Unused and Probably Unusable

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?