Archive | August, 2004

It seems that one of the detainees being tried at Guantanamo, Ali Hamza Ahmed Sulayman al-Bahlul, wants to admit he is a member of Al-Qaeda and doesn’t want a lawyer to help him.   Mr. Bahlul at one point asked not to be interrupted. He declared that there was no evidence as important as a confession […]

The claim: A paper on climate change reaches bad results because the authors entered one piece of data in degrees rather than radians. (See Crooked Timber (John Quiggin) and Deltoid (Tim Lambert).) Whoops! Not quite as bad as filling up an airplane in pounds rather than kilograms or using the wrong units in the Mars […]

A tangentially related phone call from a reporter reminded me of this story that a law professor I know and trust told a while back. It seems that a visiting colleague’s students were going to a public school in Texas, and declined to say the Pledge of Allegiance. The teacher insisted that they say it, […]

The new academic year has arrived at law schools around the country, and that means it’s fall law review placement season. Professors are sending out articles they wrote over the summer, and student articles editors are selecting articles to publish. I thought I might provide a public service to law review editors out there by […]

seems to be marked on ears, not foreheads. Thanks to GeekPress for the pointer.

seems to be saving the day — or ruining it, depending on whether you’re human or a bee. UPDATE: My colleague Steve Bainbridge has a different view.

In case dancing in the streets during the GOP convention doesn’t bring the Republican Party to its knees, Al Franken has a back-up strategy: Have people across America yell “fuggedaboutit!” just as President Bush is about to begin his acceptance speech. (Hat tip: Wonkette)

I’m looking for examples of factual books — preferably how-to books — that some readers read for the fun of imagining themselves using this knowledge. One example, though I don’t know if such a book actually exists, would be a work that explains how someone could reconstruct civilization if stranded on a desert island. It […]

An intriguing and very readable piece.

Venkat Balasubramani (Begging to Differ) points to what appears to be a revocation of a visa based on an alien’s speech: The US administration came under fire for barring prominent European Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan from entering the country to take a post at the renowned Notre Dame University. Ramadan, rated by Time magazine as […]

Here’s an excerpt: Digital radio promised lower costs, higher quality and more variety. To portray this as a bad thing, the NAB turned the free-market logic of 18th-century economist Adam Smith on its head, stressing the harm satellite radio could do to the listening public. Satellite’s “purported benefits are, in the main, nonexistent, unrealistic or […]

The Harper’s Magazine site contains the following (thanks to Christopher Rohrbacher): [Letter to the Editor:] I was most impressed to read of Lewis Lapham’s ability to travel in time in “Tentacles of Rage” [Essay, September]. As far as I can tell, on the day I received my copy of Harper’s Magazine, the Republican convention had […]

Alice Cooper apparently has little patience for all the rock bands touring the country to encourage their listeners to vote against President Bush. “To me, that’s treason. . . . I call it treason against rock ‘n’ roll because rock is the antithesis of politics. Rock should never be in bed with politics.” Cooper continues: […]

The JibJab “This Land Is Your Land” controversy (see here and here and several posts in between) is over: It turns out, thanks to an investigation by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, that the song may well be in the public domain — and thus free for all to use — because the original copyright had […]