Although I don’t really buy the arguments of the “keep Terri Schiavo alive” brigade, Dean Esmay thinks her parents have a fairly strong case; read their side here. Unfortunately, I can’t find anything on Michael’s side except this statement from 2003 before Florida’s legislature got involved. The truth being a three-edged sword, take both with a rather large grain of salt.

I won’t pretend this is an easy issue, but I tend to think—whatever its other faults—the legal system does a better job of deciding these things than the court of public opinion or grandstanding politicans do, and the judiciary remains unconvinced of the merits of Ms. Schiavo’s parents’ case.

Well, I’m massively behind on the 50 Book Challenge, but I did finish reading the copy of James Fallows’ Free Flight: Inventing the Future of Air Travel that I threw in for $6 with an Amazon.com order for “work” books. As Robert mentioned last month, it’s a pretty interesting look at some of the new innovations in small planes (or “general aviation”). The book slightly suffers from being dated—in particular, I think there’s a good chapter that needs to be added on the last two years of the Eclipse 500 saga.

It’s also not entirely clear how Fallows sees “air taxis” fitting in the larger aviation system; he talks a lot about the threat they pose to what most transportation folks call “legacy carriers” (e.g. American, Continental, Delta, Northwest, United, and US Airways) but not so much about how the air taxis would affect the regional jet networks associated with the legacy carriers or the “no-frills” carriers like Southwest and airTran. I suspect that, by further drying up the pool of high-revenue customers that the legacy carriers depend on to stay in business, the “hub and spoke” system will fall apart and two classes of travel will emerge in the aviation hinterlands of flyover country: on-demand “air taxi” travel for the rich (or those who can convince their company that an extra $200 in airfare is worth saving a night in the hotel) and increased once-a-day point-to-point travel to popular destinations. Of course, like any other predictions, these may be completely wrong.

Nonetheless, it’s a very interesting book and I recommend it highly for anyone with an interest in general aviation.

Stephen Karlson writes:

I expect juniors and seniors to have a basic understanding of the meanings and spellings of simple words.

An expectation, mind you, that is largely in vain. In my public opinion class last week, when talking about affect (in the public opinion context, a synonym for emotion), I ended up explaining the difference between the words affect and effect in common usage. I’m pretty sure this was the first time any of my students were made aware that these two words, in fact, are not the same.

Of course, it doesn’t help by the time students have reached me they generally have had 13–16 years of experience with teachers and professors in various fields whose reaction to shoddy grammar and usage can be summed up as “eh, it’s not my job to fix it,” rather than the proper response of whacking them over the head repeatedly with a copy of Strunk and White.