Discourse.net

The European Soccer Championship: Guide

Now that the Boston Celtics have won the “world” championship, eyes are firmly set on the Euro soccer championship. The tournament has already moved to the quarter finals. It is hard to understate the impact of this event on life in most of Europe (and many other parts of the world).
Even if you are not interested in the game itself, perhaps you might enjoy my general observations on the meaning of the euro soccer championship:

• Law of supply and demand: International soccer championships are a special occasion. The European championship occurs only every 4 years. The World championship also takes place every four years. This means that there is always one year of “nothingness” in between each tournament. Artificial scarcity of supply => increase in demand.

• Global warming. Streets are empty during most games. Al Gore loves soccer championships (except victories for Turkey, see below).

• Numbers don’t add up:
o Some small countries (Croatia, Holland) perform really well on a consistent basis even though they have a small population. Most likely explanation: something in the faucet water.
o The distortion of money: one of the very richest soccer leagues in the world, England, has the best teams (see Champions league results) but underperforms on the world stage. One explanation: the money allows them to import foreign players, lowering the amount of national players in crucial positions in the league (beware MLS).

• Soccer & Steroptypes: Germany: it is not always pretty, but the outcome is always efficient. Gary Lineker famously described soccer as a game ” for 22 people that run around, play the ball, and one referee who makes a slew of mistakes, and in the end Germany always wins.”. The German soccer team always manages to beat some of the most stylish, talented teams and advance to the final stages. This years seems no different. In the first quarter final Germany beat an immensely talented Portuguese squad (3-2). The bookmakers (who are also very efficient) favor Germany as the final winner (1/4) of the tournament.

• Flags & Cars: Every Turkish victory (even in first round games) = (equal) “drive by celebrations” in cities across Europe.

• Exams and soccer. June is exam month for students. Also the start of real summer weather. Exam results = studying minus soccer watching minus hot weather.. Resits for exams are in August, a much more quiet time. ;) Same equation applies to grading by professors.

• Nationalism and soccer. Often problematic (see Holland-Germany game in 1988). But sometimes its just plain cheerful (and ridiculous looking). Proof: Holland being covered in Orange colors during soccer championships.

Chocolate Considered Dangerous

Women More Likely Than Men To Surrender Security For Chocolate:

Women are four times more likely than men to surrender their computer passwords for chocolate, according to a survey of 576 office workers conducted outside Liverpool Street Station in London by Infosecurity Europe.

According to the survey, 45% of women revealed their passwords to strangers posing as market researchers for a chocolate bar, compared to 10% of men.

Apparently the overall percentage of password-yielding respondents this year (21%) represents an improvement over 2007, when 64% of respondents traded their security for a few moments of chocolaty goodness.

Infosecurity Europe made no mention of whether inducements tailored to men, such as sports tickets, free beer, or explicit pictures, were offered to test the possibility that the noted gender disparity might be reversed under different circumstances.

(via PogoWasRight.org)

Grading Puzzle

Here’s a nice grading puzzle, smaller versions of which sometimes come up in law school exams: How should you deal with students who make mistakes about basic facts that are not directly relevant to the question:

Big Monkey, Helpy Chalk: “If only we had forgiven Iraq for 9/11”,

I have now received three (3) student papers that discuss Iraq’s attack on the Twin Towers on 9/11. All three papers mention it as an aside to another point. I’ve had two papers on the virtue of forgiveness that argue that if we had just forgiven Iraq for the 9/11 attacks, we wouldn’t be at war right now. I just read a paper on the problem of evil which asked why God allowed “the Iraq’s” to attack us on 9/11.

The thing that upsets me most here is that the the students don’t just believe that that Iraq was behind 9/11. This is a big fact in their minds, that leaps out at them, whenever they think about the state of the world.

Serious Commuting

I have an easy commute. Were it not for the need to get the kids handed off to school, my morning transit to work would consist of a short walk.

Some of my students have it tough: they drive from pretty far away — and have to fight some pretty nasty traffic unless they leave earlier than anyone would want to.

But that’s nothing compared to what these kids do to get to school.

What is Your Nightmare Job?

What would be the most unattractive job in the regular economy? I’m not talking about the objectively least-well paid or statistically most dangerous, or most unpopular (car salesman?). I mean, what job would you least like to have. No fair saying subsistence farmer in Darfur either — I mean in the US (or other developed economy).

For me, I think the worst job I see around me easily has to be toll booth attendant: Breath fumes all day. No real human contact. Uncomfortable reaching. Half in and half out so your body is a mix of too hot and too cold depending where and when. Much worse than the worst job I ever had (for a week) of (attempted) selling books by phone.

What’s your worst nightmare of a job?

Air Rage, Flight Attendant Dept.

A woman refused a flight attendant’s demand that she drug her toddler to stop him saying “Bye, bye plane” over and over again. So the Continental Express attendant kicked them off the flight.

I’ll bet many travelers have fantasized about making a noisy kid near by disappear, not to mention the ones who kick your seat. But few would want it carried out in practice. And to demand the parent injure the child’s health? That’s appalling.

NJ Gov. Jon Corzine's Poweful Seatbelt Commercial

YouTube - NJ Gov. Jon Corzine’s Seatbelt PSA

[I’m in Italy until late Wednesday, so I queued up a few posts to cover while I’m away. This is one of them.]

Higher Education--Dream and Reality

St. Petersburg Times columnist Bill Maxwell decided to leave journalism and go teach at a historically black college in order to “give back.” The results are sobering: Part One, Part Two, with Part Three due on May 27th.

Spotted via South of the Suwannee.

My Lucky Day

David Post has one for the annals of improbabiity,

You Think You've Got Bad Luck?: Some of you may recall the weird story of a few years ago, when one of the giant balloons at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade in New York (the 60-foot tall "Cat in the Hat," in fact) came loose, crashed into a streetlamp, and fractured the skull of one of the onlookers below. And most of you surely recall that last October a small plane co-piloted by Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle slammed into an apartment in a building on New York's Upper East Side. What you may not know (and what I didn't know until recently) is that these accidents both happened to the same woman. (I was pretty sure this must be one of those silly urban legends that make the rounds from time to time, but according to the NY Daily News, MSNBC, and others, it is in fact true). It truly boggles the mind -- making the front page of the New York Times twice for falling victim to two of the most freakish, random, and improbable events one can imagine. The likelihood of this happening to the same person? Obviously, not zero (since it happened), but surely about as close to zero as one gets; what odds would you have given someone in 1998 if someone had been willing to bet on its occurrence?

At least she wasn't on my flight home today from Sao Paulo.

In Your Face

BoingBoing takes us to Tattooed teacher teaches tolerance:

Bruce Potts is a teacher of Public Speaking at the University of New Mexico and has a full tribal face tattoo. He has a straight forward attitude and imparts a cool vibe of acceptance. We'll bet his students get an extra edge on using demeanor and attitude in public speaking. And a life long lesson on not judging books by their covers. Either that or they study really hard because they're afraid he'll eat them.

You know, I bet he doesn't have to deal with problems like this.

Things I meant to blog but didn't get around to

• The Brutal "Miami Model" for Subduing Protests
• Billmon has been visiting Egypt. Read about his train station and train trip from Cairo to Luxor. Both remind me strongly of one of my greatest travel memories. Egypt is special.
• Via SDFL Blog, Holland & Knight has raised local associate salaries to $120,000 per year. Miami tends to run behind the North East cities with higher taxes and living costs, but this helps close the gap.
• SDFL also has your Padilla case update. It seems the government won't even give him copies of his own statements while in custody -- on the grounds that the information is classified!
• Daily Kos Diarist makes the case that Bush Lied About Abu Ghraib. Interesting to see the "Bush lies" meme propagate and mutate.

Link-o-Rama

Quickies. Because I'm distracted.

• The most important post of the day. I will write about this if I can find the time/energy, but go read it.
• Officer Friendly (not)
• Outrage fatigue (On discovering that people in government who tell the truth get forced out of their jobs: "It's like reading that, once again, the freeways are crowded this morning.")
• Our Air Force isn't only a home to religious intolerance verging on bigotry, it's headed by four-star suspects
• One thing that has surprised me about Wesley Clark is how poor his online presence is. I'd have thought he'd be making a bigger bid for the online activists. Now it begins: he's speaking to Daily Kos convention. I hope they chide him about his web site.
• Establishment Democrats support Leiberman. despite his routine practice of putting a knife into the party's rigbs. Real Democrats don't.
• Republicans understand about party discipline: there will be strong right-wing primary opposition for an only somewhat conservative Republican Fl. state senator who recently voted his conscience (and his district) scuttling Jeb Bush's latest attempt to undo the Florida constitution's class-size amendment. That amendment, which Jeb hates and has plotted to undermine for years, caps the sizes of public school classes (and thus creates a need to actually pay for schools!). And polls show voters (but not Republican primary voters, maybe?) love it.
• Ranking Law Reviews is a high-quality effort, but is the game worth the candle when everything is online and searchable?

Making a Scene

Improv Everywhere Mission: Best Buy. So these people all dress up as Best Buy employees and descend upon a store.

It's very funny except that it seems to weird out some of the employees, which gives it a creepy tinge.

I Love Stories Like This

Via Wampum, whom I have inexplicably failed to blogroll until now, comes Hotter Than A Pistol, the sort of story that could make a grown man get a bit misty-eyed.

It's so nice to read about ordinary goodness.

The Myth of 'Going Postal'

In a discussion of the security aspects of last week's post office shooting, Bruce Schneier says that the US Post office's reputation for harboring (or creating) a workforce of repressed homicidal maniacs is in fact undeserved,

There is a common myth that workplace homicides are prevalent in the United States Postal Service. (Note the phrase "going postal.") But not counting this event, there has been less than one shooting fatality per year at Postal Service facilities over the last 20 years. As the USPS has more than 700,000 employees, this is a lower rate than the average workplace.

A Strange Kurdish Parable

I love this story. Although I'm not utterly sure I know what it means, I can certainly think of times that it would have been appropriate. Jonathan Dworkin guest blogging at Political Animal tells a Kurdish parable:

A man is crazy. He believes he is a flower and birds are trying to eat him. A doctor takes him to the hospital. After months of treatment he improves. "I am not a flower," he tells himself. As he is walking home from the hospital he looks up at the sky. "I know I am not a flower," he thinks. "But those birds still want to eat me. How do I convince them that I am not a flower?"

Real-Life Happy Ending

Via TalkLeft (sporting a very nice new layout these days, by the way), a link to the LA Times's account of the sort of real-life happy ending -- horribly delayed, but still a happy ending -- that you never believe when you see it in the movies.

In fact, if this isn't going to be a major motion picture, or at least a made-for-TV movie soon, Hollywood deserves to be outsourced.

Because You Need to Procrastinate at this Time of Year

They claim that no one can play Strange Attractors without laughing at least once. I believe it.

This game uses only one control, the space bar, which turns gravity on when you press it. Weird, silly fun.

Happy Thanksgiving

Risks Again

One risk the British Prime Minister’s family doesn’t have to deal with that others do: the risk that forgetting to take their passport to the airport will interfere with their travel plans.

Shorts

• Brad DeLong links to a cautionary tale about how Bush policies are fostering American decline.
• The NYT gets around to writing an explainer about how the Yee prosecution could go so wrong. Bottom line: bigotry and stupidity in the military, seasoned with unsubstantiated rumors produced by the FBI. Add prosecutorial incompetence, remove due process, and voila! The dark side of military justice is balanced by the sterling efforts of the lawyers representing incarcarated at Guantanamo.
• Want perspective. Try this story about Tihun Nebiyu, a seven-year-old Ethiopian girl being forced to marry.
• The German language apparently suffers from an English invasion, producing “Denglish”.
• Techie fun. Coke machine hacks and peronalized M&Ms and online PDF conversion tools, all via boingboing.
• News about the Open Office 2.0 preview release.

Spoofed

Seems that the study claiming parents lose IQ is in fact an urban legend . Not true. No such thing.

Similarly, the Washington Post thinks that the CBS documents probably aren’t real either. Looks bad for CBS — if this isn’t real it will go down with the Hitler Diaries scandal. Which means it’s all been one great big disctraction from reality—as US News & World Report has been showing independently of the CBS docs, GW Bush’s own account of how he met his service obligations just don’t add up no matter how you try.

Different Drum

I was thinking about Linda Ronstadt’s problems that resulted from dedicating an encore of her signature song to an American film maker. My personal muse, UPN (the muse of bad taste), came to me. Here is what we wrought:

MICHAEL MOORE (sung to the tune of Desperado)

Michael Moore, what did you think you were doing?
You went out filming Iraq and Capitol Hill
Oh, you’re a hard case
I know that you are from Flint
These things that outraged you
Can reach us somehow

Don’t you count on Mike of Disney boy
He’ll screw you if he’s able
You know that Lion’s Gate will be your best bet

Now you’ve made some good films before
I like the rabbit lady
But you had to make a movie about the mess in Iraq

Michael Moore, oh, you know you ain’t Leni Riefenstahl
Your democratic vision is what really shows through
And Cannes, oh Cannes, that’s just some people votin’
Your real reward should come on November 2

Don’t you get sick of lying bullshit
The nonsense comes and the media ducks
it’s hard to prevent truth decay
But you’re fillin’ theaters high and low
The people, they come anyway

Michael Moore, what will be your next film?
Tony Blair not a subject, maybe the AMA?
It may not be Fahrenheit, but it still will enthrall
And help us remember what made America great

Heartland in Darkness?

Remember the big blackout last August? What has been done to prevent another? Sadly, not much.

At the time of the blackout, I was living in Minneapolis. The media all reported that a blackout could just as well have happened to us because of the congestion in the transmission lines over the St. Croix river between Wisconsin and Minnesota. So, I got interested, even though all I really know about energy is that I get most of mine from Cuban coffee. (Those not in Miami, to buy Cuban coffee, check out Javacabana.com . )

Why has nothing been done? There are lots of reasons, I’m sure. But one is obvious: Congress didn’t pass the energy bill. The basic idea of the energy bill was that the problem was lack of transmission infrastructure. So, throw money at energy companies. In particular, give energy companies unprecedented tax breaks. (As mentioned in my post yesterday, some of those breaks are in the Senate version of the ETI repeal legislation rather than the House’s bigger benefits for foreign operations of US corporations.) But, moderate Republicans in the Senate balked at the giveaway, so the bill died.

In any event, the bill didn’t deal with the institutional problems, particularly deregulation in a non-transparent market. (The recently released Enron trader tapes — “stick it to Grandma Millie” — certainly proved this point.) Fortunately for me, I now live near a dangerous nuclear reactor (Turkey Point, I didn’t make the name up), so I don’t have to worry about transmission (although, of course, a quick power drain could shut Turkey Point down like the plants up north went down last August). But for you all, I’m scared. A quick Google search turned up a pretty comprehensive Harvard site on the blackout, Harvard Blackout Site. It lead me to the site of a group with a fascinating name, Power Engineers Supporting Truth, PEST Site , and even more fascinating analyses.

I would love to learn more from somebody who really know what she is talking about!

Link Dump

Every so often I have to admit that I’m never going to get around to writing useful comments on the links that are gathering dust in my saved folder. So here are some interesting things that I had planned to post about:

• Deserter: The Story of George W. Bush after He Quit the Texas Air National Guard
• Update: blocked sites for .mil websurfers
• Balkinization: Arguments That Make You Ashamed to be a Lawyer
• Two from Flablog: Well, maybe a few children left behind and More voucher scams
• Collaborative, open textbook
• Florida Senate Candidate Betty Castor has a blog . There’s an interesting controversy about Castor’s actions (or inactions) while president of the University of South Florida, in which she didn’t try to fire a tenured professor, but did suspend him, when he was charged with helping raise funds for a terrorist group
• Newsweek reports on domestic military spying making its comeback

Commencement Addresses

The Commencement Address is a very odd literary form. Here is a transgressive one, by the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart (William & Mary ‘84) at his alma mater.

Our speaker at the law school this year was considerably less interesting.

Notes About All Over

I am in New Haven, put up at the very traditionally elegant therefore not especially comfortable “Q club”. I can forgive the desk that is too small and too high to type on well. The noise pollution from the TV next door. The lack of a high speed internet connection. It is harder to forgive the contortion needed to find a plug (and there seems to be just one). And it’s even harder to forgive the slowness of the telephone internet connection: 26.4k! That’s the slowest I’ve ever had in the USA. Slower than most of the UK. Slightly slower than Italy.

So rather than provide a series of posts, here’s a little collection of annotated linkage:

• Laplace’s Demon is teasing me which is probably deserved.

• Daily Kos says Clarke is a patriot

• Amanda Butler blogged the oral arguments in the Newdow case. The TV here in the ‘Q Club’ has CNN, and they had a long item on the case. The commentator kept saying what a great job Newdow did, emotions and all, at the argument. The anchor — who looked like someone trying to play a fluffhead but not quite managing — kept saying ‘but doesn’t the little girl want to say the pledge and be like all the other little kids?’

• Slacktivist is having a record-breaking day

• Letters of Marque has an MT-Blacklist problem

• Clarke 9/11 commission hearing transcript: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. I caught a little in the airport. It was impressive.

• And more great Clarke stuff at all the usual suspects, notably Talking Points Memo, Brad DeLong, Whiskey Bar, and especially Road To Surfdom, which is blogging the book.

Posner Poker

I think they must have too much time on their hands at the other UM Law — U. Michigan Law — as in addition to all her blogging, first-year student Heidi Bond has invented a fun-sounding poker variant: Posner Poker, the game with tradable cards (for those of you who are not lawyers, just think of this as “Let’s Make a Deal” poker).

Or maybe it’s being trapped indoors due to all that cold and snow.

Charitable Giving Season

As the tax year draws to a close, people sometimes round out their charitable giving. There are always more good causes than there are dollars. While something could be said for combining one’s giving into a single gift that might actually make a noticable difference to one group, Caroline and I have instead adopted a somewhat scattershot approach, which includes giving to homelessness relief, various educational institutions (here at UM, we give to a group which supports student-funded-fellowships in the summer: law students use them to work for pro bono groups—a double-effect donation), and a fund that helps provide lawyers for the indigent. We haven’t yet decided whether and how much to give to whom in the upcoming election, perhaps because this year I seem to suffer from a problem a bit like a N-dimensional Buridan’s ass.

You don’t need me to tell you how to find similar groups active in your community. We do, however, give to two less-well-known charities that I think are worthy of your consideration if you are planning any charitable giving.

There are a handful of groups doing good work in the information privacy field, including the
ACLU and (significantly more often than not, but not inevitably) the Center for Democracy and Technology. [Update: And of course EFF does great stuff too! (But you knew that.)] And there are very good people at each of them. But of them all, my favorite is the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC). I may not always agree with Director Marc Rotenberg on every detail, but I deeply admire his efforts and the organization he has built. EPIC’s work is of consistently high quality on both the domestic and international fronts, and it is a leader in the causes of information privacy and electronic civil liberties. I believe that these issues will only become more important in the next five years. EPIC is both pioneering and effective. Donate here.

Another group that I believe delivers enormous bang for the buck is Ashoka, a US-based charity that gives grants to “fellows” — they call them “practical visionaries” — who work for institutional or economic reform, primarily but not exclusively in poorer countries. Individual grants are actually pretty low, a “living stipend typically for three years, depending on individual need and local salary standards”. So far Ashoka has supported 400 fellows in 48 countries — and they produce results. Donate here.

Happy Thanksgiving

Coronal Mass Ejection Headed Our Way

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Earth put on solar storm alert:

Imminent disruption is predicted for satellites, power systems and even mobile phones because of a solar storm.

It comes from one of the largest groups of sunspots seen for years. On Thursday superhot gas erupted above them.

The event, called a Coronal Mass Ejection, sent 10 billion tonnes of superhot gas speeding towards Earth.

As well as communication blackouts, aurorae - polar lights - may be seen from mid-latitudes as the gas arrives.

“10 billion tonnes of Superhot gas”? Speeding our way? I left the car in the sun yesterday, and when I got into it in the late afternoon, the thermometer said 111 degrees Fahrenheit (ie 43.8 Celsius). Isn’t that hot enough already?