Ancient Egypt swings in and out of fashion, of course, but why can't I find noodles in the form of hieroglyphics? Capitalism has failed me! Stupid capitalism.

Alternative thinkier question: what language and character set of soup gives you the greatest probability of finding a word in your spoon? I'm tempted to say Chinese, because any realistic Chinese alphabet soup would have a limited, and carefully chosen, set of characters - but is it cheating to use a cherry-picked noodle distribution?

1. Go to the dentist regularly.
2. Salivar pH levels vary from person to person; if you have acidic spit, you should eat the whole box of chocolates at once rather than spacing it out through the day, and rinse your mouth with water immediately afterwards, and then brush your teeth five times when you get home. If you have neutral spit, just shut up, okay?
3. No, really, your teeth don't have shit for internal diagnostics, they need to be checked on a regular basis even if they don't hurt and you don't have a dental plan.
4. You know there's a lot of people in this world who would love to have the nice root canals we have in America.

I have only a 50/50 chance of a root canal, depending on the performance of a rather large chunk of composite filling... and two cavities apart from that. Sigh.

The House has just passed a clever attempt at thwarting Constutional separation of powers, and in particular the quaint notion of judicial review. Go, House! But the analysis on OxBlog makes me think this law was written by a trickster-god:

Article III of the Constitution says the following:

1. The judicial power of the United States shall extend to all cases presenting federal questions. (Art. III, sec. 2, cl. 1). Shall is not the same as may -- "shall" is non-discretionary. It would be unconstitutional for the judicial power of the United States not to extend to these cases.
2. The federal judiciary must consist of a Supreme Court. It may also consist of inferior courts, as Congress shall direct. (Art. III, sec. 1).
3. The Supreme Court must have original jurisdiction over certain enumerated classes of cases. Congress may make exceptions as to the appellate jurisdiction of the Supreme Court over other types of cases. (Art. III, sec. 2, cl. 2).

Here's what we can conclude from this. Combining (1) and (2): If Congress does not create any inferior courts, then the Supreme Court, as the entirety of the federal judiciary, must exercise all of the functions of the federal judiciary. This means that it must have jurisdiction over all federal questions. This would be original jurisdiction (it couldn't be appellate -- there are no lower court from which to appeal). In this case, (3) would be irrelevant -- Congress' power to limit the Supreme Court's appellate jurisdiction wouldn't come into play because the Supreme Court would be exercising original jurisdiction, not appellate. Result: the Supreme Court would have to be able to exercise jurisdiction over federal questions cases.

The law - sorry, bill, it hasn't made it through the Senate yet and probably won't - in question strips all inferior, Congress-made federal courts of jurisdiction over the Defense of Marriage Act. It also strips the Supreme Court of appellate jurisdiction, but if Josh Chafetz has it right, I'm not sure why that would matter. After all, if Congress fails to provide an inferior court with original jurisdiction over a federal question, the Supreme Court gets it - automagically, through the mystic powers of Article III Section I. By insisting that there be no inferior courts with original jurisdiction over DOMA, H.R. 3313 is actually creating a quick, easy path for a Supreme Court case on gay marriage, almost forcing the Court to grant certiorari.

Or maybe I'm missing something. I'm not a lawyer, or even a semi-serious afficionado of constitutional law. Maybe this is what the bill's proponents want - settle the issue now, before too many tolerant kids grow up and vote and become judges and ruin any chance of such hateful nonsense ever becoming enshrined in SCOTUS precedent. But I can't help thinking of Bugs Bunny, who is surely the trickster-god of our times, and the amount of time he spends dressing up like a girl and kissing Elmer Fudd...

UPDATE: Although Josh Chafetz wrote back to more or less confirm my interpretation of his interpretation, one of blogland's favorite genuinely legitimate law professors has spoken, and referred us to this outline by a superly-duperly genuine law professor who even thinks about the issue on a regular basis. The apparent consensus legal opinion is that (1) Article III does, in fact, permit Congress to limit federal jurisdiction in very narrowly specified ways, for meaningful definitions of federal jurisdiction and not just the meaningless one put forth on OxBlog, but (2) the narrow specifications must be decided by barroom brawl.

One possible brawl outcome is OxBlog's argument, but with explicit acknowledgement of a "permissive tier" of cases currently heard by federal courts that aren't "federal questions". Another would hold H.R. 3313 unconstitutional because it attempts to tell the courts not just which cases to decide, but how to decide them ("You may hear this case and answer any other constitutional questions raised, BUT NOT THAT ONE"). The third, of course, is the operating assumption of the bill, where the only judicial review process untouchable by Congress takes place in state courts.

State courts are also required to interpret and uphold the U.S. Constitution, so all is not lost. But it's sure not as funny this way, boo.

(original links from Alas, A Blog)

I don't know about you, but if I had $20,000 to spare I'd certainly spend it on a 24-day cruise to the North Pole with a bunch of crazies:

Days 9-11 Start the search for the North Polar Opening to the Inner Continent.
Days 12-14 Once found, travel up Hiddekel River to City of Jehu. *
Days 15-16 Take a monorail trip to City of Eden to visit Palace of the King of the Inner World.

* Please note that if we are unable to find the Polar opening, we will be returning via the New Siberian Islands to visit skeleton remains of exotic animals thought to originate from Inner Earth.

The validity of the hollow earth theory was explored and debunked, for the Nth time and for all, in my freshman geology class. But if anyone needs a journaliste with experience in geology and paleontology to document this experiment, in an all expenses paid way of course, I could easily be persuaded to debunk it again.

(via BoingBoing)

Peter's been watching the Tour de France on delayed internet broadcast. I'm still looking for the thing that makes it so exciting, but that's okay. What I'm really curious about stems from all the commentators' talk of doping scandals, in cycling and in, um, whatever other sports have been having doping scandals lately - the hammer throw? Whatever.

There are crazy medical risks and side effects associated with athletic pharmaceuticals, but it's not like we ever show much concern for medical risks taken by other members of society in the name of fame and/or money; it seems unfair to limit our concern to athletes. I for one would quite like to watch other people explore the limits of the drug-enhanced human body. Why aren't there sports leagues where doping is openly accepted practice?

The Washington Monthly has an article up about John Kerry's education platform - he's apparently "Hot For Teachers". The ultimate goal is to get a bumper crop of good teachers through incentive pay; it's a nice idea that seems to have worked in some places, but some of the assumptions that go into it give me pause:

Teaching pays poorly compared to other professions that require a similar level of educational attainment. And many intelligent young people who might otherwise go into teaching in spite of the low pay are put off by the mind-numbing credentialing process.

I'm an intelligent young person who very nearly went into teaching. The mind-numbing credentialing process didn't put me off; neither did the low pay. What did put me off was the prospect of spending more time on disciplinary and administrative trivia than on actual teaching, and then having my performance evaluated by a multiple-choice test that doesn't require half the skills I think are important.

We need to recognize that we're collectively unwilling to pay teachers what they're worth. Lesser amounts of money still help, but $5,000 is not enough to compensate for rotten working conditions and a lack of professional respect, not when you could get that $5,000 and some respect in another profession. Any serious education reform effort must look at ways to attract bright new teachers through non-monetary perks: more supportive administrators, enhanced mobility (harmonized credential requirements among states, tuition repayment programs without specific residency requirements), better ways of dealing with the one or two consistently disruptive students in a class.

Of course this sort of thing gets lip service:

Most educators don't go into the profession strictly for money. I've known many teachers who would gladly have sacrificed pay for a sense of accomplishment and respect. In place of a raise, they'd prefer a schedule that would allow them to go to the bathroom more than once every four hours, a principal who would treat them as professional adults, or a building whose structure wasn't rotting. [...] Improving local school governance, however, isn't something Washington can really do directly.

I have a friend who just spent a year with Teach for America in one of the worst-performing districts in the Rio Grande Valley. One of the most frequent complaints in his email updates was that the administration was unwilling or unable to help him discipline his students - sending a student to the office or issuing an administrative write-up, the two classic measures of last resort when I was in high school, were utterly ineffective and even frowned upon. I can't think of a good way to measure and incentivize school administrator performance just by sitting here on my blog for five minutes, but if we can do it for teachers, surely we can do it for principals as well?

FYI, there's a nice discussion on anonymity, and to an intruiguing but insufficient extent the genderedness thereof, happening over at leuschke.org. Me, I rather enjoy not having to defend my chosen level of thin pseudonymity, so I won't weigh in. But it's interesting nonetheless.

This post is meant to lay the groundwork for an argument, to be presented in summary on a portion of my GRE, that the popular "in bed" fortune cookie game can be usefully applied to any generic pronouncement on the subject of wisdom, success, or human nature. Therefore, essays which respond to a prompt by justifying and applying the "in bed" heuristic should not be given null points - off topic, but rather should be taken as a serious effort to unite pop culture with the philosophical tradition of silly gedankenexperiments.

I know some of you pretend to be philosophers, historians, and sundry liberal artists on a regular basis, and a few of you aren't even pretending. So if all y'all would help me out with some possible examples or analogies, and idiot-check what I've got already, I'd be much obliged.
(more...)

When I was in Denmark my room back at Tech was occupied by a Danish mirror-self...

Yup,
he's got a blog!

But is this sort of thing, as Anna may or may not say, somehow indicative of a fundamental property of blogging? More than anything else it reminds me of walking around downtown Iowa City, where I usually meet someone I haven't seen in years; occasionally someone I know but don't immediately recognize (cuz, you know, years) will walk by and tell me that someone else I haven't seen in years has been looking for me, even though by rights both of these people should be halfway across the country and definitely have no sane way of knowing I'm in town. Which is to say, that's just how life is most of the time, and a good thing it is too.

As I previously alluded, I've signed up for the GREs at the end of next month. As soon as I stopped learning things at work it got exceedingly dull, and I expect it will only get duller if my varied managers don't carefully cherry-pick interesting assignments for me - which they don't because they rightfully cherry-pick them all for themselves, as payment for having more stress and rottener work hours.

I snagged the (free) official preparation software and took part of a practice test over lunch; it's just swell, but it's all on computer, as is the test nowadays, and somebody decided that ~20 characters would be an appropriate column width for all the reading comprehension passages. Twenty characters (ish)! At that width, every fourth word is hyphenated and it's impossible to tell where paragraphs start and stop. Slows my reading speed down immensely, and makes it rather difficult to answer questions about things "as described in the third paragraph" since I have to actually scan for breaks in thought.

Everything about that test has been focus-grouped to a fare-thee-well, so what were they thinking? There's certainly some need to have a test program that will run on minimal hardware, so it can be standardized worldwide, but for $120 bucks a pop you'd think ETS could buy a set of new monitors for their third world test centers and run things at better than 640x800. I mean, geez.