PVRblog links a post by Dave Zatz that takes note of a new TiVo contest in which the grand prize is the long-awaited Series 3 HD TiVo; Zatz has started a side contest in which readers are asked to speculate on a release date and price for the unit. Although the official word from TiVo is “second half of 2006,” the betting money is apparently on “early September” at this point.

Over at QandO, Dale Franks mocks James Miller’s idea that what the voters are clamoring for is a space elevator—for starters, the name “space elevator” needs to go, since who wants to spend a week listening to The Girl from Ipanema while they trundle towards geostationary orbit?—and McQ does a post-mortem on the DP World ports deal.

The latter of course points out the futility of trying to ask the American public questions about Middle Eastern politics; if the average American has the emirate of Dubai (which has been a consistent U.S. ally for its entire existence) equated to al Qaeda in their heads, what hope could he or she possibly have of meaningfully distingushing between Saddam Hussein (a known bad guy) and al Qaeda?

NRO has gallantly lept into the debate about the academy with a blog that, at the very least, should be as worthy of being relentlessly mocked as “The Corner.” Case in point would be this nonsensical post from Joel Malchow, who can’t even figure out what particular phenomenon (co-ed dorms? co-ed dorm rooms? co-ed bathrooms?) he is complaining about, only to make the statement that “like unisex showers, co-ed dorms are generally met with very little interest among students.” Proudly spoken like a man who’s never seen Undeclared. Or gone to college.

If that weren’t enough, the decision to grant posting privileges to the terminally vapid Kathryn Jean Lopez is surely the death knell for this project as any worthwhile contribution to debate over the current state of the academy.

þ: Orin Kerr and Stephen Karlson.

One of the benefits of the ever-expanding blogosphere is that someone else will take care of the heavy lifting for you; case in point, Trapper Markelz posting his thoughts on the BSG season finale saves me from having to put together a six-page-long post covering the same territory.

I just wish I could delegate my scholarly activity in the same way…

If I were a Republican strategist, I’d be doing everything I could to help the Democrats play Don Quixote by trying to censure—or even better, trying to impeach—the president. Start the impeachment hearings today and load them up with Bush-bashing witnesses like George Galloway, Cindy Sheehan, Scott Ritter, and Ramsey Clark.

The absolute worst thing that can happen (and I put the odds of this at about zero) for the Republicans is that the impeachment effort succeeds and the GOP can get rid of an unpopular lame-duck whose approval ratings are dragging down the whole party. The best? Well, remember the 1998 mid-term elections, when Bill Clinton had 80% approval ratings after all his dirty laundry was aired in public.

Colts HB Edgerrin James has signed a free-agent deal to play for the Arizona Cardinals, which will probably either (a) put the Cardinals back on the NFL map or (b) relegate James to football oblivion. Given that decent backs are dime-a-dozen in the contemporary NFL, my money is more on option b.

Only the Democratic Party could conclude that their main problem in the 2004 election was that the people who nominated John F. Kerry were too white:

An influential Democratic committee on Saturday endorsed the idea of adding as many as four state primaries and caucuses to the early presidential nominating season, now dominated by Iowa and New Hampshire.

The goal, they said, was to add more racial, ethnic, regional and economic diversity to the process of choosing a Democratic nominee.

Iowa, whose caucus marks the opening of the nominating season, and New Hampshire, which holds the first primary, have long been criticized as far too homogeneous and atypical to exercise such a powerful influence over the process.

Back-to-back victories in those states can set a candidate on a glide path to the nomination — as they did for Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts in 2004 — before the bigger and more diverse states weigh in.

And, just to prove that the DNC is in complete disarray, they can’t even figure out what the problem is in the first place:

The commission also debated using bonus delegates to reward states that move their contests back in the season. This is an effort to deal with another criticism of the nominating process — that it is too “front-loaded,” with too many states bunched together in the early weeks.

So, the problem is that the nomination process is too front-loaded, so the solution is to have six states decide nominees before February 5th, instead of two. My mind truly boggles at the concept.

I hesitate to give advice on this matter to either major party, but the party that figures out first that the primary and caucus process is a giant waste of time and money and goes back to using the conventions to select nominees will probably end up nominating much more credible candidates.

Orin Kerr links an Independent on Sunday article that claims the administration is planning to shut down the prison camp at Gitmo. Color me skeptical, to say the least.

Ars Technica explains IPTV to the masses. In theory, IPTV will be the telephone companies’ (i.e. AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon’s) response to the cable companies’ offering of “bundled” services, although it seems like with the exception of Verizon (and, even in Verizon’s case, only in limited areas) the phone companies don’t seem to be all that interested in rolling out these services. At least from my perspective, the phone companies are going to have to do a much better job in pricing and bandwidth to get me back from the cablecos.

Sunday’s New York Times returns to its recent modus operandi of serving as an advertising platform for its reporters’ books with an article revealing Saddam Hussein’s thinking on the eve the U.S. invasion of Iraq, derived from Cobra II by reporter Michael Gordon and army Marine Lt. Gen. Bernard Trainor (Ret.).

There’s not much terribly new here if you were paying attention, and I’m not really sure it adds anything to arguments on either side of the conflict—although it does perhaps give further credence to the argument that intelligence agencies worldwide were obviously going to have a hard job figuring out that Saddam Hussein didn’t actually have WMD when he was trying his darnedest to make everyone think he did. Of course, the obvious followup question, left unanswered in the article, is why Saddam would dismantle his WMD arsenal while maintaining the fiction he hadn’t—wouldn’t it have been wiser for him to simply to keep the WMDs and stonewall the inspectors?

þ Orin Kerr.

This ad was seen in the ACC Tournament preview in the Duke Chronicle:

These people must work for ESPN in some capacity.

I’m afraid I’m being thoroughly useless today as I try to recover from about four weeks of sleep deprivation; all I’ve really done today is check my mail, listen to the Battlestar Galactica finale podcast from Ron Moore, and crank up iTunes in the living room.

The good news is that this coming week is spring break, so at least I should be able to get some research done, including finishing up the R&R I have from PRQ so I can get it back to the editors.

Well, I have to say that (the season finale of Battlestar Galactica, for those who don’t get the reference) came pretty much out of left field. There are definitely a lot of very interesting directions they can go in from here—and curse Sci-Fi for making us wait for seven months to find out where they decide to go with this!

Elsewhere: Steven Taylor has some additional bullet-point thoughts, while Timothy Sandefur ponders the question of whether Laura Roslin’s effort to steal the election was “right.”

As Duke recovers from the visit of David Horowitz, freshman Oliver Sherouse writes about the best post-mortem of his visit that one could hope for, featuring among other observations this gem:

SAF wants free speech, but only if you agree with them. They want to tell us about this secret conspiracy that involves our professors shouting liberal dogma in every class, ostensibly without us noticing. They want to “educate” their professors on how to profess.

At least a portion of the Duke community acquitted themselves rather poorly at the event as well, although the promised partial nudity from members of the crowd failed to materialize (alas). It makes me almost sad that I was wedged inside a full MD-80 during the event.

I ended up having 1½ phone interviews for one-year jobs on Wednesday morning, when I was only expecting one (the ½ was about 10 minutes of Q&A on my cell phone with a department chair in a neighboring state); I think they both went well, although neither institution has as of yet committed to giving me a campus interview.

At this point, though, I suppose any news is good news; I don’t think I was a particularly good fit for the needs of the department that interviewed me in person this week—I think they are looking for more of a public law guy, and while there’d be the opportunity to teach in my research areas, it probably wouldn’t be every semester—and I have yet to hear back from the interview a couple of weeks ago after having been assured that a decision would have been made by now—which, in the academic world, usually means at the very least that you’re not the most preferred candidate, consistent with my expectations.

As of this posting, I am one of 290 Debian developers who have thus far bothered to vote on the first General Resolution of 2006, which will state Debian’s position on the GNU Free Documentation License and decide whether (and under what conditions) GFDL-licensed documents will be allowed in Debian’s “main” distribution.

My sense is that the spirit of the Debian Free Software Guidelines is most consistent with the interpretation embodied in Amendment A—I seriously doubt the Free Software Foundation will go after people who distribute GFDL-licensed documents on DRMed media and the “transparent formats” issue is probably a non-issue in practice, judging from the distinct lack of interest by the FSF in going after people who violate the GPL’s “you must make source available for three years” rule, but the invariant sections rule is clearly non-free and cannot be ignored.

Unfortunately (or, fortunately, depending on your perspective) this means Debian users will not have access to most of the documentation that uses invariant sections—primarily those documents distributed by the FSF themselves. On the upside, it will at least spare our users from having reams of Richard Stallman’s political rants foisted upon them and their hard drives in exchange for the privilege of having the Emacs manual available.

So, anyway, here’s how I voted, since it will be public at the close of the vote anyway: 2143—or, in other words, Amendment A [GFDL allowed if invariant sections not used] > Original Resolution [GFDL not allowed at all] > Further Discussion > Amendment B [anything GFDL'd goes].

Next up: the elections for Debian Project Leader, featuring a smorgasbord of seven candidates.

Via email from FCS, a story on a professor at Suffolk University who apparently can’t work Fn-F4 (the internal/external display switch) on his laptop properly:

A Suffolk University professor is under investigation by university officials following accusations of alleged pornographic misconduct.

According to Emily Macdonald, a student in the class, [the professor] allegedly watched porn on his computer, which was unknowingly connected to a monitor that was behind him.

The class ended half an hour following the display, and the students never tried to intervene.

All sorts of intriguing questions arise here: was he multitasking at the time, both lecturing and watching Hung Jury 17 simultaneously? How does one “unknowingly” hook up one’s own computer to a monitor? Perhaps most importantly, from a pedagogical standpoint, did the porn in the background hurt or help students’ comprehension of the other material presented in class that day?

Update: The boss has additional thoughts on this matter.

Update (19 July 2007): At the request of the individual involved in this unfortunate incident and after some reflection, I have removed his name from this post; his identity was really not all that important to the point of this post.

Jane Galt reponds to a post from Steven Teles on the effect of affirmative action on the academic market with an interesting observation:

[T]he academic job market, as described here, is very close to what most academics think labour markets are like outside the [academy]: a sharply binary process in which there are clearly delineated winners or losers, the outcomes are somewhat arbitrary, and a very slight run of bad luck can land you in a place from which there is literally no hope of escaping. This might go a long way towards explaining academic leftism, in two ways: first, going through the academic job market might make you more left-wing; and second of all, people who think that the entire world works this way might be more predisposed to pursue jobs in academia.

An aside: does anyone have a citation for the Rick Hess article in PS that Teles mentions? A search of JSTOR and the Cambridge Journals site has drawn a complete blank.

Since I am off on an interview today, posting may be restricted to this linkfest:

• Hei Lun Chan of Begging to Differ dissects the NFL labor dispute to the bare essentials; if only he were as hot as Rachel Nichols, I might never need to watch ESPN again.
• Clint Ecker of Ars Technica reviews the Intel Mac mini for those who have not experienced for themselves the bliss that is Core Duo.
• The Solomon Amendment case was another 8–0 slam dunk for those right-wing extremists on the Supreme Court, and probably the right decision on precedent (in my mind, it would be hard to strike down the Solomon Amendment but uphold much of the Civil Rights Act of 1964); overall, I tend to agree with Will Baude’s assessment that policymakers (explicitly excluding, being the attitudinalist I am, the Court) on all sides of the issue are wrong. Baude also ponders the possibility that private universities might choose to divest themselves of their law schools to avoid any adverse effect should they chose to continue to bar military recruiters.

That’s all I’ve got for now.

In the blogosphere, any old conversation can become new again; the case in point is Eszter Hargittai’s post on the various and sundry titles used to refer to her (þ: Daniel Drezner).

I’ve said my piece on this before—indeed, over time, I’ve become rather more enamored of the title “doctor,” perhaps because (a) I won’t actually lose that title in May—unlike “professor,” which will go on haitus until at least August, and perhaps permanently—and (b) I continue to spend time in the South, where people with doctorates are typically so-addressed.

A commenter at the TiVo Community Forum nails the difference between The Tonight Show and The Late Show:

Letterman's show is not a Talk Show .... it's a *SATIRE* of a Talk Show. It's just a big giant goof on the whole talk show genre. That's why they have Stupid Pet Tricks and Larry Bud Melman and Mujibur and Sulaiman and Does It Float and canned hams for prizes, and indeed even why Letterman's interviews are so un-interviewy. All that was initially designed to make fun of how talk shows had always done things before.

Paul's role is to be the satirical Talk Show Band Leader. His role is NOT to be a professional band leader on a talk show .... his role is to MAKE FUN of (i.e., spoof) professional band leaders on talk shows. So, e.g., the "cheesy" songs, the intermingled laughter, his look, etc. all satirize what a professional band leader (like whoever the latest lackey on Leno is or Doc Severinsen) would do - that's why the songs are so one-dimensional and corny.

On the other hand, Leno's show plays it straight - it's not a satire of a talk show at all ... it's an actual talk show.

It's not surprising that the two camps (Letterman supporters and Leno supporters) are so diametrically opposed. Letterman supporters can't stand what they perceive as the staleness of the talk show genre and love watching it be goofed on. Leno supporters on the other hand still like the traditional talk show format, and don't "get the joke" that Letterman is playing on it.

See, now it all makes sense!

The blog is now running on the Mac mini, apparently without incident. The blog seems a little zippier in responding to requests now that it’s not running over the wireless network; the dual cores on the Mini may also be helping the zippy feeling, as the computer is compiling an Emacs 22 prerelease from fink in the background.

I’ve been remiss in noting the news of the passing of Harry Browne, the indirect recipient of my first two votes for presidential electors (in 1996 in Florida and in 2000 in Mississippi). Like Timothy Sandefur, I only met Browne once—in my case, at the LP’s 2000 post-election gala in Atlanta. That, of course, was prior to my conversion from idealism to neoinstitutionalism.

Meet the new addition to the Lawrence household, an Intel Mac mini (1.66 GHz Core Duo, 512MB RAM and 80GB hard drive):

See all of the photos here.

Thus far, it’s been pretty spiffy. I can’t really sit all the way across the room and use it, except when in Front Row, and I’m still getting used to the slightly different key shortcuts for things with the Belkin MediaPilot wireless keyboard/thumbmouse I bought to go with it, but those aren’t problems with the computer per se. I haven’t sat down and done much Unixy stuff with it yet; all I have really done is a brief foray into Terminal to copy a file from my work machine to email to someone this evening, during which I found that the backspace keybinding acts funny in ssh sessions to my Debian boxes (undoubtably a simple setting I’ll have to Google for later on).

Anyway… back to watching NewsRadio Season 3…

It is generally a bad sign when I get home and fall asleep on the couch watching Pardon the Interruption around 6 or so, because inevitably what happens is after a 30-minute nap I’m nicely rejuvenated to the point I can’t fall asleep again until the wee hours of the morning.

I guess the upside is that at least I can sit in front of the computer and work on some job applications to kill the time I’d otherwise be spending staring at the ceiling trying to fall asleep.