Alright, I've caved. I have upgraded to a paid LJ account so that I can syndicate my content on here. That way you guys will know when I've posted without having to stop being archaic in your lack of RSS reader.

As a compromise, I am not (for now) putting full posts' texts on here, just links to posts. In other words, when I post on my blog, a new post will show up on your Friends page with nothing but a link to the post on my blog. You can come to my site to read the post and (I hope) comment. If this creates a huge burden on anyone, please let me know.

I will not get notified about any comments you post to the LJ feeds, nor do I have the power to turn off commenting on them, nor will I be checking there. So, please please please continue to comment, but please do so on my site. Also note that when you add this, all the posts currently on the feed (15 or so) may appear at the top of your Friends page initially, but new posts will appear normally.

Just like on my site, there are three feeds that I've created on here. Just add one of these to your Friends:

Barzelay.net Main Feed (Full posts and mini-links): barzelay_ljfeed
Barzelay.net Mini-Links (Mini-links only): barzelay_minis
Barzelay.net Full Posts (Full posts only): barzelay_fulls

The time has come to abandon the Livejournal version of my blog. I know this will be troublesome to a few of my friends (ironically, to the readers of my blog to whom I have the closest personal relationships). I'm truly sorry, but I have spent WAY too much time constantly wrangling the Movable Type LJ plugin to work for the last two years, and I'm tired of it. After having not posted in a week or so, I posted early this morning, and the plugin again failed to work. I spent a half-four or so trying to fix it, and then I decided that I'm done with it. I have no need for the LJ version of this journal, and I only kept it up to make it easier for my close friends to read my blog. But far better tools now exist for you to keep up with my and everyone else's blogs.

I recommend Google Reader. It's great, but it has one downside for this community: it can't see posts that are friends-locked. That's not a problem for my blog, but it is for some of your blogs. So you may still want to return to your Friends page on the regular in order to make sure people who use friends-locking haven't posted. You know... to make sure Claire hasn't posted something, Cara hasn't whined about how guys can't commit, Liz hasn't posted something ridiculously personal while wasted, Ula hasn't posted to bitch about law and how much work she has to do, Violet Flames hasn't posted pictures of her boobs, and Audrey isn't whining about the bratty kids she has to photograph.

I do very much hope, however, that all of you will keep reading my blog. So I hope to continue to see comments from Michelle, Sarah, Everett, Jacob, Erin, Daniel, Megan, Lauren, Colin, Jonathan (happy birthday tomorrow), Scott, Christ-y (happy birthday soon), Elizabeth, Dan, Adam, Chris Santoro, Kelly, Angela, Minkey, Martin, anyone mentioned above, and anyone else who reads this journal.

And by the way, there are a bunch of you that I haven't talked to in a while. Let's talk. I'll have my people call your people.

In case you hadn't noticed, I'm not blogging lately. Exams and papers and my family visiting D.C. have converged, to be followed by travel. I'll be emerging on January 1, the Day Of The Holy Circumcision, as from a cocoon, new site design and all. Wave goodbye to the beauteous banners that now adorn the upper reaches of my site, savor the last days of my inverted color scheme, and prepare to welcome cartoony line-art, tesselations, the illusion of simplicity, and judicious use of color.

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I just realized that my last post, "There Is No Such Thing As A Hard Exam, And Studying Doesn't Matter Anyway", was my 500th post in the long annals of Barzelay.net! I started in May of 2004, roughly two years and seven months ago.

That means I've averaged just over one post every two days. That's pretty pathetic. The same measure as of the end of last school year would have yielded a much higher average, but my, how my blogging has suffered as my work has increased! And I was just getting going again when exams hit, too. Damn.

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There is no such thing as an easy exam, either.

All exams are equally difficult, and any variations in grade between students, or between classes for a particular student, is a combination of variations in intelligence, expectations, and random chance. Here's why:

If I think an exam is going to be extremely difficult, then I get apprehensive about it. The amount of studying I do for it is inversely related to my level of apprehension. For instance, five days ago I was very worried about my Evidence exam, since I've done nothing in that class since September. So I buckled down and studied hard, which I so rarely do, and was, to the amazement of myself and those around me, extremely productive. In fact, I was so productive, and covered so much material, that I was no longer worried about it as of two days ago, and could no longer convince myself that I needed to be productive. So, I've done absolutely nothing since then. Which brings us to tonight, the night before my Patent Law exam, still having been unable to do anything for that class, because I am not too worried about it. I did all the reading for it, and mostly paid attention to Professor Thomas in class (who is awesome, by the way), so it just never loomed ominous the way that Evidence did. A lack of looming ominous means a lack of me fleeing to the books.

>>Show explanation<<Hide explanation

And so it is that I am equally prepared for all of my exams, and in general, they are all equally difficult for me during the actual exam. One might ask why, then, I get a different grade on every exam. Well, I have a further theory that there is zero correlation between effort/knowledge on law school topics and grades on law school exams. I literally think that a student's grades have nothing to do with how much that student prepares. The only exceptions are at the very top of the class (solid A grades always know their shit and have worked very, very hard), and the very bottom of the class (C grades have to know extremely little, and are either not extraordinarily intelligent in the type of thinking required for the class, or else did next to nothing throughout the semester--or both). But for everyone in the middle range (say, 80% of the class), the preparation has nothing to do with the normative performance.

That isn't to say that a particular student can't study very hard and go from a B to an A-. It definitely can happen. But between one generic student who has studied very hard and another generic student who has not, it is almost just as likely that the latter student will score higher than the former. This is, I think, still true even if the two students are of identical intelligence, though slightly less so. But since it is impossible to determine one's intellectual standing relative to one's classmates, such a slight difference cannot rationally motivate one's behavior.

What that means is that law school exams do a very poor job of testing students' skills and knowledge. I don't think that law school exams are written poorly, or that the culture of law school exams is necessarily flawed. But I do think that the types of skills on which we are being tested are inherently untestable except over a very large period of time and in a large variety of situations. Exams can't hope to create a large enough sample to measure our actual skills and knowledge, and so they are very prone to random sampling errors. We happened not to know much about the Huddleston standard, and yet that's what the Professor asked about. On the other hand, we were expert in the Hilmer rule, but that wasn't on the exam. Or we wrote an exam that was equally analytically sound as another student, but the Professor was psychologically biased against us because we made a typo and wrote, "inabmissible," while the other student did not. Or the outline we used didn't include a citation to 35 U.S.C. § 105, instead referring to it by the section's title, "Inventions In Outer Space," so we didn't find it when we used Ctrl-F. There are infinitely many ways in which one can randomly be screwed over by one's exams.

So the obvious conclusion is that one should study a very little bit, but not much. One should seek only to avoid the Cs, and then, if I'm right (and I'm almost definitely not) one's grades will be distributed randomly around the average, which is somewhere between B and B+. Just don't sweat the outliers.

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UPDATE: It turns out that Sleepy Brain has been posting about this book quite often, and asked me to link to their contest to give away a copy of the book.

Lonely Planet has released its Travel Guide To Micronations. Yes, micronations, those lovable little slices of supposed sovereignty where crackpots and geeks can become the tyrants and philosopher kings of their pre-teen dreams. Micronations, most famously the Principality Of Sealand, exist where some individual or group claim, but are denied, sovereignty over some (usually quite small) bit of land.

From the Wikipedia article, Micronations generally have a number of common features:

1. They often assert that they wish to be widely recognised as sovereign states, but are not.
2. They are small; those that claim to control physical territories are mostly of very limited extent - however the majority exist exclusively in the online world. While several micronations claim hundreds or even thousands of members, the vast majority have no more than one or two active participants.
3. Some issue government instruments such as passports, stamps, and currency, and confer titles and awards; these are rarely recognized outside of their own communities of interest.

When I heard about this book--a legitimate travel guide to micronations--and read this interview with one of its creators, pangs of nostalgia were awakened, and I was brought back all the way to eighth grade, circa 1997, when I was part of my very own micronation. For a few brief months, my friends and I literally were masters of our domain. And our domain was a thirty-yard circle around the large oak tree next to the Southern wing of Burnett Middle School.

We declared our independence under the sovereign name "Mexico II," and set about constructing our government. It was modeled after the United States government, but most of us didn't know much about Civics at that time. We had picked up snippets, for instance, we knew the order of succession should something happen to the President. And "President" is a very important title, so being Speaker Of The House--second in line for the Presidency--seemed like a pretty sweet position. I'm not positive but I think that Eric Robinson and Jordan Carpenter were President and Vice, though I don't remember which was which. Jon Cooper was Secretary Of Defense, and someone else was Speaker Of The House. All very important positions, right? Until one considers the power grab with which they let me get away; I was the entire House (Speaker excluded), the entire Senate, and the entire Supreme Court. But those positions seemed meaningless because they didn't include the word "President," nor even the prospect of ascending to that title should the President get beat up on the playground.

And so Mexico II was born. We came up with a rudimentary set of prescriptive laws regulating behavior in Mexico II. We wrote out an official Constitution--never ratified--that spelled out exactly what powers each of us had. We even had a flag, though it is long since lost.

Our coup turned out to be bloodless, and so there was unity all across the land. But little did we know, those happy times were not to last. Though we fancied ourselves free men under self-rule, in truth our little nation lived under the oppressive influence of the teachers' cruel and expansive empire. They possessed advanced weaponry in the form of referrals and grade reports, and our ragtag militia (no offense to Secretary Cooper) was no match for their indiscriminate orthodoxy. We had no choice but to pay tribute in the form of homework, and readily abandoning our home in Mexico II at a moment's notice to get to class before the bell rang. They were ruled by a cruel dictator, Principal Heard, who imposed order within all of her hinterlands through her own brand of justice.

The following year (when we were no longer at Burnett), I began dating Principal Heard's daughter, Laney, a savvy political match that cemented diplomatic relations between Mexico II and the Burnett Empire.

But that eighth-grade year at Burnett, as we constructed and regularly inhabited our very own nation, we experienced the pleasure of creation. A country is the ultimate DIY project, the ultimate hobby. And like most DIY projects, ours was eventually abandoned, our hard-won borders reclaimed by our old adversary. But Mexico II was our own little slice of supposed sovereignty, an escape every morning from what must have seemed, at the time, the horrible oppression of adolescence. In Mexico II we were free, and in control of our own destinies. At least until the morning bell rang.

I'm proud of our little experiment, and I'm excited that so many others maintain their little fantasy countries. They may not be recognized by the larger governments of the world, but they're literally holding down the forts despite them. Micronationalists are the true libertarians. And though I don't think the release of this travel guide is likely to elevate the tourism industry to the tops of micronational economies, it's nice to see them at least catalogued. It's a fitting reminder that even this nation, the United States, is an experiment in democracy and peaceful rule, and like Mexico II and all experiments, its principles are rather prone to abandonment.

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Vancouver is considering installing retractable public urinals for drunken, late-night urination. And "public" does not only mean, "free to all," it means, "in full view of everyone walking the street, including sweet old ladies and lurkers with golden shower fetishes." The reasoning goes that drunks piss on walls and in corners in public late at night anyway, so why not provide them with places to do so cleanly and legally? The urinals are stowed under the sidewalk during the day, and an attendant will use a remote control to bring the urinals up to ground level when night falls. That way the public restrooms aren't an eyesore during the day.

I think this is pretty brilliant, and a nice step toward removing the shame our society directs toward our bodies and its natural processes. But try to imagine a local government trying to do this in America. The protests would be widespread and vehement.

Even I would protest, though I'd be protesting the fact that they are urinals instead of toilets. Because as we all know, I boycott urinals. Since I wear pairs of jeans a good thirty or so times before washing them, I'd really rather not be splashing urine spray on them whenever I pee. And it is mathematically proven that it is impossible to pee into a urinal without some of it spraying back onto one's legs. It even says so in The Bible. Really, it does. Read John 10:13: "And whosoever shall empty himself unto the okay, it doesn't really say anything about urinals in The Bible. But I don't need the Lamb of God to descend from on high and appear to me in a dream just to inform me not to piss all over myself rather than wait twenty seconds for a stall.

Other than that, yeah, I'd go number one in public. But then, I have a blog, so I clearly don't mind spewing other nasty things in public. In general, I'm a very public individual. In fact, I can only think of one thing that I can't imagine myself doing in public under any conceivable circumstances, and that is to pop my shirt collar non-ironically. That's where I draw the line. But I would gladly pee in public on people who pop their collars.

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• 

  Some farmer tattoos the pigs on his farm in interesting and satirical designs. If you don't have any pigs but still want the experience, get this product and you can tattoo your children instead!

• Tired of giving a real email address to sites and apps, knowing that they're likely to start spamming you? I am. But sometimes one arrives at some website needing to sign up to attain the site's wisdom, or create an account to make some purchase, and no matter how shady the privacy policy, one has no choice. One needs whatever they're slingin'. Well, some us have a trash email address that we use only for such occasions. But if you're looking for an even less permanent solution, try this new service called 10 Minute Mail. It instantly gives one an email address that is accessible for ten minutes (can be extended). When it has expired, the address is gone, imploding into a black hole of unwanted email that will let nothing escape, not light, not penis enlargement pills, not unbelievable penny stock info.
• In the ongoing saga of the nanny state's foray into the kitchen, Jacob Grier writes a pair of posts about FDA rules shutting down artisanal meat production, innovative cooking techniques like sous vide, and (I salivate at the thought) raw milk cheeses. A pair of chefs write letters in support of their rights to use controversial techniques and foods, with Peter Hoffman writing about meat curing, and Ariane Daguin in support of the legality of foie gras. Now Maine won't allow a brewery to put Santa Claus on its beer labels, fearing that the lovable old guy will attract children (the brewery is suing).

  And now SFGate.com has an article on NY food inspectors cracking down on illegal meats. And here we aren't just talking about ham cured at greater than forty-one degrees. We're talking about stores and markets (especially ethnic markets) selling things like iguana, armadillos, and even gorilla meat. With the exception of endangered species such as gorilla, the problem isn't the species but the fact that the meats are purchased from unlicensed sources, and hence, have not been properly inspected. But niche markets of food production aren't served by the sort of farms and plants that are likely to conform strictly to food inspection rules. In many cases, the foods are shipped from foreign countries, making their production suspect. Is this just an inevitable consequence of the long tail, or should we trust consumers to make their own decisions as long as they are properly informed? Or will that just lead us idiots to go and do things like get addicted to salt?

• The TSA's absurd regulations rear their ugly head in Louisville.
• If PCs are stodgy (Hodgy?) old men, and Macs are mid-twenties hipsters, Sony Vaios are apparently poorly dressed slutty girls. But it turns out that half of Mac owners are 55 and older--double the share of PC users. Side note: I love the use of the term "silver surfers" in the article to refer to old people who use the internet.



• I absolutely love this game, "flOw." Created as Jenova Chen's USC Masters thesis, it has apparently been bought by Sony for development into a full PS3 game. I must warn you, however, to start your game at the beginning of class, rather than the end--the game will love you long time, and it lacks a meaningful pause function. Anyway, it's very intuitive and immersive, and is based on the principle that a game's difficulty should seamlessly adapt to its player's ability. That way, casual gamers can pick it up and start playing, with waiting to climb the learning curve.</a>
• Finally, in case you missed it, the Supreme Court heard arguments last week in KSR v. Teleflex, about the test for determining whether or not an invention is "obvious" (and hence, ineligible for a patent). I'm a huge proponent of patent reform, and I think obviousness is the most important place to attack the current regime. "Obvious" has an obvious meaning--the one we all use every day. Based on reports of oral arguments and the transcript, things look good for reform. Scalia called the current test "gobbledygook," and Roberts said, “[T]he Federal Circuit’s approach focuses... on prior art-—as opposed to, I would say, common sense.” Go, go gadget unanimous decision.

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My father is from Boston, and his parents are both Jewish. His mother left Belgium with her family in order to escape the Holocaust, and his father was of Sephardic descent. In fact, "Barzelay" is a very common name in Israel. His father, my grandather, was a die-hard Red Sox fan. Eventually, their family moved down to Daytona Beach, Florida, and my Dad really grew up there. Then my Dad went to Florida State University, and majored in Marketing and Business Administration. He ended up becoming an insurance salesman. So to review, he's a reasonably educated, white collar Northern Jew who grew up in a resort town (albeit, a cheap one). With that background, one wouldn't expect him to have all the habits of a redneck, but one would be wrong.

For starters, he loves fishing. We're not talking sport fishing in the sea for tarpon, or going on fly-fishing vacations to the Northwest. We're talking about bass fishing, worms as bait, on little lakes with Indian names like Istokpoga, Okeechobee (not a little lake), and Thonotosassa. So every weekend or two, he slathers the sunscreen all over himself at 3:00am, puts on a shirt with the collar ripped out, some silly hat with a mesh back, and makes sure he doesn't forget his pocket knife. Often he manages to drag my mother along with him. He gets the boat ready--the boat is named "Judy's Too," a joke on the fact that it is my mother's as well--and then he drives to some lake, hours away, to launch the boat as the sun rises. Morning is prime fishing time. And he fishes all day, then comes home.

Many weekend days while growing up, we'd all go out and greet my Dad after he came back from a long day in the sun, fishing in some tournament. He'd make my brother and I give him big hugs even though he was a pungent mix of sweaty body odor, sunscreen, and fish guts. Then he'd toss a couple bass in the sink and we'd watch while he cut open the stomach to show us what the fish had been eating, and then he'd cut off the head, and filet the fish for dinner. Then he'd shower while my mother cooked.

But fishing isn't his only redneck hobby. He also loves auto racing. And my father didn't get into NASCAR in the recent wave of popularity. He's been into it all my life. And he isn't interested in the personalities of the drivers, or anything like that. He's into the racing, and into the cars. He's interested in how they squeeze an extra few horsepower out of the cars by drilling holes in the carburetor, or how a driver uses the air currents and low pressure zone created by the car ahead of him to pull him along and save a gallon of gas over fifty laps. And he isn't just into NASCAR. He's into drag racing, and Formula-1, Busch Series and whatever Winston Cup is called. He even watches swamp buggy races.

If he's watching television, he's watching SPEED Network. My brother and I wanted digital cable for years, but it cost extra, so we didn't get it. Then SPEED Network came out, and it was only available on digital cable. My father ordered it immediately.

He actually raced cars when he was younger. He started the auto racing club at FSU, and the extra space in our garage is filled with trophies. Smattered around are plaques etched with checkered flags, tires, and sports cars, trophies with leaping bass or an angler rendered in faux gold, and other proud mementos of redneck success; a rusty old lawnmower that he keeps running, a box full of metal scraps or random sections of various tubings or hacked up pieces of plywood and two-by-fours (all just in case they're needed). And sure enough, if something breaks, he goes out to the garage, and we hear the metallic clink of hammering, and the grating whir of power tools. Eventually he comes back inside and it's fixed.

His fishing buddies have managed even to alter his speech. My father who used to correct me every time I said "Me and my friends," or "I'm doing good," now has the vocabulary and grammar of a yokel. He still doesn't have a Southern accent.

And so my father has turned out, against all odds, to be a redneck. Even despite all the other evidence, fishing and tons of yard work literally have given him a red neck. And every night when he's out in the garage painting his custom lures, oiling his reels, and tweaking his boat's propellor, it just makes me wonder how the hell it happened. In the ultimate illustration of his paradox, he even scouts out fishing reports for the lakes online. He's a thoroughly modern, intelligent, and yet hopelessly redneck man.

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As promised, this is the remainder of the photos from my giant cross-country National Parks tour extravaganza. These are even cooler than the previous sets. Arches National Park, especially, was just amazing. It was the highlight of the trip, so at least check those out (though Bryce was no slouch). As usual, I took a zillion photos. I can't wait until this summer, when a good chunk of one of my firm checks will go to something like this, and then you'll have to wait even longer for my photos to load. Anyway, check these out.

• Bryce Canyon National Park: The main features of this park are its natural formations of rock called "hoodoos." They look like strange spires, and they rise up out of the canyon with lots of color. Hiking down into the canyon, one sees a very different side. "Wall street" is a very oft-photographed location where two giant rock walls rise up on both sides of a very narrow path. Very cool stuff.
• Photos while driving through Utah: Just some nice views.
• Arches National Park: Insane. Just amazing. This park features a ton of impossibly huge rock formations standing out against a giant sky. There are the eponymous arches, including one that is the subject of Utah's license plate (which was a mile hike to get to, so I contented myself with the view from a distance, hence there are no pictures of the famous Delicate Arch). But besides the actual arches, there are about two thousand other wonderful views, many of which outclass the arches. You should go here before you die.
• Photos while driving through Colorado: Things that caught my eye while driving through Colorado.
• St. Louis Arch: It was my first time seeing the St. Louis Arch, but I didn't feel like stopping, so I took these photos while driving.

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Music

• The Shins - Wincing The Night Away
  Not a revelation, but not at all disappointing. It's very good, and I can't wait to listen to it in crisper-quality. We have until January 23 to wait for the official release, thanks to Sub-Pop's marketing schedule, even though it's completely done now. On first listen, from the very first notes on the album, it feels so comfortable and pleasant returning to The Shins sound (and I'm not implying that it sounds stale or that it's just like the old stuff). They have such a distinctive sound. Some great bands grab one instantly, others take a while to insinuate themselves into one's musical pantheon. For me, The Shins were in the former category. I sat at my desk and listened to Chutes Too Narrow straight through twice when Jon Cooper first told me to download it. Nothing else going on, just listening. It was that good, that fresh. Would Wincing The Night Away have been the same, had I not already been familiar with The Shins? Maybe. Either way, it's a great album.
• Beck - The Information
  Good, but more of the same. Sea Change was amazing, then Guero went in a completely different direction--it was a very good album, but it was clearly lighter fare than Sea Change, and it recycled a lot of Beck's earlier sounds. The Information might as well be "Unreleased tracks from Guero." That isn't necessarily negative, but Beck is at his best when he tries new things. This album won't surprise anyone with its sound. Still, Beck album are like sex and pizza; even when they're bad, they're still pretty good.
• The Decemberists - The Crane Wife
  Great. The second track is a twelve-minute suite that is just awesome. This is the best album The Decemberists have put out, and I loved Picaresque and Castaways And Cutouts. And even though it's their major-label debut, this album is far less catchy than their previous ones. Twelve-minute songs don't make for easy radio play, even on college radio stations.

Movies

• Tideland
  Probably none of you saw this, but this is Gilliam's darkest film to date, and yet it retains Gilliam's beautiful spark: hope and survival through fantasy and imagination. This is not going to be a movie for everyone. It's like The Adventures of Baron Munchausen but here he keeps the fantasy inside the young girl's head. At times I rolled my eyes, because it has a couple of the typical, over the top Gilliam characters. It also made me uncomfortable at times, which is pretty tough to do. But overall, I think it's an excellent and fitting addition to his oeuvre, not like that last piece of crap.

• The Prestige
  Awesome movie. I really loved some movie from the first month or two of last year, but now I can't remember which one. Pending recovery of that memory, I will say with confidence that The Prestige is my favorite movie so far this year. It keeps up an impressive level of action and suspense, but still manages to satisfy the discerning film viewer with its wonderful acting, smart script, and beautiful cinematography, as well as the geeks with its reverence for both magic and science (is there any difference?). Definitely see this.
• The Departed
  I loved this all the way through, but then the ending left me with way too many unanswered questions. I got the feeling that this one was cut pretty heavily to avoid it being a four-hour NC-17 flick. I'll reserve judgment until I find out whether an Extended Edition is forthcoming. This had some of the best dialogue I've ever heard in a movie. The dialogue here was Glengarry Glen Ross, Pulp Fiction good.

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• A couple is suing Starbucks, claiming that their child was severely burned when she spilled a hot chocolate on herself. Apparently, the parents gave this scalding hot drink to their child, while she was strapped into a car seat, in a moving car, and they did so without first testing the drink to see how hot it was. If you give a kid (age unknown, but young enough to be strapped into a car seat) a drink in anything but a sippy cup and put her in a moving car, the chances of that drink spilling all over her are on the latter side of a scale from 1 to idiot. The fact that you do so with a beverage whose name includes the word "hot" means that your child's genetics are so unfortunate that she is probably better off dying by being boiled alive in her beverage than growing up and finding out that she's doomed to be as dumb as her parents.



• Someone's Wiimote has already snapped off of its strap and gone flying, apparently smashing into and cracking a 60-inch television. The most innovative aspect of the Wii engineering was how its tech team convinced its legal department to greenlight the thing. Why not let the advertising department in on the secret, so that they can include a free lollipop-shaped cigar in every Wii box, and run commercials featuring busty sixteen year-olds using the Wiimote to pleasure themselves? I hereby predict a class-action lawsuit seeking damages for an entire generation having arthritic rotator cuffs.
• Several European cities have done away with traffic signs, signals, painted lines, and sidewalks. Entirely. The idea is that the unregulated, uncertain situation will cause drivers naturally to be wary and therefore cautious and safe. Right. Because it works so well in India, Mexico, and China. Actually, I think this really could work, but only in low-traffic situations. The road on which I live has no traffic signs or lines, and things work out fine. But can you imagine K Street on a weekday morning without "WALK" and "DON'T WALK" signs? Oh wait, someone already has.
• I don't even like Dilbert, but here I am linking to its creator's blog for the second time in as many weeks. Scott Adams post, "Atheists: The New Gays," points out (favorably) that public atheism seems to be on the rise, and ties it into what small-minded Christians see as the rise of Islamic extremism.

  I think the hidden benefit of Islamic extremism is that it freed the atheists from their closets. The old mindset in the United States was that almost any religion was good, and atheism was bad. But since 9/11, atheism has moved above Islam in the rankings, at least in the minds of Christians and Jews in the United States... Ask a deeply religious Christian if he’d rather live next to a bearded Muslim that may or may not be plotting a terror attack, or an atheist that may or may not show him how to set up a wireless network in his house. On the scale of prejudice, atheists don’t seem so bad lately.

  I outed myself years ago. I am flamboyantly, fabulously atheistic. I'm the atheistic equivalent of assless leather pants-wearing, rainbow flag-waving, PRIDE parade float-riding homosexual. I am promiscuous, seeking to share my freedom from religion with as many others as possible. I don't understand why everyone isn't.

• A district court dismissed a Fair Housing Act suit against Craigslist, brought by the Chicago Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. They claimed Craigslist was in violation of the Fair Housing Act of 1968 because they didn't actively filter out discriminatory housing ads. Craigslist claimed protection under the Communications Decency Act, which shields web forums from liability for postings by their users. Personally, as one who has found housing on Craigslist multiple times, I can confirm that discriminatory ads (as defined in the act) are rampant on there. I've often wondered whether anyone had ever tried to sue them for it. And even though Craigslist has (rightfully) escaped liability, the individuals who post those ads are still liable. I wonder what Craigslist's data retention policies are. Anyway, the sort of discrimination on Craigslist ads are usually not the sort that I find particularly reprehensible. I've never seen any ads that overtly racially discriminate. Thankfully, people are smart enough to save that for when things aren't in writing.



• A couple of old nudists apparently think that the key to ending war is orgasms. From the activists who brought you Baring Witness. "The orgasm gives out an incredible feeling of peace during it and after it," said Reffell, 55. "Your mind is like a blank. It's like a meditative state. And mass meditations have been shown to make a change." Yeaaaaahhhh... I'm all for it, but I don't think it's gonna do anything about the war. Oh, wait. They have a helpful Flash demo of how the whole thing will work. Now I understand.
• Is a counterclaim for attorneys' fees in a copyright case a valid cause of action, independent from any other counterclaims? The RIAA doesn't think so. Perhaps we need an expansion of Copyright Misuse doctrine to cover these situations. I'm sure Congress will get to that right after Howard Berman gets done repealing the DMCA. I'll hold my breath.

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If you're seeing this, you're now using my shiny new webhost, Dreamhost. They seem like pretty cool people, so check them out. I cannot yet recommend them, but two of my readers did. So thanks, Jay and Cathy, unless it turns out to be a bad webhost, in which case, screw Jay and Cathy.

In theory, the 500 Server Errors that have been occurring should no longer occur, and everything should be faster. Let me know if you spot anything awry. It'll take a couple days to work out all the kinks.

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It's time for me to get a new web host. My current host, HostExcellence.com, has been very responsive to all problems, has excellent rates, features, and bandwidth and storage allocations. Theirs isn't a very fast pipe, but it isn't so bad that it's caused any problems. No, my dissatisfaction arises from a single issue that they've been unable to correct. If you're at all a frequent commenter on this blog, you probably recognize this page

Server Error (500) I'm looking into the problem. For now, go back and save the text from your comment, and then refresh the comments to make sure it did not, in fact, go through. Then, if necessary, try submitting your comment again and it will almost always work.

And after almost a year of "looking into the problem," I'm giving up. Movable Type simply does not work on HostExcellence's setup. I've contacted technical support at least twenty times about it, and have done several complete reinstallations of Movable Type, and the problem is still present. It is much worse at peak times, but 500 SERVER ERRORs occur roughly 1 out of every 5 CGI scripts that are accessed. Since Movable Type works by bouncing to several CGI scripts (or reloading some particular script) to complete each of the various tasks involved in posting, commenting, or any other task, this means that pretty much any possible action on my blog results in a 500 error. That's unacceptable, and HostExcellence has been unable to fix it, insisting that it's a problem with Movable Type (a suite of blogging software used by probably hundreds of thousands of people without duplication of this problem). In addition, with an identical configuration of Movable Type on my previous two web hosts, the problem did not occur.

And so it is that I must end my relationship with HostExcellence. The trouble is, I don't have any other prospects. Seemingly every site that rates web hosts is commercially influenced and gets kickbacks, or is otherwise biased. I have now had two web hosts that were highly rated all around, and each has ultimately resulted in failure. I need anecdotal evidence.

Has anyone ever used a web host that they didn't hate? Here's what I need:

• > 25 GB of storage
• > 5 email accounts (forwards are fine)
• decent bandwidth and server speed
• > 150 GB transfer per month, and reasonable prices for overages
• unlimited FTP access
• PHP, MySQL (a couple databases), Perl

All of this for under $25/month. I'd prefer cheaper (obviously), but at this point, I'm willing to pay for quality.

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My friend Jake just sent me a card. On the front is a typical nativity scene.

On the inside, he wrote the following:

Dear David, As a thank you for your generous, thoughtful donation to AIDS Project Los Angeles, I am sending this picture of my parents and me as a baby boy.

I love blasphemy.

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Scott Adams (creator of Dilbert) on e-voting:

Now don’t get me wrong – there’s a 100% chance that the voting machines will get hacked and all future elections will be rigged. But that doesn’t mean we’ll get a worse government. It probably means that the choice of the next American president will be taken out of the hands of deep-pocket, autofellating, corporate shitbags and put it into the hands of some teenager in Finland. How is that not an improvement?

Statistically speaking, any hacker who is skilled enough to rig the elections will also be smart enough to select politicians that believe in . . . oh, let’s say for example, science. Compare that to the current method where big money interests buy political ads that confuse snake-dancing simpletons until they vote for the guy who scares them the least. Then during the period between the election and the impending Rapture, that traditionally elected President will get busy protecting the lives of stem cells while finding creative ways to blow the living crap out on anything that has the audacity to grow up and turn brownish.

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Years ago, before the idiot took office, I was registered Republican. For a brief two years, in fact, I identified as moderately conservative. I was never the least bit socially conservative, but I definitely have a strong libertarian streak, and it used to be that the Republican party was the party for small government and for less intrusion into our lives. That is definitely no longer the case. Both of the major parties are now equally interested in shoving their policies and their programs up our asses. Nevertheless, during the intervening period, I've come to support the Democratic party quite strongly. During college I experienced a political maturation, and realized that there is a proper role for government social programs and a reasonable amount of market interference. I also realized that while the economic side of politics is important, it is nowhere near as important to me as civil liberties. And the Republicans have completely relinquished their commitment to liberty in favor of their commitment to their religion.

As I shifted swiftly to the left, I assumed that I genuinely was changing my mind to support the things the Democrats stood for. I was a Democrat, not just an independent who really hated George Bush. And indeed, I do agree with the Democrats quite often. But last night, the Democrats won back the House and the Senate, and in the course of one night, I really surprised myself. After years of staunchly supporting all Democratic candidates (at least over Republicans), being an apologist for Democratic policies, and praying to the FSM for Dem gains, in the course of one night I gained a lot of insight into my own political opinions.

You see, as I watched the returns come in, and the various races were called, a curious phenomenon occurred. The more seats the Dems won, the more I got to thinking about how little I like the Democrats. When it was confirmed that they had won the House, I was thinking about all the corrupt, pandering, focus-group style representatives on the Democrats side. When Nancy Pelosi came on talking about all the great things Dems are gonna do, I was rolling my eyes at her sudden willingness to work with Bush, at her frozen face, and at her general politican-ness. When the pundits were discussing how many of the gains were made by socially conservative "values Democrats," I was disgusted that "my" party was harboring so many bigots and self-righteous, anti-reason, anti-science assholes. And when Montana and Virginia were tentatively called for Dems, I realized something very significant:

I am not really a Democrat. I am a contrarian.

In other words, I dislike whoever is in power. For the foreseeable future, I'm likely to keep voting Dem, because while the Democrats are way to the right of me socially, the Republicans are even further. The Republicans right now are all about fear, racism, torture, violence, brutality, machismo, repression, sexism, homophobia, and censorship. I'm not about those things. But I definitely hold no special love for the Democratic party. They aren't standing up and demanding same-sex marriage, nor demanding restoration of the rights eroded since and before 9/11. The fact is that even the Democratic party is, by the standards of myself and my peers (i.e., those with whom I interact regularly), quite conservative. And I am not.

Is the Democratic party the progressive party? The party of change, of enlightenment, of a more free and fair society? Well, only compared to the Republicans. And so I hope that in the ensuing years of Democrat control, they show me otherwise. I hope that they show that all of their moderate talk was nothing more than appeasement, designed to capture the power before getting back to their real, liberal, pro-gay, pro-minority, pro-social program mentality. We'll see.

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On Georgetown's main campus this weekend, I spotted this sculpture on a bench. But the chess board isn't very noticeable until you're right up next to it. I wonder how many students absentmindedly have sat down and gotten a bishop up their butts?

Then again, Georgetown is a Catholic university, so I guess that many of the students already are used to having religious authorities up their butts.

P.S. - It's very difficult for a law student to type "statue" instead of "statute."

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• Grammar instruction is back in schools! Praise Allah! I can't distinguish an infinitive from an appositive, at least not in formal terms. Nevertheless, I do care very much about writing and speaking grammatically, and I think I am usually successful, or at least significantly more so than most of the population. Despite that, I lament my woeful lack of formal grammar instruction. Every year, from 1st grade until my Bachelor's degree (and one of my majors was English), every English teacher would say something like, "Every other teacher drills you on grammar, so I'm not going to." And so I never learned formal grammar. But that doesn't mean I can't be an idiosyncratic snob about it.

  I constantly read writing that is otherwise reasonable but the prose of which is horribly grating on me, to the point that it makes me stop reading, affects my choices as a consumer, and causes me subconsciously to cut off communication with friends. There is at least one popular blog whose content I like, but whose prose is so poorly written that I can't take anything in it seriously--and its author is an aspiring writer, an enduring irony that makes me shake my head with incredulity on a semi-weekly basis. But at the same time, I recognize that many people seem to have no trouble reading all of those misspellings, split infinitives, sentence-ending prepositions, subject-verb disagreement, purple prose, histrionic diction, internal inconsistency, random capitalization, missing and superfluous commas, improper use of ellipses, em dashes, en dashes, and apostrophes, inability to distinguish between the plural and the possessive, and general lack of logic, flow, and taste--as I said, it's just an idiosyncrasy of mine.

• An Oklahoma political candidate has graciously given us one of the most applicable metaphors for America that I've ever seen: a bunch of rednecks in the backyard firing guns at textbooks. Hilarious.
• In one of the most fucked up stories I have ever read, the NYPost scoops allegations that Warner Brothers promised prosthetic limbs to a bunch of African amputee children in exchange for filming them for their upcoming movie Blood Diamond, and then never got them their limbs. When the children contacted Warner Brothers to inquire about their promised prostheses, they were told, "You will have to wait for December, when the movie comes out, so we can get some publicity out of it."
• China is moving to a system where registering a blog requires giving one's real name. One can still blog under a pseudonym, but the registration is non-anonymous. Presumably the goal is that subversives can be disappeared without all that tedious investigation. So all you supposedly anonymous bloggers out there, beware, lest this happen here, too. Good thing America isn't anything like China. Oh, wait.
• Bush says he uses "the Google." He also misuses the word "remind," when he means to say "reminds." Perhaps he would benefit from the aforementioned grammar instruction.
• Researchers have finally discovered what causes the trains of tiny bubbles that form in champagne flutes. They have long known why bubbles formed, but until now, it's been puzzling why they continually rise in a line from a particular spot. It turns out that the bubble trains are caused by "tiny gas pockets and fibers stuck on the inside of a glass." My roommates will be sure to examine the phenomenon at our Halloween Party on Saturday night.

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Sunday's WaPo had an awesome, touching, wonderful article about Garry Trudeau, creator of the comic strip Doonesbury. He has always shunned publicity, and so this glimpse is supposedly a big deal.

I haven't read comics in the paper since I was too young to care about Doonesbury's dry, topical subject matter, so this article is my first rendezvous with Doonesbury since childhood. The article focuses on a particular storyline in which one of the main four characters, B.D., who has been in the strip since its inception, has to go to Iraq, and ends up losing a limb. Pretty serious subject matter for a silly cartoon.

Trudeau has been visiting wounded veterans to talk to them and mine them for ideas. Recently he accepted an award of excellence in the arts from the Vietnam Veterans of America. Anyway, I really loved the article, and it induced me to purchase a collection of the B.D. in Iraq saga, as well as the aftermath. It is called The Long Road Home. Anyway, check out the article.

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