It was pledge week on the radio recently, and as I hadn’t heard Cokie Roberts on the radio recently, I wondered if my preconditions for resuming my donations to NPR might have been met.
My conditions were simple: No money to NPR so long as they employ Juan Williams and Cokie Roberts. Williams is (famously) history, and Roberts no longer seemed to blight my morning radio. Is it safe to donate? Apparently, not.
Brian Tamanaha predicts, plausibly, that law schools will be subject to external scrutiny. It does sound as if they’ve earned it. I was not aware that the Law School Admissions Council has the ability to provide (or check) LSAT (and other?) data that has been being falsified by some schools. Getting the accurate data from the source seems like a no-brainer.
I would hope that a move to more verified reporting is an unalloyed good for UM, just as it most certainly would be for prospective law students everywhere. If, as seems to be the case, we’re reporting honestly, we can only gain from stamping out the trimmers.
The Supreme Court has posted the transcript of today’s (!) oral argument in Golan v. Holder, the case about the constitutionality of taking works out of the public domain and extending copyright protection to them.
It’s an unusually good argument on all three sides (2 advocates and the court), but I think that Anthony T. Falzone’s effort for the Petitioners was especially impressive.
I have been having a problem with the web site for my bank, which after many years of working OK suddenly decided a few weeks ago that it really didn’t feel like downloading my transaction information into Quicken any more.
Yesterday I finally broke down and called the bank to see if they could sort it out. I hate calling the bank because every time I want something it takes over an hour and I have to speak to three or more people. Indeed, I spent five minutes with the first tech, then got escalated to Trish, a nice tech from Level 2 tech support. Eventually I was able to convince her that it actually wasn’t working. But her attempt to actually solve anything was frustrated by the fact that the bank, having just rolled out a redesigned of their entire web site yesterday, wasn’t actually serving many downloads because something had crashed.
So we made an appointment to talk on Thursday. Seemed like a positive experience on balance. But not so fast! Today I get a call from a different tech, informing me that Level 2 is not making appointments to talk to people, so the first tech would not be calling on Thursday. Yes, he called me when I wasn’t free to talk to say they wouldn’t be calling me when I was free to talk. And, oh yes, systems are still down, so no point doing anything today either.
On the positive side, the more-than-one-hour-and-three-or-more-people rule seems intact.
His fans will be glad to know that Gary Farber seems to have overcome the problems in his life long enough to take up blogging again, and has a stemwinder of a post in Papers, Please on the new Alabama anti-undocumented-immigrant statute.
I had not being paying enough attention, because until he pointed it out, I had not known that among the many jaw-dropping features of this piece of punitive xenophobia is this bit, hidden in plain sight in the New York Times:
Among the other sections Judge Blackburn upheld: one that nullifies any contracts entered into by an illegal immigrant; another that forbids any transaction between an illegal immigrant and any division of the state, a proscription that has already led to the denial of a Montgomery man’s application for water and sewage service; and, most controversially, a section that requires elementary and secondary schools to determine the immigration status of incoming students.
Nullification of contracts? Er, what about this little section of the Constitution, in Art. I, Sec. 10, para 1:
No state shall enter into any treaty, alliance, or confederation; grant letters of marque and reprisal; coin money; emit bills of credit; make anything but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts; pass any bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law impairing the obligation of contracts, or grant any title of nobility.
(emphasis added). Surely that’s relevant?
Apparently, the author of How to Procrastinate and Still Get Things Done just won an Ig Nobel prize for it — 15 years late.
The article is quite worrying, for, as I have mentioned before, it more-or-less describes much of how I work.
Also relevant: Annals of Procrastination (01/09), Procrastination Prediction Vindicated (02/11).
Incidentally, as regards the 02/11 entry, I did in the end get the book, but I had to return it before I got around to reading it.
The use of hobby blogs as a procrastination tool is left as an exercise for the reader.
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