The Scrivener

Bob Berring on the Structure of Law

2009-11-03T11:53:00.008-05:00

This is an excellent video on the structure of the law.

I think what Prof. Berring is addressing at the end is the way that technology interpenetrates society as it, and society, progress. As Edelcrantz (the librarian of the Royal Academy of Turku, Finland, by the way) noted all the way back in 1796, technology follows a path of (as Stephen Jay Gould put it) punctuated equilibrium: technology and culture stay the same for a long time, then change rapidly. (Of course, one can also make the argument that what we're seeing lately is merely the exponential growth of technology; the pace of technological growth, the slope of the curve, is merely becoming steeper.)

Or, as I quoted in the chapter of my undergraduate thesis that explained what hypertext was (back in 1994), with respect to the social acceptance of technology,

It often happens, with regard to new inventions, that one part of the general public finds them useless and another part considers them to be impossible. When it becomes clear that the possibility and the usefulness can no longer be denied, most agree that the whole thing was fairly easy to discover and that they knew about it all along.

- Abraham Edelcrantz (Abraham Niclas Clewberg), A Treatise on Telegraphs (1796), quoted in Holzmann, Gerard J., and Björn Pehrson, "The First Data Networks," Scientific American, v. 270, no. 1 (January 1994): 124-129.

Gnocchi alla Romana--semolina gnocchi

2009-11-03T09:48:00.002-05:00

Goody! I found a recipe for semolina gnocchi. Lots of work, though.

Semolina gnocchi--from about.com.

Becco, or Italian (mono)mania

2009-11-02T22:05:00.001-05:00

As I said on Facebook, microblogging the New York trip, good Italian food is thin on the ground in South Florida. That's one reason B. and I went to dinner three times at the same restaurant in New York, Becco, in the Theater District, on Restaurant Row, owned by PBS celebrity chef Lidia Bastianich.

As I see it (and B. might disagree), there are four basic reasons we went to Becco so often (well, add a fifth).

First, the good food. There's nothing exotic about the dishes at Becco--the ideas for dishes are common ones, or variations thereof. Pollo al limone, for instance--a common dish, exceedingly well executed. Although our first night there, one of the pasta dishes was an exquisite semolina gnocchi, sauced with a cream sauce, then baked or broiled. Marvelous! (I must see if I can get a recipe.) The key is the execution, which at Becco was impeccable.

Second, the great prices. Becco is comparable in price to the restaurants--good ones--in South Florida. In fact, Michael's Genuine Food and Drink, a touchstone of our Miami fine eating experience, is, while excellent, comparable in quality to Becco--and probably half again as expensive.

Third, the fabulous service. Becco just takes care of its customers. An example: on our last night, Saturday, Halloween, the resaurant was quite busy. My entrée was late arriving, to the point where Marie, our waitress, at one point came by and asked if I was okay. (I was a bit restive, understandable under the circumstances.) Angelo, one of the floor managers that evening (and dressed as a quite creditable Burgess Meredith-era Penguin), without asking me, noticed my restiveness and inquired with the chef about the status of my entrée. He then came over--again, this was without being prompted--and told me that my entrée would be ready in a few minutes--which it was. Excellent.

A fourth reason dovetails (Dovetonsils?) with the above reasons. As those of you who know me well know, my father went to medical school at the University of Bologna (Italy), and my mother lived there with him for a time. My mom was a good cook before she went there, and when she came back, she had been schooled in the dark arts of Northern Italian cuisine. (Bolognaise lasagna has, I believe, two different sauces: Bolognaise ragú and what can best be described as a Bechamel sauce on steroids.) As a result, I know a little bit about Italian food, good Italian food. Becco delivers on this. The semolina gnocchi were a standout, but all their pasta, even the dishes we didn'tlike so much, were well executed. All the entrées we ordered were first-rate. My salmon filet the second night was on a bed of braised cauliflower so good that I ordered a side order--and we ate it all--with my hanger steak the third night. And I don't even like cauliflower. As our waitress Marie said, Becco is very good at making tasty vegetables (another dark art).

The fifth reason is simple: when dinnertime rolled around, B. and I were (I trow) so exhausted that picking a restaurant became a chore.

Well, picking Becco for dinner was never a chore. Becco has my highest recommendation.

A Clarification

2009-11-02T18:29:00.002-05:00

In my last blog post, I wrote "So anyway, don't let your FFB (frum--Orthodox Jewish--from birth) status discourage you--kosher Indian vegetarian is out there."

All I meant by that was that few frum-from-birth Jews have eaten, and enjoyed, Indian food. As B. and I demonstrated, it's not impossible to instruct frum-from-birth Jews in the joys of Indian cuisine.

New York (Food) State of Mind

2009-11-01T20:26:00.003-05:00

Well, back from the 212 in the 954. Tired and a bit loopy, and Big Things afoot tomorrow.

But there are two things that deserve blogging about while they're still fresh-ish in my mind, both about food--Indian cuisine.

I had two Indian meals in New York, not a large number for a week. But both meals were special. First, we took the daughter of our friends, herself a friend, who goes to Yeshiva University's Stern College for Women, and keeps kosher, out to Madras Mahal, what I had thought was the only kosher Indian restaurant (vegetarian) in New York. The food was serviceable, about a 7 or a 7.5 on a 10 point scale. B. and I agree that our local Indian vegetarian restaurant in South Florida, Udipi Café (which unfortunately is not kosher) gets about a 9.5. In any case, our friend's daughter loved it, loved Indian food (Which she had not had before), and pronounced it the best meal she'd had in Manhattan.

But imagine my surprise: there is another kosher Indian restaurant two doors down from Madras Mahal, Pongal. It's Zagat rated, but I see from the reviews that it may not be as good as Madras Mahal. Oh well--an embarrassment of riches. So anyway, don't let your FFB (frum--Orthodox Jewish--from birth) status discourage you--kosher Indian vegetarian is out there.

Oh, my goodness. My goodness gracious. There's a kosher Indian fleishik (meat) restaurant in South Florida, in North Miami: Thai Treat/Bombay Café (same seating, same kosher supervision, etc.). I'm excited, very, at the thought.

Just a quick note: the other meal was also vegetarian, vegan actually, and was from a street cart in Washington Square Park (at W. 4th and Sullivan), right across from NYU's law school. It was a simple dosa, with sambar and coconut chutney, and it was to die for. Thanks go out to Thiru Kumar, the Dosa Man. If you're in the area, hungry for inexpensive, excellent Indian food, go see Mr. Kumar. Or call him--he sometimes runs out of items--at 917-710-2092.

Well, enough excitement--and drooling over Indian food--for one night. TTFN!

Bob Berring on Reference

2009-10-31T11:41:00.002-04:00

An excellent video of Bob Berring on reference work:

http://nsulaw.typepad.com/novalawcity/2009/10/bob-berring-on-reference-.html

I think Berring is advocating for mindfulness on the reference desk, about which more anon.

New York, New York

2009-10-31T10:48:00.006-04:00

Hully gee, but it's been a long time since I posted a blog entry.

Well, dear readers, exciting things are happening. I'm in New York, sitting in the New York Public Library's (NYPL) main branch reading room in Bryant Park. I just got an NYPL library card! (Well, a Visitor's Card--I don't think I can check out materials.) B. and I leave New York tomorrow, which would be sad, but... on Monday I start a job at an excellent academic library, at the closest law school to my home.

Wow. About the job, much more than that I do not know. No thirty, as we journalists say. It's temporary, and probably part-time, and the duties are nebulous. But I can't wait.

Ummm... impressions of New York. Why do New Yorkers have a reputation as being rude and unfriendly? I love New York (obvious enough--you can take the boy out of Brooklyn, but you can't take the Brooklyn out of the boy). But I also love New Yorkers. They're polite, friendly, and cheerful. They don't suffer fools gladly, but they make allowances (sometimes wide ones) for tourists.

Broadway. I keep swearing (or affirming) that I will start blogging about everything we see, on Broadway and elsewhere. But that particular to-do item never bubbles to the top. Well, here are my brief impressions of the three shows we've seen this trip.

Next to Normal: Strong meat. A musical, and not a typical one, about a mother with bipolar disorder (almost certainly bipolar I disorder, for those of you that know the difference and/or care). My quick take is that the show does a great job of showing the ramified nature, and interactions of, brain chemistry and environment. On some level, it's all chemistry (whether you're a reductionist or not). Sometimes, the causes of mood are difficult to tease from the skein of life. Other times, the causes of mood are as obvious as a scream.

The Royal Family: Great fun, but also with its serious elements. About a family based on the Barrymores, it shows that actors are both like the rest of us, and very much unlike some of us. As big a theater buff as I am, I appreciated this distinction. I also understand why The Royal Family is such a popular show with insiders--it's very much like a 1930's version of 30 Rock.

Wishful Drinking: Before I saw this, I thought well, although not often, about Carrie Fisher. Now, I love her. It's true, as one review said, that she's less confessing about her own self than taking a created character (the one that played Princess Leia) and confessing from that perspective. But that self is quite entertaining, and extremely revelatory. Two more points. First, her show (from my lawyerly perspective) is a tribute to two black-letter rules of U.S. law: you can't defame the dead, and truth is an absolute defense to an action for defamation. Second, as she says in the show, if you name something, and own it, it takes much of the power away from that thing.

Well, I have an article (on library job interviewing) to pull, reading to do, and a lunch appointment with a friend of B.'s who is here for the same conference that brings us to New York. A quick 570 words--in 25 minutes, no less!

Later, gentle readers--but hopefully not this much later.

George Carlin, R.I.P.

2008-06-26T16:33:00.003-04:00

I really like this Carlin quote from an interview he did with the Miami Herald in late 2006, quoted in his obituary in the Herald.

Unlike many comedians who "turn it off" when they're not on stage, Carlin's humor wasn't an an act. In an interview with The Miami Herald in late 2006, Carlin ripped through rapid-fire rants that weren't rehearsed, but sounded so.

On his tendency to skewer human behavior, Carlin explained:

"I like people one at a time -- I don't like the f------ grouping. It's when they group that bothers me -- the clotting. People-clotting is what causes the trouble. As soon as it's about eight or 12 guys, they start having a fight song or a f------ slogan, or they give themselves a name and buy baseball hats, or they get jackets with their name on it and they wear little arm bands, and pretty soon they got a list of people they don't like, and pretty soon they're marching over in the park -- and it's a f------ danger. Groups are a danger.

"They sacrifice their individual beauty for the sake of the group. And the loss of the individual is tragic."

Here's the link to the full obituary: http://www.miamiherald.com/511/story/580353.html.

Myanmar

2008-05-16T16:56:00.003-04:00

Do I need to tell you all about what's going on in Myanmar, the former Burma? I mean the repressiveness of the regime before Cyclone Nargis tore through the Irawaddy Delta, but also what the Independent magazine labels that regime's placing "pragmatism before principle" in restricting not only news coverage of the event but any but the most paltry foreign aid. (See the Independent's story here.)

Well, by special request from the person who turned me on to them, here is a video produced by my favorite rock en Español band, Maná, condemning the Myanmar junta:

Watch it. Go to http://uscampaignforburma.org/ to read more, and to add your voice to those who love liberty and despise tyranny.

Please.

Blog It? Why, yes, thanks!

2008-04-17T10:23:00.001-04:00

I'm using Six Apart's new Blog It application on Facebook to blog (again--when I used it last night, it didn't work. We'll see what happens now).

I'll have to do my own HTML formatting, but whaddayawant, egg in your beer?

World AIDS Day

2007-11-30T22:03:00.000-05:00

As many of you know, tomorrow, December 1, is World AIDS Day.

So, in commemoration, I asked my good friend the Squidbag ("Mockery, heady madness, and silver-tongued blasphemies since 2004"!) to design a World AIDS Day logo. The results were intense and disquieting, or, to quote the Song of Solomon 8:6, "strong as death." In other words, perfect.

In memory of my father, Norman Sheldon Silverman, M.D. (1930-2000), zikhrono livrakha, may his memory be for a blessing.

The graphic is Copyright 2007 by the Squidbag. If you'd like to use it, email me and I'll see what I can arrange.

Burnout

2007-11-28T17:09:00.000-05:00

I had an interesting exchange yesterday with my boss Cathay Crosby and the Senior Volunteer who is answering rjdp questions (questions that would ordinarily have to be rejected because their due date is too soon or has passed) during my Senior Ref Admin shift yesterday.

I told hir that sie could claim as many questions as sie wanted to before 10PM, and have up to the "stautory" 24 hours to work on them. (I am using gender-neutral pronouns here to mask the person I am talking about—by convention, one doesn't mention IPL people by name in writing about the IPL, a convention that I violate all too freely with respect to Cathay. Oh well.)

But then Cathay emailed back to me and hir. I usually copy Cathay on my "bureaucratic" IPL email—she's a good check that I'm remembering how it all works. And she has an excellent "feel" for the stuff that's not covered by the rules—as you will see.

She wrote that the Senior Volunteer should only take what sie could answer comfortably during hir shift. Then she wrote "No burning out! The least amount of stress the better!"

This is something that, while my practice as a Ref Admin reflects, I tend to lose sight of. I mean, I'll reject a question because it's over quota or rjdp a question (if there's no rjdp person working) in a heartbeat if I'm busy or if a question is going to require a significant time commitment. Yet I still need to keep in mind—as do we all—that burnout is all too easy to have happen—and all too easy to avoid.

Wise words from Cathay, indeed.

P.S. Sorry about all the jargon, but it should have all been explained here. If not, post a comment or ask a question, and I'll 'splain.

"Natural" history of an IPL question, Part 3

2007-11-21T17:48:00.000-05:00

6. Question Review and Inactivation

This is the last thing that happens to questions (with one very large exception): an IPL staffer reviews the question for content and form (see my previous post). If the question is answered properly, it is inactivated. That is, it is marked so that it can be ignored by people who are working with active IPL questions.

If the question is not answered properly, the IPL staffer makes a careful note of the problem or problems (often, an answer will have more than one problem) the answer has. The staffer notes the problem in hir (also explained previously) inactivation report for that shift. Then someone, usually Cathay Crosby, IPL Assistant Director for User Services, emails the student and lets them know they fouled up. (I don't recall whether the student has to fix the problem or not.)

7. Research

The one major exception to inactivation being the last thing that happens to an IPL question: remember, the IPL's Ask-A-Question service, in addition to being a virtual reference service, is a gigantic experiment-in-process. Individual questions aren't likely to be quoted, but they can be. And in the aggregate, a number of people have written articles making use of IPL statistical data, including Joseph Janes. One example:

Carter, D. S., & Janes, J. (2000). Unobtrusive data analysis of digital reference questions and service at the internet public library: An exploratory study. [Electronic version] Library Trends, 49(2), 251-265.

Well, that's about it. Happy Thanksgiving, everybody!

"Natural" history of an IPL question, Part 2

2007-11-18T21:06:00.000-05:00

4. The Senior Reference Administrator

There's one role I skipped over in my last post, the Senior Reference Administrator ("Senior RA"). The Senior RA has a 24-hour shift, from 10 PM one day to 10 PM the next. The Senior RA supervises the three RAs who have shifts during that 24-hour period. Sie (it's gender-neutral—I'm all about the neologisms) checks in periodically, to make sure that the flow of questions is proceeding properly. If everything is fine, as it almost always is, checking in takes five minutes. If everything is not, it can take up to half an hour or more. Because when everything is not fine, the Senior RA has to either reach out to the RA that has the difficulty or whose shift the difficulty involves (if it's the RA's problem, I tend to just pick up the phone, but if not, I'll usually email), or fix whatever the problem is hirself (ditto on the gender-neutral neologisms). Depending on how badly bollixed up things are, the Senior RA may have to take the RA's shift (which can really wreck your day).

Senior RAs also supervise and mentor their RAs. This is the more delicate and nuanced part of the Senior RA job, but it's also both the harder to describe and the part less relevant to this subject. Being a Senior RA can be fun, and a breeze, or it can be a challenge—sometimes both on the same shift.

(I currently have one Senior RA shift, and one RA shift under another Senior RA.)

5. The Student's Role

This is the meat of the IPL question-answering process, or, at least, the part that the IPL user mostly sees. The student looks at the subject (usually set by the RA), looks at the whole question if the subject is interesting, and then claims the question. This starts the clock ticking: a student (as with IPL volunteers, RAs, etc.) has 24 hours to answer a question once sie claims it, unless sie requests additional time.

Students have two different types of criteria they must follow in answering an IPL question, content and form. These overlap to a certain extent.

For content, for example, answers should not rely on one source (although, as with anything, there are exceptions to this: if someone asks "Does Oklahoma still have a criminal syndicalism law on the books?", there's no point in providing two different routes to the official Oklahoma state statutes on the Web). The answer should also explain to the user how the material that answers the user's question was found (ordinarily, the user doesn't get the answer given to them, though again, guess what, there are exceptions).

For form, there are four basic parts to an IPL answer: the salutation ("Greetings from the IPL," for example), an acknowledgment of the question, the answer, with the most specific URLs possible, and the closing.

Okay, it's 9:40 PM on Sunday night... question review and inactivations will have to wait for next week.

(Hopefully, this post can be counted as part of the week of November 14....)

2007-11-18T18:16:00.000-05:00

Playwright August Wilson's Jitney--by North Miami, FL's M Ensemble--is an slice of urban Pittsburgh verite, circa 1977. Go see it, if you can.

2007-11-17T20:43:00.001-05:00

Melissa Etheridge RAWKS!
No thirty!

Harry Crews

2007-11-16T09:42:00.000-05:00

A very nice classmate of mine, who remembered that I was a Harry Crews fan, sent me a link to a column in the St. Petersburg Times, my favorite paper when I lived in Sarasota (the Sarasota and Bradenton papers were mediocre, and the Tampa Tribune endorsed George H. W. Bush for president in 1992) about one of my favorite authors, Harry Crews, written by excellent NPR commentator and FSU professor Diane Roberts (relative of, inter alii, former Florida Supreme Court Justice B.K. Roberts, author of the court's decisions in the Virgil Hawkins cases, and that link is to another excellent St. Petersburg Times column by the esteemed Martin Dyckman... but I digress—repeatedly).

(It's funny, having classmates who know my predilections, but whom I've never met and may never meet.)

The purpose of this blog post, however, is to relate my humorous Harry Crews anecdote.

I went to law school at the FSU College of Law (whose main building is named "B. K. Roberts Hall"—and people wonder why I'm not a proud FSU alumn?). I was on my way home to South Florida with a good friend. I became peckish as we were approaching Gainesville. I remembered that there was then a kosher delicatessen in Gainesville, conveniently near I-75.

So my friend and I stopped to get corned beef sandwiches. (My friend is from St. Lucia—I don't think she'd ever eaten Jewish-style corned beef before.) We were in line after ordering, waiting for our sandwiches, when a very worn-out looking man and a younger, good-looking woman got in line. The man had a strong Southern accent, but obviously knew a lot about Judaism—he was explaining some things to the woman. I looked at him, and a little light bulb went off in my mind. I said "Excuse me, but would you happen to be Harry Crews?" He said "I would."

I gushed for a few minutes, telling him how much I liked (for instance) A Feast of Snakes. He was polite, friendly, and gracious—a heck of a nice guy.

Then I had a bright idea: why not get his autograph. But what could I ask him to sign? I didn't have any of his books with me, and I wanted his autograph on something significant.

So I got his autograph on a Sammy's Kosher Deli menu.

2007-11-15T11:05:00.001-05:00

And now I can blog on the go two ways--but only 160 characters at a time. I really need to set up email on my phone.

Well this is a test...

2007-11-15T10:28:00.001-05:00

Well this is a test of using jott to do moblogging. We'll see what happens. listen

Powered by Jott

"Natural" history of an IPL question

2007-11-07T14:23:00.000-05:00

A friend who submitted a question after my most recent post kindly forwarded me the answer to his question (I don't get to see very many answers in their final form, as they are sent to users). And in talking to him about the process, I realized that there isn't really a description of the natural history of an IPL question in one place. Students who answer IPL questions have some perspective, and Reference Administrators and Senior Reference Administrators (and IPL staff and researchers) understand the whole process, but users certainly don't get the whole thing.

So here are a few of the steps an IPL question goes through; I'll finish up in my next post.

1. The Form

First, the form. Adults enter their questions on the adults' form; kids under 13 on the kids' form. The user enters a lot of information about the question--but not everything.

2. The Subject

But the subject of the question is set automatically--it's the first 60 characters of the text of the question. This can cause problems, because the subject of the question is the first thing (often the only thing) that a student considering answering a question sees.

Take my friend's question as an example. He asked a fascinating, complicated question. But like a lot of people (but not everyone), he realized that a real person would be looking at and answering his question. So he included a lot of social language at the beginning of his question. For example (and I'm making this up): "You know, I would find it really interesting to know how many professional football players have died from heart attacks during practice or games." But that would leave QRC (the database which processes IPL questions and in which IPL questions are stored) to make the following as a subject: "You know, I would find it really interesting to know how man". Oops! Hard for an IPL student to know what to make of this question.

3. The Reference Administrator

Here's where the Reference Administrator (often abbreviated "Ref Admin" or "RA") comes in. The Ref Admin is supposed to do a number of things. First, the Ref Admin determines if the question should be rejected for any one of a number of reasons. If answering the question (for example) requires legal, medical, or tax advice, asks more than one question (unless the same sources will answer all the questions), is in a foreign language or asks a question that has to be answered in a foreign language, the question gets rejected.

Assuming that the question is accepted, the RA also decides which of two categories the question will be assigned to: factual or sources questions. The RA sends an acceptance email to the user, and transfers the question to the correct category.

But the most important task the RA accomplishes is to rewrite the subject of the question, if necessary. And it is almost always necessary, unless the question is so short that the subject caught it all.

Okay, that's enough for right now. Next post I'll finish up and talk about the students' role and question review and inactivation.

Now's your chance to have your questions answered...

2007-10-29T17:21:00.000-04:00

...by professionals, or at least pre-professionals.

The IPL, which those of you reading this blog as part of Professor Mon's Virtual Reference Environments class already know about, and those of you who aren't probably wish I'd shut the heck up about already (sorry, there's another six weeks or so in the semester), is at a particularly busy part of the semester for students in introduction to reference librarianship classes at participating schools of information/library and information science (Drexel, FSU, Michigan, Illinois, University of Western Ontario, and a few others I'm missing), who need to answer questions as part of their classwork.

They need questions to answer, and based on what I saw during today's IPL Ref Admin shift, we're hurting for questions like we never have before in my experience. Cathay (my excellent boss) even told me to move questions that were due tomorrow into the to-be-answered question categories, which I've never done before (ordinarily, questions due in the next 48 hours are handled specially or rejected).

Which brings me to my point: if you have an interesting reference question that you would like a more-or-less-substantive answer to (you'll probably be directed to sources that will answer your question, not the answer itself) from a specially trained student librarian--especially if you don't need an answer in the next 48 hours--now would be a good time to submit the question to the IPL's Ask-A-Question service.

Adults and teens, submit your questions here. Children under 13 (do I have any preadult readers? Zounds!), submit your questions here.

I know my non-class readers (and many of my classmates) are a trivial, curious bunch. C'mon--give 'til it hurts.

And let me know what happens! Post a comment about your experience.

Saving up posting material...

2007-10-26T15:43:00.000-04:00

...is never a good idea, because the circumstances which lead you to want to write about whatever it was may change abruptly.

For instance: I had been planning on posting here about my increasing feelings, with respect to the IPL, of being overwhelmed. Because I had thought that my project for Virtual Reference Environments (VRE) were insufficient, or might be, I wrote to Cathay Crosby, my boss at the IPL (whom you've been introduced to if you read the story about the IPL in the Philadelphia Weekly--go ahead and read it, I'll wait) about my workload.

Okay, back from reading the article? Good.

I emailed Cathay and wrote something about how Cathay was going to have to let me do inactivations (inactivate IPL questions that have been answered, after checking them to make sure the answers conform to standard IPL content and form guidelines) or some such if she took away one of my two IPL Ref Admin shifts (one of which I was just covering, during my Senior Ref Admin shift), as I needed them, or so I thought, for my project for VRE.

Cathay wrote back to me and told me that an IPL staff meeting, the staff unanimously agreed that I could do inactivations--which days of the week were good for me?

Which is a good example of being careful what you (sort of) ask for.

But for several weeks I had been unable to start doing inactivations, because of various schedule conflicts. And as I had been anticipating doing them--they're a large time commitment--I had been feeling under pressure with the amount of work I've had to do. I had also realized that my wife (who, after various antisemitic comments on this blog directed at her similar to this one directed at me, and written before I turned anonymous commenting off, will not be mentioned by name) would be shortchanged by my having to do inactivations while she was home. She would have dealt with it, but I would have felt bad.

So, with trepidation and self-disappointment in my heart, I called Cathay, told her that I was honored by being selected to do inactivations--so far above the pay grade of even a Senior Ref Admin, told her I was enjoying my current level of IPL involvement, and asked her if it would be okay if I didn't start doing inactivations after all?

And this is why I like working for Cathay so much: she told me it was okay. Whew.

Where does this connect to this post's title? Well, I had planned to post about this around the time it happened (earlier this month), even though my sense of being overwhelmed had subsided. And then the other shoe dropped--my second Ref Admin shift did get taken away from me (last week). So much for being whelmed, let alone overwhelmed. (And yes, I know, "whelm" is a real word, and doesn't make sense being used this way.)

So I emailed Prof. Mon, explained what had happened, and asked if my project was still okay. She said yes: whew again.

Which is why I say (principally to myself) don't store this stuff up. Revenge may be a dish best served cold, but (glib) introspection (wry grin) is better served at body temperature.

Article about the IPL

2007-10-17T17:45:00.000-04:00

Alternative newspaper Philadelphia Weekly has an article this week about the Internet Public Library, in which I am quoted. The article is at:

http://www.philadelphiaweekly.com/articles/15667

More about the question that gave rise to the quotation later, perhaps—I have to make sure it's okay to talk about.

Institutional Review Board Review and the Independent Scholar, Part II

2007-10-13T17:21:00.000-04:00

Or, Recursive Lawyering (finding a lawyer by calling a lawyer)

There's one issue I didn't address in my discussion of independent scholars and human research/IRB review.

(Nothing in this post is legal advice, nor does it establish an attorney-client relationship between you and me.)

I mention finding a lawyer skilled in institutional review board (IRB) and human research issues. But how do you find a lawyer with that kind of experience? Here are three suggestions. The first two are likely to find such a lawyer with the appropriate experience, but less likely to find one who will be available to work for you. The last one is likely to find a lawyer who will be available to work for you, but will be less likely (I think) to find a lawyer with thee necessary experience.

A. Call the general counsel's office at a local university that has an IRB. Ask a lawyer in the general counsel's office with IRB/human research experience for a referral, as it is unlikely that the lawyer in the general counsel's office will be able to help you directly.

B. Call a professor at a local university that is on its IRB. (The office of the university provost, its chief academic officer, should be able to give you the name of a professor who's on its IRB.) Ask the professor for a referral to a lawyer outside the university, as it is unlikely that the university's lawyer will be able to help you directly.

C. Call the American Bar Association (ABA) or your state or local bar association. (Some states, like New York, do not have integrated bar associations, that is, bar associations to which all lawyers must belong.)

In the ABA case, get the name of an officer or board member of the Section of Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice. In the state or local bar association case, ask for the name of an officer or board member of its administative law section. (Do not let the bar association refer you to a lawyer referral service, as such a service is unlikely to help with such a specific request.)

Call that officer or director, tell them you need a specific kind of administrative lawyer, and describe what you're looking for. They should be able to give you (or get you, after some research of their own) a name or a few.

Institutional Review Board Review and the Independent Scholar

2007-10-13T13:12:00.000-04:00

(This started as a discussion board post for Professor Mon's Virtual Reference Environments class, and metastasized into a blog post.)

First of all, let me state that this post is not meant to disagree or take exception whatsoever to Professor Mon's post about IRB review.

(Let me also apologize in advance that this post reads like it was written by a lawyer. That's because it was. Nonetheless, nothing in this article is legal advice, nor does it establish an attorney-client relationship between you and me.)

That said, there is the issue of how one would deal with the requirement of IRB review were one an independent or quasi-independent scholar, say, a situation that those of us who work in non-academic libraries but who wish to publish research involving human subjects may find ourselves in.

First, I found a post on the Georgetown Law Faculty blog by Professor Rebecca Tushnet that deals with the free-speech implications of mandatory IRB review. In Virginia, Va. Code §32.1-162.19, "Human research review committees," requires that any person doing human research must affiliate themselves with an institution with an IRB, and must obtain IRB approval for their research. (The post is at:

http://tinyurl.com/2tzzht

(full URL:
http://gulcfac.typepad.com/georgetown_university_law/2006/10/institutional_r.html
)

The comments to the blog post are also thoughtful and well-written, if you are interested in the subject of the First Amendment and institutional review. One poster references a Harvard Law Review article on the borders of First Amendment protection, Frederick Schauer's The Boundaries of the First Amendment: A Preliminary Exploration of Constitutional Salience, 117 Harv. L. Rev. 1765 (2004). As the commenter writes, "There, Schauer discusses the range of regulated behaviors involving speech that simply do not (yet) command FA [First Amendment] attention."

Second, a cursory review of the Florida Statutes (my home state, the state in which I am am member of the Bar, and the state in which FSU is located) does not show a similar statute. (There are statutes that require IRB review, but only for research performed with state Department of Health funding, see Fla. Stat. §§381.85-381.86.) This is not to deny, of course, that as FSU students, we are subject to the jurisdiction of FSU's IRB.

As well, as Professor Mon points out, we are contractually bound to follow Linden Labs' Terms of Service with respect to obtaining permission to use SL conversations or wholesale posting of logs. As those of us who read Judge Easterbrook's decision in ProCD v. Zeidenberg, 86 F.3d 1447 (1996) in Intro to Info Policy will recall, just because all you did to assent to the SL TOS is click on a dialog box, you did legally assent to those terms.

But this in turn points to a way around the independent scholar problem, if one somewhat difficult in practice to apply. As a poster to the Chronicle of Higher Education's discussion boards points out, while s/he is not affiliated and cannot therefore clear hir(1) research with an IRB, s/he was able to protect hirself via contractual arrangments with hir research subjects. See:

http://tinyurl.com/3b4phl

(full URL:
http://chronicle.com/forums/index.php/topic,42370.msg695167.html#msg695167
)

As long as one keeps in mind "the ethical principles fort [sic] the protection of human subjects in research as set forth in the Belmont Report of the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research (1979) (http://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/humansubjects/guidance/belmont.htm)" (http://www.research.fsu.edu/humansubjects/), principally respect for persons, beneficence, and justice, and one has one's release drafted by a lawyer in your jurisdiction well-acquainted with human research issues (and, for that matter, has one's plan of research also reviewed by that same lawyer), one should (in theory) be able to address the necessary protections.

Unless you're in Virginia, in which case you should probably find a co-author who's a) affiliated with an institution with an IRB, and b) knowledgeable about filling out IRB applications.

1. "Hir" is a gender-free third-person singular pronoun; read "his or her."

IT Humor

2007-10-10T17:59:00.001-04:00

From Web comic XKCD, http://xkcd.com/327/, "Exploits of a Mom."

Heinlein on Librarians

2007-10-10T14:52:00.000-04:00

Librarians are important. Robert Heinlein, that Mozart of science fiction, once postulated that librarians of the future would become the most essential people in the galaxy, for only they, because of their special skills, would have the ability to gather, organize, and provide access to the infinitely scattered keys to wisdom. (Forbes 1998, 211).

Forbes, D. H. (1998). Destination library. In James V. Carmichael, Jr. (Ed.). Daring to find our names: The search for lesbigay library history. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

My Virtual Reference Environments Project, Part II

2007-10-05T10:47:00.001-04:00

Part II of my project for Virtual Reference Environments (VRE) involves that little box with the IPL logo you can see above, and in my previous picture of my avatar in Second Life (SL).

That box is a LibMon, short for Library Monitor. It lets you link from the box to Web sites outside SL—very easily. It was designed and built, and is updated frequently, by SL user bucky Barkley. It can be licensed for free for nonprofit or educational use, and inexpensively for for-profit use.

My project is to set a LibMon up, for the Second Life LawSpot Library on Info Island (which is where this snapshot was taken), that will link to the legal resources available at the IPL. Once the Patent, Copyright, and Trademark FARQ that I have revised (and which will have a new name) gets put up at the IPL Web site, then I'll be able to complete this project quickly.

My Virtual Reference Environments Project, Part I

2007-09-28T18:01:00.000-04:00

Part I of my Virtual Reference Environments (VRE, one of my classes for Fall 2007) project consists of my IPL work, which consists of the following:

Two Reference Administrator shifts per week, covering one shift as part of #2, below: 12PM-5PM on Monday, and 10PM Monday-12PM Tuesday.
One Senior Reference Administrator shift per week (10PM Monday-10PM Tuesday).
Starting Monday, October 8, I will be doing inactivations one day a week.
Serving as VRE IPL Reference Team Leader, which includes, inter alia...
Mentor my fellow students in whatever aspects of the IPL: reference, collection development, including my smattering of HTML and my hopefully soon-to-improve Hypatia (the IPL's collection management database system) skills, I can that they need.

Just in case I haven't explained what IPL Reference Administrators and Senior Reference Administrators do, and what inactivations are, here goes.

Reference Administrators do the gruntwork that keeps the IPL going. We look at questions when they come into the IPL. Do we have too many questions already? (Are we at quota—usually 15 unclaimed questions?) If so, we sometimes reject the questions, or answer them ourselves, or leave the questions for others (not students) to answer.

We decide if they're suitable for the IPL: Does the message have more than one question? Is it a personal question? Would answering the question require giving professional—legal, medical, or accounting—advice? Should the question have been directed to the user's local library? And so on. If not suitable, we reject the questions.

We make sure that the question's title accurately reflects the question. Then we sort the questions into two categories (factual or sources questions).

Senior Reference Administrators (lightly) supervise Ref Admins, filling in as necessary when their Ref Admins are unavailable (which is seldom). We also answer such questions as our Ref Admins ask that we don't have to pass on to the IPL staff.

"Inactivations" means I'll be evaluating student-answered questions for proper IPL content (e.g., two sources, search strategy explained) and form (e.g., all six question elements present), inactivating the correct questions, and reporting the incorrect questions to the rest of the team, so that Cathay can handle the necessary feedback. This is not part of my role as a Ref Admin or Senior Ref Admin; in fact, this is a task usually handled by IPL staff. I made the mistake [sic] of asking Cathay about it when I thought I might lose one or both Ref Admin shifts, and wanted to make sure I would have sufficient activity for my project.

No thirty—Part II of my project (early) next week.

More Second Life

2007-09-28T16:10:00.000-04:00

This is my avatar, Mitchell Stransky, standing in the Second Life LawSpot Library on Info Island.

That box with the IPL logo on the floor next to me is part two of my project for Virtual Reference Environments, about which more anon.

Some notes about IPL process

2007-09-16T21:35:00.000-04:00

In my experience as a student, Reference Administrator and Senior Reference Administrator at the Internet Public Library's (IPL) Ask-A-Question service, I have found the documentation of what I should do to answer questions properly to be first rate. But one area where there's little documentation is how to answer questions—the mechanical process one goes through.

Well, since August 1 I have answered 16 questions, so figure that since January I have answered roughly 54 questions (.36 questions/day plus 4 as a student). In answering those 54 questions I've come up with a definite technique, although I just took some steps to formalize it last Monday (2007/09/10), for the "Slam the Boards" event.

I. TextPad

The first part of my method: a text editor. You can use Notepad, which comes with Windows, but if you're a Windows user you should check out TextPad, at http://www.textpad.com/. Very flexible, can spell-check your text, edit multiple files at once, save workspaces (sets of files). It supports macros and syntax highlighting, which is not so useful for the IPL but works wonders for that HTML/CSS or VBScript project you've been thinking about (both of which I have used TextPad to code in). It's true shareware, which is to say that you can use it forever without licensing it (although I have paid for it).

Any time I answer an IPL question that's more complicated than a rejection, a FARQ, or a PF, I write and edit it in TextPad. And I usually save a copy of the answer—without the question, to preserve confidentiality—to my local IPL folder.

II. Clipmate

The second part of my method over the months has been ClipMate, http://www.clipmate.com/. ClipMate is an insanely useful program; I probably use it more than any other single program. ClipMate is, as its Web site says, "a better clipboard." ClipMate works with your Windows clipboard, making a copy of whatever you put on the clipboard and keeping it around for later pasting. But also, ClipMate lets you set up clip libraries, from which you can put whatever you like onto the clipboard with a few keystrokes and paste it wherever you like.

ClipMate is relatively reasonably priced, at $34.95 (I originally bought it because it makes repetitive drafting, as with contracts and wills, much easier), and you can try it for free for 30 days.

Here's a screen shot of ClipMate in action, set to my "IPL Templates" collection, which is what ClipMate calls a separate preassembled set of clips.

How do I use ClipMate when answering IPL questions? First, I copy any URLs or text I come across in researching a question, which puts those text clips into ClipMate for later use. But second, there's my "IPL Templates" collection. I did not set this up until Monday—until then, I would either use the Quick Answer template or, for instance, open an old question and use it as a template. But then I realized, especially since the "Slam the Boards" event would involve answering a lot of questions, that I really should set things up right.

So I finally collected a bunch of templates: an opening template ("Greetings from the IPL! Thank you for your question about 'X'."), a closing template ("You may also wish to contact the reference desk "in person" at your local public library. Don't forget to use and support your public libraries! Please write back to us if we can be of further assistance. Thank you for asking the IPL!"), several different answer templates, and the templates I used for quota and rjdp answers during the Slam the Boards event.

How can this help you? Well, I'm going to link to two things from this blog post. First, here is an XML file I've exported from ClipMate. If you use ClipMate, just import this file into it, and you'll have the same setup I do. Second, here is a text file (open it in your favorite text editor) that has the same content as the ClipMate XML file, just set up to be used without ClipMate. All the clips--the individual clipboard copies--are in the text file.

If you have any questions about how this all works, if I've been insufficiently clear, please email me and I'll post a followup answering your question.

September 11

2007-09-11T21:45:00.001-04:00

Graphic by The Squidbag.

Fun Home

2007-09-10T09:56:00.000-04:00

Alison Bechdel's autobiographical graphic novel Fun Home: A Tragicomic is today's featured article on Wikipedia's main page. (Here is a permanent link to today's main page.)

I have written about Fun Home, and attempts at censorship of it, elsewhere in this blog. (According to Wikipedia, the library that had temporarily censored Fun Home has returned the book to the library.) And as many of you know, memoir is an interest of mine. (I wrote my New College thesis about watching my father get sick and die of AIDS.) Fun Home is a complex story about two people, Bechdel and her father, who were both more different and more similar than either knew. It blew my mind when I first read it (after checking it out of my local library), and I liked it even more when I recently re-read it. I recommend it highly.

An Explanation

2007-09-10T09:41:00.000-04:00

With respect to my belligerent tone about my Second Life avatar (and yes, I know that's a Wikipedia link) wearing a yarmulke, a Jewish skullcap, I should explain, or at least point to the source of, my attitude.

I posted something of a political nature on my blog (since retracted—it's a long story). I had neglected to turn off anonymous posting. As a result, I received some... unappetizing comments. For instance, this one. Nice, huh?

Second Life

2007-09-09T16:58:00.000-04:00

On Second Life, I am Mitchell Stransky. (That's me above.) IM me!

(And yes, my avatar is wearing a yarmulke—what's your point? I'm a proud member of the Second Life Synagogue.)

"Slam the Boards" event--Monday 2007/09/10

2007-09-09T15:25:00.000-04:00

Librarian Bill Pardue has proposed a "Slam the Boards" event for Monday 9/10, to great acclaim and acceptance. (He set up a wiki devoted to the idea; the page with the announcement is at http://answerboards.wetpaint.com/page/Slam+the+Boards%21.) The idea is that librarians (or, in my case, library students) will go to a Web site with an "ask-a-question" service (Wikipedia's Reference Desk and the Internet Public Library's Ask-A-Question service being two examples), and provide added value by using their professional skills to answer questions to professional standards (as opposed to the hit-or-miss manner in which some of these services' questions are answered).

I, and several of my IPL Reference Team teammates from Professor Mon's Virtual Reference Environments class will be participating in "Slam the Boards." I will be "slamming," inter alius vicis, during my IPL Ref Admin shift on Monday. We are supposed to answer as many questions as possible, so the slammers will be answering questions that would ordinarily be rejected because their due dates are too soon ("rjdp," instead of the Ref Admin who usually answers rjdp questions) or that would ordinarily be rejected because the IPL received too many questions ("quota").

I urge anyone who participates in "Slam the Boards" to go and sign up on the wiki to indicate that they're participating.

Government Secrets

2007-09-02T15:43:00.000-04:00

There's an excellent article in the Naples Daily News today (where I am, on vacation), about the troubling trend towards secrecy on the part of the federal government. OpenTheGovernment.org, a coalition of 67 organizations, has compiled a report, Government Secrecy: Decisions Without Democracy 2007, detailing how the George W. Bush administration has increased secrecy and decreased public oversight of government. (Interestingly, the Naples Daily News article doesn't attribute the secrecy directly to the current administration until the ninth paragraph of the story.) Here's a link to the story (at forbes.com, originally from the AP). Here's a link to OpenTheGovernment.org's press release. Here's a link to OpenTheGovernment.org's report.

The state secrets privilege was first recognized in United States v. Reynolds, 345 U.S. 1 (1953), which, like other legal notions arbitrarily imported from English law (e.g., obscenity, with Regina v. Hicklin, L. R. 3 Q. B. 360) don't necessarily apply, or shouldn't, in the U.S. There's no obscenity exception in the First Amendment, so why should there be an obscenity exception to the First Amendment? Take that, textualists! As well, Reynolds was probably decided incorrectly on the facts: when the accident reports about the plane crash that was the subject of Reynolds were declassified, it turned out that there were, in fact, no state secrets implicated in the case. See Hampton Stephens' March 14, 2003 article "Supreme Court Filing claims Air Force, government fraud in 1953 case: Case could affect 'state secrets' privilege," from Inside the Air Force, reprinted at the Federation of American Scientists Web site.

The same trend is, fortunately, not apparent in Florida—Charlie Crist, as South Florida radio talk show host Jim DeFede has said, is shaping up to be the best Democratic governor Florida has had for a while. His first executive order was to establish an Office of Open Government, and he's also established an Open Government Commission. See an article about Crist's open government efforts, on the Government Technology Web site.

Virtual Reference Environments, Week 1, Redux

2007-09-02T00:21:00.000-04:00

First, a link to Professor Lorri Mon's individual FSU Web page (apropos to my comment about the lameness of the deep-linking unfriendliness of FSU CI's Faculty Profile page).

I'm also supposed to list the roles I've taken on in Virtual Reference Environments (henceforth, "VRE"). We have four teams in the class; each team will support an area of the Internet Public Library (http://www.ipl.org), a virtual library with which I have already become involved, starting with the Introduction to Information Services (Introduction to Reference Librarianship, to you laypeople) class I took my first semester.

We will have four teams in VRE: an IPL Collections Team, an IPL Reference Team, an IPL Education Team, and an IPL Community Outreach Team. We split up into teams during our first class, and we were given an opportunity to switch teams halfway through, if we wanted to be on two teams. (I had already decided to take advantage of my continuous partial attention, and the two monitors on my desktop computer, and attended the chat sessions of both teams all the way through.) I joined the Reference team and the Collections team. I have relevant IPL experience for both teams: I am a Senior Reference Administrator with the IPL, supervising other Reference Administrators, and I am working on updating an IPL FARQ (Frequently Asked Reference Questions) Web page.

As for roles: I volunteered to be Reference Team Leader, and will continue to serve as a Senior Reference Administrator, and will also serve again as a Reference Administrator starting on Monday 9/10/07. (Reference Administrator is one of the VRE IPL Reference Team roles.) As for the Collections team, I will serve as a researcher and Web designer (I can hack a bit of CSS and HTML).

I've had a lot of fun since April, as an IPL volunteer. I hope and expect that VRE will also be as much fun.

@Wheeeee!

2007-09-02T00:16:00.000-04:00

I am now and forevermore msilverman@alum.ncf.edu—and I am now a member of the New College Facebook network.

2007-08-31T16:22:00.000-04:00

Test email

IPL Issues

2007-08-29T21:46:00.000-04:00

Well, it looks like I'll be blogging a bit more here, as I have to blog on a weekly basis for one of my classes, Virtual Reference Environments with FSU College of Information Professor Lorri Mon. (I've just realized that the FSU College of Information faculty profile page doesn't support linking to an individual professor as a document fragment—how lame is that?)

My first post on this subject, and I'm not sure this counts for class, but what the heck, is about something that's been bothering me about the IPL. That, specifically, is what it means to supervise people in an environment like the IPL, and how to go about it. One of the Reference Administrators I supervise had some problems early in my tenure as a Senior Reference Administrator (the RA has a work shift right during her IPL shift, which must be very awkward). That RA has improved markedly, though, and according to my supervisor, I get to take credit for that. Okay, sure. The important thing is, there has been improvement.

But two of my three RAs consistently do not send in their shift logs. I have tried reminding them, mostly without success. Have I not been persistent enough? Should I remind them each week? What is my responsibility here? More importantly, what is the right thing for me to do?

Perhaps I'll ask my supervisor.

Retraction, Part 2

2007-06-22T15:18:00.000-04:00

I have also retracted my complaint letter to the RIAA. (See the retraction I posted on my blog, at http://the_scrivener.blogspot.com/2007/06/retraction.html.)

The thumbnail of my retraction letter is here. The PDF of the retraction letter is here.

A Retraction

2007-06-22T14:35:00.000-04:00

It has come to my attention that noncommercial copying of digital music recordings may not be an infringement under Title 17 of the U.S. Code, "Copyrights." I apologize for any confusion I may have caused or any mistaken impression I may have given.

Copyright is Dead, Part 2

2007-06-21T11:58:00.001-04:00

The original contents of this post have been removed, as they may not have contained all pertinent information. That information was not necessarily available to me, or to the public.

It has come to my attention that noncommercial copying of digital music recordings may not be an infringement under Title 17 of the U.S. Code, "Copyrights." I apologize for any confusion I may have caused or any mistaken impression I may have given.

Please see the retraction I have published on my blog, at http://the_scrivener.blogspot.com/2007/06/retraction.html.

Copyright is Dead

2007-06-21T11:56:00.000-04:00

An Open Letter to the Squidbag

2007-05-12T16:44:00.000-04:00

Dear Garrett,

I just tried, and I cannot give this question either a short or a simple answer.

I am by upbringing and inclination both a Reconstructionist Jew, which is to say that I believe Judaism is a civilization and am suspicious of the notion of "chosenness," and a humanistic Jew, which is to say that I am a Jewish (as opposed to secular) humanist, a Jewish rationalist as opposed to a Jewish traditionalist (i.e., one who believes in Jewish law first) or mysticist. (As the Reconstructionist Jewish saying has it, "the past gets a vote, but not a veto"). I am also a Jewish feminist and feminist Jew, which is why we usually (though we forgot this year) have an orange at the center of our seder plate (see http://www.miriamscup.com/Heschel_orange.htm). Of course, being a Jewish feminist goes along with being a Reconstructionist/humanistic Jew: in 1978, when I was bar mitzvahed, a female rabbi officiated. I didn't do it as a political statement, but I'm darn glad now that I did, for political, religious, and spiritual reasons.

And I am a Reconstructionist who in one way differs with Reconstructionist theology: to Reconstructionists, the group—the synagogue and its members, with guidance, but no veto, from its rabbi, for instance—decides matters of religious practice. I agree with the Reform movement, in thinking that the individual decides.

As far as religious belief, Judaism is much more about orthopraxy—right practice—than about "orthodoxy," the name of the Jewish movement to the contrary. "Israel," the name Jacob was given after he fought with the angel, means "to wrestle with God," which is who the angel really was. It's perfectly okay in Judaism (even Orthodox Judaism) to doubt God, as long as you pray three times a day—four on Shabbos.

Want more? Allow me to quote from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanistic_Judaism:

In some ways, the principles of belief of Humanistic Judaism are similar to those of many within Reconstructionist Judaism, with its emphasis on retaining Jewish identity while accepting a scientific, materialist worldview and a Dewey-like ethical outlook. However, Humanistic Judaism presents a far more radical departure from traditional Jewish religion than Mordecai Kaplan ever envisioned. Kaplan redefined God and other traditional religious terms so as to make them consistent with the materialist outlook, and continued to use traditional prayer language. [Rabbi Sherwin] Wine [founder of Humanistic Judaism], rejected this approach as confusing, since participants could ascribe to these words whatever definitions they favored. Wine strove to achieve philosophical consistency and stability by creating rituals and ceremonies that were purely non- theistic. Services were created for Shabbat, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and other Jewish holidays and festivals, often with reinterpretation of the meaning of the holiday to bring it into conformity with Secular Humanistic philosophy.

I am (mostly) a Humanistic Jew in my beliefs, but a Reconstructionist Jew in my practices, who usually goes to Conservative synagogues. This is because the one Reconstructionist synagogue around here—the one at which I was bar mitzvahed—no longer has the sense of community that it did then, and until about five years ago, and because the rabbi I feel closest to is the Argentinean Conservative rabbi—there is a well-respected Conservative seminary in Buenos Aires—at my wife's old synagogue in her hometown in Colombia. Not that I hold him responsible for any of this.

Oh, I guess there is one short way I can express my religious and spiritual views. I had come up with something similar, a while ago, but then I found this quote, which expresses my belief so much better than I did. As the late Prime Minister of Israel (and Milwaukee native) Golda Meir put it, "I believe in the Jewish people, and the Jewish people believe in God."

And not that button-slogans are a good basis for theological/spiritual positions, but I once owned a button that said "Militant Agnostic: I don't know, and you don't, either!" I'm also a First Amendment absolutist (see this for my take on the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment): as a friend of mine once said, it's hard to separate religious beliefs from everything else.

How's that?

YHOS,
Mitch

The Squidbag wrote:
Subject: People of Faith and Otherwise
> ...which I think is mostly a matter of degree.
>
> Hello, people who semi-regularly read my blog. I am
> doing a quick and dirty little survey, which will seem
> weird to some of you, but I would appreciate an
> answer, even if it's an "I decline to answer."
>
> If you would, please favor me with a response to the
> question, "How would you define yourself, limited to
> the simplest explanation possible, spiritually?"
>
> I am getting accused in emails of having an
> "atheistic" readership, and while I think that's maybe
> three of you, I think the rest are other things. I
> would like to know what the numbers actually are. So,
> quick as you can manage, please let me know.
>
> I will be doing an entry about this, making a point,
> but I will not connect anyone's responses to their
> names, and I may not even make a list, unless I can
> make it interesting.
>
> Hope all of you are well.
>
> Thanks,
>
> G.
>
>

Public Libraries: Censorship and Intellectual Freedom, a Minoritarian View

2007-01-22T14:45:00.000-05:00

(This is a version of a short essay written for one of my classes at the Florida State University College of Information, "Introduction to Information Professions," with Dr. Renee Franklin.)

Censorship, while a problem in all types of libraries, is especially a problem in public libraries. A major role of public libraries is to inform and entertain the entire community in which the public library resides. A political reality of public libraries is that funding of the public library is in the hands of the people who reside in that community. (Some—I contend principally the censors and their allies—view funding as a means of political control.) In censorship cases in public libraries, these two realities are directly in conflict.

A case study in censorship is Alison Bechdel's book Fun Home: a Family Tragicomic. Bechdel's book was reviewed in the New York Times Book Review. The review notes that

Bechdel's slim yet Proustian graphic memoir, "Fun Home," must be the most ingeniously compact, hyper-verbose example of autobiography to have been produced. It is a pioneering work, pushing two genres (comics and memoir) in multiple new directions, with panels that combine the detail and proficiency of R. Crumb with a seriousness, emotional complexity and innovation completely its own. (Wilsey 2006)

Bechdel's memoir (which I recently read, after checking it out unfettered from my local library) contains discussion of adult themes in a manner appropriate to a young adult, and of a nature that might well prove beneficial to a young adult. As a transgendered formerly female friend of mine, who used to self-identify as a lesbian, puts it, "I grew up in a vacuum, and Alison Bechdel's work was one of the few [queer-positive materials] that was findable... that portrayed its characters as more than just their sexualities.... Her characters are open about what they are." My friend could relate to Bechdel's characters, who [in Bechdel's independent, syndicated comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For] are a full spectrum of the lesbian community, and portrayed aspects of that community—including their disagreements—in a way that no one else did. (E. L. I. Knapp, personal communication, January 17, 2007) (Note)

Fun Home does include explicit content, primarily, images of two women making love. But given the above, Fun Home has serious literary, artistic and political value (this is the Miller test, after the Supreme Court case Miller v. California that currently defines obscenity in the U.S.), and would no doubt pass muster to a higher level of scrutiny.

And yet Fun Home is, predictably, being censored.

"My concern does not lie with the content of the [graphic] novels [Fun Home and Craig Thompson's Blankets]. Rather my concern is with the illustrations and their availability to children and the community," said [Marshall, MO] resident Louise Mills, during a recent public hearing. "Does this community want our public library to continue to use tax dollars to purchase pornography?" (Twiddy 2006)

The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund and the National Coalition Against Censorship jointly sent a letter to the Marshall Public Library's chief librarian, Amy Crump, at the beginning of this controversy, defending Fun Home and Blankets. (Comic Book Legal Defense Fund 2006)

The library board has since removed the two books from circulation while it develops a collections policy. (Twiddy 2006)

There are, as Rubin implies in chapter 9, two models of the library as educator of youth. The first is the majoritarian, control-oriented model, intended to protect young minds from malign influences. The second is the liberal, critical thinking-oriented model, intended to help youth to appreciate the wide variety of perspectives in the world. (Rubin 2004, pp. 399-400) Rubin's models here deal with schools and school library media centers more so than public libraries. But they apply to the youth-oriented services of public libraries equally as well. And historically the former view has been popular in public libraries. As Melvil Dewey famously said, and as Rubin quotes, "'only the best books on the best subjects' were to be collected." (Rubin 2004, p. 190) As American Library Association President Arthur E. Bostwick said in his inaugural address at the 1908 Annual Conference:

‘Some are born great; some achieve greatness; some have greatness thrust upon them.’ It is in this way that the librarian has become a censor of literature. . . Books that distinctly commend what is wrong, that teach how to sin and how pleasant sin is, sometimes with and sometimes without the added sauce of impropriety, are increasingly popular, tempting the author to imitate them, the publishers to produce, the bookseller to exploit. Thank Heaven they do not tempt the librarian. (Krug 2003, p. 1380)

But what about my friend (and those similarly situated)? What about the next time a Louise Mills decides that someone else's positive role model is her pornography? For the Louise Millses of the world, the solution is simple: do not check Fun Home out of the library. I am not advocating by this that libraries not have priorities when it comes to collection development. Instead, I am advocating two things. First, that libraries firmly maintain the distinction between selection and censorship that Rubin (2004, pp. 189-90) makes: selection is based on reasonably objective criteria, while censorship relies on nothing more than personal bias. And second, that when it comes to selection, that libraries develop collections that reflect their entire community, no matter how marginalized some of its members may be.

The broad goal of serving the library's entire community—including children and young adults who may find such materials especially valuable—is much more important than narrow moralizing, especially in the absence of proof that honest depictions of sexuality are harmful to children or young adults. (As Rubin [2004, p. 192] mentions, there is evidence that depictions of violence may actually injure this population.)

Note: My friend's situation—he is a former lesbian who is now a transgendered male—is becoming increasingly common in the lesbian community, not without controversy. See Vitello (2006).

References

Bechdel, A. (2006). Fun home: A family tragicomic. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. (2006, October 10). CBLDF sends letter to Marshall, Missouri. Retrieved January 17, 2007, from http://www.cbldf.org/articles/archives/000309.shtml

Krug, J. F. (2003). Intellectual freedom and ALA: Historical overview. In M. J. Bates, M. N. Maack & M. Drake (Eds.), Encyclopedia of library and information science [Electronic version]. New York: Marcel Dekker.

Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15 (1973).

Rubin, R. (2004). Foundations of library and information science (2nd ed.). New York: Neal-Schulman Publishers, Inc.

Twiddy, D. (2006, December 18). Library patrons object to some graphic novels. [Electronic version]. The Washington Post, pp. C03.

Vitello, P. (2006, August 20). The trouble when Jane becomes Jack. [Electronic version]. The New York Times, pp. 9.1.

Wilsey, S. (2006, June 18). The things they buried [Review of the book Fun Home]. [Electronic version]. The New York Times Book Review, pp. 9.

BoingBoing

2006-11-02T19:14:00.000-05:00

BoingBoing, "a directory of wonderful things," is one of my favorite blogs. I mentioned to a friend that I had, in fact been BoingBoinged twice, and he said he knew, and said that I must have mentioned this on my website, right?

Well, I haven't, until now.

Here's what happened, the short version. Cory Doctorow posted about Phillip Sandifer, a University of Florida Ph.D student, who wrote some fiction and posted it on LiveJournal. One creepy and hilarious story, called "I Am Ready to Serve My Country," is a first-person story of someone preparing to become a secret agent by indulging in some murderous and sociopathic "training. " (I recommend you read it.) The story involves some creepiness and violence, which is important in what follows.

Sandifer is an active Wikipedia editor. Apparently, someone who really disliked his Wikipedia efforts sent an anonymous email to the UF cops that Sandifer was a sociopath himself — because of course anyone who posts something first-person and sociopathic on Livejournal must be a sociopath himself.

As Cory posted on Boing Boing, the UF cops bought it, of course, and went ape.

That's where the story was when I came in. Cory had already written that the UF cops had asked Sandifer for his fingerprints and DNA. A spokesperson for the UF police department denied this, of course. Public-spirited Florida resident — and lawyer — that I am, I decided to see exactly what was going on in Gainesville, by sending the UF Police Department a public records request. I emailed Cory a copy of my request letter. This got me BoingBoinged for the first time.

Barely two weeks later, without having to cajole (or sue) anyone, I got a fat envelope from the UF police department. It didn't comply with my original, complete request, but what they did send — an "Offense Report" generated from their internal database — seemed sufficient.

UF police officer Stacy Ettel admitted to twice having asked Sandifer — in what seems to me, even from her notes, to have been a threatening way — whether he had ever provided fingerprints for any reason, and once about physical evidence. As Officer Ettel wrote, "I advised Mr. Sandifer that obtaining physical evidence is as easy as obtaining discarded trash." (So much for the Public Information Officer.)

And even this isn't the worst of it. As Cory wrote,

The report is remarkable for what it doesn't say: it is an apparent fabrication that contradicts the eyewitness reports of everyone I spoke to involved in this story. We're left to decide whether Sandifer and his advisors are lying, or whether it's the police — who ducked reporters, used lies to intimidate Sandifer, and exhibited the poor judgement in investigating someone for unspecified murders because he published fiction about a murder.

It's an embarrassment to the University of Florida that its police force can attempt to dictate to English students and faculty what fiction can and can't be published.

So I scanned the report into my computer, and after redacting the driver's license numbers and so forth of everyone in it, at Cory's suggestion, Cory asked Sandifer if he would mind the report being posted to Boing Boing. Sandifer said okay, and I got BoingBoinged for the second time.

And all for doing what I see as my civic duty. Cool!

Rabbi Joseph Telushkin

2006-10-31T17:07:00.000-05:00

Modern Orthodox rabbi and author Joseph Telushkin spoke at the David Posnack JCC's 19th Jewish Book Month (ably chaired by my good friend Hannah Handler Hostyk, Esq.) last night, and I went and listened to him speak. (I also said hello to him; I met him in the summer of 1994, when I attended CLAL's Jewish student leadership retreat.)

He spoke mostly about Jewish ethics, in part because his newest book, newly released, is the first volume of what is to be a three-volume series, the first code of Jewish ethics written in English, A Code of Jewish Ethics: Volume 1: You Shall Be Holy.

But one thing he said impressed me greatly. One reason he spoke about ethics, and one reason he wrote You Shall Be Holy (and several other books on Jewish ethical themes) is as follows. Not every Jew is comfortable or willing to pray in the same environment. The example he used is the mechitza, the divider in Orthodox synagogues that separates the men from the women: some Jews would feel uncomfortable if they could see, or in the case of Orthodox Jewish men, hear, women praying during synagogue services, while some Jews (I among them) feel uncomfortable in a sanctuary with a mechitza. (I long ago resolved that I would only attend services in a sanctuary with a mechitza if there was a very good reason, like making up a minyan to allow someone who needed to to say the Mourner's Kaddish.)

And this is a state of affairs that neither Rabbi Telushkin nor I are uncomfortable with — pluralism is a good thing. But as Rabbi Telushkin pointed out, one subject that most Jews can profitably discuss together and learn about from each other and from the traditional texts of Judaism, Tanakh, Talmud, and others, a subject central to Judaism — is ethics. As Rabbi Telushkin said, Judaism may have brought monotheism to the world, but monotheism by itself is neither good nor bad. What Judaism — and Hashem, pace my good friends the Hostyk family — brought to the world is ethical monotheism. (FN1)

First of all, I have always enjoyed studying ethics, Jewish and otherwise, for two reasons: discussing and learning about ethics increases the chances of my acting rightly, and because I find the discussion of ethics intrinsically interesting.

And second — as much for that reason as because Rabbi Teluskin both is a great person (in at least two senses of the word I can think of) and has a virtuoso command of his subject, I had a fantastic time listening to him speak last night, and I am looking forward to reading his book. In addition to discussing some of what I enjoyed about his talk, I hope I have also given you some flavor of it.

(FN1) "Ethical monotheism" is how a humanistic Jew might describe Judaism's defining characteristics. This is my comment, not Rabbi Telushkin's.

We have a problem

2006-10-19T12:51:00.000-04:00

It has come to my attention that the way I am inserting images and video into my blog — whether hosted on flickr or YouTube or, incredibly enough, Blogger itself (using Blogger's default CSS and HTML) — gives Internet Explorer indigestion. (Specifically, it won't display the sidebar text next to posts with graphics; instead, it pushes the posts with graphics down below the sidebar.)

Bizarre.

Anyway, since this is a Blogger problem, and since my feeble efforts to fix the problem by editing my blog template haven't worked, I'm surrendering. Use a decent browser, or put up with Internet Explorer. Sorry, folks!

If anyone is using a browser other than Firefox or Internet Explorer, please leave a comment and let me know if you have this problem, or any others.

We now return you to our irregularly scheduled blogging.

(Update 10-25-2006 10:02 AM: Of course, I post this message the day that Microsoft releases IE 7. Haven't tested this blog with IE 7, and likely won't; if you do, post a comment, please.)

G.W. Bush on what his job is

2006-10-12T13:07:00.000-04:00

As Bush says, "One of the hardest parts of my job is to connect Iraq to the war on terror."

Jon Stewart has a great demonstration of "connecting" Iraq to the war on terror in this Daily Show excerpt, at about 6:52.

Jon Stewart is a great American.

More quicklogger.vbs

2006-10-06T16:24:00.000-04:00

I modified the quicklogger VBScript again. In addition to its previous functionality, it will now

repeat the last activity description if the user enters " " " (the double quote character) into the input box, and
save a semaphore blockfile for the day (and stop keeping track of time for that day) if the user enters "*STOP*" (in upper or lower case) into the input box.

The new version is available here. A webpage at my website devoted to quicklogger is available here.

Excel time logger VBScript redux

2006-09-25T16:45:00.000-04:00

The newest version of the Excel time logger VBScript now asks you each day if you want to log your time. (It tells you what day of the week it is — originally, it was only going to ask on the weekend.) If not, it saves a file it uses as a semaphore. Each time it runs, it checks for that day's semaphore file. If it's there, it exits silently. If not, it logs your time. If found, it deletes the previous day's semaphore file, for neatness. The new version of the script is here. It's still licensed under the GPL, so knock yourself out. My original post — with a link to full instructions — is here.

You learn the darndest things on the Web

2006-08-28T12:31:00.000-04:00

From the soc.culture.jewish FAQ file (available here).


  Subject: Question 6.17: Must Jews use wine?

  Answer:

  Actually, grape juice can be used, even if it's just because
  you like it more.

  By the way, Rav Moshe Feinstein ruled that Catholics are
  allowed to use grape juice for the eucharist. To be more
  precise, R' Dr Aaron Twersky is both a rabbi (from a long
  line of Chassidic Rebbeim, but I mean "rabbi" in the sense
  of having a synagogue, not the head of a community) and a
  psychologist [sic] who works in a substance abuse center. One of
  his patients was a preist [sic] who was being cured of alcoholism.
  This means he can't drink even a drop of wine again; a
  problem for a priest who must take communion. His self-
  control just isn't reliable. So what is he supposed to do
  during Mass? He voiced this concern to Rabbi Twersky, who
  asked why he didn't just use grape juice. The priest asked
  his cardinal, and eventually the problem made it all the way
  to Rome. Can grape juice be used for communion? Well, the
  Vatican heard that we consider the grape juice a kind of
  wine, but they wanted to know more. So the question went
  back to the priest and Rabbi Twersky. R' Twersky sent back a
  citation of a responsum of R' Moshe Feinstein, allowing the
  use of grape juice for the seder. The Vatican concluded that
  if grape juice is okay for the seder, then it was usable for
  the Last Supper, and therefore when Jesus said at that meal
  "this is my blood" he meant grape juice too.

Twersky is a psychiatrist, by the way, not a psychologist.

Some background for that journal entry

2006-08-26T22:17:00.000-04:00

Some of you who know me only through this blog (are there any of you out there?) might be confused by that journal entry I just posted. It doesn't connect too well if you don't know any of my history.

To that end, another link: an essay I wrote in 1991, called "AIDS: Everyone's Problem." This essay was a precursor to the senior thesis I wrote as a graduation requirement at New College of Florida (then a subsidiary of the University of South Florida), "Anything but Herpes I can Cure": a Hypertext Thanatography. The essay, and the thesis, are about watching my dad, Norman Silverman, M.D., A''H, sicken and die of AIDS. The quote in the title of the thesis, by the way, was my father: that was how a urologist taught his son about the birds and the bees. He said it to me in his office one day, dressed in his white coat, and as near as I can tell, he must have already been HIV-positive when he said it, unbeknownst to him.

A few words about this essay. First, it's very raw – not unfinished, but like a freshly debrided burn. Second, I was much angrier (in general) when I wrote it. And third, it was written in 1991, and last revised (lightly) in 1994, 12 years ago – when AIDS was a death sentence. I don't propose to change it now; it's a period piece, a relic of my past.

But it is a pretty good precursor to my thesis, and to the preceding blog post.

In general, this was not a situation – that is, the iatrogenic follies – with which I was unfamiliar. To see my most recent take on this, see an essay I wrote to honor my thesis sponsor at New College, Mac Miller, "Mac Miller – a Humo(u)rous Tribute." In it, I mention my father-in-law, José Katz Wons, M.D., A''H, and his struggle with pancreatic cancer. My father-in-law passed away November 20, 2004.

A journal entry from March 2006

2006-08-26T18:15:00.000-04:00

The stage door of the Lincoln Center theaters (the Vivian Beaumont Theater and the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater), at 150 W. 65th Street, Manhattan.

Journal entry: 3/22/06

Becky and I had theater tickets for The Light in the Piazza, at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center. When we got there, there's an underpass on 65th Street, under Lincoln Center proper. When we walked close to it, I flashed back to the last time I saw something at Lincoln Center, which must have been 1994, when I was in New York for the CLAL retreat. I saw Spalding Gray. I remembered the stage door -- where I met him for the first and only time -- being under that overpass. I told Becky.

As we walked under it, I realized I was wrong -- that wasn't what the stage door looked like at all, so I told Becky I'd been wrong.

But when we turned off of 65th Street and walked to where the sign for the Beaumont pointed us, the memory returned even stronger -- and I saw the sign that said "Stage Door." I'd been right all along. I was sad, yet it was a happy memory. When I told Spalding Gray about my thesis (so it must have been 1994), he said "Keep writing!" Happy because I told someone whose work I liked that I liked it; sad, because I haven't followed his advice -- and because of what happened to him.

The Light in the Piazza was really good. [Spoiler warning!] It's about a girl who is, in her mother's words, "a special child," kicked in the head by a Shetland pony at her tenth birthday party (for which her mother blames herself) -- who finds happiness, or at least the chance of happiness -- with an Italian she meets in a Florentine piazza. In the opening song, I couldn't see where it was going and I was cold to it, but it rapidly won me over. Romantic without much sentimentality, and the girl -- Clara -- has her developmental disability painted pretty realistically (rather than being stereotypically "retarded," she tends to get overwhelmed, as someone with AS [Asperger Syndrome] or HFA [high-functioning autism] might.) Very moving.

Then, at the end of the applause, Aaron Lazar, who played Fabrizio, Clara's love interest, makes a little speech. We are again in New York during the fundraising period for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS (which is how we got our Producers poster, autographed by the entire cast, including Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick), my favorite time of year on Broadway.

So we got some autographed Piazza schwag (an autographed Playbill, which will look great near the Producers poster and autographed Golda's Balcony Playbill).

As we were leaving the theater, it all got to me. I said something, or started to say something, to Becky about how I'm glad we came to New York at this time of year, but I was overcome. My eyes filmed over and I had to go lean against a wall. I started to cry a little bit. I really am glad we're here.

Later, when I asked her about what I said before I started crying, Becky said she felt so impotent because she couldn't console me, because I console her so well when she gets sad. I replied that she does just by being there. It's true that I've been through some bad times, and I miss my dad. But these last seven years have been the best of my life.

Does this surprise anyone?

2006-08-26T16:42:00.000-04:00

I am nerdier than 93% of the population.

Excel Time logger VBScript

2006-08-23T11:49:00.000-04:00

I spent most of a day and a half modifying a VBScript I got from the Lifehacker blog that now creates and formats a new Excel time log file every day and updates it every time it's run. The XLS this VBScript produces computes the duration of each entry, sums the total duration, and supplies the appropriate column headers and so forth.

I run it as a Windows scheduled task every 15 minutes and as a keyboard macro. The modified VBScript is available here. It's freely distributable, licensed under the GPL. The Lifehacker post that tells you how to make it run as a scheduled task and also how to make it run from your keyboard is here (it's also in the comments). Look at the VBScript to see what to change, though -- you need to change the filepath variable, not the filename.

2006-07-10T14:35:00.000-04:00

The stage door of the Lincoln Center theaters (the Vivian Beaumont Theater and the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater), at 150 W. 65th Street, Manhattan.
(This is in preparation for a blog post.)

My Linguistic Profile

2006-06-30T13:07:00.000-04:00

Your Linguistic Profile:

45% General American English

35% Yankee

15% Dixie

0% Midwestern

0% Upper Midwestern

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

My Personality Today

2006-06-30T13:01:00.000-04:00

I'm a O84-C25-E53-A17-N96 Big Five!!

The N96 is no surprise.

No surprise here

2006-01-28T13:35:00.000-05:00

Sorry I haven't blogged in a while.

I have been moving in the lefty-libertarian direction, for reasons that would not surprise those of you who know me well.

You are a
Social Liberal
(88% permissive)

and an...
Economic Conservative
(61% permissive)

You are best described as a:

Strong Democrat

Link: The Politics Test on okcupid.com

Ouch

2005-09-24T13:09:00.000-04:00

From EFF attorney Jason Schultz's personal blog, a lesson on why you should carefully proofread documents filed in court.
- Link to his blog post
- Link to PDF of filing
Read paragraph one of the filing. Carefully.

Zadie Smith

2005-09-17T14:07:00.000-04:00

In this blog post from Colombia, I made reference to a Zadie Smith essay in the New Yorker. I have just Googled, and that essay (which is worth reading; I may have to read On Beauty; see what the New York Times (courtesy of 3QuarksDaily) has to say) is here.

Neil Gaiman is (barring some ontological problems) a Great American

2005-09-17T12:22:00.000-04:00

Because (among other reasons) he said this, in an interview at comicbookresources.com:

...Hollywood executives really love the smell of their own urine and what they really like doing is urinating on things. And then going, "Hmm, now this smells really good" and being really puzzled when the rest of the world goes "No, actually it smells like pee."

Really. Go read the whole quote, and the rest of the interview.

Michael Newdow is a Great American

2005-09-15T21:55:00.000-04:00

I've been reading the Order issued yesterday in Newdow v. U.S. Congress, et. al., the Reverend Doctor Michael Newdow, Esquire's (really!) latest attempt to actually enforce the establishment clause of the First Amendment.

Let's review, shall we? The First Amendment, as it speaks to religion, says: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...." The second clause, "...prohibiting the free exercise thereof...", is known as the free exercise clause. The first clause, "...respecting an establishment of religion..." is known as the establishment clause.

When I pull my Constitutional Law hornbook (I have the Fifth Edition; Amazon lists the Seventh) down from the shelf and turn to Section 17.3, "The Establishment Clause--Introduction," I am reminded that:

The establishment clause applies to both the federal and local governments. It is a prohibition of government sponsorship of religion which requires that government neither aid nor formally establish a religion. While at its inception the clause might not have been intended to prohibit governmental aid to all religions, the accepted view today is that it also prohibits a preference for religion over non-religion.
* * *
When a law is challenged under the establishment clause it must pass a three-part test, although the meaning and usefulness of this test has been attacked by Justices and scholars. First, the law must have a secular purpose. Second, it must have a primary secular effect. Third, it must not involve the government in an excessive entanglement with religion. When the potentiality for excessive entanglement must be determined another three part test is employed. The degree of entanglement is estimated by evaluating: (1) the character and purpose of the religious institution to be benefited, (2) the nature of the aid, and (3) the resulting relationship between the government and religious authorities. Additionally (although this may be considered a part of the entanglement test) the law must not create an excessive degree of political division along religious lines. (p. 1223)

Now how does the Pledge of Allegiance get us to tests used to determine whether a law violates the establishment clause? Well, see 4 U.S.C. s.4, "Pledge of allegiance to the flag; manner of delivery":

The Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag: ''I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.'', should be rendered by standing at attention facing the flag with the right hand over the heart. When not in uniform men should remove any non-religious headdress with their right hand and hold it at the left shoulder, the hand being over the heart. Persons in uniform should remain silent, face the flag, and render the military salute.

The Pledge of Allegiance, as originally written, did not contain "under God." See yesterday's Northern District of California opinion, pp. 3-4; the Pledge was enacted by Congress without "Under God" in 1942 and amended in 1954.

Now how does b) apply to c)? Allow me to quote a fellow named Richard Land, who called yesterday's ruling “absurd.” He went on to say,

It shows the degree to which some federal judges carry their hostility to the religious heritage of our nation. What’s next? Taking ‘In God We Trust’ off of our money? If the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals does not strike down this ludicrous ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court undoubtedly will, particularly with John Roberts as chief justice. If, for some unfathomable reason, the Supreme Court were to uphold this California federal judge’s decision, I predict you will see the fastest ratification of an amendment to the Constitution in our nation’s history. Congress and state legislatures will rush to compete with each other to see who can most quickly ratify an amendment that will guarantee the constitutionality of the Pledge of Allegiance. Nine out of 10 Americans disagree with this ruling; you cannot subvert the will of 90 percent of Americans forever.

Who is Richard Land? President of the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission.

Newdow is no fool; he understands, what James Madison wrote in his "Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments" in 1785: "Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other Religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other Sects?"

As Newdow put it,

All [the Supreme Court] has to do is put the pledge as it was before, and say that we are one nation, indivisible, instead of dividing us on religious basis. Imagine every morning if the teachers had the children stand up, place their hands over their hearts, and say, 'We are one nation that denies God exists. I think that everybody would not be sitting here saying, 'Oh, what harm is that.' They'd be furious. And that's exactly what goes on against atheists. And it shouldn't.

Make no mistake, the Pledge as it currently exists violates the establishment clause. If you don't believe this, just consider Newdow's gedankenexperiment. How do you think that that 90% of people Land mentions would feel about Newdow's alternative version of the Pledge?

I'm now using Ecto

2005-09-15T18:40:00.000-04:00

I'm now (after an adventure in Microsoft .NET troubleshooting -- scroll down and you'll see how to fix the problem I discovered by editing a Microsoft .NET configuration file, instead of having to hack code) using Blog posting and management tool Ecto, http://ecto.kung-foo.tv/. It has to be better than Blogger's tool for Word, which manifestly sucketh (wouldn't work at all on my machine).

Update: Works, but has problems -- notably, I'm editing this post to add this note in Blogger's Web interface; Ecto wouldn't let me do it. For me, as a perfectionist, I'm going to have to jump between Ecto and Blogger in order to finish posting entries.

Reason Versus Powers of Reasoning

2005-09-05T17:10:00.000-04:00

South Carolina state senator Mike Fair has introduced a bill that would, according to Agape Press, "free up [South Carolina] public schools to teach the controversy surrounding evolutionary theory by requiring them to expose students to the 'full range of scientific views that exist' on biological evolution."

In proposing this bill, Senator Fair said, and I quote the Agape Press article,

"Many of us -- most of us, I hope -- come from homes where children are taught by their parents that there's a reason behind it all," Fair says. "The biblical worldview, the one that I embrace, is that our Creator God spoke things into existence, and that same creator God demonstrated His love for me by sending His only son, Jesus, to die on the cross. And what a wonderful message that is." (http://headlines.agapepress.org/archive/8/262005f.asp)

I am infuriated at this, for two reasons.

First: There is an obvious First Amendment, establishment-clause issue here. One hopes the Federal courts will read this quote as part of his legislative intent.

And second, and much more important: Am I somehow a second-class citizen because, rather than being taught that there was a capital-R Reason for everything that happens, I was taught that human reason -- Darwin's well-settled "theory," with natural selection occurring over geologic time -- could explain everything that exists?

Perhaps I'll send Senator Fair a Flying Spaghetti Monster emblem for his car. Anyone got any better suggestions? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

Administrivia

2005-09-05T16:49:00.000-04:00

For those of you who are regular readers of this very irregular blog, let me warn you: Blogger has changed their standards for blog names. So should this blog disappear, please try two alternate URLs:

1. http://thescrivener.blogspot.com/ (which is what I think the new URL will be)

2. http://scrivener.agman.us (which will be forwarded to the new URL)

instead.

We now return you to our irregularly scheduled blogging.

World Blog Day

2005-08-31T20:38:00.000-04:00

First, it's World Blog Day. To celebrate, I'm to provide links here to five blogs I like.

Some of them are supposed to be from cultures other than mine. Reluctant admission: as multicultural as I am (really!), most of the blogs I read are done by bloggers shamefully similar to me in interests and cultures.

So, okay, a challenge: identify two blogs I like from different cultures.

The first two blogs I'd like to direct you, my hypothetical reader, to are no-brainers. First and foremost, bOING bOING, truly, as the tagline says, "a directory of wonderful things" ("things" in the most general sense), and Infomaniac, a blog run by a former librarian and research editor at the Miami Herald, which does not, however, limit its scope to South Florida.

One legal blog. But which? I regularly read half a dozen, most on Florida law, but not all. The one I most regularly read, and enjoy, is Abstract Appeal, a website whose author, Matt Conigliaro, reads every Florida appellate case (that's all five state District Courts of Appeal, the Florida Supreme Court [which I omitted when I originally posted this], all the Eleventh Circuit Federal cases that interpret Florida law, and whatever Federal Supreme Court cases do likewise -- quite a load) that comes out, and comments on selected cases, and other related issues, concisely and intelligently. But Mr. Conigliaro doesn't limit himself to appellate cases; he spent a lot of time covering the Schiavo case. His coverage of that case made me proud to be a member of the Florida Bar, as he is -- it was detailed, only as complicated as necessary (and he used very little jargon) and, even though Mr. Conigliaro used to be a Deputy Solicitor General in the Florida Attorney General's office under Governor Jeb Bush -- which means that he would argue cases for the (generally Republican) Florida state government in front of the Florida Supreme Court -- absolutely free of bias. In fact, to the extent that I can impute any opinion to Mr. Conigliaro, it is that he stood against Governor (and President) Bush's attempts to influence the process that governed the adducement and interpretation of Teri Schiavo's last wishes and for the ability of the courts to make that determination without executive or legislative influence, and for the rule of law.

It wouldn't surprise me if Mr. Conigliaro some day becomes a Florida appellate judge.

Two blogs from different cultures. (A disclaimer: I just went looking for these blogs today, but I intend to read them henceforth.) First, Naaz, an excellent choice: a blog written by an adventurous Indian expat living in Bogotá, Colombia. I like the combination of viewpoints, the travel in Colombia, the variety of interests, the writing. I look forward to following her adventures.

Okay, three blogs from different cultures. Naaz, Balagan in Jerusalem ("balagan" means mess), run by an Israeli woman from Brazil, a journalist who was right there during the disengagement (this blog I had heard of before), and Shalom Israel, the blog of a guy who moved from North Carolina to Israel. Notable because he's not Jewish. He doesn't explain why he moved to Israel (is it correct to say he made aliyah?), according to Google, but perhaps he will in the future.

What did you do to celebrate World Blog Day?

Resquiat in Pace

2005-03-07T15:51:00.000-05:00

As my friend Squidbag posts, today his friend and mine Jonathan Guy would have turned thirty. This post started its life as a comment on Squidly's blog, but grew.

I also had the privilege of knowing Jonathan Guy at New College, more as Mac guru than in his incarnation as PBJ. I'm sorry to say I never smoked up with Jon, but I did get to know and like him a great deal.

I still remember the day I found out that Jon had died. I had just returned to New College from my home in Sunrise, in southeast Florida, where I had been avoiding working on my thesis. I was sorting through all the junk in my campus mailbox, when I found the note from Student Affairs about Jon's death. I felt at the same time empty and overwhelmed -- my usual reaction to the deaths of those close to me. This was a big theme for me at the time: as some of you reading this know, my New College thesis was about watching my dad grow sick and die of AIDS.

After I finished my thesis, I spent more time than necessary on its acknowledgments pages, a New College tradition. Allow me to quote from the first section:

Rescquiat in Pace [sic]

Jonathan Guy. As he wrote on Josh Heling's dorm room wall, shortly before he left New College for the last time, quoting King Lear: "As flies are to wanton boys, so are we to the gods -- they kill us for their sport."

I really liked what Squidbag has to say. If you knew Jon -- or if you wish to honor the memory of anyone who is no longer with us -- I commend his post, linked above, to your attention.

Eine Kleine Nietzsche-musik

2005-02-20T15:48:00.000-05:00

Mystical explanations are considered deep. The truth is that they are not even superficial.
- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, s.126

I was going to include this, one of my favorite Nietzsche quotes, in my last post, but then I realized it undercuts my argument somewhat.

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself"

Wittgenstein's Poker and Restoring the Lost Constitution

2005-02-20T13:49:00.000-05:00

My friend Chagrin and I both recently read Wittgenstein's Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers, by David Edmonds and John Eidinow. I found the book frustrating because I couldn't get a sense of Wittgenstein's philosophy from it. Or, rather, the sense I did get was frustrating. (Note 1.)

According to Wittgenstein's Poker, Wittgenstein founded two schools of philosophy, denoted by Edmonds and Eidinow as Wittgenstein I and Wittgenstein II. "But in Wittgenstein II the metaphor of language as a picture is replaced by the metaphor of language as a tool." (p. 228)

Further, according to Wittgenstein's Poker,

Philosophical questions, then, are puzzles rather than problems. In unraveling them, we are not uncovering the hidden logic unearthed by Russell and Wittgenstein I, but merely reminding ourselves of what really exists, how language is actually employed. Can I "know" I am in pain? Well, in ordinary usage this is not a question that can be raised. Expressions of knowledge -- "I know that Vienna is the capital of Austria," for example -- are predicated on the possibility of doubt. But my pain is, to me, beyond doubt. What time is it on the sun? We cannot say -- not because we do not know the answer, but rather because the concept of time on the sun has not been allocated a place in our language; there are no rules to govern its application.

Does all this mean that philosophy is useless except to those intent on learning their living in it -- those liable to fall into the mire of self-deluded profundity? As Gilbert Ryle put it, what has the fly lost who never found himself in the fly bottle? The answer of Wittgenstein II [the second school of philosophy founded by Wittgenstein] was that his method combats the philosopher in us all. We are almost bound to topple into fly bottles -- it comes with the language. Although only a few of us are philosophers lecturing at the podium, all of us are philosophers at the kitchen table or in the Dog and Duck.

pp. 231-32

So according to Wittgenstein, there are no philosophical problems, only language puzzles.

But as a lawyer with an interest in the philosophy of law, I have to say that there are real philosophical problems. I am reading Randy Barnett's Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty, which is itself a work on the philosophy of the U.S. Constitution. I intend to blog about Barnett's book as I read it; consider this the first post.

In Chapter Two of Restoring the Lost Constitution, Barnett addresses the legitimacy of a constitutional regime without unanimous consent -- the current state of affairs in the United States. He takes as an example of unanimous consent Leisure World, the private residential community his parents live in.

Unlike the town and state I live in, Leisure World originally purchased and owned all the land on which it is built and sold parcels on condition that the purchaser accept its governance structure. Because of its original ownership, it could rightly condition the sale of its property on obedience to the governance structure of Leisure World. There is a world of difference between obtaining land rightfully and conditioning its sale on consent to a lawmaking process, and imposing a lawmaking process on a nonconsenting rights holder. It is the difference between real consent and no consent.

(p. 41)

As Barnett acknowledges in a footnote to the above paragraph, he is eliding a number of philosophical issues.

Though I am not unaware of the serious philosophical issues raised by this paragraph, it would be unduly distracting to parse and pursue them at this point. For example, how do physical resources come justly to be privately owned in the first place, and what conditions can justly be placed on their alienation [i.e., their sale or rental]? However they are resolved, the difference remains: justifying the control over property exercised by persons who obtain title by the consent of previous rightful owners, or by first possession,is a substantially different matter from justifying the claims of some to rule territory belonging to others. For further discussion on the rightful acquisition of property, see Barnett, The Structure of Liberty, 69-71, 153-54.

Id.

What we must do, thought Wittgenstein II, is battle against the bewitchment of our language. We should constantly remind ourselves about everyday language -- language in the home. Our bafflement arises when language is used in unfamiliar ways, "when language goes on holiday." Can something be red and green all over? No, but that is not a deep metaphysical truth--it is a rule of our grammar. Perhaps in a far-flung corner of the world, in a distant part of a remote jungle, there is an undiscovered tribe in which descriptions of shrubs or berries or cooking pots as "red and green all over" are commonplace.

Wittgenstein's Poker, p. 231.

To a legal philosopher, consent and ownership are real issues. No amount of language manipulation can do away with the philosophical problems of individual consent to a legal regime, or ownership of property. These problems do not exist because of lacunae in the language used to describe them. To use one of the metaphors of Wittgenstein's Poker, there cannot exist a tribe somewhere whose language somehow untangles the "confusions" of consent and ownership.

I don't mean to deny the existence of language problems, or even language puzzles; I just refuse to grant them primacy of place in philosophy. I like language games -- as anyone who knows me will attest. But it is because I like them that I know that they are not the sole concern of philosophy.

Note 1. I confess: I tried to read Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-philosophicus while reading Wittgenstein's Poker, and found it impenetrable. I know it's bad form -- and possibly intellectually dishonest -- to rely on someone else's interpretation of philosophy in criticizing it, but c'mon.

Grace versus (Matrilineal) Descent, Part III

2005-02-20T13:20:00.000-05:00

Another follow-up post to my friend Chagrin's comment.

I like the "triangular religion" paradigm (could call it a meme, but nah -- too teuthid). Nationality, ethnicity, and personal beliefs. Many Israelis are, for example, ethnic, secular Jews. I am an American secular Jew. Chagrin is an American ethnic Protestant Deist, while her father is an American ethnic Protestant with a "personal relationship" with Jesus, i.e., an Evangelical Christian.

Chagrin again: "I think it's important that one not get too lost in the overlap of issues of nationality, ethnicity, and personal beliefs, because there is no perfectly triangular 'Jew', 'Japanese', or 'WASP'."

I think that wraps this thread as well as anything I could say.

Grace versus (Matrilineal) Descent, Part II

2005-02-19T14:01:00.000-05:00

My friend Chagrin posts a very interesting comment, not least because it anticipates my next post in this thread.

She writes: "WASPs go to church for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is finding a life-partner or a business partner. They network."

Interesting, isn't it, that skeptic, humanist, agnostic that I am, I hung out in the chatroom on JDate.com, a Jewish dating website, married a (very) Jewish woman I met there in a Jewish ceremony (Note 1), and have expanded my connection -- certainly mostly cultural -- to Judaism through her, her enormous, very Jewish, family, and the Jewish community in her hometown? (Note 2.) It's even true, even though, as I say elsewhere, I married a a shayne maydeleh from Barranquilla, Colombia, that her family and my family are from the same area of Eastern Europe, then the Pale of Settlement, but now Poland.

More in my next post.

Note 1. I actually married my shayne maydeleh wife in two ceremonies: one civil, one religious. This is one of those things (the other was having a woman rabbi officiate at my bar mitzvah) that made much more sense to me, philosophically, after the fact. After all: what part of "Congress shall make no law" don't they understand?

Note 2. I even represent the Centro Israelita Filantropico, the Jewish community center in Barranquilla (and I have the permission of its President to disclose that -- but there's another blog post there).

Grace versus (Matrilineal) Descent

2005-02-16T18:30:00.000-05:00

I just read an entry in a good friend's blog (who shall remain nameless) in which her father, a self-professed Christian, tearily told my friend, who is not: "I love you, and I don't want to go to heaven without you."

This caused me to reflect about something that's been on my mind a lot of late. My beliefs, I suspect, are similar to my friend's. I'm more a militant agnostic (politically as well as religiously militant) with atheist tendencies, while my friend and her teuthid spouse are (or so I infer) flat-out atheists. (See note 1.)

But my situation's more complicated than that -- allow me to elaborate.

I was just reflecting that a humanistic outlook (which is another way of describing my views) fits much better into Judaism than into Christianity -- especially given Christianity's emphasis on salvation by grace. My friend's father is (for certain values) a Christian -- because he has accepted fanciful stories written down a hundred years after the events they allegedly describe occurred as the revealed, inerrant word of God. (And yes, I'd describe the Tanakh -- similar but not identical to what my friend's dad'd call the Old Testament -- the same way, but change "hundreds" to "thousands.") My friend, however, is not a Christian. Had my friend been born into a Jewish family, however, her mother would have been Jewish, and she would be too -- whether she wanted to be or not. In that crucial respect, Judaism is a tribe, not a religion. So I am Jewish because my mom is, and regardless (within limits) of what I profess to be. My friend, on the other hand, doesn't accept Jesus as her ShorDurPerSav, um, that is, personal savior -- and that's that.

There are two related issues here that I am eliding. One, what happens in a Jewish family where the father is Jewish, but the mother is not. This is a complicated question; each branch of Judaism (across the spectrum: Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist) has different rules, which interact awkwardly. I don't have the time or the energy to address these issues here, but here is a good basic discussion, and here, courtesy of Wikipedia, is more then you probably want to know about Judaism, the word "Jew," "Who is a Jew?", and the Israeli legislation that lets Jews obtain Israeli citizenship as of right, the Law of Return (which article also has a link to the text of the Law of Return, in English, at the website of the Knesset, the Israeli parlament). (Hey! I just edited my first Wikipedia article!)

And two, the religious status of a Jew who has converted to another religion, especially one incompatible with Judaism. Being a Buddhist Jew is, rather than a contradiction, easy, according to this practicing Buddhist (a teacher of Buddhism, even) and observant Jew and this dialogue between a Buddhist Jew and a rabbi. Being a Christian Jew -- while it may have been true in an historical sense in the early part of the first millennium C.E. -- is and was, theologically, a contradiction in terms.

Of course, who am I as a humanistic/Reconstructionist Jew to say who is, and who is not, Jewish?

Note 1. I mis-read the signals. To quote my friend, "You might consider calling dad an evangelical, born-again, fundamentalists nutball. You might also add that I am a Jeffersonian deist with strong Buddhist and humanist leanings. What an oddball." No oddball she!

Hurricane Shutters

2004-09-12T20:28:00.000-04:00

I've lived in South Florida since 1970. As everyone by now knows, South Florida's lucky streak is over and hurricane patterns have returned to their more usual statistical level.

On the drive here (I'm blogging at my mother's — via dialup!), I heard someone who had their house destroyed by Hurricane Andrew (in 1992) preaching the gospel of proper shutters. She gave out a NOAA URL for shutter information: http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/shutters/. Word.

Why Shed Tears?

2004-09-11T19:39:00.000-04:00

I had planned to spend some time today blogging further about the answerers — interesting fellows (all male, so far as I can tell) to know — or perhaps about several legal, political, or religious topics that have caught my mind lately.

One of the blog posts (had to stop myself from calling it an essay — what would de Montaigne say about blogging?) was to be about authenticity of religious expression. I was at a kosher food store yesterday (Friday) afternoon on an errand. Outside stood a yeshiva bochur (a Jewish Orthodox rabbinical student) or rabbi — Chabad Lubavitch, I'll wager. "Hello, friend!" he said to me. "I'm sorry, " I said, because I could tell from the other fellow standing there putting on tefillin that he wanted me to put them on too. Putting on tefillin is a mitzvah, a good deed, as, I think, is helping people do it. "But it will just take one minute!" he said, as I passed him on my way into the air conditioning.

As I left, he called to me again. I just ignored him. It was hot, and I was in a hurry, and I just couldn't be bothered. Even so, I almost turned around. As I walked to my car, I outlined a blog entry about why I didn't lay tefillin: because it would not have been authentic for me.

The phone rang early this morning, at about seven a.m. The caller ID said "Denise —," one of the aides who takes care of my bed-bound, enfeebled 98-year-old great-uncle Harry. My wife answered the phone, then handed it to me. It was my mother, borrowing Denise's cell phone. "Harry passed away. He died in his sleep, at about 6 a.m."

My wife and I showered, dressed, and headed to Harry's condo to be with my mom.

As I started thinking about this blog post, I opened my copy of Mencken's Dictionary of Quotations to "death." I found this one that I liked:

Why shed tears that thou must die? For if thy past has been one of enjoyment, and if all thy pleasures have not passed through thy mind, as through a sieve, and vanished, leaving not a rack behind, why then dost thou not, like a thankful guest, rise cheerfully from life's feast, and with a quiet mind take thy rest?

- Titus Lucretius Carus, De rerum natura ("On the nature of things"), book III, 57 C.E.

Or, from a more poetic translation by William Ellery Leonard (the above translation is unattributed in Mencken's Dictionary of Quotations):

Why this bemoaning and beweeping death?
For if thy life aforetime and behind
To thee was grateful, and not all thy good
Was heaped as in sieve to flow away
And perish unavailingly, why not,
Even like a banqueter, depart the halls,
Laden with life? why not with mind content
Take now, thou fool, thy unafflicted rest?

All this Epicurean philosophy is well and good. But in sorting through Harry's effects and arranging for his funeral this morning, we found his tallit (prayer shawl) and two kippot (skullcaps) — and two sets of tefillin. One Harry's, old and worn, and one probably his late son's; the son had no sons (and no interested daughters) to leave them to. Harry will be buried in his tallit, but tefillin are passed down — traditionally, to sons.

So yesterday, I refused to lay tefillin. Today, I own two sets. I can't help thinking, Lucretius to the contrary (not believing, necessarily, just thinking) that there's a connection there.

— — —

Tefillin, phylacteries (the Greek — from the Hellenized Jews of the period around year 1 B.C.E – 1 C.E. — term, I believe) are boxes observant Jews (mostly men, but controversially — but not to me — some women) strap to their foreheads and non-dominant arms when they say their daily prayers. Putting them on is called "laying tefillin."

Harry was — I had written "is" — my maternal grand-uncle; he and my late mother's mother — and my 100-year old great-aunt Dora, still with us; we celebrated her 100th four days before my 39th, on July 24th — were all siblings.

In Orthodox Judaism, many men receive semicha, rabbinical ordination, without intending to serve as, as the Reform movement calls them, "pulpit rabbis."

De rerum natura: see Wikipedia; link to document at the Gutenberg Project.

Chiseled Spam, Part Two

2004-09-10T18:13:00.000-04:00

In his first email to me, Jeff Harrell presented quite a simple, lawyerly argument in favor of the answer. With his permission, I'm blogging his answer here.

From Snow Crash:

Y.T. has been privileged to watch many a young Clint plant his sweet face in an empty Burbclave pool during an unauthorized night run, but always on a skateboard, never ever in a car. The landscape of the suburban night has much weird beauty if you just look.

Back on the paddle again. It rolls across the yard on a set of RadiKS Mark IV Smartwheels. She upgraded to said magical sprockets after the following ad appeared in Thrasher magazine.

CHISELED SPAM
is what you will see in the mirror if you surf on a weak plank with dumb, fixed wheels and interface with a muffler, retread, snow turd, road kill, driveshaft, railroad tie, or unconscious pedestrian. If you think this is unlikely, you've been surfing too many ghost malls. All of these obstacles and more were recently observed on a one-mile stretch of the New Jersey Turnpike. Any surfer who tried to groove on that 'vard on a stock plank would have been sneezing brains.

Don't listen to so-called purists who claim any obstacle can be jumped. Professional Kouriers know: If you have pooned a vehicle moving fast enough for fun and profit, your reaction time is cut to tenths of a second—even less if you're way spooled.

Buy a set of RadiKS Mark IV Smartwheels—it's cheaper than a total face retread and a lot more fun. Smartwheels use sonar, laser rangefinding, and millimeter-wave radar to identify mufflers and other debris before you even get honed about them.

Don't get Midasized—upgrade today!

These were words of wisdom. Y.T. bought the wheels.

From The Diamond Age:

"Chiselled Spam," Miss Matheson said, sort of mumbling it to herself.
"Pardon me, Miss Matheson?" Nell said.
"I was just watching the smart wheels and remember an advertisement from my youth," Miss Matheson said. "I used to be a thrasher, you know. I used to ride skateboards through the streets. Now I'm still on wheels, but a different kind. Got a few too many bumps and bruises during my earlier career, I'm afraid."

Okay, more posts soon — I'm full of ideas. (Some would say that that's not all I'm full of. Hi, Becky!) Going to Barranquilla again next Wednesday — perhaps I'll get to blog some from there.

No thirty, as we say.

Chiseled Spam

2004-09-10T18:12:00.000-04:00

Kudos to Jeff Harrell, "a dot-com refugee and desperately struggling writer," whose website is http://shapeofdays.typepad.com. Jeff has some interesting things to say about the documents recently discovered that purport to show that George W. Bush was suspended from flight status. He waggishly calls it Rath^ergate; you'll see why. (He points out that this was not his invention.) I had already downloaded the docs, and looked at them after reading his comments. Summary: they're almost certainly forged.

He also has a hilarious, black-humored Infocom game parody based on his life, called "The Great Adventure"; check it out.

He lives in Dallas, TX, and he's unemployed. The man is obviously bright as hell, detail-oriented, and quickly responsive to inquiries, as his answer to my question — the first correct answer I received — shows. Somebody hook a brother up, yo?

The answer in my next entry.

Um, make that a non-obvious reappearance

2004-09-08T17:02:00.000-04:00

Um. Guess I'm not the Stephenson geek I thought I was.

As the estimable Professor Volokh reminds me, Enoch Root, who first appears in Cryptonomicon, also appears in Quicksilver and The Confusion (and, one presumes again, in The System of the World).

So allow me to be more specific: the reappearance I am thinking of is non-obvious, and the character does not have the same name. Further, the reappearance I am thinking of is in exactly two (no more, no less) of Neal Stephenson's books.

Of course, anyone who comes up with another instance that meets all my criteria will be ~~pummeled brutally with a copy of The Big U~~ warmly congratulated and have their answer also posted here.

¿Está claro? Muy bien.

Neal Stephenson and "cameos"

2004-09-08T15:45:00.000-04:00

Okay, I admit it: I am a Neal Stephenson geek.

However, so are, inter alii, law professors Eugene Volokh (of UCLA law school and the excellent Volokh Conspiracy blog) and Larry Ribstein, of UIUC law school (see his blog entry on Cryptonomicon, which he calls "the greatest sci fi book ever.") Professor Volokh has made numerous references to Stephenson in the Conspiracy.

At one point, Professor Volokh writes, "Which character in Cryptonomicon is likely a descendant of Eliza, the Quicksilver/The Confusion [and presumably, The System of the World -- available September 21] character?

The answer, of course, is German mathematician (and Alan Turing's lover) Rudy von Hacklheber. I unfortunately first read his trivia question through an RSS aggregator, which did not properly hide the answer to the question (as he had intended).

Anyway, I have a Stephenson trivia question I am proposing to Professor Volokh, and to you all (ha, ha) here: I was re-reading some Neal Stephenson recently when I noticed that there is actually one (major) character who (almost certainly) appears in two of his novels. The second reference is small but significant, but the reference is not passed by name, as it were, but by description. Does anyone know who it is?

Please email me the answer at mitchell (at) silverman-esquire.com. (Yes, this is me.) I have some hints I'll be posting if I don't get any answers.

Blogging and Distraction

2004-07-24T13:35:00.000-04:00

Yes, yes, I know. One post a day. Ha. Ha.

Okay, I'm going to try to glue butt to chair. Really.

I've been distracting myself with Bloglines. I have yet to be current with all of my blog subscriptions, and I have something like 500 (541, according to Bloglines' notifier) items unread.

Take a look! ¡Infomania aqui!

(Will this work?)

Actually, this will work better. (Don't expect me to update my Bloglines blog, though.)

The Legacy of the Caribbean

2004-07-01T17:36:00.000-04:00

I enjoyed my trip to Colombia, but brought several million Colombian passengers back with me. (Do you think I should "report" them to Immigrations and Customs Enforcement?) (Here's more info on the passengers -- the third description and image.)

At any remove, I am waiting on some help in dealing with these passengers -- who have already overstayed their welcome.

I'd blog more, but I can't concentrate -- I think the passengers are throwing a party.

Mas desde Barranquilla

2004-06-24T18:39:00.000-04:00

Woah.

My first blog comment (from New College friend Steve Waldmyn -- and yes, Patrick Haller (site is down now) is right), and what does it say?

Steve´s been to Barranquilla!

No, haven´t been to the zoo, but saw a sign at the airport. When he emailed me to tell me he´d posted a comment, I was like¨"How´d he know about the zoo?" Then I read the comment -- cool.

Meanwhile, I´m having a touch of, uh, "traveler´s distress," and I´m typing this in an internet cafe -- so time to go.

Caribbean Racism -- A Response, and American Racism.

2004-06-23T15:55:00.000-04:00

My wife read "Caribbean Racism," above, and had three points in response.

First, Juan, the cerrador (security guard and general helper) was asked to carry the suitcases upstairs. Second, one of the "European-appearing" people I was thinking of as I wrote my post -- the owner of a pharmacy -- is actually Lebanese. And third, that the United States is also very racist.

I replied that the history of the United States was -- and in some ways still is -- racist in a horrible way that the Caribbean never has been. Slavery, Jim Crow, fire hoses in Birmingham, lynching (which happened to Jews, of course -- to Leo Frank, in Atlanta).

Slavery. That one word, though, horrible as it is, just skips through the mind. But think of it -- people, treated as property. Arbitrary punishment. Rape. Families broken up by whim or for economic advantage.

There are few mass wrongs that compare with the Shoah, the destruction of European Jewry, for the intensity of the images they invoke, that they should invoke. Slavery is one.

Afrocolombians and indigenous Colombians are as much a part of the social fabric in Colombia (to my eyes) -- though at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum -- as the Europeans, which I don´t think is the case with African-Americans in the United States. When African slaves were brought to the U.S., practicing their religion and speaking their native languages were punished harshly. The obviousness of African-Americans´ difference from Caucasians -- racism in the United States is binary, white or black, in a way that doesn´t seem to exist in Colombia -- has kept them separate from whites -- marked and unmarked cultures and marked and unmarked linguistic traits (Black English Vernacular, q.v.).

Of course, the U.S. isn´t alone in its binary racism -- there´s a really funny bit in Zadie Smith´s vacation essay in the current New Yorker about how if you are a brown woman dating a white British man, you will eventually receive a Gauguin image from his Tahitian period -- it´s happened to her three times with three different men. (I don´t have the magazine to hand, when I do, I´ll blog the quote right in a subsequent entry.)

Rant finished. More later.

Mas Saludos

2004-06-23T15:48:00.000-04:00

Hello again.

B´quilla is still hot. Very hot. And very humid. Becky and I took a shower, uh, walk yesterday, five blocks each way. When I got back to my in-laws´, I had to put every item of clothing on my body in the dirty clothes, and take my second shower of the day.

And I have four words for you: No. Central. Air. Conditioning.

And I thought South Florida was bad.

Ugly American? Me? Nah. I´m having a great -- and very relaxing -- time. The people are (mostly) wonderful (nicer than in South Florida), and the city is beautiful in a very Latin American way. It´s the exact opposite of Buenos Aires -- everything is different.

Plus, I hope we can get zapotes -- a delicious, exotic fruit --back home.

Caribbean Racism

2004-06-20T19:06:00.000-04:00

racism n 2: discriminatory or abusive behavior towards members of another race.

I've only been in Colombia for three days, and I've already realized something: As a rule, the more European-looking you are, the better off. The more indigenous or African ("Afrocolombian"), the less well-off.

Perhaps it's the servility -- I am not used to being waited on virtually hand and foot. My in-laws have a full-time (six days a week) housekeeper/cook (who helped raise my wife -- they're very close) and a guard in the parking area under the building 24 hours a day. (The guard on duty, when we arrived carried our luggage up two flights of stairs, without even being asked.) And they´re all darker than any of my family and I are.

That is only one data point. Here's another: in the June 7-14, 2004 issue of of Semana, a well-respected Colombian national newsmagazine, there is an article "Sin Cedula," about Colombians in the area the article discusses -- "an Afrocolombian population," the article says -- 85% of whom are without identification documents, either the cedula, the Colombian national I.D. card, or even birth certificates. As the article says, "They are people of whose existence the State never has knowledge. They do not exist in the statistics, nor are they considered for development projects. Partly for that reason they are so abandoned."

There are three pictures with that article. In those pictures are
18 people. OF those 18, four are European in appearance -- and they are all wearing UN High Commission on Refugees (in Spanish, "Acnur") T-shirts. The UNHCR is helping the Colombian government register these citizens.

My wife thinks that I have a slanted view of all this, that I haven't met many non-Jewish European Colombians.

Nonetheless, my rule of thumb (not a politically-incorrect term, really!) is retrodictive, and predictive as well. But I'm not wedded to it -- I am prepared to admit I'm full of it (and delete this post? Nah).

Time will tell.

¡Saludos desde Barranquilla!

2004-06-18T22:03:00.000-04:00

Greetings from sunny -- and hot! -- downtown Barranquilla!

I´m down here with my wife, visiting my in-laws for Father´s Day.

Again, no thirty.

Same-Sex Marriage

2004-06-06T22:40:00.000-04:00

I just wrote (well, just finished) a long post about same-sex marriage. Unfortunately, it was so long that Blogger didn't see fit to put it on the main page -- ever.

So anyway, go read it. Or else. Please?

I Am My Own Wife

2004-06-06T22:33:00.000-04:00

Doug Wright's play I Am My Own Wife just won two Tonys, one for its entire cast (Jefferson Mays, as Charlotte von Mahlsdorf) and one for Best Play. My wife and I saw it on Broadway in March. It blew us away. If you get the chance to see it (I doubt it will play anywhere other than New York -- it is very dependent on Jefferson Mays' abilty to play several dozen characters), I highly recommend it.

What's New College?

2004-06-06T17:21:00.000-04:00

According to Patrick Haller's website, this blog is written by an alumnus of New College of Florida.

I have no idea what he's talking about.

Vadge Badge

2004-06-03T18:48:00.000-04:00

I'm a big supporter of free speech. Click on the Vadge Badge for more info.

I Love Science

2004-05-25T19:16:00.000-04:00

Just a short post -- one a day to start.

I love science.

"There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact."
- Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi.

These days, trifling it ain't.

The latest from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) -- combined with observations from Kitt Peak.

What's on my desktop.

Save the HST.

Same-Sex Marriage -- a Political and Religious Perspective

2004-05-25T11:45:00.000-04:00

Same-Sex Marriage

I am in favor of same-sex marriage. I don't just tolerate it; I think anyone should be able to marry.

And I think that the opposition of religious groups supports my view. In a country that cannot and should not ever have an official religion, the opposition of a religious group is an impermissible attempt by a faction (more on that later) to impose its views on others.

There's a theme here. The First Amendment says that:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

While President Bush says:

The sacred institution of marriage should not be redefined by a few activist judges...I called on the Congress to pass an amendment to our Constitution defining and protecting marriage as a union of a man and a woman as husband and wife. The need for that amendment is still urgent, and I repeat that call today.

Neither should an activist President, or an activist Congress, make such definitions.

Don't believe me? See Federalist No. 10, at Yale Law School's Avalon Project:

Complaints are everywhere heard from our most considerate and virtuous citizens, equally the friends of public and private faith, and of public and personal liberty, that our governments are too unstable, that the public good is disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties, and that measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority. However anxiously we may wish that these complaints had no foundation, the evidence, of known facts will not permit us to deny that they are in some degree true. It will be found, indeed, on a candid review of our situation, that some of the distresses under which we labor have been erroneously charged on the operation of our governments; but it will be found, at the same time, that other causes will not alone account for many of our heaviest misfortunes; and, particularly, for that prevailing and increasing distrust of public engagements, and alarm for private rights, which are echoed from one end of the continent to the other. These must be chiefly, if not wholly, effects of the unsteadiness and injustice with which a factious spirit has tainted our public administrations.

Factions are bad, because they result in the imposition of majority rule over the rights of minorities. If a Constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage passes, the measure will be decided by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority.

If you find my argument interesting, you'll like Paul Kurtz's article "Two Competing Moralities: The Principles of Fairness contra 'Gott Mit Uns!'" in Free Inquiry magazine, Volume 24, Number 4. Kurtz says that the dispute between ideas of marriage is a battle of conflicting moralities, and that the morality that would ban same-sex marriage is based on Biblical inerrancy and xenophobia rather than science and fairness.

Which is a good segue into part two of this post.

The Jewish "View" of Same-Sex Marriage

I'm Jewish. There are Jewish authorities on both sides of same-sex marriage, from "Same-Sex Marriage, In The Jewish Tradition" by Rabbi David Ellenson, president of the Reform seminary Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, to "Orthodox Response to Same-Sex Marriage" by Rabbi Tzvi Hersh Weinreb, Executive Vice President of the Orthodox Union, the umbrella organization of Modern Orthodox Judaism.

I agree with Rabbi Ellenson, but Rabbi Weinreb makes a point that actually supports my position:

We can also debate the wisdom of a constitutional amendment defining marriage. It can be argued that any tampering with the U.S. Constitution, a document that arguably has done more for the Jewish people than any other secular document in historical memory, is a risky proposition. However, whatever your position on the constitutional amendment, the inclusion of same-sex relationships in the definition of marriage is something that any Jew of conscience should oppose.

So Rabbi Weinreb is saying that Jews should all oppose same-sex marriage, but should also maybe oppose a Constitutional amendment because of the beneficial effects on Jews in the United States. Because of the Constitution and the First Amendment, in the U.S., the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority -- which has not favored the Jewish people over the last three thousand years -- has been restrained from acting through the organs of government. Goverment-sanctioned antisemitism has been the Jewish experience. And because the government has been so restrained^(*), Jews and Judaism have flourished in the United States since its founding, and we have reciprocated (cf. Haym Salomon). This supports Publius's point.

Anyway, this entry has been stewing long enough -- (past) time to release it to the world.

Extra Credit: there's an excellent documentary about Jewish gays and lesbians -- Orthodox gays and lesbians, that is -- called Trembling Before G-d. I recommend it highly.

^*.See Justice Louis D. Brandeis's dissent in Olmstead v. U.S., 277 U.S. 438, 485 (1928):

Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.

My Influences

2004-05-24T18:55:00.000-04:00

Henry Louis Mencken.

Get some more information about one of the greatest Americans of all time. Join the Mencken Society, or at least find out more.

Here's some rather relevant Mencken:

"All the extravagance and incompetence of our present Government is due, in the main, to lawyers, and, in part at least, to good ones. They are responsible for nine-tenths of the useless and vicious laws that now clutter the statute-books, and for all the evils that go with the vain attempt to enforce them. Every Federal judge is a lawyer. So are most Congressmen. Every invasion of the plain rights of the citizens has a lawyer behind it. If all lawyers were hanged tomorrow, and their bones sold to a mah jong factory, we'd be freer and safer, and our taxes would be reduced by almost a half."

– H.L. Mencken (1880-1956), "Breathing Space", The Baltimore Evening Sun, 1924 Aug 4. Reprinted in A Carnival of Buncombe (1956).

And more than a bit outside. Verb. Sap., eh?

First Impressions

2004-05-24T18:02:00.000-04:00

So, a blog. I'm going to keep this anonymous, so I can say things I might not otherwise be able to say.

Blooging from work, you say? Never.

No thirty, as they say.