Posts filed under 'Uncategorized'
After dithering about it for a couple of months, I finally went ahead and bought an iPhone. So far I’ve been quite pleased with it–the interface, build quality, and feature set all proclaim “Designed by Apple in California” just as strongly as the text on the back of the device. Strongly recommended.
As you can see, I decided to take a MySpace-style bathroom-mirror photo of myself. I think now I might have to get a pair of those skinny drainpipe pants and maybe a fixie.
January 1st, 2009
And now, a public-health message from the Tellumo.net World Service.
So, the good people of Wikipedia have informed me that today is Global Handwashing Day! The audience of this blog is almost by definition an affluent and educated one, by global standards, but I’m struck by how much washing of hands, with soap and water, has improved public health for the better. It’s cheap, it’s simple, and it’s remarkably effective. Indeed, one study holds it can reduce the incidence of disease causing diarrhea by nearly half–a large number in anyone’s math, and even larger in tropical nations with limited health-care resources. The Global Handwashing Day site I linked to earlier has further information on the subject.
In the unlikely event that soap is unavailable in your locality, I have written a little monograph on the subject, which begins here. If you require information on manufacturing lye, check this out; if on the manufacture of oil, talk with someone who’s been to a farm of nearly any description.
Anyway: hand washing with soap. It’s cheap, it’s simple, and it’s probably the greatest public-health advancement of the 20th century (although penicillin is right up there, even if it isn’t as cheap). So scrub up, ok?
October 15th, 2008
So I’ve been seeing a little of Carl Icahn in the news recently with this whole Yahoo! business recently, and I’ve been in a bit of a weird mood due to the bar exam, and it led to me coming up with this:
powered by icanhascheezburger
I don’t know whether cheezburgers constitute a significant portion of Mr. Icahn’s portfolio, but I suppose if they don’t I could plead comedic necessity.
There, that counts as studying corporations, right?
July 21st, 2008
Fresh from the why-didn’t-anyone-tell-me-about-this-sooner dept.: CHDK, the Canon Hackers’ Development Kit. CHDK lets you access capabilities of your camera that Canon never intended that you should, all without changing your firmware or doing anything other than writing a couple files to your SD card. You can change the shutter settings, take RAW photos, run scripts, even read text files and play games.
I strongly approve of this sort of thing, as evidenced by my prior enthusiasm for BitPim. However, unlike BitPim, which only lets you transfer files to and from your phone (although that is very nice), CHDK actually lets you do things that your camera is capable of, but that Canon didn’t design into the firmware. Personally, I feel that this verges on malpractice–if there’s something that the hardware can do and that most people won’t want to use, go ahead and hide it in an “Advanced” menu, or even behind a “Enter the following number in hexadecimal” challenge if you want to get fancy, but don’t make people who are smart enough to know what it is have to resort to hacks like this to use the hardware to its fullest. This is part of my problem with BREW–if my telephone can run arbitrary code, then I should be able to run arbitrary code on it, without needing to know any secret licensing handshake. Free hardware is an inherently good thing.
Politics aside, I suppose not knowing about CHDK earlier is my own fault for not keeping up with Lifehacker and Hack-a-Day and Photojojo and Wired and such. I suppose I’ll have to plead bar-exam craziness and get off the hook that way.
June 25th, 2008
Some background, first:
Becoming a Lawyer
Law School
The first step in becoming a lawyer in the United States is attending law school. In many other countries, law is an undergraduate major, but here it’s a three-year graduate degree.
The first year varies remarkably little between schools: contracts, civil procedure, torts, criminal law, and property. Some schools require constitutional law as well, and some allow students to choose an elective at one point. My law school required all the courses I mentioned at the beginning of this paragraph (two terms of the first two and one of each of the last three) and allowed us to choose one elective our second term, all of which related to an area of law governed more by statutes than by prior cases.
Students will also generally need to take a course in legal writing and research. At Hastings, we did this our first term and took a moot court course in our second. (Moot court is much like it sounds–you get a case, usually one that’s pending before the United States Supreme Court or the highest court in the state where the school is located, are randomly assigned a side to argue, and spend a unit or two’s worth of time researching, briefing, and arguing it.)
In the second year, students pretty much get to take what they want. Some schools (including Hastings) don’t require con law and evidence, but you’d be a fool not to take them, especially as they’re covered on the bar exam, more on which later.
The third year, at Hastings at least, is much the same from a formal standpoint. Some schools (such as George Washington, I’m informed) take a page from medical schools’ books and have an entirely clinical third year–students work under the tutelage of experienced attorneys or judges assisting them in their duties. It remains to be seen whether this will become standard practice, but clinical programs are becoming more common and prominent in the American law-school landscape. For my part, I spent half my time my last semester of law school working for a judge at the San Francisco Superior Court. If you’re in law school, I strongly recommend it.
“Reading law”
Of course, you could go the seriously old-school route and not bother with law school at all, instead taking a period of apprenticeship to an attorney or judge and studying under them. This used to be the only way to become a lawyer, but it’s far less common these days–most states don’t even allow it, but California is one that does.
June 7th, 2008
I started using that phrase a while ago, and I just recently realized that there weren’t any other uses on the Net I could find. So hey, enjoy the phrase. Billion with a G.
More bar prep stuff coming up!
June 6th, 2008
Hi! Contrary to all apperances, I haven’t completely disappeared–I’ve just been extremely busy! This past term, I was finishing up law school, including working at an externship at a local court. Highly recommended if you’re of the law-student persuasion.
And I’m still a student of sorts, even though I’ve graduated, as I’m busy with my bar review course until the bar exam in late July. I’ve been writing some posts about the bar-prep process on my laptop, and I’ll upload them once I have a few more free moments. For now, enjoy the bright shiny new version of WordPress I’ve uploaded; I wasted far more time than I ought to have getting it set up and hacked so it works reasonably close to the way the old one did. (This would be a much easier process if I actually knew PHP instead of faking it; fortunately, the code I needed to tweak was pretty straightforward.)
More soon, but if you’re looking to waste some time, you could do a lot worse than TV Tropes, one of my other recent addictions. Have fun!
June 4th, 2008
Whoa, what’s this? A blog entry? Yeah, I’ve been in a bit of a full-court press here with finals, school projects, and job hunting, which has left me basically no time at all to blog. But finals are over now, so I’ve got some time to breathe–hooray!
The title of this post is about the amount of perfectly servicable stuff people have just abandoned while moving out of the Tower. It is ridiculous. So far I’ve gleaned:
- 15 or 20 outlines and study aids
- 10 or so textbooks, most of which aren’t even going to be superseded
- A few other books
- A blender (saw that one and thought soap!)
- A flatbed scanner
This doesn’t count the furniture (a swivel chair, a decent-looking couch, and a few tables and beds), the two printers, the refrigerator, the two microwaves, and other housewares-type stuff I didn’t pick up. I can understand chucking some stuff, but this is just ridiculous. Anyway, look for most of these items to return to the stream of commerce via finer thrift stores everywhere.
In unrelated news, I’m hoping to get a little more soap stuff done this summer, and possibly another legal-research thing like the Field Guide. And finally, if you’re going to be at the Maker Faire tomorrow, I’ll see you there!
May 19th, 2007
Sir John Hargrave and Rob Cockerham are masters of the sort of Internet humor that involves doing outlandish things, taking pictures of them, and making webpages about the whole affair. My soap posts have a certain similarity to this, and I was indeed inspired by the Cockeyed.com Science Club.
Anyway, they recently joined forces, which would have been awesome in itself, but their objective is what takes the cake: to prank the Super Bowl.
We’re talking about a six-person job, five hundred pounds of materials, and gross expenses in excess of $40,000 (including not only shipping and materials, but also game tickets and legal advice). The story is in progress; keep following their sites to see what happens.
February 13th, 2007
I am not a hunter, but I have some relatives who are or used to be. I recall eating pheasant as a child and enjoying the taste, but keeping a wary tongue out for shot that may have remained in the bird. (Naturally, this isn’t a problem if you don’t hunt with a shotgun, but I understand it’s remarkably difficult to take game birds any other way.) I also recall hearing about how lead shot was being phased out in favor of less toxic metals, like bismuth, tungsten, and steel. Some clever people in Minnesota have figured out how to solve both problems at once, and to give hunters a head start on their cooking as well.
How is that, you may ask? They simply make the shot out of spices. Season Shot expects to enter beta this hunting season and to enter “full production by the fall of 2008.”
January 30th, 2007
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