Unused and Probably Unusable

To quote another legal epistolary writer (Aaron Streett; the extra T at the end is probably for Terrific), "Greetings, sportsfans!" See here, for the first March issue of his periodic chatty Supreme Court opinion, order and grant roundup. I highly recommend it to all SCOTUS groupies. Prawfsblawg reprints them, but you can get them delivered straight to your inbox by mailing him at the link at the end of that post. Streett, an associate in Baker Botts' Houston office, provides all the inside baseball commentary one could want, in a breezy and entertaining tone. Oh look, there's links to all of them at Baker Botts.

Anyway. Hello to those who enjoy watching athletic events. How's your NCAA tournament treating you? Thought so.

I had an intention to write about Gender and Change in Heinlein's writing. So that'll be my next topic, because I think it's got more juice for me right now than the grim-seeming discussion of war crimes that I had planned. I'd planned to unroll that one in mid-August 2006, and then the topic so disheartened me that I went and did things I felt like doing more instead.

So: forthcoming, a discussion of gender-bending, gender roles, stereotypes, cross-dressing, a bit about sexuality (although that's not the focus), and gender as a mutable characteristic in the works of R. A. Heinlein. Because after all, if I can't write what I feel like, what am I doing out here in the blawgoverse, anyway?

Other posts I'm brewing up: a quick perusal of the controversial No Child Left Behind act, which has been heavily criticized as elevating testing, and particularly apparent improvement in testing, over real education, as well as skewing priorities in educating students - like, how much to test-prep vs. other skills, how much to the bottom quintile vs. the next vs. the next. My favorite example of unhappiness was the NY Times article about an excellent school that had been deemed a failure under NCLB. I might do a more searching review of what's being said about it. Wikipedia now notes in the No Child Left Behind Act article that "a new Congress has already started considering major revisions, as one group of 50 Republican senators and representatives introduced legislation in March 2007 that would provide states much greater freedom from NCLB's controls and punishments." - but as always, trust Wikipedia only so far. How do we KNOW that they introduced such proposed legislation unless we go looking through THOMAS ourselves?

Also, a possible HF post on addiction, and another on wealth and power.

Until next time, that's today's unused & unusable inside baseball! (Again, a tip of the imaginary hat to this guy.)

Blog Burnout is a serious problem. Not "serious," per se, but worrying. If one worries about trivialities, anyway. And for some, the problem is more of a situation, rather neutral in tone and timbre. [Tone quality is a synonym for timbre, as I just learned from Wikipedia, but has nothing at all to do with Timber, or Timberlake, or Timberlands. Wait, that's not right, Justin Timberlake presumably has tonal qualities. Oh, nevermind.]

Just as blogs grew up, mushroomlike, in the wake of the popularization of web software that made it effectively free to blog, requiring only expenditure of time and the effort of banging fingers upon keys, so many of them waned, much like webpages built in the pioneering days of the Internet, ca. late 1990s to early 2k0s.

People realized they had better things to do - or, lacking those, that they could free up really prodigious of time in order to do nothing at all, merely by allowing their site to fall into disuse. Let a daily update slide to a week - then two. String together a couple twos and make a month, and after just a pair of them, most readers reluctantly (or secretly gratefully, since there is then one less Thing they have to read) conclude that the blog has been abandoned.

Blogs need no excuse, since they take up very little real estate, but they also need a reason to perpetuate. For some bloggers, it is a sense of outrage. For others, it is the dread disease - the need to write, whether there is a readymade subject to hand or not. I suspect that many others write because they only want the attention. This, I think, explains the great many blogs on current events, many outraged in tone.

I got tired of being outraged, like in my last post. Reading headlines in the hopes of finding something to be outraged about takes a great deal of emotional energy. Why not read a good book instead?

So I did.

I've been reading, and watching movies, and television (almost caught all the episodes of The Sopranos that I had missed), and am ready to return, I think, to blogging. Life permitting. But I think I'll be a little less outraged, for a while. Life permitting.

A blog is also like an indefinitely deep hole, into which one can always toss in a few more shovelsfull of loose dirt. Or a handful of pebbles and gravel. Or the occasional precious nugget.

Happy 2007, although we're over a seventh of the way into it already. Goodness, it's almost to the Tuesday of the Week of '07. Well. In that case, the Monday hangover should be well over, and it's time to get some blogging done before the week is out.

I'll be back soon.

Blogging goes through periods of varying frequencies, as with most aspects of life.

Sometimes, I post with a frequency which indicates a vast surplus of available time, available mental energy, or both.

Occasionally, as this month, my own self-imposed goals (weekly postings on Friday, at a minimum) aren't met because other rhythms have disrupted the schedule.

My vacation from Heinlein Friday will continue for another week, but its long-term status as a permanent weekly commitment is in doubt. I have more to write, but the very decision to start so huge a project as the Law of War post, which produced dozens and dozens of paragraphs with inadequate planning on how to tame them, has placed an unfortunate obstacle in the path of continued easy posts.

I may want to withdraw it, and prepare a more modest HF post. It wouldn't be the first time I've done this: my last major blawgging project was to be a Scalia Mega-Post, in which I dealt with each and every things about Scalia's jurisprudence (and personal style, and irritating statements) which annoyed or frustrated or infuriated or troubled me. As it turns out, that kind of project involves more than just brainstorming, writing, and collecting links.

To take on a really massive writing project, there needs to be some thoughtful editing, at the planning stage. What gets in, and what is excluded? What's the right order? How does one section relate to another?

I've seldom constructed such open-ended writing projects, and when I have, failure to adequately edit my own structure has been at least as big a problem as inability to find words.

I'm also better at starting projects than finishing them, but of course it's easy to finish a task when you can see its goal clearly and therefore understand the nature of the work that will accomplish it.

Writing a brief is easy by comparison. It's got to have the requisite pieces, to comply with the Federal Rules or local practice or the judge's orders. There's only one way to organize it - the right way, with first things first, all the necessary prefatory and preparatory announcements (introduction, statement of jurisdiction, statutes involved, etc.). A motion for class certification has a form that's virtually pre-ordained, just because it has to comply with Rule 23, or its state law equivalent - see the discussion in this long-ago post. August 5, 2005? It's been a while.

===================

What else is on my mind?

I try not to journal too much, this being a Blawg and all, but it's so pleasant to write down observations and get them out of the mental buffer. Nobody has to spend time reading about what my cat did today (she's nonexistent, so pretty much the same things she does every day, or rather doesn't do, or perhaps even doesn't not do). But some observations are worthwhilier than others.

Philadelphia's weather has turned distinctly dismal. Temps in the 80s or above (with miserably high humidity) have been replaced by highs in the low 70s, with a distinct overcast. Summer's over. The season has changed, and we can look forward to months of complaining and wishing it was unpleasantly hot again.

Politics in Philly is about to get increasingly unavoidable. I haven't heard from the Lynn Swann candidacy lately, but I assume he's still running against incumbent Governor Ed Rendell (who is married to Third Circuit Judge Midge - er, Marjorie O. Rendell). I haven't seen any lying commercials from Santorum lately - although I hear there's an accurate one going around about how often his Democratic opponent, Bob Casey, Jr., has sought different offices. Well played, Santorum campaign. Keep trying to distract us from the issues of character, philosophy, politics, trust, and substantive issues.

Philly car share, I can now report, is a lovely thing. It may not be competitive with Zip Cars or the other nationwide car-sharing programs. PCS is a nonprofit which (presumably for good and valid and insurance-related reasons) can't let you take one of their cars into D.C. or New York or Baltimore or otherwise outside the Area. But, I think it does finally eliminate the need of many students, many professionals, and most city-dwellers to actually buy, own, maintain, gas, insure, and find permanent parking for their vehicles. Google them if you're in Philly and haven't already considered joining. Many have - and many have sold their cars and finally rid themselves of that albatross, car ownership.

That reminds me, I can buy a new transpass today - why not be able to ride any bus OR check out a car with an hour's notice? It's affordable, as owning and insuring a car in the city isn't.

Life beckons, much as it intruded last week. Off I go, to face another long, dreary, wearying Friday, followed immediately by a three day weekend and then a four day week. Wait, that's not too cumbersome after all.

Posting will resume on or after the weekend.

So, "Eh," if that is your *real* name, why the blawg hiatus?

Well, me, since me asks, I've been busy.

Blogging grew out of my need to get it all out, and onto the page. I had been commenting anonymously (or pseudonymously) on blogs for some time, including at my favoritest, Evan Schaeffer's Legal Underground, as it was then known.

I had spare time. I had unexpressed thoughts. I was visiting blawgs that had no commentability, and that annoyed me. I felt like, if the author had something to say, and it was provocative enough (or wrong enough), that they had an obligation - a duty! - to let me comment on it.

Obviously, that's not how writing works, but it is how blogging works - or one of the ways it can work.

Blogging was a hobby, but it was also fun. I could link, I could make snarky comments, I could vent - but I could also indulge my obsessive reading of news and blogs. Suddenly, being overinformed was not a sign of weakness; it was a source of inspiration.

When life gets hectic, as it has lately, I fall behind on my blog reading. Right now my Bloglines page has over 500 posts that I haven't had a chance to pore carefully over - or even skim or skip past. I love blogs - this is the Blogroll created for me by Bloglines, and here's what I have blogrolled at del.icio.us - that is, the same sort of thing, but more haphazardly, since delicious is about impulse and saving everything, like a magpie, rather than carefully selecting only those posts, blogs, or webpages I really and truly need.

I notice that I have 39 blogs on my delicious blogroll; that includes new addition Lawyers, Guns & Money, and Conglomerate, as well as "215 words," the sorts of things I would never have added to bloglines. That's because bloglines pushes posts to you, and they look like they pile up in the aggregator unless you read them. I prefer to lay out the links for myself to peruse at leisure, no obligation to buy, no money down.

I'm about to go on vacation. I'm winding up a document review and preparing for a filing - which will occur while I'm on vacation. I have family duties pressing. I have social responsibilities calling. There's a Jim Henson / Muppet exhibition down in D.C. at the Smithsonian's museum of American history, and not just the exhibit but the museum closes on September 5th, 2006 for a good several years for renovation.

Also, I have a headache, and the water's too cold, and I don't feel like it.

***

I have less to say about the Laws of War than I'd thought - and also have written far, far more words for that post than I can usefully use. When you write a lot and have nothing to say - and does that include this post? - you know you're deep in trouble.

***

'Tis better to keep one's mouth shut and be thought a fool, than open it and remove all doubt. Or so 'tis said by people who say 'tis and 'tain't a lot.

In that vein, I posted to del.icio.us this classic, originally run in Pl*yb*y (name munged to protect the guilty; after all, only illicit and licentious writing ever appears there, cf. this other favorite author of mine)...

The Dark Truth About Comp 101, blogged at Thus Blogged Anderson.

Say, interested in writing? See more links about it (del.icio.us/eh_nonymous/writing).

***

You know, you read a 1,600+ page opinion now and again, and people think you're obsessed. Still, sometimes a case will involve a lot of writing for a judge. See, e.g., this news story on the tobacco decision by the D.C.-based federal judge.

You know, if you like reading legal opinions, I should recommend that you check out del.icio.us/eh_nonymous/pdf for all my links to opinions (except the ones in html format, of course), as well as other PDFfy items of interest. That includes a teaser for an article by Prof. Nate Persily on Scalia's decision in the LULAC race-based gerrymander case, and advice on geting a clerkship, and a long philosophical paper by a soldier on why Don't Ask, Don't Tell violates the military's own ethical standards. Not to mention some of the Best Judicial Opinions On the Web, selected entirely by my own caprice and blind chance.

Prefer funny stuff? Or all the links that relate to law? Some categories overlap - they're tags, after all, not a filing system in the normal sense - but they're all pretty helpful.

Or if it's advice you need, I've found plenty of that too.

As with blogging, the best part about all this is: it's not just for you. It's for me, too. I get to have a flexible, endlessly interconnected set of bookmarks for myself. Oh, right, I also bookmarked some items to look over later. Hm. Must clean that out soon and add more.

***

So, while the Heinlein post (and the series as a whole, in fact) are in limbo, do like I'm doing: take a vacation from it. Get away from it all.

When I come back, I'll decide which way I'll wind it up. I might do it straight, as I've done most of the others, but I was also thinking about laying out the process of creation. Of course, that might be like explaining a joke, or dissecting a frog. It's messy, it takes a while, and in the process the frog dies.

Have a good August!

As I noted last week, the promised Heinlein Friday post on the Laws of War was delayed by the utterly predictable, yet totally unexpected unfolding of the Universe.

In the meantime, here's what's up.

I've been blogging since June of 2005, and show no particular inclination to stop thinking, reading, commenting on (er, meaning "at" - er, meaning "at the location of") other blawgs, caring about politics, or writing about law, language, science fiction, or anything else that comes within my sights. Sight? No, sights.

Blogging serves a number of functions for me. It allows me to say what I cannot say at work - or at least, cannot say at such length. Work is for work, which is to say, is not the right place for a rant about Scalia, or a scholarly review of Heinlein's fiction pertaining to sex changes (pending...), or a snarky commentary on Tom Cruise's wacky religious beliefs.

Blogging is writing - and publishing, all in one. It's not journaling, at least not if done right. People can see this - will see it, if I point it out or their browsing brings them here. It's public expression, as well as personal exposition.

As Jeremy recently noted, blogging is (also, or especially) a way to get inside people's heads. He gets to eavesdrop on the thoughts and feelings of others, observe their mental processes. See his commentary at Powell's Book Blog. To the same effect, see architecture columnist Inga Saffron's thoughts on her recent BlogDay (anniversary of blogging). Her comments are thoughtful and, to me, quite interesting. They are the opposite of the fear that journalism will be killed by blogging:

I started the blog without knowing what I was getting into. I saw it as a place to channel odd bits of information that didn't quite measure up as column material, and to try out oddball ideas. It's been a dream situation for a journalist: No deadlines. No limitations on story length. No dumb headlines. No annoying editors. No plodding bureaucracy. What you see is what I write, flaws and all. I never expected that getting rid of the middleman would be so liberating. I also never expected the kind of feedback I see in the comments. Until recently, journalists could never be quite sure of how their work was being read. No more. I've learned a lot just by eavesdropping.

In her view, journalists are liberated by being bloggers. In Jeremy's view, a writer can (finally) connect with his audience, not just letter by letter or one at a time, but in a wave of two-way communication and reaction and reply.

As I am (purposely) a low-profile blogger, I don't have quite the same experience.

I've been asked why I bother blogging at all if I don't keep track of my number of hits, my blog traffic, my ranking, how well I'm linked, who links me, etc. etc. ad nauseam. Frankly, I don't care. I write because I need to, and the fact that I can get feedback (and, indeed, accountability for what I write) is a bonus. The icing on the compulsion cake.

I don't do this to change the world. I do this because it helps me out.

Blogging lets me:

- get things off my chest
- store my thoughts in their most coherent (sometimes) or cogent form
- try out various writing styles, from the most formal to the least
- store my links in one useful location

So expect more of the same, to my second Blogaversary, and on into the foreseeable future.

In the meantime, thanks for reading, to those who do, and thanks for commenting - you know who you are. You help convert this from meaningless self-referential solo gymnastics into an exercise (literally) for the reader - and the blogger.

And now, to get back to work on this overdue (and still imposing) HF post. Maybe if I can find a better way to break it into pieces...

To my disappointment, the Heinlein Friday for this Friday wasn't done yet - not even half done yet, which would have let me post Part 1, to be followed next Friday by part 2.

So, mea culpa, and let me just leave a few good links here as a taste of what I'm going for. The real HF will be posted... but not before midnight. Maybe not even before next Wednesday. :)

• Wikipedia "Laws of War"


• Fred (Slacktivist) on "You're Not Allowed to Kill Civilians"
  
  
  
  • the Title post
  
  
  • YNATKC continued (for those who didn't get the message after part 1)
  
  
  • Nagasaki - for those still unclear on the concept
  
  
  • Perverse Arithmetic - for those who eagerly look for permission from the prohibition
  
  
  • Terrorists are Bad - for those eager to hide behind labels, particularly when they are unfamiliar with history, war, or both
  
  


• Some links at my del.icio.us page on the Global War on Terror, starting at p.2, which includes some goodies. Of note: Neat Katyal's plea to finally start where we should have, and try courts-martialing detainees; Fafblog's biting satirical comment on the coordinated suicide of three Guantanamo detainees "6/10 changed everything!"; a guest post at Concurring Opinions about how a law clerk grew up, got appointed to the Supreme Court, and turned his former judge's great dissent into the law of the land, eviscerating a terrible precedent, in "Who's the Greatest Law Clerk Ever?" (referring to the recent Hamdan decision).


• The first page of same, which includes the intriguing comment by Prof. Gerber at Intel Dump that perhaps not trying detainees at all would be the right way to go. Why go with kangaroo courts, when you can just decline to try (or punish) them at all? I need to review this, see what he's basing his argument on.

There's lots to say - including about ongoing events, including political ones such as the defeat in Connecticut of a certain formerly Democratic Senator by Democratic nominee Ned Lamont, a rich progressive liberal who won because the primary voters were sick and tired of the incumbent's refusal to vote or talk like a Democrat on a wide range of issues. The first and foremost being the need to show skepticism towards whether the Administration should be credited with competence and good will in the war in Iraq, neither of which it has actually demonstrated. And, of course, the War In Iraq (is it Civil yet? Is it Accomplished yet?) is not really a front in the GWOT - until our leaders turned it into one. "Come on," he taunted.

The Vice President talks as if Iraq were part of the War on Terror. The Senator (soon to be former Senator) talks as if "terrorists" (meaning guerilla warriors, or meaning terrorists? Does he even know?) will take heart if we stop fighting the wrong war and begin fighting the right ones. Both ignore the reality that Saddam was not behind 9/11. Saddam cheered when Americans bled, but that's not enough; many of our enemies did. Anarchist fanatical theocrats have remarkably little in common with westernized despotic secular tyrants. And just where did Saddam purchase that poison gas he used on the Kurds?

Much, much more when I get around to it.

This week's Heinlein Friday may be a bit delayed by the unavoidable, inevitable, ineffable unfolding of the Universe. Current ETA is this coming Friday, August 11th.

However, I can tell you that the next HF will involve

- discussion of Heinlein
- discussion of the laws governing the military, and their conduct in warfare
- " of the Geneva conventions
- " of war crimes
- " of detaining combatants
- " of detaining civilians
- " of killing civilians (hint: don't)

There's already been some mention of the above, particularly when I mentioned law and justice in the military, like in Starship Troopers.

It will also, I warn you in advance, be very quoteful. Quotatious, I'm calling it.

More soon.

Also, I always in these preview posts take the opportunity to plug my del.icio.us page - check it out for the latest links, breaking news, rare resources, and surprising facts that make blogging so interesting. But instead of having to embed them in a post, with the inevitable wondering about how unique or "post-worthy" the link is, I can just post the link itself, and let you the reader decide what’s interesting enough to click on. I promise, there’s something for everyone.

Just browse to http://del.icio.us/eh_nonymous - and enjoy.

Or don't, see if I mind. :)

As I've got my act (more) together this week than last week, when I needed to make the HF post mostly not about Heinlein, and come out on a not-Friday (HF: Judge Jones speech report) - does that make it a non-H non-F post? - let's kick things off with a Wednesday preview of this week's HF.

So far, to recap, we've discussed

• Courts and judges



• Crime



• Lawyers



• Justice



• Aliens



• And there was a special post one week on Jerry Was a Man, which implicated humanity - implicated Being Human.

This week, I turn to another interest of mine: Intellectual Property. HF: Inventions will discuss patents, trade secrets, and invention in Heinlein's fiction.

Not all the inventions Heinlein discusses (or "discloses," or "particularly describes") are covered by IP. Intellectual Property, for anyone without a background is "an umbrella term for various legal entitlements which attach to certain types of information, ideas, or other intangibles in their expressed form." (Wikipedia, which covers the topic nicely).

In other words,

with IP, instead of "owning" a house or a shirt or a wallet or a pile of sprockets, you "own" rights in the plans of the house, or the shape of the shirt, or the design of the wallet, or the name of your sprocket business.

These rights are different in some respects from Property Rights, which most people instinctively understand. If you own your home outright, only one person can be The Owner - sell it, and you no longer own. You can exclude others from entering (in general, with exceptions for emergencies, the police with a warrant or exigent need, etc.), you can let others in, you can allow others to trespass on your rights. And you can divest, as I said, by selling (or giving) your property away.

In intellectual property, you can do many of those things - but the law has to change, as always, when the underlying nature of the property alters. A song, for example, is not a fixed Thing until you record in some form (on a music sheet, or on tape, or in the head of a parrot) - at which point, there's a song AND a thing. The song can't be reproduced - it's a song. It can be imitated. It can be captured, replayed, edited, mocked. But the Thing can be copied, and copied, and copied - that's the nature of Things.

IP sometimes lets you prevent people from copying Things, and also sometimes from copying the Idea expressed in the Thing.

Heinlein didn't usually spend a lot of time discussing all this, the policy and nature of IP. But he certainly used it.

In "The Door Into Summer," the entire plot hinges on patents. And not in a normal way - TDIS is a time-travel story, with at least one paradox or bootstrapping problem. In other science fiction, authors (who often understand far too little biology) may ask, what if you go back and become your own grandpa? (Cf. the song - also note that things are different if a woman goes back and becomes her own grandmother.)

In Heinlein's book, Dan patents a design - but he does it after he's already seen it invented. This convoluted result is one of the things I'll discuss for Friday. The story also contains IP fraud, trademark issues, brand naming, and various new inventions, including Stik-Tite (think velcro on steroids), and "grabbies" (think movies, then extrapolate - they "null the theater on some shots" so "buckle your seatbelt").

Other stories I'll discuss include "Let There Be Light," "Lifeline," and "Friday." But you'll have to come back on Friday for the rest.

And since I've got your attention, and did this before, let me take one more opportunity to flog my del.icio.us page. It's HIGHLY linky, it's got my commentary, and it's much more categorizable (and categorized) than any blog. It's only bloggy in two ways: Newest added entries are at the top, and I post new (and old) links frequently with a note or a description if needed.

Go read the latest Skeptics' Circle, up now at MWSR - it's Scooby Doo-themed this time. Also quite funny.

As always, the Best of the Web (according to moi) appears irregularly but quite frequently at the Del.Icio.Us page I post to. I mentioned how cool delicious is here, and had been previously ranting about Jots, as in this post. The adulation previously unduly showered on Jots.com (now defunct) is equally if not more deserved by the more-popular, more-stable, still-extant delicious.

Why are you still here? Go read the 39th Skeptics' Circle, or check out my delicious page.

(Heinlein) Friday is just three hours away, so keep your eyes (or RSS feeds) peeled. In other news, I've had it with Jots. It was a noble experiment. I'm fed up.

My new non-blawg links collection is available here: My del.icio.us. I have 80 links posted so far, none duplicative, and they're neatly categorized (and cross-categorized). They are not, alas, saved cached versions, so the expiring pages (like my most recent addition, Jeremy's brilliant WSJ op-ed piece) will someday no longer be found at the addresses posted.

As most of you know already, delicious (I'm tired of putting in the dots, please assume them) is a wildly popular site that takes advantage of collaborative tagging. See the Main page (clever use of the .us suffix, no?) for more.

I have other useful pages elsewhere, besides this blog, and the previous iteration of this blog: There's also my Wikipedia profile (minimal, to say the least; Wikipedia isn't about the User, it's about the Project), and as I've noted previously I also am a big fan of Bloglines, so I have a Bloglines subscription (free) which aggregates my favorite feeds. Check it out by clicking here.

The upcoming Heinlein post will finally get to one of my favorite topics: Science Fiction Crimes! After all, if a story doesn't have a science-fictional element crucial to the story, it shouldn't be set far in the future, or under the blazing twin suns of Fomulhaut VII, or anywhere other than in a standard contemporary setting. So if a story is appropriately set in a what-if ficton, and there's a crime, it's much more interesting if it's not a normal crime happening to normal people who happen to live in a futuristic or high-tech setting.

The best part of the intersection between Law and Heinlein: coming up next, in the sixth Heinlein Friday.

Just like last week ("Pending Post: Heinlein Friday & Superman"), I'm choosing not to publish this week's HF before I head off to work in the morning. But, here's a preview.

I've been talking about "Jerry Was a Man" for the last three weeks, in the Superman, Aliens / Combatants, and Courts posts. That story's time has come, its day in the sun is here.

(Hey, why not? After all, It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia....) (FX official site; Wikipedia entry). [That new tv show, by the way,


Right, end of digression. Oops, just one more: anybody heard anything good about Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest? I did so like Jack Sparrow (channeled portrayed - or is it perpetrated? - ably by Johnny Depp, one of my handful of favorite male actors) but the current movie's getting mediocre reviews at best, unlike its predecessor. So many p's.

Back to the subject: HF

Last week's HF had me looking outside of Heinlein's work to shed light on what he was doing, and whether it was successful. This week, I'm back to focusing on his writing as my main source material. "Jerry Was a Man" is a 1947 short story, collected in Assignment In Eternity, and although there are some (to me, today) inexplicable words or phrases, most of the story has aged quite well in 53 years. It's timely, even, in part. But if the racial and sexual politics (and sensibilities) have changed, have the scientific ones? Maybe. Possibly not. We have 50 more years of genetic modification, of experience with the nuclear age [if it's proper to describe the End of Innocence as if it were an Age, of Steam or of Information (aside - which last we are assuredly in, even as most new American jobs continue to be in the service industries, and the professions, rather than in dealing with "pure" information)... nested parenthesis problem... perhaps a ']' would help. ]. The world is older and not necessarily wiser. People are much the same. And Jerry? Is he a Man? We'll open it up, later today. You have about 10 hours to submit comments or questions, and then the post is up. Of course, since it's a blog, unlike a newspaper, I can then make corrections/ additions/ emendations to the piece - that's why I consider every post to be New, for purposes of discussion. Heinlein doesn't go stale - or any staler than he already is.

So if you see anything in any of the HF series (full list at the bottom of any HF post), leave a comment (until the comment period expires - and I may extend them) or drop an e-mail. This is my forum, and I'm inviting your reactions.

Next topic: the 2006 FIFA World Cup in Germany

The greatest single-sport athletic event the world has to offer is nearly at an end, to return in another four years. Several countries have distinguished themselves. A greater number did not. A few embarassed themselves - or were humiliated by others. Brazil, which had so effortlessly cruised over lesser teams, bowed out ignominiously, not even making it to the semifinals. Finishing below the top four, when you are defending champs (2002, hosted in Korean/Japan) and have won outright many times, is a major fall.

The last non-Brazil winner, France, won in 1998, and will be playing in the finals this Sunday, at 1:30 p.m. eastern time, against Italy, which has a long history with the finals. I remember watching Baggio in 1994, when Italy last made it to the finals, losing on penalty kicks. A sad end, and not the best way to decide a soccer game, if I had it to design over again. I stopped watching games in this tournament when they went to PKs. That's why I was so glad Italy beat Germany in the final seconds - scoring twice at the end of the second period of (non-sudden death, aka "No Golden Goal") overtime, in the 119th minute overall, and at 120 + 1 minute of injury time, only a minute or so before the final whistle.

I'd have loved to see a German home final. I'd also have loved to see Portugal (an underdog favorite for me since their defeat of Mexico in the opening round) in the final, but it was not to be; they had opportunities but could not convert. For that matter, a Germany/ Argentina final would have given me a chance to make lots of Fascist jokes, which would apparently get me arrested in Germany. Freedom and democracy, at the cost of limited freedom of speech. A suspicious proposition, in my view. Portugal/ Brazil, had it happened, would have been a "former colony/ former colonialist" match, and would also have been an opportunity for interesting social commentary beyond the match itself.

The Third Place match, between the losers of the semifinal matches, will be played by Germany and Portugal at 3 pm EDT on July 8th, tomorrow, Saturday.

Next World Cup, in South Africa, we'll see who has stepped up and who can't handle the stiff competition.

As a side note, Jots seems to be performing quite poorly. I may have to migrate from Jots to del.icio.us, which has an inferior interface (but if it works, that's necessarily a better interface), or switch to something else entirely. BlogSpot has a Blog post feature; I may check that out. (Free *is* a good price). Or I may try Tags.

And that's all, until later today.

Contrary to my usual practice, this week's Heinlein Friday will issue later than usual, perhaps by 8 p.m. today.

This week, I plan to reveal the perhaps non-obvious connections between the new movie Superman Returns (it's great, by the way) and Heinlein's work. Heinlein worked on, or wrote the source material for, three movies: Destination Moon, Starship Troopers (and its sequels and spinoffs, I suppose), and Robert A. Heinlein's The Puppet Masters (long name used to distinguish it from a prior, unrelated movie). His books themselves, though, provide a more apt and more interesting comparison for the distinct and distinctive form of media - and sensation - that is the new Superman.

Also, check out this cutting and skeptical article at CSICOP, titled Critical Thinking: What Is It Good for? (In Fact, What is It?), by Howard Gabennesch [sic - the For was not capitalized in the original, it appears, despite the capitalization of Is and It. Highly irregular]. The article appears also in the March/April 2006 issue of Skeptical Inquirer.

To summarize: "critical thinking" does not mean "critiques of generally accepted institutions and norms. "Critical" means hard-headed, rational, and logical, not ideologically biased in a different direction. It is not "critical" (in the sense of critical thinking) to say that the cosmetics industry is a monstrous money-making machine which "perpetuates the myth" that older women are less attractive. It is critical, surely. It is not unbiased. It is also not necessarily an honest formulation. As HG suggests, a more critical approach might recognize that the cosmetics industry is a monstrous money-making machine which is both a cause and an effect of society's reflection of the fact that there is differential attractiveness of adult women with respect to age, due in part to biological differences, such as fertility and related reproductive (and thus evolutionary) advantages.

Also, as always, check out my Jots page for some of the best recent (and not so recent) links I've found, neatly cross-categorized for your reading convenience. And finally, check out the outstanding coverage of the wonderful result in Hamdan at SCOTUSblog. There are literally a dozen or more interesting end-of-term posts, particularly this one by Marty Lederman.

More to come!

Eh N.

The latest Blawg Review is now up, hosted by Blonde Justice.

Here are some links:

• Read Blawg Review # 61



• Read my contribution to this week's BR.



• Check out the Blawg Review I hosted, # 47.



• Visit the Blawg Review archives, or even sign up to host it.

(alternate title: HotJotSpot. Or not.)

I won't keep saying it - and shortly, I hope to not have to. If Jots won't automagically post all my most recent Jot-tings from the previous day directly here, then I can at least put a link to my Jots page at or near the top of the blog. But one more time:

Read my Jots!

I post new ones frequently, and it's not all brand-new material. Some of it is brand-old, including articles and blogs that have been around a while. They're all helpfully tagged, so if you want you can view just the ones by dahlia (lithwick, of Slate.com), or just the ones involving bigotry (there are plenty of them - Kip, Esquire and Dave Neiwart are particularly active in identifying basest prejudice when they see it), or just my blogroll or my list of useful references (both still being added to).

So come here, by all means, when you need a Heinlein Friday (or the second or the third)...

But if you want what _I'm_ reading, go to Jots! It's my best of the web, with a ton of links and not too much commentary.

Evan is the rock star of the legal blogosphere. He's a legend... in his own mind. Step inside that mind, see how he rolls, and bask in his reflected glow. He's a weblogging idol who makes all the judges weak in the knees.

Read the whole, magnificent thing.

Also of interest today is the 36th Skeptics' Circle, hosted by Dr. Charles.

And, as I mentioned before, check out my Jots page for links of interest.

Jots is a meta-surfing accessory. Jots is useful. Jots is in its infancy. Jots is still getting the bugs out.

What's Jots?

A "collaborative bookmarking system" (think of flickr, of del.icio.us, of any of the sharing-and-improving programs out there which help others build on your knowledge) which "allows you to Store, Share and Discover relevant links."

Jots is probably experiencing growing pains; right now I'm not sure if it lets you "ignore" users who are trying to spam the site. But here's the beauty: spam is instantly degraded in a collaborative system. Nobody other than the spammer, and the spammer's confederates, are going to point to spam. So if you feel that a given Jotting is spam, then the person who thought it was good is worth Ignoring. You don't have to listen to them any more.

On the flip side, if someone is posting links you like, then maybe some of their other favorites are worth checking out.

As Jots gets a bit less geek-friendly and a little more user-friendly (bigger fonts, please?), I suspect it will hit like a tidal wave. Maybe a small one.

You can view my bookmarked sites and posts of interest at http://www.jots.com/users/ehnonymous. It's much, much, much easier for me to drop a link (to a website, to a post, to almost anything) than it is for me to blog about it here. So if it doesn't merit its own post, it's going to be Jot-ted.

The best part: Jots should be just perfect for supplanting my blogroll. Now, if I can just organize it - aha! I can add the "blogroll" tag to my Jots.

Also, Jots is alleged to cleanly import del.icio.us tags, so if you have an account there, you can bring it in, with no lossage.

Rating and recommendation: B+, needs some improvement for prime time, worth glancing at.

There's been yet another revolt against the Project - the Blawg Review was subverted, or there was an attempted subversion. Ed-itor in Chief rejected the attempt, by Marty, and so the official Blawg Review # 60 is hosted at Blawg Review.

I would note we have had prior flirtations with unusual, occasionally edgy and even sometimes borderline contemptuous hosting jobs. Some work. Some hosts do exemplary jobs. This time, I'm a bit dubious. I also liked Ed's theme, involving the Socratic Method.

Hopefully there'll be some of my submissions in the next Blawg Review, which will be hosted at Blonde Justice.

[welcome to Blawg Review readers! Thanks to Blonde Justice & Co. for presenting a fun and very, very pink Blawg Review # 61.]

Why don't I do things like Kip's Diamond-blogging, or the other folks who dog- or cat-blog? See this brilliant comment by Paul Noonan to Evan Schaeffer's already-brilliant satirical post, Advice to Federal Judges # 3 ("Dear Mr. Schaeffer. I am a federal judge who has a weblog....")

Why don't I post a ton of pictures like Ann Althouse does (brat-blogging?), or pictures of random neighborhood cats? [Update: I note that Wikipedia credits Kevin Drum, of CalPundit fame, with a pioneering role regarding the 'Friday cat-blogging' trend.]

It never felt right. There's at least three reasons why I don't put a picture of myself up on the sidebar, and why I don't include pictures in the body of the blog.

Physician Attorney, heal reveal thyself

First of all, I'm pseudonymous, although only thinly undercover. Dozens of readers, commenters, and fellow bloggers know who I am. I openly disclose what I do, where I do it, and what general kind of cases I work on. I just never felt that my actual, personal identity was relevant to whether my writing was at all interesting, or any damn good. See this discussion in my post, Carnival of the Anonymous, and in the comments, where an innocent question from a loyal reader elicited a rambling, and at times near-hysterical, response from me.

So I don't put up a picture of myself on the sidebar. I don't publish my personal e-mail address, only my blog e-mail address. I don't post pictures of the view from my window, sorry Andrew. It is, however, pretty good.

Illustrations

Why not, as has been suggested, punctuate posts with pretty pictures?

Some do. See the Shape Blog, which would lose almost all its impact without depictions of what they're writing about. David Giacalone (and all his alter egos at f/k/a, the Ethical Esq., etc.) usually interspersed his posts, not with pictures, but with haiku. (Sad to note that f/k/a is now on hiatus; best wishes, David, and I hope you chose to resume blogging if and when your allergy to it subsides.)

Why write in all-words? Part of it is deep, based on the way I first interacted online. Before Gmail (I heart Gmail, and all its functions, including the Chat program, which is smoother and possibly all-around better than AOL IM, is seamlessly incorporated within Gmail, automatically saves chats in a highly searchable, organized way (but also provides an easy to way to go "off the record")), before I knew of chat rooms on IRC, before I surfed web pages using Mozilla/ Netscape, there was a Before Time.

Back Then, going on the Internet meant firing up Lynx, a text-only browser, from within my text-only Unix shell. The web, I came to see, was the text plus the links. Pictures were usually represented by an [INLINE] tag, and were sometimes "clickable" - meaning I had to select them and hit enter to follow the link, still unable to see what it was. Text-only pages were useful. Text-friendly pages were useful. Graphics-intensive pages weren't just too slow to load; they were impossible to use.

Chatting, meanwhile, began with the msg command, and I eventually learned about ytalk (and the xtalk family). Ahh, heady days. That's when I went from touch-typing to speed-typing. Got to keep up with the conversation. [I also learned a lot about errors in speech-production, written form. I knew what I meant to say; other people knew what I meant to say; my fingers insisted on completing words and even phrases the way they were comfortable doing. I also learned that my fingers often made predictable errors, like erros for errors, and wya for way. End of digression.]

As a result, I got a heavy dose of preconceptions and prejudices about Content. Content wasn't pretty pictures. The pretty pics were for people with fast internet connections, lots of leisure time, and less interest in what it all meant. Plus, pictures could be unwieldy, misleading, or even ugly. To avoid all that, my first webpages were majority-text, or at least text-friendly. The visually impaired (or blind, as the differently brained call them) should be able to access my writing without too much difficulty. Understanding it, as with the Sighted, is entirely the reader's problem. ;-)

There are times when pictures aren't a luxury. Sometimes, pictures add a thousandfold to a discussion. You can drone on and on about an intersectional collision, or an innovative product, or a magnificent vista, but unless there's pictures, something is badly missing.

I like pictures. They're virtually required to interpret some kinds of data. They're also potentially very pretty. My favorite source for pretty pictures. But I don't always feel that they add dramatically to what I write.

The other reason, besides early training, for my all-text style, is that I frequently write like a lawyer.

What's a Lawyer like?

(Which reminds me of one my favorite Groucho lines. "Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana." Say it out loud if it's not clear. Which reminds me of my favorit-est Groucho paired witticism: "Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.")

Look at all the blogs out there, the lawyer blogs. Volokh hasn't posted a picture in many a moon. Evan Schaeffer does, but usually only for particularly awesome Lawyer Gadgets (also see the post comments, including sniping between Stan and Ted, which amused me). Ann Althouse, as noted, goes heavily in the other direction, complementing most posts with graphic illustration. But the lawyerly blogs, and even Ann's lawyerly posts discussing a legal issue, imitate legal writing. They're imageless, by and large.

Lawyers write briefs. We write arguments, in words. We write persuasively, sometimes academically, but we never rely on the picture. If there's a Figure 1, we have to describe it sufficiently that there's no confusion if someone can't see it. Law students don't illustrate their student notes. Law professors seldom illustrate their work. Judges seldom include pictures in the text, although there's always exhibits and attachments.

Besides, if I have something to say, I want the words to stand on their own. I'll link to pretty pictures, but I suspect I won't be inserting them in the text anytime soon.

Your reactions?

Coturnix informs me that the latest Skeptics' Circle is up, and this week's conceit is that the collected posts are the latest scientific literature. Blog names are transformed into a listing of the contributing authors, e.g. ("Left, Brain, Right and Brain, 2006a, b"), to amusing effect.

Coturnix has been a prolific carnival host, and has been involved with meta-carnivals - carnivals of carnivals. Also known as Bora Zizkovic, Coturnix is also the blogger behind The Magic School Bus (edublogging) and Circadiana (clocks, sleeping, jet-lag, fruitflies; science-blogging at some of its narrow best).

Abel Pharmboy... clever name... is hosting this week's Skeptics' Circle, #31. (I hosted #28 a little while back. Hosting is always good clean fun... or at least fun. Beware the Pooflinger, I always say.)

Among my favorite bits of this episode: a prominently featured foot massager (wasn't there an Onion spoof about a miraculous new shoe insert that combined five kinds of pseudoscience? Anyone got a link?); a mention of the 10% of your brain nonsense (you use lots of your brain. really. truly. the 10% figure was never accurate. Although see the NY Times' Scan Shows Different Growth for Intelligent Brains for some interesting science on how the thickness of the cerebral cortex changes); and the question, How Should "Experts" Be Defined? I prefer the formulation, an Expert is someone from out of town, with a briefcase.

Check out the 31st edition of the Skeptics' Circle!

Check out the (folksy, and ever so charmin') 30th Skeptics' Circle at Paige's Page. As usual, plenty of autism and health care nonsense claims debunked. I particularly enjoyed this edition's section on Evolution - post topics include thermodynamics (it doesn't support creationism), the immune system (it doesn't support creationism) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (just guess).

Blawg Review #48, with a determinedly atypical format and content - I expect this to be a controversial artistic choice, to say the least - is up at Rethink(IP). I recommend a glance - it's not much like past iterations. It is, in a word, minimalist. I'm a bit mystified if the promised "other posts" are going to appear on Blawgr, the community blog (update: aha, there it is), but I do know this: it will take the average Blawg Review reader far less time than usual to peruse the entire review.

I had a great time hosting Blawg Review, and want to extend a thank-you to all the blawgers who contributed and linked, helping drive eyeballs and new readers to Unused & Probably Unusable.

I want to particularly recognize Bob Coffield, of Health Care Law Blog, who posted Colorful Spectrum of Blawg Review #47, with a nice historical note on the phrase "Philadelphia Lawyer."

... at the Huge Entity, we have the latest, highly poetic, edition of the Skeptics' Circle.

Two innovations of note: a clean chart layout, making it easy to peruse for topics or authors of interest. And, the use of Mu-Haiku exclusively in the post descriptions. Very good stuff. Check it out.

At De Novo, Sean Sirrine has posted the latest Blawg Review, #46.

The next Blawg Review will be hosted right here, on March 6th.

The Blawg Review main page is the source for instructions on submissions, guidelines for hosting, and the schedule of upcoming hosts.

Over at Clever WoT (Waste Of Time, not a pun on "Clever, what?") the occasionally-brilliant, oft-entertaining Kurt posts helpful answers to the questions implied by the searches that propelled folks to his blog.

Since it appears to be fashionable amongst the more illiterate segments of Brit society to spell "what" as "wot," in keeping with their alien pronunciation, Kurt gets a fair number of search hits from people with questions like "wot does tigers eat". If these folks represented the Future, there'd be trouble. Fortunately, I don't think they represent the future.

I note that the linked post has been admired by the Fark community - linklove is always a nice thing, if you can stand the traffic.

Kurt previously discussed "spelling-deficient English kids" at Wot Happened to Spelling?, which provides additional examples of disturbing mangling of the Anguished Linguage.