Who would have thought that updating two syllabi for classes you’ve already taught before would take so long? Now, the fun part: writing a syllabus from scratch for constitutional law…

Pieter of Peaktalk notes an interesting immigration pattern. One suspects, however, that he underestimates the number of reliable NDP voters among my northward-bound ex-countrymen. Of course, the substantive effects of the migration are the same either way.

From Scipio comes this word:

In court on Friday, Judge Pickard announced that he was going to effectively bar asbestos and silica products liability cases in Jefferson and Claiborne Counties, because about half of every jury pool consists of named plaintiffs in asbestos and silica cases. Accordingly, the defendants would not be able to ever get a fair trial in those two counties.

I don’t know what’s more disturbing: that half the people of two counties are named plaintiffs in liability cases, or that it took half the people of two counties being named plaintiffs in liability cases to get any meaningful tort reform in this state.

Interesting statistics: in 2000 Jefferson County had 9,740 people, 86.7% of whom were black (the highest proportion of any Mississippi county), while Claiborne County’s population was 11,831, 84.4% of whom were black (2nd). Mississippi as a whole had 2.844 million people in 82 counties, 36.6% of whom were black; the median county propulation was 22,374, and the median percentage black in a county was 37.5% (μ=39.6%, σ=20.2).

Brian J. Noggle explains the physics behind getting “free” stuff (well, it’s not free—usually, someone else paid for it and got screwed over) from vending machines, an art mastered by many a college student over the years.

My advice: although “tipping” the vending machine may not vend free product (as the labels say), it usually manages to dislodge any loosely-hanging items that failed to vend properly. Just don’t do it when anyone else is around.

Laura of Apartment 11D is understandably quite annoyed at the public response that at least one (presumably prominent, although I haven’t seen the post in question) blogger gave to her survey.

I generally agree that, ethically, a good blogger will provide readers with an opportunity to have opposing views heard, at least in the form of trackbacks. It is disappointing that many “big boys” of the Blogosphere like Glenn Reynolds, Josh Marshall, the Volokh Conspiracy, and Andrew Sullivan don’t use “real” Trackbacks—Volokh relies on Technorati, which isn’t a proper pingback/trackback service, while Reynolds, Marshall, and Sullivan don’t even go that far; Sullivan accepts “reader mail,” but much of it is buried and all is stripped of any way to tell how authoritative the response is.

Laura cites Usenet as a more “democratic” medium; it is, in the sense that it does facilitate conversation more readily, but there are significant drawbacks to it—most notably, no inherent ability to enforce strong identities of participants in the discussion, which leads to the sort of trollish behavior that one finds at the comment sections of some prominent weblogs (or inmate-run asylums like Slashdot and K5), not to mention issues of spam, off-topic discussion, gratuitous vulgarity, and other vices large and small. The “decline of Usenet,” mind you, has been a staple of Internet discussion since at least 1992, when I was first exposed to it, so it has proven to be more resiliant than one might have thought.

The election came and went, and, while the Liberals did beat the Conservatives in the realm of seat counts, neither side (apparently, pending recounts) won enough to form even a coalition government with a natural partner (a Liberal–Bloc Quebecois coalition would work in terms of seat count, but not in terms of ideology). Collin May suspects the real winner in all this is Alberta premier Ralph Klein, while Albertan Colby Cosh does his postmortem duties. In any event, virtually nobody expects this parliament to last very long.

Apparently the use of cell phones, like everything else it seems (except khat), leads to reduced sperm counts in men.

Meanwhile, I can’t tell if Amber Taylor is upset that these inanimate objects are sexist in their effects or just interested in obtaining an inexpensive form of contraception.

Alex Knapp more-or-less sums up my reaction to the Supremes’ ruling on the Guantanamo detainees and José Padilla. More, of course, at Volokh. And, there’s archived Signifying Nothing Gitmo coverage here.

Incidentally, both Alex and Von approvingly quote from Antonin Scalia’s dissent. (Mind you, the most immediate impact of this case on my life is now I have to shoehorn it into two-thirds of my courses in the fall.)

All it seems to do here is rain… I feel like I accidentally moved back to England or something. This also means the jackasses at Home Depot have rescheduled the installation for the trim around my front door (never mind that they are doing the work indoors), meaning another few days of me staring at bare doorframe in the living room.

If that weren’t annoying enough, the good folks at a certain Oxford bar (who otherwise have given me good service in the past, hence my lack of interest in casting aspersions on them publicly) managed to lose my debit card Friday night while they were holding it to secure my tab. One might suspect that the universe was conspiring against one’s efforts to have a social life, if one were the paranoid type. (One also drank a little too much beer and has been regretting it for the past two days.)

On the other hand, I do have a spiffy custom cap (well, actually a tam), gown, and hood on the way in plenty of time for the fall convocation, so there’s that at least.

Matt Stinson has a list of Gmail deficiencies. There are a few more I’d add:

• No (obvious) way to search or filter on arbitrary headers, à la procmail.
• No way to mark messages as “to” you (e.g. with ») that are addressed to other addresses than your Gmail account (useful if you’re using a procmail recipe to Bcc all your incoming mail to Gmail).
• No way to automatically Bcc all your outgoing mail elsewhere.
• Nonexistent handling of mailing list headers (Mail-Followup-To, etc.). Ideally, Gmail should automatically create tags based on X-Mailing-List.

Still, it’s managing to win over this devoted mutt user quite quickly.

Riddle me this, Batman:

I think it’s a safe bet that somebody is wrong.

Contra the quoted individual, I’d like to extend my best wishes to our Canadian friends and allies as they go to the polls today to choose a new parliament (and almost certainly a new government).

More thoughts from Peaktalk, Colby Cosh, and Collin May, all of whom are rooting for a Conservative victory. Unlike certain other American pundits of similar girth, I will not be weighing in on this matter, as it is strictly an internal affair for Canadians to decide for themselves, except to express the view that the GOP might be a more attractive option at the ballot box (for me, at least) if they reflected the more vigorous attitude toward federalism and libertarianism expressed by their ideological counterparts on the other side of the 49th parallel.

Steven Taylor is helping a colleague obtain recent books to donate to Baghdad University in Iraq. In particular demand are recent textbooks in mathematics, the sciences, and medicine, although I suspect any and all donations of relatively contemporary texts (from the last five years or so) would be welcome.

Matt Stinson would support a constitutional amendment forbidding Britney Spears from getting married again. Apart from the unfairness of singling out Ms. Spears for constitutional opprobrium (surely, the violations perpetrated by Jennifer Lopez and Larry King are equally deplorable), conservatives—as opposed to libertarians—might legitimately be concerned that such an amendment would lead to widespread sympathy for Ms. Spears engaging in nonmarital* sex, and—if we are to believe the cited Mr. Sullivan’s views on same-sex marriage—increased promiscuity by Ms. Spears and other individuals prohibited from the benefits of legal marriage.

On a more legalistic level, one might be concerned that such an amendment amounts to a bill of attainder and deprives Ms. Spears of equal protection (particularly if Ms. Spears is subjected to some nonmarital abuse), although it is unclear whether a constitutional amendment can be unconstitutional in its own right; an amendment reducing or increasing the Senate representation of any state in which Ms. Spears resides would clearly be unconstitutional, as would have any amendment passed in 1800 restricting someone from importing Ms. Spears as a slave, but these are clearly “corner cases” in the law. Such questions would no doubt lead to great controversy between the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals—which has jurisdiction over Nevada, undoubtably the site of any future Spears “marriage”—and the Supreme Court, inevitably leading to a further decline in public respect for both institutions.

Thus, and for reasons of good taste, I must decline Mr. Stinson’s implicit invitation to join his effort to amend the constitution. Nonetheless we should remain vigilant that the institution of marriage remain the sacrosanct cornerstone of American society. Or at least retain the possibility that Ms. Spears might, eventually, come to her senses and marry the proprietor of this weblog.

Eric Grey attempts to describe the rules for forming a minority government. There are a few points worth mentioning:

• The rules vary among parliamentary democracies. Some democracies, like Germany, require constructive votes of no confidence; in other words, to get rid of an existing government, you have to nominate a new one, which necessarily increases the stability of the system. In some other parliamentary democracies, the government falls if any government proposal is defeated on a party-line vote (i.e. not a “free” vote). Canada generally follows Westminster tradition, where “confidence” is a customary rather than a legal requirement; since only the Prime Minister (well, technically, the sovereign) can dissolve parliament and call elections, essentially this system is equivalent to the German system—although, since a government could only be replaced by a plurality vote, the PM is more likely than not to call new elections before such a vote could take place.
• Minority governments are somewhat more common than one might suspect. Notably, Israel’s government is currently a minority government. Britain and Canada each have had a few since World War II. Interestingly, minority governments are much more common than coalitions in countries with first-past-the-post (plurality) elections.

An interesting study of coalition government, by the way, is Multiparty Government by Michael Laver and Norman Schofield. Laver and Ken Shepsle’s Making and Breaking Governments is probably also worthwhile (from a more game-theoretic perspective, as is Shepsle’s bent), but, alas, I haven’t read it.

Incidentally, I’d appreciate recommendations on a scholarly text (or even a textbook) on Canadian politics, perhaps something comparable to Philip Norton’s The British Polity. For now, it’s just an idle scholarly interest, but maybe an employer one of these decades will be desperate enough to let me teach some comparative courses.

If you’re suitably wealthy (to the tune of $16.00), you may now invest in a printed copy of my dissertation. Of course, you can still download it for free, but this gives you the option of obtaining it in convenient book form—and, I might add, at a price significantly cheaper than that charged by UMI, while still funneling several bucks into my pocket.

I seem to have struck a nerve with my (admittedly off-the-cuff) criticism of critics of popular music.

I think Jay gets to the heart of much of my critique, but there’s another component of it as well. One often hears that “band X is a ripoff of band Y.” Band X need not have covered any of band Y’s songs—all they have to do is “sound like” band Y. This has always struck me as something of a silly critique; if people like what Pearl Jam sounds like, and Pearl Jam isn’t making any more songs, why should we complain if Creed makes some songs that sound like something Pearl Jam might have performed? I could understand the critique if Creed went out and covered every song on Ten, or if Pearl Jam were still releasing new albums, but the critique as it stands seems rather odd.

There is one other point I should clarify from my previous post; I made a point of including “NPR listeners” among the group of similarly-afflicted snobs. I actually have no problem with NPR listeners in general, although I do have a problem with NPR listeners who make a point of telling everyone they meet that they listen to NPR. (The classic quote on NPR is, alas, missing from the memorable quotes page for NewsRadio in the Internet Movie Database.)

As mentioned earlier, I rented Love Actually and Lost in Translation last week. Not surprisingly, the combined effect of the films was to make me want to visit both London and Tokyo.

I think Lost in Translation was the weaker of the two films, although I did enjoy it nonetheless. Bill Murray and Scarlet Johanssen both gave excellent performances, the film deftly avoids a cliché resolution, and the cinematography was outstanding, but the whole is ultimately unsatisfactory—although I can’t really put my finger on why. Perhaps the weakness is simply relative to the amount of hype the film received.

On the other hand, Love Actually was a supremely enjoyable film, with excellent acting, an engaging plot, and (also) outstanding cinematography. In terms of story construction, the obvious referent is Robert Altman’s Short Cuts, but Newell uses that framework in service to a more comedic story. A minor demerit for the use of Rowan Atkinson in a throw-away role; if you’re going to use him, put him in a real role (a sin also committed less egregiously by Newell’s Four Weddings and a Funeral).

The only other problem with Love Actually is that the widescreen cinematography used—on the order of 2.8:1 2.35:1—would make the film virtually unwatchable on a standard 4:3 television set (and thus seems inappropriate for a comedy). Luckily, as I mentioned before, it did play on my laptop’s 1.6:1 display, though even there was ample unused screen real estate at the top and bottom of the screen.

I noticed on my last visit to Blockbuster that sufficient desperation has set in that they’ve decided to offer a NetFlix-style “unlimited rentals” plan… for $24.95 per month (limit 2 rentals at once), which strikes me as rather noncompetitive if you ask me, although I seem to remember NetFlix being significantly cheaper than it is now in the past.

Of course, the fact Blockbuster decided to raise the DVD rental fee to $4.19 hasn’t exactly ensured my continued patronage after I use up my $20 gift card.

My most recent rentals are Love Actually (some of the humor in which, I suspect, is lost on people on this side of the pond—most notably, the plight of the has-been singer trying to get the Christmas #1 is something of a riff on a British tradition of has-beens and never-wases trying to gain glory with a hit Christmas single) and Lost in Translation, the latter of which doesn’t seem to be very cooperative with my laptop for some reason (I couldn’t get Totem to play it at all under Linux, and Windows Media Player won’t let me skip past any of the promo crap on the DVD). So we’ll see if the real DVD player can cope with Lost, and then I’ll run to Blockbuster to return the DVDs.

Apparently, Dick Cheney was ahead of the curve and speaking on behalf of fans of P2P networks when he told Patrick Leahy what he thought of him:

According to this News.com article, Senator Hatch’s “INDUCE” act has been renamed the “Inducing Infringements of Copyrights Act,” but has not otherwise been changed. ”Foes of the IICA, including civil liberties groups and file-swapping network operators, are alarmed that the measure enjoys strong support from prominent politicians of both major parties. Its supporters include Patrick Leahy, D-Vt.; Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn.; Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D.; Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.; and Barbara Boxer, D-Calif.”

Brian J. Noggle has figured out how Celine Dion came into existence. Cloning is involved.

Stephen Karlson ponders curriculum reform—in particular, an emphasis on interdisciplinary learning. My knowledge of such matters is necessarily limited—I was not a guinea pig for the integrated first-year curriculum at Rose-Hulman (those of us with high-school calculus were too far along), and I was never a freshman again.

All I’ve gotten so far on Millsaps’ interdisciplinary core is the fluffy, press release material aimed at potential students and parents and anecdotal accounts from various participants (principally, my tour guide during my interview)—I assume it works, since they’ve been doing it for over a decade, but I have no empirical evidence either way. It certainly seems more rigorous than NIU’s approach to the problem, but then again there are advantages in such things to being a selective private school that can restrict its enrollment and worry less about the implications of transfers in or out.

I have two Gmail invites to spare. Email me if you’re interested. All gone!

James Joyner links reviews of C2 by Meryl Yourish and Kevin Aylward.

I gave a fairly positive review to the product last weekend, which seemed to fit the general consensus until Ms. Yourish weighed in.

Update: Steven Taylor asks a question that proves he’s not a cola connoisseur.

My latest little project for Debian is an automatic printer setup tool, built from lots of the bits and pieces I’ve developed for Foomatic-GUI. Details here on debian-devel. Short instructions:

Add this to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://lordsutch.dyndns.org/~cnlawren/printconf/ ./

Then do (as root):

apt-get update; apt-get install printconf

Success or failure reports would be greatly appreciated.