Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

Toys Are Not Just for Kids

Posted on March 11, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

I used to think that the next time I was in a silly mood I'd order a few pounds of brightly colored Dilatant compound. I certainly don't want 100 lbs of it, and even $12/lb seemed steep.

But now I'm thinking the black stuff would be nice. Except that it's $24/lb. Would just one pound really be enough? And then there are all those other neat colors….

(Other problem: the stuff seems to melt in Florida, even indoors under air conditioning. I bunch it up and two hours later it has ooozed out into a flat boring ameboid shape. Could it be the humidity? Or does it do that everywhere?)

Posted in Sufficiently Advanced Technology | 2 Comments

Was It Too Slow For You?

Posted on March 11, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

According to the web site optimization page, this blog is too big and loads too slowly:

Connection Rate Download Time
14.4K 70.21 seconds
28.8K 36.81 seconds
33.6K 32.03 seconds
56K 20.58 seconds
ISDN 128K 8.66 seconds
T1 1.44Mbps 3.86 seconds

For readers on a good cable/DSL connection, this shouldn’t be an issue; but the thought that it might take 20 seconds to load this page on dialup is sobering. I currently have the blog set to show six past days of content. I could set it to fewer in order to speed things up. Should I?

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Posted in Discourse.net | 5 Comments

The Veepstakes (Herein of McCain et al)

Posted on March 10, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

This John-McCain-might-like-to-be-Kerry's-veep meme is running around the internet. (E.g. The Blogging of the President: 2004). It's a nice spring fling of a concept but would be a Really Stupid choice.

Kerry's veep needs to have all of the following characteristics.

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Posted in Politics: US: 2004 Election | 6 Comments

Distributed Human Sorting of Internet Objects

Posted on March 10, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

I learn a lot from reading Ed Felton. In A Spoonful of Sugar he describes an absolutely brilliant method being used at Carnegie-Mellon to “label all the images on the web”.

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Posted in Internet | 1 Comment

An Extreme Approach to Faculty Time Management

Posted on March 10, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

Via Invisible Adjunct comes the tale of Prof. David Lester's extreme approach to managing the conflicting demands on a professor's time that get in the way of writing.

I suppose the guy is a nut, and there's no doubt that if everyone was like this it would be a Bad Thing, but I will confess that as I read it, I could see how a person could be driven to it. Certainly, I would go to fewer faculty meetings if I could square it with my conscience. Or with my live-in conscience, the spouse who is also a colleague.

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Posted in Law School | 1 Comment

The Libraries That Time (and Budgets) Forgot

Posted on March 10, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

Michael Winerip's On Education: At Poor Schools, Time Stops on the Library's Shelves is a deeply depressing story, and the sort of journalism we need but don't get nearly as often as we need.

It seems that in poor neighborhoods — predominantly black neighborhoods — the schools have been starving the libraries. The books in the school library mostly date from before the schools were integrated. Not only do they lack the biographies students need for Black History Month, but they are innocent of four decades of modern technology, politics and literature. They don't even have Harry Potter — the books that are credited with sparking a new generation of readers.

What better example of our national shame of unequal class-based (which often in effect means race-based) public education?

That said, I do have one tiny criticism of the article: do not make fun of Freddy the Pig.

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Posted in Readings | Comments Off on The Libraries That Time (and Budgets) Forgot