How to do stuff

Insert mandatory Heinlein quote here.

The El Dorado of Economic Theory

I was going to characterize this post as "inadvertently amusing," but isn't that just a nicer way of saying "LOL"?

10:54:41 AM Brit Friend: you might be able to build a better system than our current version of banking
10:55:01 AM bitchphd: right, of course
10:55:06 AM Brit Friend: and you might even be able to find a better system than capitalism
10:55:27 AM Brit Friend: tho no-one is entirely sure what it is or how it would function

But see Watership Down!

Bleg

If anyone knows of a convenient and reasonably priced place to get a massage in downtown DC, I would be grateful for the information.

More like a song and less like it's math

By all rights, today should have been terrible:

- Having to go to two different hardware stores and still not getting what I need for a task: -1
- Walking in the drizzle for about 6 miles total: -1
- Giving the cat a bath: -1
- Giving the cat a haircut: -1
- Breaking two CFL bulbs and scattering broken glass and toxic substances all over my dining room: -1
- Getting whistled at by dudes outside the car dealership and called a puta when I didn't respond: -1
- Finding out that new couch will not be delivered for 10-12 weeks: -1
- Coming home to a beeping smoke detector and running around looking for fire, only to conclude that the humidity must have set it off: -1

However, it was completely saved by an unbelievable chain of awesomeness:

- Two successful home repairs: +2
- Rocking out with new stereo: +1
- Chai latte at Murky: +1
- Fun time at new knitting group: +1
- Brisket sandwich: +1
- Random street festival: +1
- Nice compliments from strangers on my shirt: +1
- Ordering new couch: +1
- Serendipitous encounter leading to stimulating discussion about law, internet privacy, and fantasy novels: +5
- Anticipation of Sunday morning quiche and a return trip to Chicago, where I will probably consume another meatball sandwich the size of my head: +1

Life is good.

I give this a low pass for timing.

Harvard Law School abolished grades. Why they couldn't have done this while I was there, I have no idea. If this means that students will take their regular classes as seriously as they previously took legal writing (the only course with HP/P/LP grading prior to this), it doesn't bode well for the level of classroom discussion.

Things that are making me angry (non-exhaustive):

1. I keep getting bounced from the doc review website so I can't look at the relatively small set of documents I need to have reviewed by tomorrow morning. AUGH.

2. What the heck is this SmartBenefits voucher thingie? Why would I want a voucher that can't be loaded onto a SmarTrip card? Isn't that Dumb? Can you add cash to it to eke out those last pennies? Do you have to scan it through the reader for paper cards on the turnstile, slowing everyone down? Why doesn't the website tell you anything useful? What was wrong with Metrochek?

3. There is a special circle of Hell reserved for those who send out announcements that invite queries and then immediately go home so nobody is there to answer when the inevitable calls come in. The all-time champion of this is the California Bar, which posts passage results on their website on a Friday night at about 5:59 PM, but they are not the only offenders.

4. Taxi lines. I hate them. I hate having the little taxi line dude flag 5 cabs away from our line for every one he allows to stop. I hate having to go through the dude at all to actually get a cab. I want a free-for-all. I would rather be body-checked by a grandmother from Indiana as she steals my cab than wait in line, watch cabs drive by, and have every cabbie/passenger encounter require a flapper. And this is Reagan National Airport! Reagan would not want us to queue up like communists waiting to buy toilet paper. I should be able to buy my way out of the line. Market pricing!

5. Craigslist is full of flakes. Just buy the darn mattress already, people.

Lit Crit, Politics, and You

Assume that you actually agree with everything in this post about the intentional fallacy and the objectionability of certain types of statements. What, then, of this?

Kiki: Sarah Palin is stupid!
Karl: That is a sexist statement.
Kiki: No it's not; I wasn't even thinking that.

Is Kiki being:

(a) disingenuous;
(b) sincere;
(c) it doesn't matter; the assertion that a female leader is stupid, given the history of aspersions against women's intellectual equality with men, is a sexist assertion.

No violin, but the Wes Anderson makes up for it.

People who have known me for a long time will understand why this fills me with sick glee.

They shoot proofreaders, don't they?

Whoever read my library's copy of The Masque of the Black Tulip has added all these corrections in the margins. It's not just spelling and typography; some of them call out the author for anachronistic dialogue or historical inaccuracies. Did they really not have lump sugar in Napoleonic times? This is why I always disliked buying used books in college; sometimes you couldn't tell if the previous owner was stupid or not.

So familiar.

Augh.

The mattress I bought is so, so, so hard and uncomfortable.

ETA that the several pairs of shoes I bought all rule. I am singlehandedly supporting the U.S. economy. Spend for the greater glory of the homeland, my friends!

Boss me around.

I am going to have to buy a new laptop, I think. Which of these computers should I get?

ThinkPad T-61
ThinkPad T400
ThinkPad T500

IdeaPad U series

ThinkPad X300 ($$$!)

I am going to buy one of these computers. It will be my only personal computer.

Things I will want to do on it: play Spore, watch downloaded TV episodes (smaller displays therefore deprecated), and surf the net.

Things I will not want to do: carry something 5+ pounds unless absolutely necessary, buy a dock, or buy ANY other brand. I get a discount on ThinkPads, my previous ThinkPad is 5 years old and has only needed one minor repair---stick to the list! Which one will be mine?

Vogue!

I have never gotten as many compliments on an item of clothing as I have today for this dress. Old school structured fashion, how I love thee.

False Premise: I don't like what you like, therefore I have contempt for you.

This seems like a fairly important thing to note as we fight micro and macro level battles in the culture wars:

You've got people who see themselves as part of the 'conservative' tribe (middle-class white people who don't live in Northeastern/Mid-Atlantic or West Coast cities, and didn't attend 'elite' colleges) complaining about contempt directed their way from what they see as the 'liberal' tribe (white urban professionals who do live in those cities and did attend 'elite' colleges). A fair number of the specific references, though, are to the fact that 'coastal'/'liberal' people just lack the cultural markers of 'conservative'/'rural' people - they don't hunt, or watch NASCAR, or whatever - and that the lack of those markers is in itself evidence of the contempt they're complaining of. John Kerry making a tin-eared comment about NASCAR is proof he had contempt for red-staters, because the only two possibilities with regard to NASCAR are being a sincere fan, or feeling contempt for anyone who's interested in it at all.

This makes the claim that 'liberals' generally feel contempt for 'conservatives' absolutely irrefutable. As a member of the identified 'liberal' tribe, I, in fact, don't know jack about NASCAR, have touched a gun once in my life (my father-in-law had a .22 with which a whole bunch of us were trying to shoot an old wasp's nest out of a tree. I missed.), don't go to church other than for weddings and funerals, and don't know much about evangelical Christianity firsthand, and so on. If not 'getting it' with regard to those cultural markers means contempt, I'm guilty. But that's crazy - in the real world, everyone is a member of some cultural group, and has the markers of that group, and doesn't have the markers of groups that they don't belong to. Turning evidence that some person isn't a member of your group into support for a belief that they despise your group leaves you feeling personally aggrieved by everyone who doesn't share your cultural markers, and refusing to trust anyone who isn't just like you.

Sandefur FTW!

Via Mike: The Ninth Circuit strikes a great blow for economic liberty:

[M]ere economic protectionism for the sake of economic protectionism is irrational with respect to determining if a classification survives rational basis review.

I also used to sing in the shower. Be afraid.

I used to be a night showerer, but that was because my hair was so long that it needed the whole night to dry. Once I cut it short, I started showering in the morning because going to bed with wet, short hair was a recipe for appalling cowlicks. The rationale for night showering still makes more sense to me, though.

Not a jest.

Pomona professor David Foster Wallace has committed suicide.

Every Move You Make?

At the risk of alienating my dear Belle, I found this article more off-putting because it classified some very mild (if annoying or disturbing) actions as stalking than for any other reason. Calling one journalist writing about another journalist, even in a semi-obsessive way, "stalking" sort of dilutes the term.

Insert some sort of tired "groove back" line here

In Maasai culture, touching a woman's head is demeaning. But female sex tourists and urbanites in Kenya love Maasai warriors and their funky hairstyles. The result? Taboo-busting hairdressers.

Hypothetical

If one wrote a screenplay based on the life of a historical personage, under what circumstances would one need to obtain permission from the author of the definitive biography of said personage, given that use of that book as source material would be unavoidable?

This will be appealed.

My former employer succeeds in stopping publication of the Harry Potter Lexicon.

Weekend Bake: Lemon Pudding Cake

I made this with Belle when I visited her last weekend. It was much appreciated by her other guests despite the unintentional addition of an extra ingredient. I'm sure that it would be even better if you don't accidentally pour a dollop of boiling water into the batter.

Ingredients
2 tbsp unsalted butter , softened
1/2 cup plus 2 tbsp sugar
1/8 teaspoon salt
3 large egg yolks
3 tbsp flour
2 - 3 tsp lemon zest
1/4 cup lemon juice
1 cup whole milk
4 large egg whites , at room temperature

Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Grease your pan. (We used a 9 inch square pan, but you could use other shapes or custard cups.) Lay a folded dish cloth in the bottom of a roasting pan and put the greased pan inside. Boil a large kettle of water.

2. Mash 2 tablespoons butter together with sugar and salt until the mixture is crumbly. Beat in the yolks, then the flour, mixing until smooth. Slowly beat in lemon zest and juice, then stir in milk. Beat egg whites to stiff, moist peaks. Gently whisk whites into batter just until no large lumps remain.

3. Immediately ladle (do not pour! I don't know why, but this is important!) the batter into the pan. Set the roasting pan on oven rack. Pour enough boiling water into the roasting pan to come halfway up the sides of the pan with the batter. Do not pour any water into the batter or that side of the cake will be decidedly more pudding-y than the other side. Bake until the cake center is set: 25-30 minutes. Remove the roasting pan from the oven and let the cake stand in the water bath for 10 minutes. Serve and devour.

Heathen's question

Both parties' candidates have been attacked for being present in church while particularly offensive or controversial sermons were being given. As a non-churchgoing person, I have been puzzling over exactly what this is supposed to mean. Do you know the content of a sermon in advance (beyond a title, perhaps)? If you find it deeply objectionable, are you supposed to walk out? Does anything like that ever actually happen? Or do you just sort of fidget uncomfortably and then talk trash about the minister at brunch?

iPhone's Lament

Guess whose laptop doesn't have USB 2.0 and can't sync with her new iPhone?

I have ordered a PCMI card as a stopgap, but it is beginning to look like I should replace my laptop soon.

Don't Blow on This

Advocates for Australian aborigines argue for pulping a book that encourages girls to play the didgeridoo, a "male instrument" that females shouldn't touch.

I always enjoy a callback to previous posts. Could compliance with indigenous peoples' preferences regarding the treatment of didgeridoos ever violate antidiscrimination laws?

Leaving on a jet plane

In a few hours, that is. Some people claim that if you have never missed a flight you spend too much time in airports. I am pretty sure that spending the night in SFO reviewing documents cancels out several instances of sitting in the departures lounge.

Things the Bay Area is Good For, Part XXI

Guess who finally got an iPhone?

Open Thread

Talk about politics here.

Going back to Cali and contracts class

Still alive: don't worry, folks. Tomorrow I get to go to a hearing (yay) and then this weekend I will be in the Bay Area visiting.

In the meantime, a question from a fellow knitter: what is the legal status of sock clubs that make you promise not to sell the club yarns for some extended period? Assume that the rules of the club clearly prohibit sale, but the seller made subsequent clarifying posts on a knitters' message board establishing that trading, even with non-members, is kosher. Assume an existing policy, applying to all yarns by the seller, of no sales for the purposes of profit (but sales are allowed to get rid of yarn that you don't like, although markups are deprecated). What is the import of the parol evidence rule here? The status of mixed cash/yarn trades has not been established (this is important because the pricing differential makes one-for-one trades unlikely).

My inclination is that 1) you're contractually obligated not to sell the yarn, but 2) the chances of actually being penalized are relatively low, as long as you are relatively inoffensive about doing so. Thoughts?

Old Fashioneds = Yum.

My name is Amber and I approve this message.

Amber is a sad panda.

Blackberry, where are you? Also, my brand-new interchangeable needle set came today and the cable broke in the middle of the first row, which nearly caused me to lose half of my sweater. Luckily, it came with two of each cable.

Warning: squicky stuff ahead:

To make my life complete, I have to wear my glasses all week because I lost a contact in my eye and spent the next few hours getting my eyeball scraped and prodded at the urgent care clinic. They said they couldn't find it; I guess I somehow blinked it out without even noticing in my frenzy of attempts to remove it, but just like you have a scratchy feeling in your throat after swallowing a fish bone, it felt like it was still there. Of course, this just means that my eye is actually scratched and I have to put Cipro drops in it and wear my librarian glasses for a few days.

Victim-blame much?

In an article about boorish, drunken British tourists, some hard stats:

A recent report published by the British Foreign Office, “British Behavior Abroad,” noted that in a 12-month period in 2006 and 2007, 602 Britons were hospitalized and 28 raped in Greece, and that 1,591 died in Spain and 2,032 were arrested there.

One of these things is not like the others . . . .

Nuts to Judd Apatow.

Check out this fascinating abortion blog.

My love-hate relationship with puzzles and games

I play a lot of board games, but have never been a huge puzzle person. The trouble is that I play word games and puzzles for the wrong reasons. I like crosswords because solving crosswords typically requires broad knowledge of a variety of cultural touchstones. Being well-read helps you solve the crossword, and therefore solving the crossword validates me as a well-read person, from which I derive a self-esteem boost. The puzzle is only the means to an end. At a certain point, puzzles are just organized mental fidgeting with no purpose or value.

Likewise, I've never seen the appeal of hard-core Scrabble. When I play Scrabble, it is for the purpose of creating interesting words. It validates your large vocabulary. However, at a certain point in Scrabble play you must engage in a rather mind-numbing, uncreative memorization of the two- and three-letter Scrabble-approved words and the placement of words on the board trumps the value of the words themselves. What is the point of putting down a cool word like pixelate or gherkin if your opponent plays some three-letter word straight out of See Spot Run that makes three other boring two- or three-letter words and gets more points?

My gameplaying habits have not won me fans at some gaming events. I enjoy games very much. However, like most people, I prefer to do things I am good at. If I already know how to play and game and that I like it, why would I (absent strong recommendations from a trusted source) set it aside to learn a new game, just of the sake of doing so?

1) It takes much longer to learn and play a new game. I have limited gaming time and want to fit in as many fun sessions as possible.

2) It is less fun to struggle through a new game than to play a game where all the participants already know the rules.

3) There is a chance the new game will suck.

At one local event I mentioned that I don't like to learn new games (if there is an option to instead play something I really like, of course). You'd have thought I killed a puppy before their very eyes. Of course, the same group kept records of the scores of every single player in every single game, even random matches with visitors like me. What is the point of tracking scores in dozens of different games? There is no way to convert the scores into a single metric or ranking, and the rankings would be adulterated anyway by the presence of random entrants and the constant introduction of new games.

Premonetary Barter Economies in the 21st C.

Person A wants Good X. Person B has Good X. Person B declares that she will barter Good X for Goods Y or Z of undisclosed types. Person A doesn't have those goods but could acquire them. Should Person A acquire several samples of Goods Y & Z for purposes of trading with Person B and similar individuals? If only there was some medium that would allow Person A to exchange with Person B in a straightforward fashion . . . .

Baby Lawyer Advice Thread

Over the next few weeks, thousands of first-year lawyers will be starting work at firms. Do you have advice for them? Hints? Exhortations? Products of bitter experience? This is the place to share your wisdom. If you want to post extremely specific or personal stories, you may do so anonymously.

What lies beneath

Egyptian women in hijab report more sexual harassment than women who go without. Awesome quotes:

"It makes a woman happy when I call to her. It makes her know she's attractive," 20-year-old Alla Aldin Salem said on the sidewalk in Mohandisseen, after going out of earshot of the glaring fellow vendor in hijab.

"The woman herself is the one who makes men harass her," said Fawzi Tahbet, a 50-year-old man selling kitchenware on another stretch of the sidewalk, under the shade of a tree. "If she's walking, swinging as she goes, of course it will happen."

I like how men have no independent will or agency here. If you see a woman walking down the street, you have to harass her. No choice. If this is true, then women should be the guardians of the men, not vice versa.

Mooning strikes me more as a C-X thing.

You can always pick out a former high school debater. I knew that there was some reason that I didn't participate. I'm sure the persistent stage fright had nothing to do with it.

Cheerleading is evil.

In a controlled experiment, n = 2, using the youthful inhabitants of my childhood home, the issue of whether cheerleading is in fact a life-destroying, crippling hobby was studied, with one individual participating in this subsidized evil and one individual taking part in activities with no physical component, like the high school literary magazine.

I have never broken a bone or had surgery, and I have no joint or tendon problems.

What Would Wes Buy?

He hasn't made a good movie since the Royal Tenenbaums, but Wes Anderson has decent taste in other media.

My internet is boring.

I am devoid of bloggable topics.

Not so crazy about the cotton candy eel.

Steve and I went to minibar last night. There was much liquid nitrogen and foam had by all. Most of the same courses on this website were present last night as well. If you plan on going, though, it might be smart not to click that link; the element of surprise was half of the fun.

Oh COME ON.

Ann Bartow is totally off base.

This discussion reminded me of this old post about message boards that try to exclude specific populations from certain fora, even for browsing, while refusing to implement technological solutions to enforce their rules. Is it "bullying" to lurk in a WOC-only thread? It's hard to say that someone's bullying you if the whole point is that you don't know you're being injured.

UPDATE: A nuanced, charitable exploration of these issues.

Vampire babies? There's some other kind?

This sounds almost as bad as Touched By Venom.

AUGH.

You'll never guess how I spent my day! Was I:

A) Stumbling around in the grip of a severe migraine.
B) Stumbling around while gorked out on migraine medication.
C) Attempting to compensate for previous hours of stumbling around.
D) All of the above.

In the spirit of crabbiness: I really wish that whoever invented the word "glibertarian" would take a long walk off a short pier.

50 Book Challenge # 46: The Post-Birthday World

Lionel Shriver is probably my favorite contemporary writer. Her last novel, the Orange-Prize-winning We Need to Talk About Kevin, was a wringing and thought provoking look at maternal ambivalence and the potential innateness of evil.

The Post-Birthday World is a very different kind of work, but it is similar in that it reflects back on a woman's life and choices, and asks us what might have been. Where Eva, the narrator of Kevin, could only speculate on what her life would have been like without her unwanted child, in World we follow Irina McGovern on two dual paths and see where each would have led. Did you see Sliding Doors? It's like that, but good. The book alternates timelines by chapter, following Irina as she muddles along in a relationship with a think tank intellectual who is secretly cheating on her, and another course in which she leaves her partner for the snooker playing ex-husband of a former colleague, who gives her a more tumultuous kind of love but can never really connect with her.

Shriver has a quiet, cutting sort of insight into human psychology and relationships, and she doesn't hold back from showing us the very real benefits of each track for Irina, as well as how Irina's behavior patterns and limitations channel her toward similar outcomes no matter what her macro-level choices. We may sometimes ask how our lives would be different if we had made a certain choice, but in many respects the course is set by what is in us, not what we do. Very highly recommended.

(Flashback post: I read this book a couple of months ago.)

50 Book Challenge #45: Lisey's Story

God, if I ever become this annoyingly saturated with intra-relationship slang you can just kill me.

Critics seemed to love this book, perhaps because it has relatively little gore. There is a much King-ier book buried in this; you get a glimpse of it with the Grand Guignol segment on the dead husband's upbringing and the confrontation with the stalker, but perhaps the best part is how it portrays relationships between siblings, parents, and spouses. The only terrible part (and it's really bad--I almost threw the book aside) is the protagonist's constant use of cutesy slang. It is like listening to someone's pudgy suburban aunt try to avoid swearing. The prose is, as Harold Bloom would be eager to tell you, only servicable, but you will be entertained. Recommended for people who are not too snobby to read Stephen King.

(Flashback post: I read this book a couple of months ago.)

Um.

So: I am old, and practically live in the burbs, and am not cool. I signed up for this Twitter thing. How do people use it? When I finally find a store that will sell me an iPhone, do I send updates from my mobile? Do I update from my computer? If so, do I have to log into the Twitter website? God, I feel ancient.

Mink-lined handcuffs and a honeymoon cottage.

Cloning. Vicious dog attacks and heartwarming doggie defense of his mistress. Topless photo shoots. Beauty pageants. Mormon missionaries. Kidnapping and rape. Going on the lam dressed as deaf-mute mimes.

This is too weird to be fake.

Another relationship poll/open thread

How can you get to the age of 25 or 30 and still be fundamentally out of touch with the concept of passionate, romantic love? How can you never have fallen in love?* Do you just never talk to people, meet people, interact? The world is full of people you could fall in love with, all of them irreplaceable and unique, and forgoing each could inspire a different regret.

* One of my friends is running into people like this repeatedly in her dating life, and I'm starting to wonder if I am closer to the emo end of the spectrum than to the Vulcan mindset I aspire to. I have been with men who "didn't know what love means, anyway," but just as often or more frequently I dated guys who seemed to have listened to a little too much Boyz II Men or were proclaiming their adoration before the first bouquet of flowers had wilted.

Random Roundup

A-cup A-listers defy the pressure to augment their assets.

Law schools make firms pay to do OCI? Unless every student is well-employed upon graduation, this strikes me as a betrayal by the school.

Birth is traumatic? I'm inclined to disagree with Jessica; lots of things that have been going on for thousands of years (death in early childhood, maiming and crippling from epidemic disease) are traumatic now because our society is comparatively safe.

Poll of Relationship Disclosure Norms

Websites like dontdatehimgirl.com can perform a useful function. People love to write online diaries about their personal lives. Your interactions with other people constitute part of their daily experiences. To censor them from writing about you would be to tell them that they could not write about themselves. With that in mind, what information do you expect to remain offline?

- The real name of a former date? Other identifying information?
- The fact that you dated someone at all?
- The length or character or your relationship?
- Why you got together or why you broke up?
- Documentation of personal sexual history (ranging from "good kisser" to "check out these photos")?
- Anecdotes about incidents (good or bad) in your relationship?

If you believe it is generally improper to post any of the above online, are there circumstances in which you would find it warranted? How unusual or creepy would a person have to be for you to feel like a "don't date him, y'all" was justified?

The hero that Gotham needs right now?

This NYT profile of trolls has caught attention from some of my favorite bloggers. (I have been mulling over a long and detailed response to them, but in the meantime here is something dashed off and flippant.) The article examines a dark internet subculture that delights in hacking websites to induce seizures in epileptics, harassing women, and deceiving readers of personal ads into providing titillating information and then distributing the information far and wide, as well as more conventional criminal activity. The internet has made it possible for sociopaths to find like-minded compatriots and act in concert.

Belle notes that this is a conflict between competing norms and asks how to counter the new, evil norms. Megan McArdle has one answer:

The internet has allowed the deviants to find each other, to construct a community with shared norms that tolerate, even celebrate, the pain of others. And it cloaks them in sufficient anonymity to get by in the outside world. If people knew what they had done, I doubt they'd survive two weeks--no one would sell them food, rent them shelter, or for that matter, permit them to merge into the exit lane.* But no one knows.

I doubt that the solution is, as the author suggests, just to learn to live with it. Rather, I'd expect that countertrolls will emerge--hackers who put as much energy into harassing these people as they put into harassing us. Evolutionary biologists call people like that "altruistic punishers", and they serve an invaluable purpose in any society.

Which mode of conduct will survive online is in part determined by the numerosity and energy of the adherents of each norm. Witness any moderately controversial Wikipedia article: unless it's frozen by mods (the long arm of the coercive state, in our model), the content will reflect not the most accurate conception but that of the most single-minded proponent with the most free time. One of the reasons that the AutoAdmit boards were so toxic is that law students and aspiring law students have a lot of spare time and often have very aggressive personalities (at least the wannabe litigators).

So how to counter trollish behavior by individuals with no other hobbies or interests? You really need a few obsessive anti-troll crusaders: people with the skills to become evil, but who use their strengths for good instead. Note that one of the women in the NYT article prevails upon one powerful troll for rescue from the predations of another band. This is like asking the godfather for justice when you are wronged by another criminal. What she really needed was a Batsignal.

* If someone posted Jason Fortuny's whereabouts online, how long would he last? Is this on Intrade?

Shiny!

I want one of these so bad, but there is no way to charge it in our building's garage. This sort of infrastructure problem is going to make it difficult for people living in dense housing to get more efficient vehicles. I should go be the crank at our next condo board meeting and nag about this.

Who shoots a dog as it runs away?

I wonder if these cops also shoot fleeing suspects in the back. (via)

Smackdown!

Melissa Lafsky versus Kerry Howley: not even a contest.

Fame!

I am extensively quoted in an article about the Attorney General of West Virginia.

AutoAdmit Trolls: Unmasked But Not (Yet) Undone

There is an article in Wired about the current status of the Autoadmit litigation: basically, it's completely FUBAR'd. Dan Solove is cited as an proponent of the new wave of anti-free-speech legal theory pressed in this type of litigation. Like my review of his book, the Wired article notes that a similar scheme has been tried with copyright, and the widespread abuses of DMCA takedown notices don't bode well for the future of online speech if Solove's positions take hold.(via)

Run home!

This is pretty awesome. I kinda hope she doesn't mace him in the face next time, though, since (as my friends were surprised to hear Monday night) mace is illegal in D.C. For those who choose to flout the Man's restrictions or live in more self-defense-friendly environs, this pepper-spray keychain is PTN-commenter approved.

Art, Status

Random theory, not particularly well-considered: there is a bell curve of artistic success. True starving artists are grateful for patrons. The marginal value of each patron is very high. Once a certain subsistence level is attained, grubbing about in the marketplace is seen as tacky and the artist may intentionally flout capitalist norms by refusing to charge a market clearing price or indeed any price at all. Artists who care too much about money once they have reached subsistence level or who attempt to capture more consumer surplus are looked down upon as sell-outs. At a certain point, though, the artist breaks through to the big time. Suddenly auctioning works of art is respectable, even if it means high or stratospheric prices. People don't sneer at Christie's the way they do at Ebay (or do they?). Is it a difference of kind instead of degree? Why is it okay for Picassos to be auctioned off for millions but not okay for small-time artists and crafters to capture more of the value of their work?

Semi-relatedly: Is ideology really driven by your desire to see certain groups attain high social status? I want the status of people who fob off novellas in novels' clothing to plummet. I like one commenter's suggestion that the Kindle will undermine incentives for publishers to demand books of a certain length. If only we could be sure that the prices for what amount to longish magazine articles (looking at you, Gladwell!) would be lower than those charged for books that truly warrant hundreds of pages. Perhaps I have no credibility, being a constant consumer of doorstop-sized SF/F novels, though.

Confidential to the dudes at pub trivia

Getting into law school? Not so deserving of praise that it warrants a nickname (creatively, "Law School") or shouting of said nickname in celebration of that group member's occasional correct answers. Practically any doofus can get into a law school.

Also, my already negative estimation of the Air Force Academy? Not buoyed by your obnoxious whoops and shaky grasp on career prestige.

Open Thread

In the spirit of the last post: what do you want to see on PTN?

Sugar and Shopping Diary

slynnro is going to track her sugar and shopping habits and post them for her readers.Good idea? Bad idea? Any interest here?

Why do cats eat toilet paper?

Lily does this also. Never with her claws: always by chewing. Why???

Ho boy.

This cannot end well. I hope P.Z. and his family stay safe.

Urban DINKs FTW!

Tyler Cowen notes that price changes over the last few years effectively provide "a net subsidy to toy-loving, camera-loving nerds and a tax on commuting parents with large families." To this I say: ha-HA!

Why economics should be mandatory in all schools.

You have a small business. Your product is so amazingly popular that every new batch you post on your website sells out in minutes and crashes your server. If you accepted all the requests for custom orders, the wait would be over a year long. Your product is so sought-after that people wait in line to subscribe to book-of-the-month-style clubs that force them to pay for products that they don't even want just so they have a guarantee of getting something. Do you:

A) Raise your prices on your site, potentially angering your customer base but making a bundle?

B) Post your product on Ebay, confident that your increased profits will more than cover the extra couple of dollars in fees and that the price increase will be seen as a product of demand and not your arbitrary decision?

C) Keep your price the same as comparable product that has nowhere near the same demand, discontinue notifications for all new product postings, and just rely on customers' ability to check your website at the right time to allocate your product?

The whole idea that it's somehow better for the customer if prices remain low is paternalistic and offensive. First, it isn't best for the people who want to buy your product and cannot because your sales logistics suck. It's rationing by time and not by money. I guess if you want to reward people with whose time is extremely low in value and who can thus spend hours monitoring availability of your product, fine, but I believe in all that rot about the Protestant work ethic and think that if someone wants your stuff you should encourage them to work and save for it rather than to sit on their butts hitting refresh.

If someone wants to run something as a vanity project, that's fine, but then I don't want to hear any moaning about the wintry economic climate or the travails of running a small business. Businesses exist to make money. You are not "selling out" by charging people what they are willing to pay for your product. You are acknowledging the value of your own labor.

Hold on for one more day.

My five-year-old laptop is making loud rattly noises. Where can I go to get the fan checked on my Thinkpad? It might last for another year or so if I can get someone to pry out what is probably a hamster-sized lint ball from the intake vent.

Talk to me like I'm a five-year-old.

Can someone please explain why A Canticle for Leibowitz is supposed to be good? I read it a couple of years ago but it just seemed mediocre: no particularly striking ideas (regurgitated Santayana and "church versus state"? not original, not originally done), no good characters (especially female characters; women apparently sink into chattel status after the apocalypse and their experience tells us nothing of interest), no unique insights into the human condition, the prose is unexciting and the plotting only serviceable . . . . I hate to say it, but I prefer Starship Troopers.

DC's Finest

Not only can you walk away from an attempted burglary in the District, you can also apparently hit a pedestrian with your car, flee the scene, and get off with a citation for failure to yield. The only reason the driver didn't get completely away was that a law firm partner né DOJ attorney on a bicycle blocked the car in and called 911.

Considering that the MPD, under its "zero tolerance" policy, camps out in front of bars and restaurants and arrests any driver who blows .01 on a Breathalyzer, when said drivers haven't hurt anyone, how can they justify writing a $50 ticket to someone who put a guy in the hospital because he couldn't wait for pedestrians to cross?

Nothing like a useless pelvic exam to add to your existing trauma.

You know that warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark? That's apparently where all the rape kits go.

Dark Knight Discussion [SPOILERS]

Steve and I finally got around to seeing The Dark Knight, although waiting for the IMAX experience ended up being a dubious decision, what with the no trailers and the group of yoots who tried to jump us for taking two of the five seats they were attempting to save (their friends arrived 30 minutes into the movie, and it was a sold-out show; they were clearly tripping to think that they could take up a huge chunk in the dead center of the theater) and did I mention the total lack of a Watchmen trailer? Grrr.

Overall, I was pleased with the movie, although the Harvey Dent transformation was psychologically and physiologically unbelievable and the Batman voice effects were a tad distracting. Ledger is almost as good as the hype would have it, and Maggie Gyllenhaal does more with a small role than Kate "Oftom" Holmes could manage. Some quibbles and questions:

- At the end, Dent is lying motionless on the ground. Is he dead, or is his another faked death? In the penthouse at the end, does Bruce say that Harvey can never know or could never know? If Dent is already dead, that's a pretty weak criminal career for a prominent Batman adversary.

- Why are we repeatedly shown Gordon's son and his fascination with Batman when it's Gordon's daughter who grows up to be Batgirl? Gratuitous sexism?

- If they needed a fall guy for the people Dent killed, why not just blame the Joker or one of his minions?

- What's up with the lame Scarecrow scene at the beginning? I don't remember what happened to him at the end of Batman Begins, but if he was caught, how did he escape? If he wasn't caught, why is he conducting small-time operations in a parking garage?

- Watchmen foreshadowing: Note the emergence of Batman-impersonating masked vigilantes. We see that they are fundamentally sad sacks when one of them is captured by the Joker. Batman's tagged deposit of Lau is also an interesting parallel to Rorschach's more deadly deliveries.

Knockoff Knits

Because the audience here is mostly lawyers, I thought the views here might be interesting.

There is, as you might imagine, serious DRAMA in online knitting communities about people publishing patterns that are inspired by or based on other designs, particularly designs that some other person is trying to get people to pay for. I am not an expert in this area, but my understanding was roughly that:

• You can't copyright a clothing design, although you can copyright the expression of a design. This is why knockoffs are legal.
• Logos and "distinctive embellishments" are protected.
• Many stitch patterns are in the public domain.
• You can't assert copyright over a procedure, method, or process. This is why recipes are copyrightable insofar as the directions are concerned, but not "2 cups flour" part

So, legal readership: what do you think of patterns for the following (assume that in all cases the written instructions are not copied directly, although things like chart and abbreviations are in some instances, necessarily, identical):

1. Someone reverse-engineers a sock based on a photo of Jane's design without ever seeing the pattern. The sock is constructed just like Jane's.
   
2. Same as above, but the sock is constructed in an entirely different way or uses a different technique, making the directions substantially dissimilar. The end product looks just like Jane's sock.
3. Someone studies a copy of Jane's pattern and figures out how to do the same things using a different technique or construction method. The end product looks just like Jane's.
   
4. Someone takes Jane's sock pattern and changes the lace or cable on the top to a different type, but otherwise keeps everything the same.
   
5. Someone takes the toe construction from Jane's sock pattern, the heel from Susan's, changes all the stitch counts to make it work with a thinner yarn, and adds in a public-domain cable pattern from a book compiled by Edith.
   

I think of patterns as being similar to recipes, especially since you often have to make substantial changes based on the particular yarn and needles you are using and sizing it to fit. This is why I will never publish patterns (I am currently musing on how to make a v-neck sweater with a Greek key motif--should the key strips go vertically over the sides of the bust, horizontally across just under the bust, or around the bottom and sleeve hems? I have been looking at other patterns for inspiration, but heaven help me if I actually succeeded and wrote up a pattern now, because "zomg copyright infringement!").

Linkage

Paul Gowder has a posse blog.

My ticket in the litigation lottery

I should hire this attorney and sue Paris Hilton.

Incest, Writing

Oh my. I just want to shake this kid so hard . . . . His letter is a prime example of the kind of overstuffed pretension that a seventeen-year-old would think was "literary." A brief visit to New York has already revealed him as an obsequious puppy, precociously able to drop old companions for the next cool thing to come along. His ambitions, though, are both enormous and sadly limited:

I just really like [Gessen's] ideas, just the way he portrays the sort of meandering young New Yorker. It’s kind of what I aspire to be, so it’s kind of really poignant.

The proper follow-up to an allegation of incestuousness is not adopting into the clan and promptly bedding all your new brothers and sisters. Honestly, these people are much less off-putting.

"I did absolutely nothing, and it was everything I thought it could be."

This makes sense, which means it will be ignored in favor of more shoe removal and giant concrete barricades.

50 Book Challenge #44: Freedom & Necessity

(To Say Nothing of the Dog + The Prestige) - half a century + Marxism. Recommended for fans of epistolary novels and lefty fantasy.

It's my birthday and I'll drink if I want to.

Resolved: change my birthday to Amber's Birthday (Observed) so it always falls as to ensure a three day weekend.

Not-So-Random Roundup

Here's a collection of recent posts from Bookninja, my new favorite literary blog:

• What are the most controversial SF novels? It depends on whether we're talking in-group or out-group. Anything involving Harlan Ellison wins the former, but the latter would probably have to be something like The Satanic Verses (which I'll take others' word for as being genre; I couldn't get more than a few dozen pages in, it being, in the words of one reviewer, like "chewing sisal.")
• Books that put you to sleep. My Corporations book was always good for this.
  
• Google book recommendations?

On the random front: hot baths make guys (temporarily) sterile. My first thought was that this can't help the already-low Japanese birth rate. If I were a paranoid NBA player, I might want to invest in a Jacuzzi, or at least a heating pad.

What will people think my name is?

Incredibly lame Slate article links to curiously addictive photo rating site.

Been saying this for ages.

Privacy is dead. The only issue now is how to maximize transparency in government.

"Please put on your turban."

I am really curious on how the family courts come out on this one: it has a wacky, unemployed, occasional-pot smoker mom versus a dad in a religious sect that marries off girls to strangers at seventeen, provides heavily censored education, and has rabbis examine your underwear. Note the part on the last page where they call for a religious consultation on whether men can listen to a four-year-old sing. It is interesting how modesty rules can simultaneously assume the existence and the impossibility of sexual self-control. Religion makes people do strange things.

There is an amusing anecdote in the Jezebel comments about a very religious doctor who wouldn't shake hands with a female patient or look her in the eye, but would conduct a proctological exam.

Weekend Bake: Cherry Pie

I highly recommend this pie. Unfortunately, I got really sick after making it so almost the whole thing is left. Looks like my colleagues are getting some pie.

Pet Peeve - No Linkage

One of the most annoying aspects of internet discourse is when someone enters a discussion and attempts to engage substantively with an ongoing debate, but is derided or ignored because s/he hasn't posted prolifically in the forum before. It doesn't matter if you've been lurking for years; it doesn't matter if you're right: you're not part of the group, and therefore not worth listening to.

If you are genuinely interested in examining an issue, not just in shooting the breeze with your friends, it shouldn't matter what the motives of the new entrant are. It shouldn't matter if you think that s/he might have just surfed over for the purpose of participating in a particular thread, or is actually in substantive disagreement with you on a variety of other issues, or is (heaven for-freaking-bid) not posting under his/her own name. If s/he makes a logical point that you would take seriously were it coming out of a regular's mouth, it behooves you to can the territorial, exclusionary insults and address the substance of the person's position.

If you're not willing to do that, just make your clubhouse atmosphere explicit so the rest of the world will know not to bother attempting to engage with you.

UPDATE: So this doesn't turn into a Carly-Simonesque repeat of my cryptic post on internet romances from a few years ago: the impetus for this post was something from a literary blog, but if you're asking "was it [some other type of blog]?" because of what you've seen there, there's probably a good reason for that. It happens in a lot of places, and I am sick of it. It's especially galling coming from people who claim to be interested in ideas.

The Rules of Attraction

"There is a groupie for every male endeavor."

Anyone can say "I'm somebody's fetish."

Are both valid? Either? Discuss.

P.S. I watched the movie from the post title recently. It was good, but frustrating, since I know that I never take away from these movies what you are supposed to. Here, it didn't seem like the characters' "excesses of sex and substance abuse [were] emotionally impossible." Universities across the nation are full of solipsistic young people from all socioeconomic strata who consume as many legal and illegal drugs as possible, blunder about oblivious to the feelings of those around them, and make unwise sexual decisions for muddled reasons. I fail to see what is so unique and terrible about this bunch, except that they were able to afford higher quality intoxicants, more stylish clothes, and shinier toys. Their lives would be just as empty were they driving to drug deals in Hondas and being rejected by people clad in Old Navy.

Why Bad Fiction Works, In A Way

The unique appeal and strength of bad fiction:

I have this thesis, well completely underdeveloped intuition, that the ways "bad" or "mediocre" prose interacts with its readers' imaginations is misunderstood and understudied. By lacking clarity & precision, "bad style" leaves space for readers to engage and participate with the text on their own terms.

There is a sweet spot for bad fiction. Too muddy a style will just confuse the reader, bouncing her out of the story so she can figure out who is talking, or why the tone changes for no reason, or why someone's eyes are blue in one chapter and violet in another. Authors with limited prose skills sometimes err too far on the other side, overburdening the reader with useless, repetitive descriptions and a shotgun approach to adverbs (see Jordan, Robert; Rowling, J.K.).

Sometimes you wish the prose were muddier, just to obscure your view of the trainwreck (Touched By Venom, represent!).

Inadvertent Hilarity

How influential is Amber MacArthur? She "co-hosts the fifth most-downloaded podcast amongst Canadians."

She's a lot better known than I am, so I don't mean to bash, but the phrasing was just priceless.

Deferred Gratification

I would really like to have watched Hellboy II and bought a new iPhone in the next twelve hours, but alas, I will not.

Unrelatedly, a British couple is facing six years for sex on a beach. Yet another reason not to go to Dubai.

Take away the tax exemption for churches while you're at it.

I don't find this especially objectionable; it's possible that people (like me) who would donate to charities for animals will now direct our money toward those that help people if we know that the A.S.P.C.A., for example, now has enough money to fund operations for decades. Anyway, it's much more offensive that people get a charitable giving subsidy for donating to horribly bigoted religious charities. Maybe we should just do away with the subsidy entirely.

Ew, Texans!

Jared asked about my "worst experience of anti-Southern/anti-Texas bias." This had to be during the 2000 New Hampshire primary. As part of CMC's Washington semester program, we all had to go up to New Hampshire for the primary and work for a candidate. Being burnt out and apathetic, and out of perverse contrarian reaction to my then-boyfriend's McCain fetish, I worked on the Bush campaign. (Shut up! He hadn't done much of anything then! We didn't know! I had to pick one--who should I have gone with, Forbes? Bradley? Zzz. Anyway, I helped him lose.)

In just in less than an hour of holding a sign near a mall I had at least half a dozen people cruise by intentionally so they could harshly declare that we "didn't need any more Texans in the White House," with "Texans" pronounced such that I was in real fear that they would spit on me.

I actually lost my accent after going to a summer writing program at Simon's Rock College and having all the other teenage emo writer-wannabes ask me to say "fixin' to" over and over again.

Why I Intentionally Lost My Accent

Sounding southern makes you poorer:

[B]lacks who “sound black” earn almost 10 percent less, even after taking into account other factors that could influence earnings. One piece of interesting good news is that blacks who do not “sound black” earn essentially the same as whites.

(It turns out you don’t want to sound southern, either. Although pretty imprecisely estimated, it is almost as bad for your wages to sound southern as it is to sound black, even controlling for whether you live in the south.)

Nice to be back in D.C.

Actual line heard over the weekend in Texas (iirc):

How hard can your job be? All you have to do is make coffee for the partner!

I had forgotten, however, how incredibly fun it is to blow things up. All hail jurisdictions with basically no fireworks regulations.

Best Passage from a Supreme Court Case I Read Today

You would hope that this is something we could all agree on:

Our duty, like that of the court below, is fairly to construe the powers of Congress, and to ascertain whether or not the enactment falls within them, uninfluenced by predilection for or against the policy disclosed in the legislation. The fact that the compulsory scheme is novel is, of course, no evidence of unconstitutionality. Even should we consider the Act unwise and prejudicial to both public and private interest, if it be fairly within delegated power our obligation is to sustain it. On the other hand, though we should think the measure embodies a valuable social plan and be in entire sympathy with its purpose and intended results, if the provisions go beyond the boundaries of constitutional power we must so declare.

Technological Job

I feel like I am being tested by the gods of modern electronic devices. I have failed. I renounce thee, technology.

Literacy Tests and Gun Ownership, cont.

I emailed an aspiring law prof friend on whether conditioning gun ownership on a written test (effectively a literacy test) should be unconstitutional, potentially through some unholy blend of the pre-Slaughterhouse Cases understanding of the 14th Amendment's Privileges & Immunities Clause, Carolene Products footnote 4, and an understanding of the historical disarmament of African Americans in the South and how current prejudice against African Americans might contribute to imposition of anti-gun laws in urban areas disproportionately populated by them. At least one reader was skeptical. My friend's response:

I've always thought that the 13th Amendment's legislative history was important, because getting rid of the "badges and incidents of slavery," while ill-defined, has great power w/r/t literacy tests, the VRA, etc, and I imagine the same for gun laws, especially with your historical discrimination and disarmament argument. ... Footnote 4 is most interesting: substantive due process will carry the day here. There is nothing in the constitution about permissible abrogations of the right to bear arms, and so now that it is recognized as a constitutional right under the 2nd, the key, as you intuit, will be the 14th jurisprudence about substantive due process.

The key will be 14.1: "1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." and 14.5: "5. The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article."

I would back up your argument that this, in conjunction with Footnote 4, as applied to the newly interpreted 2nd amendment (and toss in the 13th) that onerous literacy tests create an undue burden on the P&I of historically discriminated minorities to bear arms. Congress should have the power to enforce the substantive due process claim by appropriate legislation, against state literacy tests. ... Again, think of the 13th, "badges and incidents of slavery," which is much broader than "former slaves."

I'm curious about whether one could push this even further and argue that the test violate a constitutional right even absent congressional action. Maybe not. Thoughts?

Sorites Paradox?

When does a blog stop being personal and start being real (corporate)? When you take on numerous guest bloggers? When you and the guest bloggers use the site in large part for promotion of your professional endeavors? When your readership rivals that of some magazines and journals of opinion? When you hire employees to help you run your blog? When it constitutes your primary source of income? When you set up an LLC to handle the legal aspects of your blog?

As someone who has conducted very personal relationships publicly on a blog, I have been tempted to delete references to previous associates wholesale, if only so I could peruse my own archives without a twinge of pain and embarrassment, but I haven't, because I own my past. Any changes in my opinions of particular individuals bear on who I am going forward, not who I was.

50 Book Challenge #43: Inferno

No, not the Dante one. There is a story in here about bees that will not leave my mind. Recommended for people who don't mind being creeped out.

50 Book Challenge #42: Duma Key

Why am I the only reviewer who noticed that the title is a pun? A bad pun, at that. This is like a mashup of On Writing (horrible debilitating accident nearly destroys middle-aged man) with Rose Madder (oooh, magical paintings). Standard-issue King, meaning it's like a diner meal: heavy and not especially good for you, but tasty. Solid entertainment executed in workmanlike fashion.