If your power goes out for 30 minutes, but for the first 20 minutes you only think it’s out in the context of a bizarre dream, as your brain hurriedly tries to establish some in-dream reason why you suddenly feel like you are on a visit to the swamps of Southeast Asia (which is basically what summer feels like in Mississippi), does that mean that really your power was only out for 10 minutes?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Will Baude is doing his best to promote International Kissing Day, July 6, introduced to these fair shores by Amber Taylor (who, incidentally, only seems to get linked by Glenn Reynolds when posting in the realm of making out).

To the attention of my readers in the greater Ann Arbor area: help! Any and all assistance greatly appreciated (via email).

I’ve posted a review of the game El Grande over at Settling Catan.

Dan Drezner and Alex Knapp have staked out positions roughly around Andrew Sullivan’s belief that there’s a coming civil war in the GOP.

Both Dan and Sullivan, however, make the classic “hammer-nail” mistake: Sullivan expects a rift over cultural issues—gay marriage and the like—while Dan expects it to be over foreign policy (and, to a lesser extent, budget issues). Both, I think, underestimate the elite consensus among the Republicans in Congress to tolerate socially conservative positions and spending increases (so long as they keep Bush in the White House) and overestimate the salience of foreign policy issues to the rank-and-file in Congress. If Bush loses, chances are many of the “moderate” Republicans will lose too—moderates tend to be in more competitive House seats—so, if anything, a Bush loss should lead to a more coherent and socially conservative party, who no doubt will be determined to make a Kerry administration the least productive administration in American history.

On the other hand, should Bush be re-elected, one suspects he will be more concerned with his legacy—and, by then, with an economic recovery underway he should be able to make the tax cuts quasi-permanent without restraining domestic spending. Since, rhetortic aside, there are surprisingly few Republicans on the Hill who care about spending restraint (that’d be Ron Paul and, er, uh, Ron Paul), this outcome seems unlikely to result in a GOP fissure either.

So, wishful thinking aside, I don’t think any of this will happen.

I think evidence of middle age is when you start to take interest in neighborhood revitalization efforts. Next thing you know, I’ll be showing up at resident association meetings and writing churlish letters to the editor.

Kate Malcolm has decided she has little use for core curricula:

I have a problem with [the liberal arts approach to] higher education. It seems to me that this approach assumes that college is necessary to be a productive member of society—“an educated citizen.” It also seems to assume that the quality of education at these universities would not decline if they imposed a larger core of required classes. I can’t say this for certain, but I believe that a larger core of required classes would likely result in bigger, less personable, less detailed classes. It might result in less motivated, less interested professors. It most certainly would sap resources from other courses. And it would also force specialized education more strongly into the graduate realm, depriving students who can’t afford those extra years (for one reason or another) of that educational opportunity.

I say phooey on the silly report. Keep the core out of our universities.

I must beg to differ with Ms. Malcolm, on at least a couple of her points. There is nothing inherent about a core curriculum that requires large, impersonal classes—such an approach is often advocated by penny-pinching college bureaucrats, but that has more to do with penny-pinching than any good pedagogical reason why Macroeconomics should be taught in groups of 100 instead of groups of 10.

To the larger point, I think a liberal undergraduate education is largely necessary to be a fully-versed, competent citizen. The purpose of a university or other four-year institution is not vocational training—if you want that, go to Ivy Tech, or go to engineering school. But no undergraduate degree outside engineering and the “applied sciences” (what respectable colleges call their vocational programs)—with the possible exception of a teaching degree—makes any claim that the degree will make you thoroughly competent in that field. Degrees in the liberal arts and sciences are intended as training in general competencies—how to think scientifically, how to come to your own conclusions based on information, how to think—rather than specific, rigorous training in the minutae of a particular field of knowledge, which is the goal of graduate and professional education (law school, medical school, et cetera).

And, in general, I think (in retrospect; as an undergraduate, I probably concurred with Ms. Malcolm’s assessment) that this is the correct approach—specialists are pretty useless outside their field of expertise without a general education to back it up. Witness the travails of modern journalists, who—armed with a B.A. in communications or some other “soft” specialized degree—routinely butcher the basics of the arts, humanities, sciences and mathematics, and confuse the common consensus of their colleagues with “objectivity,” all because their basic knowledge extends no further than a modicum of grammar and the ability to produce prose in “inverted pyramid” form. Those who deride the inability of the American press to “nail” the president might do well to remember that, “chimp” or not, he’s probably significantly more broadly educated than his would-be interrogators.

More core thoughts here.

Update: Stephen Karlson argues that Ms. Malcolm and I are talking past one another, although I personally don’t see it. My conception of the core is largely (though not completely) in line with that expressed in Millsaps’ core curriculum

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.

In an attempt to curb underage drinking, Missouri has passed a new law which goes into effect Thursday, requiring beer kegs to be registered to their buyers.

The law requires retailers to attach a tag that will allow the keg to be traced back to the buyer. The store must keep records for three months with the buyer's name, address and birth date.

The idea is that if someone bought a keg and supplied it to teenagers, and the party was broken up, law enforcement could identify who provided the alcohol and pursue charges.

They'll take my beer when they pry it from my cold dead hands!

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.

According to this story in the New Zealand Herald, the terrorist menace may have a new weapon: booby-trapped beer coolers!

Security officials have warned of a possible new weapon in the terrorist arsenal - booby-trapped beer coolers.

Law-enforcement officials in the United States have been warned to be alert for the enticing bombs.

The warning was sent to 18,000 law-enforcement groups by the FBI last week, Time magazine reported.

Is nothing sacred to those barbarians?

I was puzzling today over the semantics of the term “laundry.”

When clothes are on your body, they are not laundry. But when you toss them into a pile, basket, or hamper, and they are waiting to be washed, they become laundry. They are laundry while they are being washed, dried, and folded.

But when you put them away, into a closet or drawer, they cease to be laundry.

I, along with a couple of friends from the Memphis Strategy Board Games Community, have started a new boardgaming blog, Settling Catan.

So far, we’ve got a repeat of a Signifying Nothing post by me, reviewing Princes of Florence, and a review of Die Macher, a game of German electoral politics.

Expect more game reviews, thoughts on game strategy, and musings on what makes a good board game in the near future!

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.