Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

Opera Browser Free Registration Offer

Posted on August 30, 2005 by Michael Froomkin

Opera, the alternative alternative browser, is celebrating its tenth anniversary. They’ll give you a free registration code for the full, ad-free, version if you send a note to registerme@opera.com before midnight tonight.

Posted in Software | 3 Comments

How Students Choose Law Schools

Posted on August 30, 2005 by Michael Froomkin

I’m always interested to learn how students decide which law school to attend. This explanation is somewhat unusual:

When I first had the inkling of attending school at UM. I knew nothing about Miami – the city. So I started watching Animal Planet’s Miami Animal Police on tv. I felt it was important to know which mammals, insects, and reptiles to run away from as an initial frame of reference for everything else in the area. Apparently, from the several episodes I saw in which “flight and flee” emerged as a common, team response to crazed-animal attacks, many of Miami-Dade’s finest believe the same.

Upon gaining confidence in my knowledge of the dangers inherent in South Florida wild-life (i.e. hungry gator – bad/black-nosed Coral snake – worse), I graduated myself to CSI-Miami. That’s when I made the decision to move to Miami. Dead people in Chicago, D.C., New York are invariably overweight, pale and pasty. But in Miami, corpses have the greatest bods and tans.

Then again…hot bodies and crazed wild critters does capture some of what makes Miami different. But only some.

Posted in Law School | Comments Off on How Students Choose Law Schools

I Spot a Trend

Posted on August 30, 2005 by Michael Froomkin

It seems to me that there are a number of connections (not all of them wonderful, either) between this Swedish library initiative to allow library patrons to check out living people for a 45-minute chat and this London Zoo exhibit.

Posted in Kultcha | Comments Off on I Spot a Trend

Is the Common Banana Doomed?

Posted on August 30, 2005 by Michael Froomkin

Popular Science, surely not a crazed/wacked gloomdoggling news source, presents a scary story suggesting that the banana as we know it is doomed.

Can This Fruit Be Saved?: The banana as we know it is on a crash course toward extinction. …

For nearly everyone in the U.S., Canada and Europe, a banana is a banana: yellow and sweet, uniformly sized, firmly textured, always seedless. Our banana, called the Cavendish, is one variety Aguilar doesn't grow here. “And for you,” says the chief banana breeder for the Honduran Foundation for Agricultural Investigation (FHIA), “the Cavendish is the banana.”

The Cavendish—as the slogan of Chiquita, the globe's largest banana producer, declares—is “quite possibly the world's perfect food.” Bananas are nutritious and convenient; they're cheap and consistently available. Americans eat more bananas than any other kind of fresh fruit, averaging about 26.2 pounds of them per year, per person (apples are a distant second, at 16.7 pounds). It also turns out that the 100 billion Cavendish bananas consumed annually worldwide are perfect from a genetic standpoint, every single one a duplicate of every other. It doesn't matter if it comes from Honduras or Thailand, Jamaica or the Canary Islands—each Cavendish is an identical twin to one first found in Southeast Asia, brought to a Caribbean botanic garden in the early part of the 20th century, and put into commercial production about 50 years ago.

Anyone who knows about the perils of monoculture could write the next act of this story.

… in 1992, a new strain of the fungus—one that can affect the Cavendish—was discovered in Asia. Since then, Panama disease Race 4 has wiped out plantations in Indonesia, Malaysia, Australia and Taiwan, and it is now spreading through much of Southeast Asia. It has yet to hit Africa or Latin America, but most experts agree that it is coming.

And it's happened before, wiping out the precursor to the Cavendish and inspiring the song “Yes, We Have No Bananas”.

The only cheerful part of this story is that I like the sound of some of the other varietals. We have a choice of apples (and tasteless Red Delicious are being pushed out of the market); maybe a diversity of bananas next?

Posted in Science/Medicine | 4 Comments

Amnesties Are Good–Usually. Then There’s Kentucky…

Posted on August 29, 2005 by Michael Froomkin

OK. Imagine a place where the ruler and key staff members are suspected of some crimes relating to the administration of government. Rather than face the music, the ruler just pardons everyone in danger of being indicted.

Even Richard Nixon rejected the pardon-everyone strategy. Even Ronald Reagan waited until after they were convicted to pardon constitution-subverters Oliver North and Admiral Poindexter.

But in Kentucky it seems they are either more stupid, more desperate, or more arrogant: via TPM we learn Gov. Ernie Fletcher (R) is going to pardon all his aides who are suspected of patronage hiring in violation of state law.

Gov. Fletcher did not, however, pardon himself. Due to appear before a grand jury tomorrow, Gov. Fletcher said he wouldn’t testify, although he didn’t say whether he’d take the Fifth or simply be in contempt (full text of speech). And there’s talk, although it’s hard to know how serious, of impeachment.

This incident shows how the power of pre-conviction, and especially pre-indictment, amnesty can work harm (here, by removing a way for the public to get at the truth of the accusations). Nevertheless, I remain persuaded that on balance giving the executive branch the power to declare amnesties is a good and necessary thing, a power perhaps not used enough in our over-criminalized society.

Posted in Politics: The Party of Sleaze | 7 Comments

Empowered!

Posted on August 29, 2005 by Michael Froomkin

The electricity went back on around 6:45 pm. So far the temperature in the house has dropped about three degrees, down to 88 (31 Celsius). I guess there is a lot of specific heat in all those books we used to line the walls.

I think it may take a couple days for my brain to cool down to a functioning temperature. A good night’s sleep would help too.

Posted in Personal | Comments Off on Empowered!