might find the send-up of Goodnight Moon to be direct enough to qualify as a fair use parody under U.S. copyright laws.

If there were a lawsuit pitting the owners of Goodnight Moon against Goodnight Bush, it wouldn't be the first time that disharmony visited the Goodnight brand. The most recent scrape occurred in 2005, when HarperCollins faced a minor bookseller revolt after the 60^th anniversary edition of the book included an image of illustrator Clement Hurd on the book jacket with a cigarette airbrushed out of his hand.

What I'll Miss About New York: #17 — The Carless Life

2008-06-04T19:59:00.008-07:00

They overcharge you for the extra tank of gas at the rental car agency. Well, really, they don't overcharge you, but you have to bring it back completely empty in order to take advantage of their faux discount. C'mon: Who brings a car back to the rental agency completely empty?

So I buy the extra tank of gas right before I return the rental car when we're on vacation or attending someone's wedding — however, other than these occasions, I haven't bought a tank of gas in three years. You see, I don't have a car.

I know people who live in Manhattan and have automobiles. These friends aren't necessarily rich – it's just that they're comfortable paying for a luxury that is altogether unnecessary in this borough. And luxury it is. You can have a monthly parking spot (if one is available) across the street from my apartment for a paltry $800 per month. As reported in the New York Times, spaces further downtown push well into the six figures.

A few months ago, I noted that there are lessons to be learned when you don't have a car. First on that list is that you don't ever buy more than $40 worth of groceries because, well, you can't carry them. Your trunk is whatever you can carry in your own two hands, so don't go buying multiple hams.

But that's just the tip of the iceberg.

A city needs two elements before most of its residents are comfortable going without a car. First, it needs the requisite density. It's easy for me to go without a car because the 100 yard radius around my apartment contains 2 grocery stores, 2 banks, 2 drug stores, a clothing store that my wife is convinced is a front for the mob, one of the best Jewish delis in the world, and 5 restaurants including a bakery, a Dunkin Donuts, and a Starbucks. I just don't need to have a car to get the stuff I need on a regular basis.

The second element that the city needs is a commitment to public transit. Of the cities I've visited, only New York really gets this — even if San Francisco and Chicago understand to a lesser extent. A commitment to transit improves the lives of all citizens, but it especially lightens the load of the lower middle class and the working poor.

In the Bay Area, folks in a lower socio-economic tier who desire to be homeowners move to places hither and yon from their place of employment. Though they might work in Palo Alto, they'll live in Tracy — a city that Google maps claims is "1 hour and 10 minutes" away. During commute times, I'd be shocked if you made the trip in under 2 hours each way.

Compare this commute with someone living in the outer boroughs yet working in Manhattan. Someone living in Rockaway Park might have a commute of a similar time duration if they work in Manhattan, but they're not driving. No $4.00 gas. No focusing on the road. Wanna read, work, or do the crossword puzzle? Be my guest.

Beyond benefits to the less affluent, not having a car benefits everybody. It means that you're going to interact with people during your daily commute and your errands. There's simply no avoiding it. You're not rolling around in a metal box with wheels — you're on the sidewalk, trying to stay out of the way of other people with your $40 of groceries, rubbing elbows with rich and poor, neighbors and strangers alike. No one rides first class on the subway and the sidewalk does not have a "Yuppies Only" section (Wait, that's Park Slope, isn't it?).

By October, we'll have a car. Hell, we'll have two. And I'll enjoy having a car again. Buying more groceries. The mobility to head off in any direction I desire. But in returning to the John Wayne Yankee car culture, I'll lose something that I had these past few years hoofing it with my fellow New Yorkers.

What's this? After living in New York City for three years, I'm returning to California. These are the parts of my New York experience that I'll miss the most.

Life Before Roe

2008-06-02T19:40:00.003-07:00

As a developmental biologist (albeit one working strictly with invertebrates), I spend a lot of time looking at developing embryos and trying to figure out, at both a philosophical and biological level, when the little egg in my microscope stops being an egg and starts being a little sea urchin/sea star/tunicate/worm/whatever. The consequences of these musings have relevance for debates about abortions in humans and that age-old question of when life begins. Someday I'll say something more about this. But what I rarely consider is the other half of the equation, namely what is it like for the parents who have to choose whether or not to allow an embryo to make that murky transition between ball of cells and a human life.

An essay today in the New York Times addresses that question, in not so many words, far better than I could have. I encourage you to have a look.

What I'll Miss About New York: #18 — Occasional Brooklyn

2008-05-31T13:06:00.008-07:00

I won't pretend that I visited Brooklyn frequently during these past three years. Truth be told, I think I visited the borough maybe a dozen times. I could blame law school for keeping me away from Brooklyn, but I think that travel time is the greater culprit. On the weekends (when I'm most likely to harass friends living there), the exclusively-local-running subway trains translate into a trip of greater than an hour each way. Of course, the trip is longer if there are glitches in the system. (Note: There are always glitches in the system.)

So I've been to Brooklyn only as many times as I've been to LA. Yet, I'm comfortable passing judgment on LA (Verdict: I hated it until visit #9. Now it's like the cousin whom you appreciate for who he is.), so I guess I'm comfortable opining on Brooklyn.

In a nutshell, Brooklyn is to Manhattan as San Jose is to San Francisco. That is, if San Jose were cool.

You see, although San Francisco captures the public's imagination, it's San Jose and the communities that surround it that really supply the engine driving the Bay Area economy. Google, Apple, eBay, Yahoo, HP, Cisco, Venture capitalists and start-ups A thru Z — are they in San Francisco? Not even close. They're all tightly clustered in the area around San Jose.

San Jose – the more populous of the two cities by 100,000 – is as bitter as a rural Pennsylvania voter, forced as it is to linger in the shadow of San Francisco. Yet, there's a reason that San Francisco came out on top of this sibling rivalry. For all San Jose's economic might, San Francisco has that certain je ne sais quoi that San Jose is most definitely lacking. San Francisco is a global city, brimming with culture and sustaining its own distinct lifestyle. It is a beautiful city populated with strange and fascinating people. The greater San Jose region? Well, it is home to low-slung offices and worker bees. (Even if those worker bees are multimillionaires and are reinventing the world economy as we know it.)

This state of affairs is mirrored between Brooklyn and Manhattan. First, there's the chip on Brooklyn's shoulder. A slight majority of Brooklyn residents voted in 1894 to merge with the City of New York, and the wound to the Brooklyn identity was referred to at the time as the "Great Mistake." Mourning the loss of an independent identity is hardly an exaggeration. One need only glance at a map of the New York City subway to see that all roads (with the exception of the G line) lead to Manhattan. How can another borough truly have an independent identity when even the subway reveals the point of the city's story?

Although the epicenter of New York City's economy is undeniably Manhattan, Brooklyn's status as the most populous borough means it supplies the people required to keep the city going. According to the last census, Manhattan's population was 1,620,867, while Brooklyn's figure was 2,465,326. The only other borough with a population comparable to Brooklyn is Queens, with a population of 2,229,379.

Despite Brooklyn's second-city similarities with San Jose, this is where the comparison breaks down. San Jose, I love ya. But Brooklyn in cool in two ways that, well, you're not.

First, Brooklyn in a cultural force in its own right. Starting with Walt Whitman, Brooklyn has served as a home to writers looking for a little perspective, a place apart from the cacophony that sometimes makes Manhattan too frantic. The trend continues. In last summer's New York Times, Arthur Phillips noted in passing that "new zoning laws that require all novelists to live in Brooklyn." Brooklyn has a siren song that the creative cannot resist.

Second, San Francisco yuppies don't grow up and move to San Jose. Conversely, Manhattan yuppies do grow up and move to Brooklyn. Sure, this migration of thirty-somethings to Brooklyn occasionally draws the ire of committed Manhattanites, but the lady doth protesteth too much. Are these frustrated urbanites afraid of losing their youth by proxy when they see their friends head to the outer boroughs?

Steph & I felt the pull of Brooklyn strongly during a trip to a friend's Park Slope home for brunch a few weeks ago. On the way back from brunch, we walked down 5^th Avenue to return to the subway. As we progressed toward Bergen Street, we both got the feeling that – were we to stay in New York – this is where we'd be headed. Turning 30, having a child, and staying on Manhattan means that someday, if you work hard and are lucky, you might have an apartment where TWO (yes, TWO!) people could shower at the same time IN DIFFERENT BATHROOMS. Alternatively, moving to Brooklyn means staying connected to the heart of the city while living in a community that permits you a little more space. To me, the choice would be easy.

What's this? After living in New York City for three years, I'm returning to California. These are the parts of my New York experience that I'll miss the most.

Manhattanhenge

2008-05-29T19:51:00.003-07:00

As noted in Gothamist and elsewhere, Manhattanhenge occured tonight. Manhattanhenge (or the Manhattan Solstice) occurs twice each year when the setting sun aligns with the east-west streets on the island of Manhattan (which are offset 28.9° from true east-west).

You don't have to wait long for the next Manhattanhenge sunset. It's on July 12.

Manhattanhenge sunset in front of our apartment on 89^th street.

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

2008-05-26T16:10:00.011-07:00

Images are an essential part of the scientific process. More so than words, and even when heavily doctored or taken selectively from dishes of otherwise abnormal samples (I mean, come on, WE know what they should look like), pictures form the foundation of monographs in natural history. Nowhere has this been more true than in marine biology and microbiology, where samples are often delicate and hard to ship to museums inland or, in the case of tiny things, can only be viewed by professional scientists with expensive microscopes and a lot of training in how to use them.

In the olde days, the obtainment of such images relied on the skills of technicians and researchers able to draw what they saw and transform those drawings into formats that could be printed for distribution in journals. Though cases of manipulation are known, for example Haeckel's drawings of early embryos, these hand-drawn images were remarkably good, and it's taken us decades (or centuries in some cases) to perfect cameras capable of recording what these early researchers saw in their scopes. Curating my image database recently, I came across a few of my old favorites that are worth showing here, both because they are beautiful and because they are an excellent reminder that some skills in science just aren't as common as they used to be.

Leeuwenhoek's first images of cells in slivers of cork bark were among the most transformative images in all of science, and remain among my favorites due both to the impact they had on how we think about biological organization (imagine biology class without cells) and because no matter how many times I've tried to recreate this image in lab, I can't get anything close to this good. My microscope costs $250,000. He made his microscope by hand.

Other favorites of mine, for reasons that will become apparent shortly, come from Mortensen's monographs on sea urchin larvae. Whenever I find a larvae I can't identify, or a feature that seems odd, I can almost without fail find out what I need to from his papers from the early 1900s. This one is his drawing of a several-week-old larvae from the sea urchin Tripneustes esculentus. I wish I could remember the website I finked this from. My apologies to you, webmeister, where ever you are.

And perhaps my favorite of all of the images from scientific days of yore are Haeckel's beautiful drawings of jellyfish, beautiful creatures and the inspiration for one of the best art-meets-science exhibits I have ever seen at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. This particular copy of Haeckle's image comes from Florian Raible at EMBL.

If you've been a reader of this blog for a while, you will no doubt have been impressed by the volume of lawyerly knowledge contributed by the other authors. I have no such knowledge. But I do have pretty pictures and proof, I hope, that there are indeed beautiful things in the intersticies of life.

A gaggle of larvae from the urchin Lytechinus variegatus viewed under polarized light to make the skeletons glow. No other manipulation of the image was performed.

A three day old pluteus larvae from Sphaerechinus granularis.

And a freaky-weird (but pretty) hybrid larvae resulting from crossing Sphaerechinus granularis and Paracentrotus lividus. Hopefully that's still legal to do by the time this goes live.

Whenever I find things tedious, frustrating, or just dump in my work, I look at these images and remember that tiny living things are really cool.

What I'll Miss About New York: #19 — (Certain) New York Weather

2008-05-25T08:31:00.000-07:00

Let's be clear: There are many aspects of New York weather I will most certainly NOT miss.

New York weather means a sweltering hot summer, with heat reflecting off concrete surfaces below you and around you as you sweat your way to the subway. New York weather also means a winter that – while not as cruel some other Northern cities – makes for some rough going. Since most everyone in New York gets about mostly on foot, you experience a New York winter in a more personal way than you would in a more car-based location.

There are two aspects of New York weather that I'll miss.

First, there is some fine weather in this city. May (and late April) and September (and early October) in New York City can mean some truly beautiful days. A room-temperature city and clear skies translates into lots of smiles on the street. Plus, New York has cold yet clear winter days that I didn't realize I missed living in Northern California (where the winter means months and months of perpetual cloud cover). Somehow that blue sky looks all the more blue when framed by the buildings lining Broadway.

Second, there's the way that New Yorkers react to good weather. Having lived in California, I have seen how a whole region can grow to take good weather for granted. I grew up in Nebraska, a place with wildly fluctuating weather, in a household that watched The Weather Channel as if we were all going to be tested on the information later. Compare that with my time in California, where checking the weather meant looking at the calendar. Is it May? If so, it's not going to rain on your barbeque – no forecast necessary.

I'm reminded of how much New York City residents appreciate their good weather every April. This year it was April 17 when the year's first beautiful 72° day arrived. Columbia's Low Library has an impressive set of steps in front of it, and as was the case with the two previous years, undergraduate sun seekers occupied every possible inch of space on these steps, happy to soak in the sun that they had missed so desperately during a long winter and a wet spring.

What's this? After living in New York City for three years, I'm returning to California. These are the parts of my New York experience that I'll miss the most.

Putting Obama's Portland Rally in Perspective

2008-05-19T07:02:00.005-07:00

According to MSNBC, Obama's rally in Oregon yesterday attended by 75,000 supporters was not the largest US political rally ever. That honor goes an 80,000 person rally held by Kerry/Edwards back in the 2004 campaign.

The big difference? The Kerry/Edwards rally was one week before the general election. Yesterday's Obama rally was 169 days before the general election.

It's not going out on a limb to say that Democratic rallies this year are only going to get bigger — a LOT bigger.

What I'll Miss About New York: #20 — All Manner of Food Delivered to My Front Door

2008-05-18T20:44:00.011-07:00

Outside the confines of Manhattan, having food delivered to your home means ordering pizza. After Domino's Pizza popularized free delivery in the 1960's, it seems that Americans decided no other food should be as convenient as the pizza, brought from the restaurant to your living room.

Not so in Manhattan. I have had Italian, Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, American, French, Japanese, and multiple kinds of Mexican cuisine all brought to my apartment from neighborhood restaurants. All without getting off my couch.

What's this? After living in New York City for three years, I'm returning to California. These are the parts of my New York experience that I'll miss the most.

What I'll Miss About New York

2008-05-18T20:38:00.004-07:00

Law school wrapped up last week, and (assuming that I passed) graduation is on Thursday.

Like thousands of other graduating law students, my summer holds the joy of studying for the bar exam. Although I suspect I'll enjoy prepping for the bar – call me a sadist, but being spoon-fed black letter law all summer doesn't sound that bad – I think I need another project to keep me sane.

We moved to New York three years ago; Steph and I depart from New York to return to California at the end of August. In the interim, I'm going to share with you some of the things that I'll miss about living in this city. I hope you enjoy it — we've sure enjoyed living here.

If Moses Had Known About This, I Suspect It Would Have Been Forbidden in Leviticus

2008-05-17T06:29:00.006-07:00

I have been introduced to the possibility that a dog might wear a sweater woven of its own fur.

Last week, I was looking over Steph's shoulder as she casually perused a short online article, How to Card Angora Fiber. As she got to the bottom of the article, both of us immediately saw a Related WikiHow link that loomed large on the screen, demanding to be clicked:

How to Make Dog Yarn

Yes, gentle reader. It can be done. It is called Chiengora and according to the scholarly work, Evaluation of Non-Traditional Animal Fibers for Use in Textile Products (.pdf link), the following breeds are more-or-less house sheep walking among us: American Eskimo, Poodle, Old English Sheep Dog (pause to let irony sink in), Shih Tzu, Schnauzer, Labrador Retriever, Pekingese, West Highland White Terrier, Bichon Frise, Cockapoo, Lhasa Apso, Pomeranian, and Australian Shepherd.

Yes, gentle reader, it can be done. But should it be done?

Time, Patience, & Quite a Bit of Paint

2008-05-17T06:20:00.006-07:00

I've stumbled across a longer version of MUTO, the incredible art installation that I posted to the blog last September:

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

(Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan)

Sexual Selection is Fun

2008-05-15T18:01:00.007-07:00

I'm not a usual promoter of cute online toys, and I've grown increasingly distrustful of online networking sites like Facebook that, as Andy pointed out, seemed designed to infantilze otherwise productive members of society. But this one's different, because it's educational. It's also pretty funny.

Courtesy of Ralph Haygood, I bring you Evarium on Facebook.

Evarium is a sexual selection simulator, bringing to to view one of the more interesting, and misunderstood, of the mechanisms originally proposed by Darwin for explaining the incredible diversity of life we see all around us, and a pretty good demonstration of the fact that God need not have an inordinate fondness for pretty colored, drag-prone Quetzals, so long as somewhere there is a female Quetzal that finds those feathers just irresistible.

Though we think about adaptation as a product of post-Darwinian thought, the idea of adaptation long pre-dates Darwin, as evidenced by the writings of thinkers like Aristotle, William Paley, Darwin's own grandfather Erasmus Darwin , and Empedocles, my favorite and most forgotten (and most spectacularly wrong) evolutionary theorist.

All of these thinkers pointed out that, when you look at the world around us, organisms seem to be remarkably well suited to the tasks they do in life. But there are some obvious, and often beautiful, exceptions to this rule, such as the tail feathers of the peacock or the elaborate antlers of some deer, that seem so over the top that you have to wonder why peacocks aren't all eaten on the spot by hungry lions (or whatever). I can tell you from personal experience that they are not hard to catch, are terrible fliers, and are very, very tasty in a stew (thank you, Chinese field assistants for that culinary adventure).

The answer, while it may seem obvious to us now, was one of Darwin's great coups: Only in the very long-run is the survival of a trait a function of the survival of a species. As long as your pretty feathers on average net you more offspring (your sexy factor minus your eaten-by-lion factor) than the other birds in the single's bar (called a "lek" by biologists), your species is going to see a lot more long tails in the future.

What wasn't appreciated even by Darwin, who considered sexual selection to be an important, but still relatively minor contributor to organismal diversity, is just how much organismal change can be driven by sexual selection alone. Ralph's simulator makes this clear in a way that is easy to understand, fun to play with, and a lot more attractive on your profile page than that stupid aquarium. I encourage you all to take a look (and while you're at it, take a gander at the Random Questions section of the Evarium page).

I should also note that every time you add this, just a little more money from the free market goes to science, a field that just keeps losing in the oh-so-important battle in our government to make cooler ways of blowing people up.

Don't Let the Door Hit You On the Way Out

2008-05-14T08:06:00.004-07:00

Law school is hard. Anyone who has been a 1L (a first year law student) will tell you that the initial attempt at grappling with legal jargon and legal nuances made them feel like a complete dullard during the first year of law school.

But – for most – law school gets progressively easier as time goes on. 2L year brings a better understanding of how this social machine works, and 3L's (frequently with a post-graduation job in hand) are old hands at this game.

At my school, graduating 3L's benefit not only from their experience, but from student rules that are designed to make failure all but impossible. A friend alerts me to the following passage from the Columbia Law School Academic Rules (.pdf link):

3.2.4.2.1 If the student receives only one grade of Fail in any term, he or she shall have the following options:

. . .

3.2.4.2.1.3 only with the consent of the instructor, to undertake remedial instruction and submit to re-examination out-of-course, in which case if the student performs satisfactorily on the reexamination, the grade of Fail will be changed to C.

. . .

3.2.4.2.2.2 it is the faculty's understanding that 3.2.4.2.1.3 will be the usual device where impending graduation or delay in grading fifth term students, together with a want of other credits toward graduation, foreclose the use of others within the usual period of the student's law school career.

O lackluster 3L, please leave the building, take your diploma, and begin donating posthaste!

This is Why Relegation is Awesome. This is Why Relegation is Terrifying.

2008-05-11T09:06:00.006-07:00

The Great Escape of 2008 is complete. 30 minutes ago, Fulham defeated Portsmouth, 1-0, to outpoint Reading (which defeated Derby, 4-0) to remain in the English Premier League.

I am completely shocked. As the commentators on Fox Soccer Channel noted, Danny Murphy's goal in the 76^th minute means £50 million for the Fulham ownership. For me, it means that I get to cheer for Fulham in the EPL in 2008-09 — something that just blows my mind, considering that I wrote the team off for dead 5 weeks ago.

Go Fulham!

Previously:
Hoping for the Chance to Eat Relegation Crow
The Fifth Stage of Relegation Grief

More on Relegation:
Why I am a Fulham Fan (...and Why You Should Be, Too) — Part I
What if MLB Had Promotion & Relegation?

Update (5/14): It's three days later, and I still think back to Fulham's escape and smile. This breakneck migration from the lowest low to the highest high feels better than any championship win I've ever celebrated.

Hoping for the Chance to Eat Relegation Crow

2008-05-04T08:31:00.007-07:00

Following their crushing defeat to Sunderland one month ago, I wrote that Fulham – the EPL team nearest my heart – was "mathematically certain[]" to be relegated down to the League Championship of English football. This Saturday, we'll see if I was wrong.

Following my April 5^th relegation obituary for the squad, Fulham – a team that had not won an away match since September 2006 – promptly won two away matches at Reading and Manchester City. Yesterday, the team won a vital game at home, pushing Birmingham further into relegation territory. More importantly, this victory temporarily pushes them out of the relegation zone — the team is currently tied with Reading for the last slot, but is ahead of Reading on points. If the season ended today, they'd escape relegation by the narrowest of margins.

Next weekend is the final weekend of the season, and Fulham has the chance to survive. (Note: As I mentioned in my original EPL post last June, the final relegation slot was also determined during the last weekend of the 2006-07 season.)

If Fulham wins and Reading wins by less than a truly historic blow-out (the goal differential between the two is +6 Fulham), Fulham is in.

If Fulham draws, Reading draws or loses, and Birmingham draws or loses, Fulham is in.

If Fulham loses and both Reading and Birmingham lose, Fulham is in.

In all other circumstances, Fulham will be relegated.

Fulham plays at the somewhat-mighty Portsmouth next weekend. Birmingham plays at home against the game Blackburn Rovers. Unfortunately for Fulham, Reading goes up against Derby County. It doesn't really matter that it's an away game for Reading — Derby is statistically the worst team to ever play in the English top league. Even if Derby beats Reading, its 14-point total for the season is the worst in the history of the English game.

So it looks like Fulham has to win. I'll be traveling during the game, which will help ease my anxiety as the team battles for its EPL life. Go Fulham!

Religious Scratchiti

2008-05-03T16:59:00.005-07:00

If you’ve been on New York City’s subways recently, you probably noticed the absence of spray-paint graffiti, long a symbol of urban decay though with its defenders in the art community. New York authorities have managed to defeat subway graffiti by using graffiti-resistant materials on subway cars. A new form of graffiti has emerged in its place: scratchiti, graffiti formed by scratching marks into glass.

This afternoon I observed some unusual scratchiti on the R train. It appears to be a Hebrew abbreviation. The first (right) letter is Bet. The second letter is He. It is an abbreviation for the phrase Baruch HaShem, which translates to “Blessed be God.”

Among some Orthodox Jews, it is customary to write this abbreviation in the upper right hand corner of letters. What it’s doing as subway scratchiti, however, is a mystery. Perhaps the scratchitist was trying to bless the train?

Unconscience Error

2008-05-03T06:26:00.005-07:00

I don't read many articles on car racing, but I like it when they contain wonderful malapropisms. Here's a bit from an ESPN article on Indycar's attempt to woo Dale Earnhardt, Jr. into the driver's seat for one of their races:
If Earnhardt's conscious wouldn't let him accept the contract, but his conscience would still permit it, then I suppose Mr. Gossage should only negotiate with his counterparty when the latter is unconscious or subject to subconscious influence.

Impressive. Most Impressive. Obi-Wan Has Taught You Well.

2008-05-02T09:28:00.007-07:00

This Obama supporter thinks The Empire Strikes Barack does a pretty good job of summing up the last couple months of our Democratic Demolition Derby:If down the road you find this to be removed by Google, then the search engine is policing the boundaries of YouTube a little bit too closely. This is clearly a fair use of the underlying material.

Update (5/2): Of course, Hillary is hardly Darth Vader. She's more Lando Calrissian, an ally and kindred spirit who has temporarily been wooed by the dark side. It just wouldn't be such a fun video if she were Lando, so let's permit the talented creators a little artistic license.

(Hat tip to Ben Smith)

Obama in the Tacky, Tacky Driver's Seat

2008-05-02T06:52:00.010-07:00

When Michigan held its Democratic primary on January 15 of this year, Barack Obama did not appear on the ballot. After Michigan breached party protocol when it moved its primary ahead in the season, Obama (along with Richardson, Biden, and Edwards) removed his name from the ballot. Although Clinton, Dodd, Kucinich, and Gravel appeared on the January 15 ballot, 40.1% of Michigan Democrats voting in this voided primary preferred someone else, voting for Uncommitted.

If you accept the tortured popular vote math offered these days by the Clinton campaign – math that requires you to add count the votes from both Florida and Michigan (without adding any portion of Uncommitted to Obama) – Clinton leads in the popular vote. If you don't engage in this intelligence insulting exercise, Obama leads by every meaningful metric.

Of course, Obama's insurmountable lead doesn't sell ads for news outlets. And it won't stop ABC from creating a photo illustration with Obama losing to Hillary in an effete half-purple, half-pink Indy car:

Target Demographic?

2008-04-29T08:42:00.006-07:00

Grand Theft Auto IV was released today. For those unfamiliar with the GTA series, here's how IGN described the game action: you "blow up cop cars, run down innocent civilians, bang hookers, assist drug dealers and lowlifes and do many, many other bad deeds." I've never actually played the game, but apparently it has inspired gameplay—inspiring, at least, reviewers to describe it in glowing terms, such as a "thoroughly compelling work of cultural satire disguised as fun."

Nonetheless, I think that Rockstar Games might have overreached their target demographic with the ad buy I noticed this morning:

In case you can't make them out, some of the headlines on the page are:
Consumer Confidence Slips as Home Prices Drop;
China Jails 30 Tibetans for Riots; and
Clinton Seeks Gas Tax Break; Obama Says No.

Future Antebellum?

2008-04-27T16:49:00.007-07:00

A super luxe building is going up at the corner of West End & 86^th Street. 535 West End Avenue will apparently have 21^st Century Pre-War Residences.

21^st Century Pre-War Residences? I know what they're selling – crown mouldings, high ceilings & that certain look – but I just can't help but wonder: Do they know something that we don't?

Of course, in the eyes of the Bush Administration, this building developer has already missed the pre-war boat.

On a Purely Parochial Note...

2008-04-08T17:25:00.003-07:00

...I wish the Stanford Women's Basketball Team would hurry up and win the national title so that ESPN can get back to telling me how AWESOME the women's teams are from Tennessee, Connecticut, and Rutgers.

It's almost rude for Stanford to interrupt ESPN's adoration of women's basketball teams east of the Mississippi.

The Fifth Stage of Relegation Grief

2008-04-05T12:43:00.010-07:00

Twice within the pages of this blog I have praised the European system of relegation and promotion in professional sports.

Last June, I cited relegation as one of the reasons that the English Premier League ("EPL") of soccer/football was interesting. At the time, I said that relegation was the "awesome Shiva of sports, destroyer and transformer." Last September, in one of the more heavily commented posts on this blog, I argued that adding relegation and promotion to major league baseball would result in a more dynamic and interesting league.

Well, these chickens have come home to roost. With today's embarrassing 1-3 home loss to Sunderland, it looks like all but a mathematical certainty that Fulham, the EPL team that I root for, is going to get relegated.

A quick review for those of you who don't know what relegation means. Here's the relevant bit from my post in June on the topic:

England (like many a soccer-addled country) has multiple professional soccer leagues. Relegation means that the bottom 3 EPL teams are sent to the 2nd flight league, the Championship, and the top Championship teams rise to the EPL. This happens serially, with each league sending their best teams up and their worst teams down.

The result is something like Darwinism for sports. Good teams are rewarded, bad teams are punished. You don't have the Milwaukee Brewers — a profitable team that will never, ever do anything meaningful in the top US baseball league. Since team owners are not monopolistically locked into their leagues, and since the lower league teams aren't farm teams, owners of EPL teams simply cannot field a mediocre product year-in-and-year-out and count on reaping profits from an over-loyal fanbase.

With 5 games left in the season, bottom-dwelling Derby County is a distant 20th place, mathematically assured of relegation (and is in hot competition with the 2002-03 Sunderland team for the worst point total in English football history). 18th place Bolton looks like it could close the gap with 17th place Birmingham. 19th place Fulham? Well, it's going to finish in 19th place.

Time and again this season, Fulham has seized defeat (or at least a draw) from the jaws of victory. They have given up a late goal to their opponent in the waning moments of the match more times than I care to recall. Although seven teams in the EPL lost the same number or more games than Fulham (17), it's Fulham that will be relegated knowing that it has a chance to lead the league in ties (12). Most of those ties could have been wins, but for the final 10 minutes.

So it's Fulham to the ~~Champions League~~ League Championship. What am I to do?

Well, I certainly can't pick a new EPL team — most certainly not yet, not one year after deciding to root for Fulham and not while Fulham has a chance to make a quick return to the top flight for the 2009-10 season. I'll go back to enjoying the EPL on Fox Soccer Channel in the same blasé, disinterested manner I did before I cheered for a single team. I'll simply go back to watching football because I like watching football, even when I don't know much or care much about who is playing whom.

And I'll be a Fulham fan in the way that all remote fans followed their favorite teams in the days before extensive television coverage. I'll follow the box score. (Although almost half the EPL games in a given week are televised in the US, it's impossible to get ~~Champions League~~ League Champsionship games on your TV without purchasing a separate and expensive channel.) I'll read about Fulham competing against a new round of names that sound strange to me. Just when I got used to the Hogwarts-esque Tottenham Hotspur and Aston Villa, the ~~Champions League~~ League Championship will bring me Fulham against Crystal Palace and Sheffield Wednesday.

And I'll hope that Fulham stays the Fulham I like: a team overloaded with Yankee players, owned and mismanaged Mohamed Al-Fayed, and a team that battles for survival and makes you cheer like a crazy person when they actually win the big one.

Go Fulham.
Update (5/14): How wrong I was.

Et Tu, Monty?

2008-04-04T10:52:00.007-07:00

I do not like noncompete clauses in employment contracts. You see, I tend to agree with legal theorists who argue that the relative nonenforceability of noncompete clauses in California has helped create Silicon Valley, creating a legal competitive advantage over other tech clusters.

Still, I'm not exactly thrilled to see the Stanford's still-much-beloved former coach Mike Montgomery is slated to coach Stanford's rival Cal. I feel like an implied, purely emotional covenant not to compete has been violated.

In professional wrestling, when a Good Guy becomes a Bad Guy, they say he turns heel. Stanford basketball fans were already in a weakened state after hearing the (not too surprising) news that Robin Lopez would join his brother Brook in the NBA draft. Catching us dazed and stumbling around the wrestling ring, it now appears that Monty is ready to finish us off with a suplex.

The 99 Cents Store

2008-04-02T06:56:00.006-07:00

The only logical conclusion is that everything at this 99 cents store is precisely 99 cents.

Kids These Days

2008-04-01T08:19:00.005-07:00

I like blogging (yesterday's social media), but like Garfield, I find aspects of the current generation of social media – namely, Facebook & Twitter – to be baffling.

I have a Facebook profile, for despite its many faults, it's a great way of keeping a persistent contact list updated by your contacts. They change their email addresses, etc. so you don't have to.

The problem with Facebook is that it infantilizes adults. No, I don't want to be a zombie, or a pirate, or learn what Smurf I am, or play fake Scrabble with you. I'm 31. I have a baby. It just ain't worth my time.

Twitter's another matter entirely. I created a Twitter account for this blog weeks ago, but never bothered to update it because, well, Twitter is pointless. Twitter is a micro-blogging platform that broadcasts your status to people who care. This is a gigantic waste of time & attention.

Steph apparently discovered Twittering this morning. Her initial reaction sums up my feelings almost exactly:

What Emily Post Didn't Anticipate

2008-03-31T17:52:00.003-07:00

I had planned to just keep my typing fingers still until the end of April (at which point the powers of academia will either fail me or pass me on to the next set of flaming hoops), but I am faced with an ethical dilemma to which I have no answer.

What do you do when you get a friend request from someone you don't know? Or worse yet, someone you know and just don't like all that much?

If I were a member of the 19th century landed gentry, I could invite the caller into my sitting room for cigars, and allow him no further and offer him sub-par sherry. That would have certainly driven home the message and no one would lose face or social grace.

Thoughts from the public are welcome.

Volunteers

2008-03-24T13:00:00.011-07:00

When it comes to the Iraq War, I try to have sympathy for the Bush Administration.

Conspiracy theories aside, the planners of Iraq War – even if they are today dashing away from claiming responsibility for their actions – did not hope for a bungled war. These planners wanted a war where the U.S. would achieve quick victory, a war where our national self-interest would be improved. (I'll turn it back to the conspiracy theorists regarding what that self-interest was: Cheaper oil? Permanent U.S. military bases in the Middle East? The removal of Saddam Hussein and his WMDs?)

I try to have sympathy for these war planners, but then Dick Cheney – who appears to be the central figure of the entire Iraq War effort – starts talking, and my ability to have this sympathy is destroyed.

The recent public display of heartlessness by Dick Cheney concerning the pain that the Iraq War has wrought in the U.S. (...to say nothing of the much greater pain it has heaped upon the Iraqi people) literally takes my breath away. In a pair of interviews over the past week, Cheney provides a shocking window into his psyche.

So?
Last week, Cheney remarked "So?" when confronted by an interviewer with a poll indicating the public's broad current opposition to the Iraq War. Cheney claimed that it was important to not "be blown off course by the fluctuations in the public opinion polls."

Of course, today's broad opposition to the Iraq War is hardly a "fluctuation." Polls on Iraq have indicated majority opposition against the war from late 2005 onward. A fluctuation? Maybe on a clock that is tracking time on a geologic scale.

Much as I hate this "So?" comment, our Constitution has set the bar for impeachment inadvisably high for people like Cheney. However strongly critics of the President and Vice President might argue for their impeachment, until Bush et al. do something that looks like "Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes or Misdemeanors" in the eyes of today's Supreme Court, our best hope is to use the other machinery of the federal government to limit the executive branch's influence for the remainder of Bush's lame duck term.

In the end, I hate Cheney's "So?" attitude, but I understand where he's coming from. We elected them. Barring impeachment, we're stuck with them. Let's demand Congress exercise its power to limit their influence. Someone has to be the least popular Vice President ever, and Cheney appears content to play the role.

Yet, I was not compelled to write about "So?" It's Cheney's comment from today that compels me to write.

They Volunteered
Confronted in an interview with the fact that the U.S. has just passed the grim milestone of 4,000 Americans dead in the Iraq War, Cheney reminded his interviewer several times that these soldiers volunteered.

Reading the article, I'm simply awestruck by how jaw-droppingly heartless Cheney comes across. He rationalizes that whatever burden communities, spouses, relatives, friends, and children bear at the loss or injury of a family member, this burden is somehow greatly eased by the fact of our all-volunteer force.

This August, I will have been writing this blog for 5 years. Over the course of writing 800 or so blog posts during this time, I've tried to develop a tone that is less confrontational than when I started blogging. Writing in a manner that tries (and, of course, fails) to see issues in shades of gray has been a continual challenge, but it's worth it — especially in developing my ability to talk about issues with people with whom I strongly disagree.

Cheney's words erase these shades of gray: Vice President Cheney, you have said and felt a horrible thing. You (and those around you?) have created a rationalization that helps you sleep at night. You've shared this rationalization with us, and it is disgusting.

As with "So?", Cheney's words carry a kernel of truth. We have an all-volunteer army. The military interests of our nation are protected by volunteers in a way that they weren't at Antietam, at Cold Harbor, on Omaha Beach, or in the Ardennes.

And let's ignore that our military draws heavily on disadvantaged populations and minorities to fill its ranks. Let's grant Cheney that, yes, we have a "volunteer" force.

Being a conscript is not the same thing as being a volunteer; however, the military requires that ALL soldiers follow orders. When rank and file soldiers confront death, even certain death, they do so at the order of another. It doesn't matter whether they're a volunteer or a draftee. An ordered military presumes – it demands – that a soldier abandon a significant portion of his or her free will in the name of achieving an objective. They must trust the system and the objective.

Iraq is a failed objective, and our continued project in Iraq is driven as much by the well-understood theory of Irrational Escalation as it by an effort to achieve ever-shifting military and geopolitical objectives.

Our soldiers volunteered to join the military. And then they were asked to do the impossible in Iraq, all the while staying in theater longer than any other soldiers in US history. They have obeyed orders and fought bravely.

That they fight and die as volunteers should do nothing to help us sleep better at night.

Volunteers & Conscripts. Side By Side.

The 4 Steps of Irresponsible Science Reporting

2008-03-22T04:59:00.016-07:00

It's easy to forget during an election year, but mass media doesn't limit its oversimplifications and distortions to political news. Media outlets are just as good at improperly framing science news as they are at skewing political news. Today's top science story provides a great example of their ability to confuse.

Step 1: Something Science-y Happens.
The first step in distorting science news is to report on something that is interesting to people who have even a passing curiosity regarding the world around them. Such an event happened on Wednesday morning.

At 2:12 am EDT on Wednesday, the effects of a star explosion arrived at our planet. The visible effects of the explosion could be seen by the naked eye for about a minute. This celestial event was made all the more exceptional due to the astonishing distance between the Earth and the star: More than 7 billion light years — about halfway across the universe.

Normally, naked eye visibility is limited to about 1500-2000 stars. The most distant object or structure generally visible to the naked eye is the Triangulum Galaxy, about 3 million light years away (1/2500^th of the distance to Wednesday's explosion). Being able to see something more than 7 billion light years away? That's cool. Let's write a story.

Step 2: A Story is Written.
Never-happened-before astronomy stories make for good sound bite-length stories, so it's unsurprising that major news websites all featured this story during the week. The NY Times pointed out in its story that this explosion was a gamma ray burst, which "might mark the implosion of a massive star into a black hole, or the collision of a pair of dense neutron stars." CNN.com left the gamma ray details of its story, noting that the story involved an "aging star."

Step 3: A Thoughtless Reader Poll is Created.
It's someone's job at CNN.com to create reader polls on the basis of the stories of the day. As minor political controversies of this election season have illustrated, the raison d'être of CNN.com's online reader polls appears to be to inflame reader opinion and heighten their interest in the news — even if that means leading them astray.

Before looking at the CNN.com poll below, let's remember what this story is about. According to the NY Times, we're talking about "the implosion of a massive star into a black hole, or the collision of a pair of dense neutron stars." With that in mind, here's the CNN.com Quickvote reader poll:Of course, it's all but a truism that our planet's eventual fate is to be consumed by our dying star. 900 million years from now, our sun's hydrogen will be on its way to depletion. The resulting expansion of our star into a red giant will make our planet inhospitable. Billions of years later, the sun will expand enough to consume the Earth — but we certainly won't be around to complain.

Current supernovae models indicate that our sun is nowhere near massive enough to explode in a supernova. Even less likely is that our star could experience the kind of core collapse supernova that may be the cause of the massive gamma ray burst in the article.

Step 4: Poll Participants Leave More Misinformed Than They Came.
As of this morning, 72% of Quickvote respondents think it's possible that our star will explode and vaporize our planet.
Of course, some of the "yes" folks are those who know something about our star's life cycle and our planet's eventual demise. However, others of these folks are just babes in the woods, alarmed that our star might explode at any moment — just like that star in the article!

An appropriate follow-on to this poll would be a story like What Is Our Government Doing to Prevent the Sun From Exploding? They could even accept responses from readers. I might propose a system of gigantic belts that would prevent the Sun from expanding. No, wait! How about a giant fire extinguisher so we could partially hose down the Sun, should it get too hot?!

(If you like curmudgeon-y blog posts complaining about CNN.com's absurd astronomy coverage, you might enjoy this old Sauntering post, where we look at the some of the ridiculous images that CNN.com pairs with any story about a potential meteor/asteroid/comet impact.)

Where Should I Park My 4 Guys?

2008-03-17T20:00:00.008-07:00

Here she comes in her palanquin
on the back of an elephant
on a bed made of linen and sequins and silk...
The Infanta by The Decemberists

I'm a big fan of the Decemberists, but I sometimes suspect that frontman Colin Meloy pens his songs with one hand on a piano, the other on a thesaurus. Her palanquin? What the heck is a palanquin?

It's pretty clear from the context of the rest of the verse that a palanquin is something like an elaborate saddle for riding atop an animal. Yet, the real magic of the internet is that you only wonder these things for a moment now — before you turn to Wikipedia and get the (collectively created) answer.

Yes, a palanquin can be a small cabin supported by one or more animals...

...however, it can also be such a cabin supported by one or more people, as you've certainly seen in movies.

There's something astonishingly servile about a palanquin (or litter or sedan chair, as these contraptions are also known) when carried by other people. In many/most cases, the people riding in the palanquin could just as easily be walking; however, the dictates of society mean that they get to ride, borne quite literally on the backs of the less socially favored.

This menial, servile past was brought closer to home for me when I learned that Ben Franklin, afflicted by the gout and unable to ride a horse to the Constitutional Convention, was carried to the convention in his sedan chair. Franklin was borne by four convicts, and their appearance is partially captured in the painting below:

When You Care Enough to Give the Gift of Ostrich

2008-03-17T08:06:00.007-07:00

So, Dad got ostrich meat for his birthday.

Why give the gift of meat, specifically flightless bird meat? First, my grandparents have the habit of sending us meats for the holidays. Giving meat almost feels like perpetuating an animal-flesh-based family tradition. Second, Dad's into all things healthy — whether that be the newest workout craze or a health-conscious food alternative. Ostrich is quite good for you, and I know that he's had it before. Third, Dad seems to already own every possible material good that he could want. Why not give him a gift that makes for an amusing story?

I found the ostrich meat at Amazon.com, where it was on offer from a third-party seller who is also interested in selling you alligator and buffalo meat. Since I made the purchase through Amazon, their comparison shopping software tracked the purchase. The next time I visited Amazon.com, I think the What Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item? feature effectively captured the serious and buttoned-up nature of today's ostrich meat buyer:

We are a stuffy set, we ostrich meat buyers.

Look on the Bright Side

2008-03-10T17:10:00.003-07:00

At least our drinking water is rock & roll-free.

Almost Walking Unaided. Almost Typing Unintentionally.

2008-03-03T15:13:00.004-08:00

According to my rough estimate, someone in my family is about 1" away from becoming a contributor to this blog.

Note the tip-toes. Good effort, Katie!

Woulda Coulda Shoulda

2008-02-24T20:58:00.007-08:00

If you want to know the law and nothing else, you must look at it as a bad man, who cares only for the material consequences which such knowledge enables him to predict, not as a good one, who finds his reasons for conduct, whether inside the law or outside of it, in the vaguer sanctions of conscience.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., The Path of the Law, 10 Harv. L. Rev. 457 (1897)

Almost exactly four years ago, I was fretting about Ralph Nader. You see, Nader had just announced his candidacy and I was worried about a repeat spoiler performance. As our (bad) luck would have it, Kerry lost to Bush by a sufficient enough margin that Nader wasn't the difference-maker.

Today, Ralph Nader has once again announced that he is running for President. As I look back on what I wrote in 2004, I realize that two ideas from my February 2004 post still ring true to me today:

The first point: Ralph Nader will not have an effect on the election in any way, shape, or form. In some bizarro alternative universe, Ralph Nader's star rose after the 2000 election, and he rode a groundswell of support into a renewed bid in 2004. We rallied around his message of battling the corporate kleptocracy, we decided to take the fight to a two-party duopoly and we railed against a flawed electoral system...

...but that world isn't our world. None of the above ever happened. What really happened after 2000 and again in 2004 was that Ralph Nader went back down the cultural rabbit/hobbit hole, disappearing from the national stage. Who knows? Maybe he was headlining policy wonk cruises the whole time and I just haven't been paying attention.

The second point: Ralph Nader is destined to join the ranks of Aaron Burr & Alger Hiss. Like Burr & Hiss, early Nader's contributions (remember that without him we would have neither the EPA nor OSHA) will be overshadowed in time by late Nader's hubris. 50 years from now, they'll remember Nader's contributions to the regulatory state? Not a chance. They'll remember him as the guy who was the but-for cause of George W. Bush's election.

Now, in that last sentence – linking Nader to Bush's 2000 win in Florida – I realize that I sound like the stock Nader critic. And the stock Nader critic should expect to hear from the standard Nader supporter: "It's his right to run," they say, pointing out that he's a natural-born citizen over the age of thirty-five.

But in responding to critics like me who say "Nader should not run" with the statement that "Nader legally can run," Nader's remaining supporters miss the point of Justice Holmes's passage above.

The law provides good guidance regarding what we can do. In a criminal context, the law tells us what we cannot do (unless we want to suffer the penalty). From this negative, we can infer that anything not prohibited is permissible. We can do it.

Yet, the law says nothing (or next to nothing) regarding what we should do. Even if something is legal, ought I to do it? You might find the answer to that question in a book, but it won't be a book of statutes or a bound book of legal opinions. When Nader's remaining supporters respond to critics who say he should not run by saying that he has every right to run, they substitute should for can.

As Bill Clinton has noted, Ralph Nader's 2000 run as the Green Party candidate "for the Presidency "prevented Al Gore from being the 'greenest' president we could have had."

O remaining Nader supporter,
I'm well aware of what Ralph Nader could do in 2000.
What should he have done?

Soundtrack for Obama '08

2008-02-11T19:30:00.000-08:00

In the 1979 movie Manhattan, Woody Allen's character lists Louis Armstrong's 1927 recording of Potato Head Blues (RealAudio link) as one of a dozen reasons that life is worth living. Sitting in a jazz history course more than a decade ago, I recall my professor (the inimitable and irascible late Grover Sales) remarking to us that he agreed with Allen, and that if he were forced to choose one song to serve as a soundtrack to life, it'd be Potato Head Blues.

I know it's the sentimentalist in me, but since then I've found the notion of a "soundtrack to life" to be a potent one. Occasionally I'll stumble across a particular song and discover that it captures the emotion of a particular set of experiences in my life.

Now, I haven't written about it on this blog yet, but I'm keenly excited about the Barack Obama campaign. And I'm a bit stunned by how enthusiastically Senator Obama has been received by a needy public. When I read and watch the news, I see time and again stories of people who have invested their fondest hopes in him, and I see how he's responded to the moment, treating it as a call to action.

It's in this context that I stumbled across the song below. To me, this is the soundtrack to the Obama campaign as of February. The energy, the striving, the power, the feeling of being unsettled, the momentum — it's all there. Here's hoping that these themes continue to develop and build through November and then through the next four years.

Perpetuum Mobile by Penguin Cafe Orchestra
(Yes, it is in the completely unbelievable 15/16 time signature.)