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Believe it or not, it must be difficult to be a politically correct lefty in the Twin Cities these days. Not because spirited conservatives are taking the battle to you, but because you really have to get creative to outdo your own brethren. Right now, everyone stands in awe of the city of Minneapolis. The Star Tribune might shill the liberal party line day in day out, but there's nothing new or creative in that. The city of St. Paul can raise property taxes to pay for more government waste, but Minneapolis has been doing that for years. The DFL controlled state legislature might pass ridiculous, impractical laws that impose on the rights of businesses, but again, that's nothing the liberals in Minneapolis haven't been doing for decades. The city of Minneapolis continues its old anti-business agenda and increasing crime rate, but additionally has one-upped everyone on the political correctness scale by hiring and refusing to fire an inept and possibly criminal fire chief who happens to be (read was given the job solely because she is) a lesbian. No one is more jealous of Minneapolis' PC posturing than the Marxists at the University of Minnesota. Their political correctness just doesn't measure up. The women's studies department hasn't been news in decades. The university has been relegated to attracting PC kudos by giving Al Gore an honarary degree. As if honoring another dead white male could score real PC points with those who keep track of that sort of thing. I however, have an idea so radical that it would put the U of M on the front page of every newspaper in the country. It is an unfortunate fact that the athletic departments of major universities garner more headlines than any of the academic departments. Late in 2006, the University of Minnesota was forced to fire the coaches of its two money programs (men's basketball and football) due to gross incompetence. After the firings occurred, sports experts suggested that the university could end accusations of aspiring to atheletic mediocrity by hiring a "big name" coach in one of the two sports. Examples of "big name"coaches included Tony Dungy in football and Flip Saunders or Rick Majerus in basketball. People who understood the aspirations of mediocrity of the U of M suggested that there would be no "big name" coach hired in either sport and instead suggested that the U would hire such non-big names as one or both of the "big time" coaches from non-rival North Dakota State. The U of M responded by hiring a nobody named Tim Brewster for the football coach position. Brewster is certain to field a team no better than that of his predicessor Glenn Mason. However, the U can still make history. They could hire basketball coaching legend Pat Summitt. Summitt would be the first ever woman to coach NCAA men's basketball. However, she would be more than an atheletic Bonnie Bleskachek. Summitt's overall record stands at 913-177, with 6 NCAA women's titles. Compare that to Mike Kryzewski or Bob Knight, with respective records of 771 wins and 3 NCAA Titles and 887 wins and 3 NCAA Titles. Unlike Bonnie Bleskachek, Pat Summitt is a qualified coach. Her record is second to none. The NCAA is currently wringing its hands that it doesn't have enough minority football coaches. Yet they have more than one for decades. There has never been a woman coach of an NCAA men's basketball team. This is an obvious display of sexism. Many men have coached NCAA women's teams. The University of Minnesota can once and for all claim PC supremacy by naming Pat Summitt its men's basketball coach. To do anything else would reinforce the existing patriarchy and make Wellstone followers everywhere cry. buy software cheap oem software

Tags: coach, ncaa, basketball, big, minneapolis

Part 4 of a 4-part series of short posts intended to clear out my bloggestive tract. Hold your nose! Well, I held out for a week. Then I read the comments. Argh! Actually they were fine. Nice comments, all around. Whew. I don't have any big themes to talk about today, but I've got a couple of little ones, let's call 'em bloguettes, that I'll lump together into a medley for today's entree. Bloguette #1: Ruby Sneaks ended accessible Python I was in Barnes today, doing my usual weekend stroll through the tech section. Helps me keep up on the latest trends. And wouldn't you know it, I skipped a few weeks there, and suddenly Ruby and Rails have almost as many books out as Python. I counted eleven Ruby/RoR titles tonight, and thirteen for Python (including one Zope book). And Ruby had a big display section at the end of one of the shelves. Not all the publishers were O'Reilly and Pragmatic Press. I'm pretty sure there were two or three others there, so it's not just a plot by Tim O'Reilly to sell more books. Well, actually that's exactly what it is, but it's based on actual market research that led him to the conclusion that Rails and Ruby are both gathering steam like nobody's business. I like a lot of languages. Really, I do. But I use Ruby. I'm not even sure if I like Ruby. The issue might just be irrelevant to whether I use it. I like OCaml, for instance, but I don't use it. I don't like Java, but I do use it. Liking and using are mostly orthogonal dimensions, and if you like the language you're using even a little bit, you're lucky. That, or you just haven't gotten broad enough exposure to know how miserable you ought to be. I use Ruby because it's been the path of least resistance for most of my programming tasks since about 3 days after I started messing with it, maybe 4 years ago. I don't even really know Ruby all that well. I never bothered to learn it. I did read "Ruby in a Nutshell" cover-to-cover, but it's a short read (and it's a bit out of date now.) Then I read bits of "Programming Ruby", but not all of it. And now I use Ruby for everything I can, any time I have any choice in the matter. I don't even mind that I don't know the language all that well. It has a tiny core that serves me admirably well, and it's easy to look things up when you need to. I do a lot more programming in Python than in Ruby -- Jython in my game server, and Python at work, since that's what everyone there uses for scripting. I have maybe 3x more experience with Python than with Ruby (and 10x more experience with Perl). But Perl and Python both have more unnecessary conceptual overhead, so I find I have to consult the docs more often with both of them. And when all's said and done, Ruby code generally winds up being the most direct and succinct, whether it's mine or someone else's. I have a lot of trouble writing about Ruby, because I find there's nothing to say. It's why I almost never post to the O'Reilly Ruby blog. Ruby seems so self-explanatory to me. It makes it almost boring; you try to focus on Ruby and you wind up talking about some problem domain instead of the language. I think that's the goal of all programming languages, but so far Ruby's one of the few to succeed at it so well. If only it performed better. *Sigh*. Well, its performance is in the same class as Perl/Python/JavaScript/Lua/Bash/etc., so there are still plenty of tasks Ruby's admirably suited for. I think next year Ruby's going to be muscling in on Perl in terms of mindshare, or shelf-share, at B&N. Bloguette #2: Java's Biggest Dog (Indeed) I still do most of my programming in Java -- at least half of it, maybe more. The Java platform continues to make amazing strides. The newest incarnation (JDK 6) has lots of goodies I can't wait to play with. Like Rhino, for instance, and although they appear to have gutted it, it's still awesome. I think it's the best choice they possibly could have made. Thank God they didn't bundle Groovy. What a catastrophe that was, and still is, and would have been for Java if they'd bundled it. Rhino rocks. The JVM is just getting faster and more stable, and there are even some OK libraries that come with it. I used to think the Java platform libraries were the cat's meow. Heck, I thought they were the whole damn cat. But working with better libraries in miscellaneous other languages has got me thinking that Java's libraries are hit-or-miss. Example: Java's concurrency libraries (java.util.concurrent[.*]) are to die for. I mean, if you're stuck with threads. I think in the fullness of time, hand-managed threads will be history, but in the meantime, Java's concurrency libraries are just superb. I recently ported a medium-sized Python program I'd written (about 1200 lines of fairly dense Python code) to Java, because the Python was taking about an hour to run, and I wanted to parallelize the work. I spent about 3 days doing the rewrite: one day on the straight port, a day adding in the threading, and a day fine-tuning it. The straight port wound up as 1300 lines of Java (surprising that it wasn't bigger, but maybe I code in Python with a Java accent?), and ran about 50% faster, down to about 30 minutes. After adding in the threading and state machine, the program ran in 50 to 60 seconds. So I got an order of magnitude improvement with only about a 50% increase overall in program size. The vast majority of the improvement was attributable to the threading, which in turn would have taken me FAR longer if I'd been using raw synchronization primitives. The java.util.concurrent stuff made it a snap. On the other hand, Java's DOM implementation completely blows chunks. It quickly became the bottleneck in my application, due to an O(n) algorithm I stumbled across with no good workaround for. I can't remember exactly where it was (this was back in July), but I found a sheepishly apologetic comment from the author in the online docs. It was something to do with setting attributes on nodes while you're doing a traversal of some sort: something you'd definitely want to be fast, but it had at least linear performance, maybe worse, and now accounts for 95+% of my app's processing time. And of course Java's DOM interface blows too, because you can't create subclasses or decorators or do anything useful with the DOM other than use it as a temp container until you've transfered the data to something more flexible. Java's collections library is decent, but not superb. It's nice having the data structures they provide, but they're not very configurable, and the language itself makes them often cumbersome. For instance, you can have a WeakHashMap (nice), or an IdentityHashMap (nice), or a ConcurrentHashMap (also nice), but you can't combine any two of those three properties into a single hashtable. Lame. And java.util is missing implementations and/or interfaces for a bunch of important data types like priority queues (you're stuck using a TreeSet, which is overkill), the disjoint set ADT, splay trees, bloom filters, multi-maps, and of course any kind of built-in graph support. Java hyper-enthusiasts will tell you: "well, go write your own! Or use one of the many hopefully robust implementations on the web!" That seems lame to me. We're talking about data structures here: they're more fundamental than, say, LDAP libraries and much of the other stuff Sun's bundling these days. It's smartest to provide robust, tuned implementations of these things, because it empowers average Java programmers to write faster, more reliable code. Oh, and let's not even get me started with java.nio. What a mess! It's pretty gross, especially if you come from the comparatively simple background of select() and poll() on Unix. But maybe the grossness was necessary. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. What bugs me isn't that the API is conceptually weird and complex (and buggy as hell last time I checked); what bugs me is that nobody at Sun bothered to put a layer atop java.nio for ordinary programmers. Like, say, a nonblocking DataInputStream that takes a type to read, a Buffer, and a callback to call when it's finished reading. So every frigging Java programmer on the planet has to write that exact class -- or just flail around with the raw APIs, which is what I think most of them do. And look what they did to poor LDAP! I mean, the LDAP bindings are dirt-simple in every language I've ever used. It's supposed to be lightweight -- that's what the "L" stands for, fer cryin' out loud. JNDI is this huge monster. So is JMX. I mean, Java libraries have this way of being so bloated and overengineered. But whatever; I've digressed. Java's libraries are not its biggest failing. The libraries (as I said) are decent, and the platform (in terms of tools, speed, reliability, documentation, portability, monitoring, etc.) really raises the bar on all those other loser languages out there. All of 'em. It's why no better languages have managed to supplant Java yet. Even if the language and its libraries are (on the whole) better than Java's, they also have to contend with the Java platform, and so far nobody's been able to touch it, unless maybe it's .NET, but who cares about .NET? Certainly not Amazon.com or Yahoo! or Google or any other important companies that I'm aware of. Literals Anyway, Java's biggest failing, I've decided, is its lack of syntax for literal data objects. It's an umbrella failing that accounts for most of the issues I have with the language. The idea behind literals is that you have some sort of serialized notation for your data type, and it's part of the language syntax, so you can embed pre-initialized objects in your code. The most obvious ones are numbers, booleans and strings. It's hard to imagine life without support for numeric literals, isn't it? Well, Java's support is limited at best. There's no syntax for entering a binary value, for instance, like "0b10010100". And there's no BigInteger/BigDecimal syntax, so working with them is a disaster and nobody does it if they can help it. Heck, Java doesn't even have unsigned ints and longs. But Java does more or less the bare minimum for numbers, so people don't notice it much. Imagine if there were no String literals, so that instead of this: String s = "Hello, world!"; you had to do this: StringBuffer sb = new StringBuffer(); sb.append('H'); sb.append('e'); sb.append('l'); sb.append('l'); sb.append('o'); sb.append(','); sb.append(' '); sb.append('W').append('o').append('r').append('l').append('d').append('!'); String s = sb.toString(); Not only is the latter bloated and ugly and error-prone (can you spot the error in mine?), it's also butt-slow. Literals provide the compiler with opportunities for optimization. Well, unfortunately this OOP garbage is exactly what you have to do when you're initializing a hashtable in Java. Nearly all other languages these days have support for hashtable/hashmap literals, something like: my_hashmap = { "key1" : "value1", "key2" : "value2", "key3" : "value3", ... } That's the syntax used by Python and JavaScript, but other languages are similar. The Java equivalent is this: Map<String, String> my_hashmap = new HashMap<String, String>(); my_hashmap.put("key1", "value1"); my_hashmap.put("key2", "value2"); my_hashmap.put("key3", "value3"); ... It might not look that much worse from this simple example, but there are definitely problems. One is optimization; the compiler is unlikely to be able to optimize all these method calls, whereas with a literal syntax, it could potentially save on method call overhead during construction of the table (and maybe other savings as well.) Another is nested data structures. In JavaScript (and Python, Ruby, etc.) you just declare them in a nested fashion, like so: my_thingy = { "key1": { "foo": "bar", "foo2": "bar2"}, "key2": ["this", "is", "a", "literal", "array"], "key3": 37.5, "key4": "Hello, world!", ... } It would be hard to do this particular one in Java 5 because of the mixed value types, though it's probably not an issue since using mixed-type data structures is something you rarely do in practice, even in dynamically-typed languages. But even if all the values were hashes of string-to-string, how are you going to do it in Java without literals? You can't. You're stuck with: Map<String, Map<String, String>> my_hashmap = new HashMap<String, HashMap<String, String>>(); Map<String, String> value = new HashMap<String, String>(); value.put("foo", "bar"); value.put("foo2", "bar2"); my_hashmap.put("key1, value); value.clear(); value.put("foo3", "bar3"); value.put("foo4", "bar4"); my_hashmap.put("key2, value); ... And then you find out later that your clever clear() optimization (instead of creating a new HashMap object for each value) busted it completely. Whee. Java programmers wind up dealing with this kind of thing by writing generic helper functions, and it winds up layering even more OOP overhead onto something that ought to be a simple declaration. It also tends to be brutally slow; e.g. you could write a function called buildHashMap that took an array of {key, value, key, value, ...}, but it adds a huge constant-factor overhead. This is why Java programmers rely on XML so heavily, and it imposes both an impedance mismatch (XML is not Java, so you have to translate back and forth) and a performance penalty. But the story doesn't end there. What about Vector/ArrayList literals? Java has primitive array literals, which is nice as far as it goes: String[] s = new String[]{"fee", "fi", "fo", "fum"}; Unfortunately, Java's primitive arrays are a huge wart; they don't have methods, can't be subclassed, and basically fall entirely outside the supposedly beautiful OOP-land that Java has created. It was for performance, to help capture skeptical C++ programmers, and they have their place. But I don't see why they should have all the syntactic support. I mean, the [] array-indexing operator is ONLY available for Java arrays. Sure would be nice to have it for ArrayLists, wouldn't it? And Strings? And FileInputStreams? But for some reason, Java gave arrays not one, but TWO syntactic sugarings, and then didn't give that sugar to anything else array-like in the language. So for building ArrayLists, LinkedLists, TreeMaps and the like, you're stuck with Swing-style code assemblages. I think of them as Swing-style because I used to do a lot of AWT and Swing programming, back when I was a Thick Client kind of guy, and they have a distinct(ly unpleasant) footprint. It looks vaguely like this, in pseudo-Swing: Panel p = new Panel(new FlowLayout()); JButton b = new JButton("Press me!"); b.setEventListener(somethingOrOther); p.add(b); JSomething foo = new JSomething(blah, blah); foo.setAttribute(); foo.setOtherAttribute(); foo.soGladIDontDoThisKindOfThingAnymore(); p.add(foo); ... Building UIs in Swing is this huge, festering gob of object instantiations and method calls. It's OOP at its absolute worst. So people have come up with minilanguages (like the TableLayout), and declarative XML replacements like Apache Jelly, and other ways to try to ease the pain. I was on a team at Amazon many years ago that was planning to port a big internal Swing application to the web, and we were looking at the various ways to do web programming, which at the time (for Java) were pretty much limited to JSP, WebMacro, and rolling your own Swing-like HTML component library. We experimented with the OOP approach to HTML generation and quickly discarded it as unmaintainable. (Tell that to any OOP fanatic and watch their face contort as they try to reconcile their conflicting ideas about what constitutes good programming practice.) The right solution in this case is, of course, a Lisp dialect; Lisp really shines at this sort of thing. But Lisp isn't so hot at algebraic expressions, and the best Lisp machines no longer look so cutting-edge compared to the JVM, and blah blah blah, so people don't use Lisp. So it goes. The next-best solutions are all about equally bad. You have your XML-language approaches (like Jelly, but for the web), but they don't give you sufficient expressiveness for control flow -- presentation logic really does require code, and it gets ugly in XML in a real hurry. You have your JSP-style templating approaches, and they aren't bad, but they can have as many as 4 or 5 different languages mixed in the same source file, which presents various problems for your tools (both the IDEs and the batch tools). And then you have a long tail of other approaches, none of which manage to be very satisfying, but that's not really the fault of the languages. It's the browsers' fault: they START with three languages (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript), rather than having just one language to control the entire presentation, and it only goes downhill from there. But NONE of the approaches to web templating is as bad as Swing-style programming, with a huge thicket of calls to new(), addChild(), setAttribute(), addListener(), and the like. The only approach that's worse (and even it might just be tied) is raw HTML printing: print("<html><body>...</body></html>"); So we're all in agreement. OOP-style assembly of parents and children is the worst way to generate HTML. You want to use declarations; you want a template , something that visually looks like the end result you're trying to create. Well, it's the exact same situation for data structures, isn't it? You'd rather draw a picture of it (in a sense, that's exactly what you're doing with syntax for literals) than write a bunch of code to assemble it. This is all assuming that you're working with a small data set, of course. But that happens all the time in real-world programs; it's ubiquitous. So you kinda want your language to support it syntactically. And so far we've only covered literal syntax for HashMaps and ArrayLists (which you can combine to produce various kinds of custom Trees.) Already Java's way behind other languages, and we haven't discussed any richer data types. Like, say, objects. JavaScript does it the best here, IMO, in the parity between hashes and objects. It's not really possible in Ruby or Python to declare a class, then create instances of the class using literal notation the way you can in JavaScript, where the keys are the names of instance variables. Fortunately you can accomplish this in either Ruby or Python with just a smidge of metaprogramming, so it's spilt milk at worst. In Java, you only have one big hammer (instantiation), and one big wrench (the method call), so that's what you use. All you can really do to help is create a constructor that takes arguments that populate the instance variables. But if any of your instance variables are collections (other than arrays), then you're back to the old create-setprops-addchild, create-setprops-addchild pattern again. And what about functions? Ruby and JavaScript and Lisp and Scheme and Lua and Haskell and OCaml and most other self-respecting languages have function literals. That is, they have a syntax for declaring an instance of a function as a data object in your code that you can assign to a variable, or pass as a parameter. (Python has them too, but unfortunately they can only be one line, so Python folks prefer to pretend anonymous functions aren't very important. This is one of the 10 or so big problems caused by Python's whitespace policy. Don't ever let 'em tell you it doesn't cause problems. It does. Maybe it's worth the trade-off; that's a personal style preference, but they should at least admit the tradeoff exists.) Well, Java sort of has them, but Java's static type system doesn't have a literal syntax for a method signature. It's pretty easy to imagine one, e.g. something like: (int, int) -> String x; This imaginary syntax declares a variable x that takes 2 ints as parameters and returns a string. Lots of languages have signature-syntax of some sort, and Java's syntax space is definitely sparse enough that they could pick a good syntax for it without fear of collisions, even conceptual collisions. But no such luck. Instead, when you want to do this sort of thing you have to declare a named interface, and then inside of it declare at least one named method (which is where the params and return type show up), and then you're still not done, because when you create the function you have to create an anonymous (or named) class that contains the definition of the function that matches the interface. Yuck. But at least they let you do it; the alternative of not having it at all is definitely worse. Still... isn't syntactic sugar nice? I mean, they added the "smart" for-loop, which Java programmers just rave about. So someone, somewhere in the Java community thinks syntax is good. I'm not sure many of them really understand the difference between syntactic sugar (into which category the "smart" for-loop falls) and orthogonal syntax, in which the basic operators apply to all data types for which those operators make sense, and there are literal declarations possible for every data type. Let alone the next step, which is extensible syntax -- but that idea strikes fear into the hearts of many otherwise brave Java programmers, and Rubyists and Pythonistas as well, so let's back it up a notch to "orthogonal", and keep everyone calm. So there you have it: Java's biggest failing. It's the literals. No literal syntax for array-lists (or linked lists or tree sets), nothing for hashtables, nothing for objects of classes you've personally defined, none for functions or function signatures. Java programmers all around the world spend a *lot* of their time working around the problem, using XML and YAML and JSON and other non-Java data-declaration languages, and writing tons of code (whole frameworks, even) for serializing and deserializing these declarations to and from Java. For the smaller stuff, they just write helper functions, which wind up being bloated, inefficient, error-prone, and extremely unsatisfying. Java's next-biggest failing may well be the lack of orthogonality in its set of operators. We can live without operator overloading, I suppose (the simplest form of extensible syntax), but only if Sun makes operators like [] and + actually work for objects other than arrays and Strings, respectively. Jeez. Epiblogue You can draw your own conclusions about why suddenly there are all these books on Ruby appearing on the bookshelves. It's a mix of truths, no doubt. And you can draw your own conclusions about why Sun's adding support for scripting languages to the JVM, rather than simply fixing Java so that people don't want (need, really) to use those other languages. But when you dig down into a programming language, and you get past all the hype and the hooplah, what you find is a set of policies and decisions that affect your everyday life as a programmer in ways you can't ignore, and that no amount of hype will smooth over. If your language is sitting on you like an invisible elephant, and everyone using the language is struggling to work around the same problems, then it's inevitable that other languages will come into play. Libraries can make you more productive, but they have almost no effect on the scalability of the language. Every language has a complexity ceiling, and it's determined by a whole slew of policy and design decisions within the language, not the libraries. The slew includes the type system (with its attendant hundreds of mini-policies), and the syntax, and it also includes the language's consistency: the ratio of rules to exceptions. Java's demonstrating quite clearly that at a certain level of complexity, the libraries and frameworks start to collapse under their own weight. People are always writing "lightweight" replacements for existing fat Java libraries and frameworks, and then the replacements get replaced, ad infinitum. But have you ever seen anyone write a replacement for XPath? Nope. It's not like everyone is rushing out to write the next big XML-querying framework. This is because XPath is a language , not a library, and it's orders of magnitude more conceptually scalable than the equivalent DOM manipulations. Object-Oriented Programming. Touted even by skeptics as a radical leap forward in productivity, and all OOP really is boils down to a set of organizational techniques. Organization is nice, sure. But it's pretty clear that OOP alone doesn't cut it; it has to be supplemented with Language-Oriented Programming and DSLs. And all languages, DSLs and general-purpose languages alike, have to be designed to maximize consistency; each inconsistency and special-case in the language adds to its conceptual overhead and lowers the complexity ceiling. So you can look at the shelves filling up with Ruby books and chalk it up to marketing hype, but I have a different theory. I think it's entirely due to complexity management: Ruby does a better job of helping managing complexity than its competitors. It doesn't do a perfect job, mind you -- far from it. But it's enough of a step forward in productivity (even over Perl and Python) that it's managing to shoulder its way in to a pretty crowded language space. With that in mind, despite my griping about Java's failings, I think Sun might actually be doing the right thing by introducing scripting languages (and improving support for them in the JVM.) Maybe. Their investment isn't really so much in Java as it is in the JVM; the JVM is their .NET. Java's not really about productivity, not really -- it's got a lot of strengths (performance, deployment, reliability, static checkability, and so on), but productivity isn't high on the list. So maybe the best way to address the productivity issue, for folks who really need it more than raw performance, is to introduce new JVM languages rather than try to pull Java in two directions. We'll see. And with that, I think I've officially un-blocked myself; I seem to be able to blog again. So I'm declaring the Blogger's Block series finished! BloggersBlock block = new BloggersBlock(); block.setFinished(true); block.tieOffAndStuff(); blog.addChild(block); ... cheap oem software buy software

Tags: java, language, ruby, string, literal

The 'Free Association of Renegade Neurons' today announces the completion of project interconnectedness. Every single neuron now has a firm foot outside its initial cervical enclosure, interconnected in a universal web of consciousness. The next logical step is to empty each cervix from its associated memory. Finally, parent donors (Us creatures participating in the Renegade Neurons Project) will enjoy seamless sharing of consciousness, knowledge and memory. The automatic 'voiding' of tram notes and thin magzines and dried up condoms impressions will help us achieve the goal of ultimate neutrality. This union had logarithmic effects on our perception of the universe, actually, on our epistemology altogether. Knowing, we realized, is not so complicated. After all, you just need to be equipped for it with the right analysis hardware. Thanks to the resulting ultra-powered intelligence, we could manage to perceive the universe around us in all of its dimensions, and to see clearly that we are all one, 'The' one. Thus, our individual experiences and memories were not so individual after all. Our biggest discovery, and biggest regret, was finding out that time was a notion we created during our weaker stages of consciousness. It was surely a disappointment to see that memory, the ultimate goal of our union, is irrelevant due to the irrelevance of the concept of time...

Tags: neuron, consciousness, memory, universe, biggest

Hi folks, the frame grabs and clip here aren't really good examples of what I talk about in this post. We just haven't had time to grab them all yet. If you have the cartoon go watch it! Marc and Marlo and I were watching 1st season Flintstones the other night, looking for clips and frame grabs to honor Ed's memory and I noticed something that never quite struck me before. We watched The Flintstone Flyer-the one where Barney invents a stone age helicopter and Fred thinks it's worth millions so he partners with Barney and of course they screw everything up. The plot is a perfect combination of a live action sitcom and a cartoon. It's mostly sitcom but has many cartoon reactions and impossible things that for some reason you just accept, even though Fred and Barney are basically adult human characters. The whole episode is animated by one guy-an amazing feat! Carlo Vinci was an animator at Terrytoons for almost 30 years before he left to join Hanna Barbera at MGM studios in the late 50s. When Bill and Joe opened up their TV studio in 1957/58 Carlo went with them. Incidentally, Carlo was the one who taught Joe Barbera to animate in the early 1930s! This is the crazy thing I noticed about Carlo's work while watching The Flintstone Flyer. I know his work really well. He did great unique full animation at Terrytoons for decades. The directors always gave him the difficult scenes. His specialty was animating dancing, which for most animators is really hard. Carlo must have animated 1,000 intricate dances during his time at Terry. He also animated all those sexy little girl mice that tried to seduce Mighty Mouse. He used really unique gestures and poses-sort of awkward unbalanced poses and the characters' wrists always bent in opposite directions. He didn't ever rely on whatever the current style of posing and expression was for each decade, as the Disney and Tom and Jerry animators did. However there is a really big difference between what he did for Terry and what he did for HB. Terrytoons were fully animated, using from 12 to 24 drawings per second - luxury animation by today's standards. Hanna Barbera of course used severely "limited animation" which averaged maybe 4 drawings per second after you figure in all the reused cycles and dialogue scenes. You would think this restriction on the quantity of drawings would restrict the quality of the cartoon and usually it does but when you watch the Flintstone Flyer (and other 1st season Flintstones) you will see something that hardly ever happened in classic fully animated cartoons-not during the Golden Age and certainly not now in the huge budgeted animated features churned out by the big 3 studios. Natural, believable acting: Fred and Barney act like real people. They make expressions that real people do. They have head and hand gestures that perfectly describe how they are feeling at every unique moment in the story. Carlo doesn't rely at all on stock animation acting. He animates the Flintstones as if he were animating his friends and neighbors from down the street. This is an incredible feat! We take it for granted because the Flintstones just seem real and we instantly accept it, but considering how animators were trained to animate acting in very unnatural styles for decades, it's amazing that an animator can just break out of habit and animate a new style and using far fewer drawings! At Terrytoons he was never called upon to do any real acting. I can tell you I know from 20 years of experience that very few animators can draw natural expressions or draw in different styles. Disney animators draw Disney expressions and animate Disney gestures. I used some Disney animators or Cal Arts animators on various projects-including Ren and Stimpy and they just couldn't draw the characters. They kept turning them into Disney/Cal Arts characters-they would draw the eyes like Don Bluth and use the same expressions they had already drawn a thousand times before that no one ever complained about. "No no!" I'd say, "This is Ren, not Mowgli! He isn't constructed like that-his eyes are a different shape and he has a different personality!" 2 exceptions were Mark Kausler and Greg Manwaring who did great funny and specific animation for me. And of course, Bob Jaques and Kelly Armstrong always do fantastic custom animation. But these people are rare. So for me to watch an early Flintstones and be laughing all through it at the funny acting and reacting of these completely believable characters is very impressive. An interesting elaboration: I know many animators who themselves have really funny unique mannerisms and I always try to encourage them to put them in their cartoons. You would think this would be an easy and natural thing to do. It isn't. Hardly any animators can draw what they actually feel. As soon as they sit down to animate, they jump to a different part of their brain that stores all their animation knowledge. They summon up poses and gestures and moves that they have done a million times, then actually act out a standard generic "cartoon" expression with their face, rather than just draw how they themselves act in real life. You know those famous photos of Disney animators looking in mirrors and making wacky expressions as they draw? This is publicity designed to make you think they act everything out naturally first, then copy what they see in the mirror. It's actually the opposite situation. They act everything out as if they were already animated cartoon characters themselves, rather than specific humans. Watching grown men act like Mickey Mouse is the weirdest thing ever. Carlo Vinci was a middle aged fat guy when he animated the Flintstones. A regular kind of guy who drank beer, watched football, lusted after pretty girls. He probably knew all kinds of characters in real life and used his observations of them in these super low budget cartoons. The Flintstones is to me by far the best animated sitcom in history. The characters are completely believable. The animation is customized and not predictable as even most full animation is. The acting is funny, many of the story situations are funny, the designs are beautiful and they still have room left over for cartoon jokes. Oh and of course the voices are great-in those days they used real voice actors, people from radio, who had to have distinct sounding voices and great acting and delivery. That certainly helped the animators. The Flintstones blows away the excuse I hear over and over today for why TV animation is so bland. The excuse of not enough money. Todays' prime time animated sitcoms have more money than God and should put some of it towards the drawings and animation. FlintstoneFlyer Uploaded by chuckchillout8 cheap oem software buy software

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--- From a blog reader--- My name is Ken Johnston. I am writing to you from Seattle Washington, United States. I'm an Medical Assistant very concerned about the disaster in SE Asian. I have been trying to find out how our group can get over to SE Asia and help with the Tsunami disaster. There are many other people wanting to volunteer. But this is my problem: I and a number of other people don't really know how to go about finding an organization we can join without months of waiting for applications to be completed. We are asking anyone in SE Asia who might give us information for volunteers coming over there to help. We are sending some people to Bankok in a week to establish an office to give us more information. But we feel that going to help in Sri Lanka might be needed more. But we are not sure. We are concerned as well about the understandable disorganization around sending too many people and supplies to one place and not enough to many other places. What we need are some solid contacts who can inform us as to what needs we can help with as far as sending volunteers. I would be eternally grateful. We want to help! Thoughts? Ideas? Help? let me (us) know, please. Sincerely, Ken Johnston (Seattle, WA) please reply to: Asiahelp@itchyego.com Also: Here's my number 206-478-4384 in the States, just in case. As well, there are some links below to the group we associate with: ** LINKS HERE: You can go here to see what's up with the group and join in the discussion: http://unitedvolunteers.blogspot.com/2004/12/tsunami-volunteers.html and also go to: United Volunteers www.unitedvolunteers.com "...because I didn't want to just sit here and do nothing" TRAVEL NEEDS - LINKS: Travel Med Clinics for Vaccines in Seattle: http://www.co.whatcom.wa.us/health/community/immunizations/travel.jsp cheap oem software buy software

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And it's another example of the disgusting, crass, vulgar material being oozed out on an hourly basis on the corporate porn-pushing gossip site TMZ.com, which ran the picture this morning to give the impression it was a gynaecological closup of a celebrity vagina. The headline, "Whose Body Part is This?" came with the hint: "Someone was a little too revealing on this morning's Today show... Hint: It's not Britney. " This is TMZ's second clumsy vagina come-on in a month. C'mon, Tonio! Even you have to admit that a person doesn't have to "have it out for TMZ" to be offended by this misogynistic smut-- it's cheap, and not very good tabloid. And we can't help but write about this fascinating phenomenon: this is marketed by a corporate monolith (AOL, Time Warner, Telepictures) as mainstream entertainment ! Anyway, it's not the only time today that TMZ used Britney to make up a story. One of the TMZ amateurs with a camera let his foot get run over by her car-- all so TMZ could promote a phony story for the TV show ( "Tune in tonight to TMZ TV to see how it all went down -- and Britney's reaction!" ). And the lazy "mainstream" news media followed in formation, pimping for TMZ by shooting video off the website for their shows this morning. Meanwhile, as the kids with cameras cause real danger, swarming and chasing unstable young women driving out of parking garages, and Harvey and company pay some asshole to stick his foot under a wheel for a show tease (and you can bet they would have sued had he not been stupid enough to turn to another pap's camera to say he was "fine"), there are real, compelling-- even important-- grown-up tabloid show biz stories taking place every day in the Twink Male Zone. cheap oem software buy software

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The Mark's Investment Track goes ulterior the Star picnics subdivision today, claiming that the \"Boring Broadsheet\" favors the Red Sox until the three-time-champion Patriots whereas the Planet's corporate owner, the New York Times Co., owns a bite of the Sox. \"National Football Ring sources\" are said to be inspire. What prompted their dime-drop becomes to be a complaint this Sphere games editor Joe Sullivan contrived encompassing attain to the Patriots during currency. Sullivan denies stinting on Pats coverage, description the Tracksters, \" I don't see how assemblage of either heap could vision shortchanged.\" But Bruce Allen of Boston Amusements Media Watch thinks there's furthermore than a little something to the Track's complaint. ALLEN: Lined up the Center Track is holding off latent the Pill being their deprivation of Patriots coverage, moreover they showing habitually Spheroid laughss editor Joe Sullivan holler over the NFL to whine around barge in to the pile everywhere control. Owing to I mentioned separating position II of my Heavenly body Control hang out year, I ear that Sullivan had done some good facets meanwhile his watch there, but recently he's been take in a covey of pop ups throughout the paper's Patriots coverage, conjointly isn't looking good due to it. His adamant progress this the paper has the most Patriots coverage within the spot rings false to anyone who renders seeing the papers onward a daily basis. His crackup to care or matched embrace this they'll substantiation to do better continues to be a slap enclosed by the face to Patriots fans. Here's the home in holder to Allen's printed matter today, although it wasn't in gear pending of that morning. Credible July 29, the Phoenix's Ian Donnis took a same build at the relationship between the Sox furthermore the Universe. Media Nation efforts three not-very-original observations: 1. Baseball is moreover interesting than football. 2. Boston is again always devotion be a baseball town. 3. I'm a group to boot concerned circumference how the Terrene - moreover uncustomarily its editorial leaf - necessitates the Red Sox' amelioration ways inserted the Fenway scene than I am about measuring column-inches devoted to the Sox conjointly the Pats. This's where the real conflict-of-interest on is.

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I had this pain that wouldn't go away. It got worse day by day. It focused on my tokus, traveled down my thigh to my toes then back to my sacroiliac, to here and there and everywhere and made a pit stop in my underwear. It even hurt me there. This embarrassing fact I must share. It flipped and flopped and sometimes stopped to shop for blood to feed my brains, to jump-start my heart, to thwart an attack before heading back on another track bypassing my veins full of cholesterol with its goal my big fat jellyroll. The pain of which I complained and paid a doctor to explain was in there somewhere. He had to find a cure for this awful pain I could not endure. I asked Dr, Hokupokus, specialist on toes and tokus, the spleen and everything in-between, "Can you give me a diagnosis and a prognosis on this pestiferous, onerous distress that I can't endure. Please, Dr. H, for goodness sake, end my ache and make a new man of me." The doctor did what doctors do. He had me stick out my tongue. He said, "Say ah." He shook his head and mutterer "Nah." He listened with his stethoscope to my lungs and muttered "Nope." He asked questions, made suggestions, found no congestion. Suddenly, he slapped my back. I thought I'd have a heart attack. He gave a shrug, "A three-foot bedbug." But be that as it may, a smashing cure was found that day. It was written up in journals this way: "The bug skittered up and down the patient's back. Often it paused to snitch a snack. Each bite caused pain. Bug slain by doctor's whack." Now it's part of medical history. buy software cheap oem software

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Greg Giles opened his Grease Monkey auto lubrication franchise in Durango just more than a month ago. But on Saturday, Giles said he could never have suspected that it would involve him in a ransom scheme. The company's huge inflatable monkey was stolen from Giles' business Friday night or Saturday morning. "I'm a new member of the community here, and I love it, but I can honestly say I never expected anything like this," Giles said. The case exceeded routine mischief when Giles found a ransom note in a cutout-letter style where his 20-foot monkey, Seymore, used to sit on the roof at his business on River Road, south of Home Depot. The note instructed Giles to deliver $1,500 to the Durango Harley-Davidson dealership at 750 South Camino del Rio, and implied the police would be of no help. The note is now evidence and the exact wording is being withheld while the investigation continues. "The strangest part of it all is the time it must've taken to plan this," Giles said. He said officers from the Durango Police Department surmised that the thieves used a ladder to access the roof, had to fold the huge monkey and its accompanying compressor/inflator into a manageable size and load it into a truck. That doesn't even address the time it took to create the ransom note, which was comprised of letters cut from newspapers and magazines. Durango Police Officer Travis Carpenter responded to the larceny call, and quickly eliminated the Harley-Davidson business and its employees as suspects. "I checked it out because we have to look at everything, but they were very cooperative. It was obvious they knew nothing about it," Carpenter said. "They were eager to assist, and needless to say, they were as amused as the rest of us." Giles said he doesn't know anyone at the dealership and believes those employed there are blameless in the caper. He said he had no idea why the ransom note would mention the dealership by name. Giles doesn't expect the theft of Seymore to rank high on the priority list, but he wanted the authorities to realize the case is more serious than it seems on the surface. The inflatable monkey is owned by Grease Monkey's corporate headquarters and is valued at more than $5,000. That makes the crime a Class 4 felony, which could result in a two- to six-year prison term and thousands of dollars in fines, Carpenter said. "It is a felony case, and as humorous as some of the aspects may be, we still have the duty to pursue it fully. Someone took his property, and someone needs to be held responsible for it," Carpenter said. Giles agreed, knowing full well that the monkey-napping will be a highly discussed matter at coffee shops and bars around town. "I think it's entertaining news, too, and let's get a good laugh out of it, but then let's get serious and just bring Seymore back - please," he said. Story here . monkey Labels: inflatable, monkey, stolen cheap oem software buy software

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Authorities have taken a monkey, an alligator, a tarantula and six piranhas from a man's suburban Dallas home after showing up on his doorstep to investigate a hit-and-run fender bender. Animal control officials last week cited Bobby Crawford Jr. on misdemeanor charges for his illegal collection of exotic animals. Crawford, 42, cried Friday when discussing Darwin, an 8-year-old rhesus macaque monkey he said he has raised since it was little. "I live for nothing else," Crawford said. "I just can't believe he is gone." Police came to Crawford's house Feb. 7 to investigate a car accident. Crawford invited them in, where Darwin was in plain view, according to court records. "I asked Mr. Crawford if he had any other animals he could show me and he replied, 'No,' " the officer said in court records. But the officer immediately noticed a 50-gallon aquarium, prompting Crawford to curse and admit the six fish were piranhas. Crawford also said he owned three American alligators named Godzilla, Blondie and Relentless. A 4-foot gator caught in December in a creek near a residential neighborhood was Blondie, Crawford said. One of the gators was confiscated Wednesday. The third has escaped, and Crawford said he does not know where it is. Animal control cited Crawford for the gator and the monkey. A report has been filed with the state wildlife department regarding the piranhas. Story here . monkey Labels: monkey, pet, seized cheap oem software buy software

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Welcome to another edition of Blawg Review -- where bloggers come for their legal news every Monday. It's good to be hosting another edition of Blawg Review at the Health Care Law Blog. However, it's even better to be done. First off, thanks to all who submitted posts to this edition. There was wonderful material to work from. Much of the information that I regularly consume online is related to my practice as a health lawyer and I enjoy the opportunity to step outside of that specialty and be a part of a larger legal discussion going on in the blogosphere. As an active participant in the blogosphere and Live Web I am constantly amazed by the knowledge, skills and imagination of those who create electronic content (written, audio and video) for public consumption. Not just lawyers -- but every profession imaginable. The volume of information conveyed online today through electronic social networking is mind boggling. How much you say? Technorati is now tracking approximately 69.4 million blogs with 175,000 new blogs created per day. The world live web is being updated with 1.6 million new posts per day, for an average of 18 per second. Could Johannes Guttenberg have ever imagined this phenomenal transformation in communication. Lately I've been thinking and posting more about the impact that blogging and web 2.0 is having on the health care industry. It is a time of change for the health care industry. Likewise, I think many of you will agree that fundamental changes are occurring in the delivery of legal services as a result of the rise of the new social networking technology movement. For more of what this may mean for health care check out some of my materials from a presentation I did to introduce health lawyers to the basics of Health Care Blogging and Web Health 2.0. [Note: I'd also suggest watching (if you haven't already) "Web 2.0 . . . The Machine is Us/ing Us," created by Michael Wesch , Assistant Professor of Anthropology Kansas State University. The video visually explaining Web 2.0 and how today's digital technology influences human interaction.] To begin with let's highlight a few of the submissions that reflect some of these fundamental technology changes which we are all experiencing as a result of the social networking phenomenon, the availability of new technology tools and the shift toward living our lives out on the web. Bruce MacEwen gives us a tour of the The Law Library of the Future? at Adam Smith, Esq showing us all the differences that exist within today's firms. From the traditionalists/silent generation to the Boomers to theGenXers to the Millennials. Online political social networking hits full speed at My.BarackObama.com covered by Susan Cartier Liebel at Marketing Genius - the "Obama Principle" and suggests that lawyers have something to learn from observing the process as it unfolds. Mike Madison and Denise Howell will be hosting a public conference call today, February 26 at 1:00 p.m. PST to gain insight on ownership considerations and issues of governance and liability that are critical to the creation, maintenance and long term health of business communities (corporate use of Web 2.0 technologies). The call is being held to help them prepare for the upcoming Community 2.0 Conference. Overlawyered looks at the liability of curb cuts and wheelchairs vs. jaywalkers in Jury blames hit-run death on wheelchair curb cut (fascinating to me is the comment discussion and the use of Yahoo Maps to support user comments on whether the jury made the right decision). Brent Trout at Blawg IT touts the ideas of Seth Godin and the application of his concepts to the practice of law in his post Law Firms - Small is the New Big. Scott Felsenthal at The Legal Scoop, a new law student collaborative blog by three students from Tennessee law schools, provides a look at the what's happening across campuses as a result of students living their lives out online in Facebook and MySpace- Quickly Becoming Breeding Grounds For Disciplinary Actions and Arrests. If you or your kids are on the edge of becoming the next one hit wonder, don't miss reading So you want to be a Recording Artist . . . by another of The Legal Scoop team members, Tim Bishop. David Lat examines a recent survey at UVA Law School and my question is -- what about Tennessee law schools? Watch and read the post on Prosecutorial Indiscretion (or the lack thereof) at Sui Generis--a New York law blog. She looks at a Virginia "rage road" incident that resulted in an ice throwing felony conviction. The video clip also includes a discussion of a series of posts on the newly promulgated lawyer advertising rules in New York which forbid the use of a nickname, moniker, motto or trade name that implies an ability to obtain results in a matter." The post series uses actual video clips of lawyer advertising clips from various jurisdictions to demonstrate application of the new rules. Dmitriy Kruglyak founder of Trusted.MD reports on two articles appearing in the East Bay Business Times. One about Kaiser's ongoing encounters with blogging and social media and the other examining how hospital administrators and executives should use blogs. On February 8, 2007, Wendy Seltzer in In My First YouTube: Super Bowl Highlights or Lowlights conducted an experiment to determine whether copyright overreach would trump her fair use rights when exercised to teach about copyright overreach. Five days later she received the DMCA Takedown Complaint courtesy of the NFL and YouTube. If you're an RSS fan don't miss Justia Federal Court Filings which allows you to see new filings by state, court or subject matter. Reported at Robert Ambrogi's Lawsites and The IllinoisTrial Practice Weblog. And now on with the rest of the submissions for this week's Blawg Review. The most highly talked about topic this past week was the Supreme Court's ruling on punitive damage awards in Philip Morris USA v. Williams. SCOTUSBLOG reports that the 5-4 decision found that it is "unconstitutional for a jury to award punitive damages out of a desire to punish a company for harming individuals other than those directly involved in the lawsuit -- that is 'strangers to the litigation'". The Court held that punishing a defendant for harming persons who are not before the court amounted to a taking of property from the defendant without due process of law. EricTurkewitz of New York Personal Injury Law Blog covers the decision in Court Tosses Philip Morris Verdict, And Further Confuses Punitive Damages Issue and Philip Morris Punitive Damage Decision - Why It Was Good For Plaintiffs indicating that the decision requires judges to now tell the jury in a punitive damage case that they can consider the reprehensibility of the defendant's conduct toward others, but not the harm to them. The South Carolina Appellate Law Blog says the decision creates an unworkable standard in After Philip Morris: What can a jury consider for punitive damages purposes? SCOTUS sets an unworkable standard and sets out some options that trial judges have when considering evidence of harms to non-parties. More on the decision from Law Prof on the Loose with Tobacco Verdict Goes Up In Smoke. Bill Watkins at South Carolina Appellate Law Blog looks at a the interplay of the Controlled Substance Act and a recent South Carolina senate bill proposing that Marijuana be considered a prescription drug in South Carolina lawmakers review bill to legalize marijuana for medical use. Ilya Somin at The Volokh Conspiracy disagrees with a recent Slate column that contended that split decisions make bad law and, in the specific context of the current Supreme Court, undermine the Chief Justice's admirable goal to promote unanimity amongst the justices. The HR Lawyer's Blog looks at the continuing trends on alternative billing arrangements in Alternative Billing - Clients Want It - Big Law Firms Hate It.The post highlights that a recent survey of corporate counsel indicate that 90% of outside counsel still resist the suggestion to consider alternative fee arrangements. Kevin Jon Heller at Opinio Juris covers a running battle between Glenn Reynolds and Paul Campos, law professor at University of Colorado, over one of Instapundit's posts arguing that selective assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists is both legal and advisable. Eugene Volokh also weighs-in with some worthwhile comments. Charles Green questions the "legal tip" included in Business Week's SmallBiz magazine which suggests that retail sales slips should include a written statement to protect the interests of your business in his post From Our Legal Experts... posted at Trust Matters. David Maister gives interesting insight into his experience as a juror in a 5 day trial involving a pastor, a parishioner and $80,000 in Jury Duty posted at Passion, People and Principles. He offers some simple lessons for litigators to remember. Charlie Weis, Notre Dame's football coach, appears headed back for seconds in his trial over an allegedly botched gastric bypass surgery. Quizlaw has an entertaining post about the events that lead to the mistrial. Only one can speculate what would have happened if the physicians chose not to respond. Are you an avid T.J. Maxx or Marshalls shopper? If so, check out Law Practice Management's post Identity Theft Begins with Access to Your Information discussing on of the latest electronic data breaches. The post offers practical advice on how to better protect your personal information in this growing age where everything is electronic. Overlawyered writes about Dr. Vatura who saved the life of a 400 pound man thrown from a motorcycle in a high speed accident in Treating the morbidly obese (redux). Due to his obesity it was impossible to stabilize the man with typical cervical spinal precautions and as a result he ended up a quadriplegic. One of my favorite medical bloggers, Kevin, M.D., covers this same topic and what he believes the impact these events have everyday on doctors. For another perspective on the impact of medical malpractice on physicians, consider hospital CEO and blogger Paul Levy's recent post The Shame of Malpractice Lawsuits at Running a Hospital. Also, Kevin, M.D. mentions an interesting issue coming before the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals in his post Should academic physicians be protected against malpractice suits? Don't miss Quizlaw's Wacko gets Jacko'd providing evidence that you can be sued for almost anything -- the family of a 73 year old woman is suing Michael Jackson and Marian Medical Center claiming that the hospital's VIP treatment of Jackson resulted in the death of the woman. PointofLaw Forum links to David Rossmiller's Insurance Coverage Law Blog which covered Mississippi Attorney General Hood's press conference call where State Farm was called "a cult,""decadent" and "robber barons".Rossmiller questions much of what was said during the call and makes a good point -- if you think that that much of the company why would you want them to stay and provide insurance to citizens of Mississippi. If you regularly draft contract language you shouldn't miss That" and "Which" by Ken Adams at AdamsDrafting who looks at the confusion over the distinction between that and which and a New York case, AIU Insurance Co. V. Robert Plan Corp. that considered the differences. Ben D. Manevitz who writes IP Notions looks at Mike Carroll's "Fixing Fair Use" made at the Some Modest Proposals 03 Conference in Fair Use and Fee Shifting and adds a suggestion that the proposal needs to be given teeth by tying the payment of attorneys feed to the process. A reason to let your associates get sleep from Davit Lat at Above the Law. Mike Madison at madisonian.net reports in IP and Insurance on a breakthrough partnership among insurers, the Standford Fair Use Project and a network of practitioners willing to discount their rates to documentary filmmakers to lower the cost of insurance for documentary filmmakers who rely on fair use doctrine for portions of their content. Lessig Blog has additional details of the announcement. This week Eugene Volokh notes that Ohioans are presumptively protected from being fired for off employer property (and presumably off duty and lawful) possession of guns. The decision in Plona v. UPS involved the termination of a UPS employee who was found to have a handgun in his vehicle wile at work. The gun was disassembled, unloaded and locked in his care in a public access parking lot used by UPS employees and customers of UPS. The court held that the public policy permitting Ohio citizens the right to bear arms under the Ohio constitution was enough to form the basis of a wrongful termination claim. More on the Second Amendment from Jacob Sullum who notes that the FAA has revised its thinking on its justification for its ban on carrying firearms aboard spaceships. My Hosting Blawg Review #97 post mentioned Kevin O'Keefe's post about the term "blawg" and the fact that it is still facing an uphill road at being recognized and understood. The post relates that Wikipedia editors have again dropped the term "blawg" (but, Blawging is still listed but redirets to Blog). Another Wikipedia term that I have referenced in the past has also been dropped by the Wikipedia editors -- Live Web. Hmmmm . . . is a Wiki-conspira-edia going on? David A. Giacalone at f/k/a says, "move over Anonymous Lawyer," and suggests I introduce Blawg Review readers to BabyBarista, an anonymously written account of the "pupillage" of a pupile barrister in London. May I suggest TidySum and Scandal. At shlep Giacalone provides a link to Babysitting and the Law in his post about when can you leave your children at home? In SOX Slaps Lawyers Leon Gettler looks at the tough rules of Sarbanes-Oxley the the impact on attorneys. Suddenly lawyers are going down like nine pins because of the crackdown on backdating. Likewise, the Wired GC discusses how the perceptions of the general counsel's responsibility are changing in the wake of the backdating scandals. Ann Althouse considers the wisdom of Eric Alterman's passing suggestion that the blogosphere needs a council of bloggers to police what's being said on the most controversial subjects. Kaimipono Wenger at Concurring Opinions looks at Anna Nicole Smith's will as a real-life law school exam. That's all for this edition. Blawg Review has information about next week's host, and instructions how to get your blawg posts reviewed in upcoming issues. Tags: blawgreview, Blog, blawg cheap oem software buy software

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The FieldTurf Israel Football League took to the field for its first preseason game just hours ago, as the Big Blue hosted Mike's Place of Tel Aviv at the Kraft Family Stadium in Jerusalem. The four-team league brings professional tackle football to Israel for the first time-- and wouldn't you know it, sitting in the stands and taking it all in was Elli Wohlgelernter, the esteemed sports journalist known in these parts as Our Man Elli in Israel, whose investigative article of the first season of the Israel Baseball League is still causing repercussions that are strong enough to have overshadowed yesterday the signing of two IBL players to the New York Yankees. A bit of free advice: "Make sure to have plenty of ice, remember the fans-- and pay the players!" buy software cheap oem software

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Peugeot 404 It was nice to have MLK off but it really meant condensing all the events and business and studying that we had to do in a limited amount of time. Some of my classmates are doing introductory pharmacy practice experiences, like following around our past Clinical Pharmacy professor, Kathy Dennehi, while taking medical histories/ screening for immunization eligibility. It is apparently a pilot program that was jumpstarted so that UCSF Pharmacy School could claim that at least 5% of its curriculum is dedicated to IPPE's. They can use this to leverage with the Board of Pharmacy to get reaccredited. I think that it is a great idea to have something in the pharm.D. program to introduce students to applying these skills that they teach you in school about assessment and counseling. From my experience in retail, you will eventually learn some patient counseling, but IPPE's can give you a much easier time during rotations and not have to climb such a rough transition from textbooks and lecture notes to real life therapeutics and patient interaction. We took our first midterm today and it was not too bad. I actually had a harder version of biochemistry in undergrad and this class was more emphasized on getting you to understand the clinical correlate of biochemistry instead of learning every annoying enzyme for those who want to become lab scientists. Our professor is really great; her name is Tracy Fulton. One class that I really enjoyed was the clinical correlate taught by our Dean, Mary Anne Koda Kimble in conjunction with Tracy Fulton. She had a mock interview with a diabetes patient while we learned about insulin and glucagon control of metabolism. One interesting point was on sulfonylureas, which increase insulin secretion from pancreatic beta cells by blocking membrane bound potassium leak channels. She even went on to explain how diabetes patients often get foot ulcers, from poor circulation and poorly functioning clotting factors. APhA had its first legislative committee meeting which assigned us first year members our own projects towards promoting the profession. My second visit as a volunteer to Laguna Honda Hospital was much longer than the first and incredibly worthwhile. I walked in to the main hall feeling like a thousand eyes upon me, knowing that I was out of place in a room of elderly patients with dimentia. I was silent as he played Bingo for about half an hour because I was afraid if he could speak coherently, percieve and be capable of interacting with me, or even have a shred of short term memory. To my surprise, he asked me very clearly what my name was and proceeded to enter a perfectly normal conversation. He was able to respond and converse with me more capablely than many of my contemporaries. So apparently, Robert was first admitted into LHH when he overdosed on alcohol. Ever since he's been residing there. In the past, he recieved his first dirtbike at the age of 11 and rode on racetracks and jumps while attending a baptist church. Throughout his life, he has traveled the entire country. Born in Chicago, he was raised on a farm in Arkansas by Swedish and Irish parents. He became a professional motorcycle racer and came in 3rd nationally in 1968. Behind the public image, many bikers spent their play money to shoot up on heroine and coke, and he was not exception. Then he moved to Riverside as a car mechanic for peugeot. Check out their website. It's a beautiful european car. After splitting with his ex-wife, he hitchhiked to New Orleans. I'm not sure about what he did in New Orleans but eventually he made his way to San Francisco. He tells me that his Swedish father, a retired stockbroker, is still alive somewhere in America. So hearing him recall his life as a hyperkinetic zigzagging path, transcending state lines, dotted with 151 proof rum, irish carbombs, and car girls. It was a perfect description of an existence that epitomized the American ideal. Living with the freedom to be susceptible to sin, ut have enough of a safety net to recover, roam but always have ties with loved ones in the past, and connect with the land but not to be tied down to it. And I think it is such an important concept to travel in order to understand America but not objectify it. His middle class values reminded me of my own father. I haven't heard anyone say the word America so many times with such gravity and with such respect that only the wise can grace upon it. It was not a conversation of problem solving or thesis writing, but it was the most intellectually stimulating conversation that I have had in a while, much moreso than with classmates whom have master's and all sorts of degrees and scholarships under their belts. His gaze started to drift and his attention dissipated as he felt a craving for a cigarrette. He bummed one off of another resident and we stepped outside so he could smoke it. He began to repeat his entire story to me as if I had never heard it before. Then I suddenly got the sense that he was not as aware of me as I was of him; the feeling you get when the person you are trying to interact with does not remember you hurts. I was subconsciously assessing his disorder in order to cover up my own emotions. He had dimentia. buy software cheap oem software

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Here is my list of the top 10 eco-friendly diet choices. 1. Buy local food. The average food purchase at a grocery store travels 1500 miles from its source to the grocery. A survey of the stickers on "fresh" produce at my nearby Harris Teeter supermarket in North Carolina turned up yellow bell peppers from Holland and red bell peppers from Israel. When I asked the produce manager if any of the produce was local, he said most of it was from South America. The transport of food from other countries, or across the US, uses fossil fuels and generates greenhouse gases. 2. Buy produce from farmers who don't use pesticides. Pesticides are not only dangerous to our health, they poison animals and ecosystems around the agricultural fields, as well as downwind and downstream of sprayed fields. 3. Buy produce from farmers who don't use chemical fertilizers. Runoff from chemical fertilizers is the biggest single source of nutrient pollution in streams, rivers, and groundwater. 4. Choose foods with minimal packaging. Paper packaging creates demand for wood pulp from pine plantations, which are displacing Southeastern native forests. Leftover dyes from the manufacture of packages find their way into our streams and rivers. And most packaging winds up in our landfills. 5. If you consume dairy products, buy from a farmer who uses sustainable farming practices. If this isn't possible, buy certified organic dairy products. This means the cows' feed was grown without pesticides. 6. If you eat meat and eggs, buy products that came from pastured or grass-fed animals. Animals at pasture don't generate the waste-management problems that animals in confinement do. Pastured waste is assimilated back into the soil naturally. In contrast, waste from factory-farmed animals is liquified and stored in vast "lagoons," then sprayed over cropfields, much of it washing into streams and rivers. 7. If you can't buy pastured meat, buy organic meat. The animals' feed was grown without pesticides, and their waste is not laden with antibiotics and hormones. When animal waste washes into streams and rivers, the feed-additives in their waste also enter the aquatic ecosystem. 8. Eat seasonal produce, even in winter. When you buy produce that a local farmer grows in winter, such as greens, you are helping the farmer stay in business year-round, selling locally grown foods in his own community. You are supporting small-scale local farmers who are much more likely to use sustainable farming methods than are farmers on huge farms with corporate contracts. 9. Eat less meat. The average American eats 246 lbs of meat per year, far more than any other country. In the U.S., 66% of our grain goes to livestock, a very inefficient use of our agricultural lands. Feeding the grain to people directly could feed up to 10 times more people than feeding the meat to people. Or, another way of looking at it - we could stop converting natural lands to agricultural lands if we made more efficient use of the farms we have now. The U.S. population will reach 300 million in October, and will increase another 19% by the year 2025. 10. When you choose foods for environmental reasons, be vocal and visible about it. If you're eating out with friends, tell them why you're not eating a fast food burger (fast food burgers are often made of poor-quality Latin American beef grown where rainforests used to be). Ask your local supermarkets and favorite restaurants to carry local, seasonal, and organic foods. And when they do, thank them. Tell them how tasty it was! Making just small changes, even a couple of days a week, can have a big impact. It doesn't have to be all or nothing to be effective! Caption: A typical factory hog farm: the farm's 40,000 hogs are raised in the six long buildings on the left. Each building is longer than a football field. The pool is the waste lagoon for their liquified manure. The round buildings are for feed and feed additives. Photo courtesy of USDA. Sally Kneidel, co-author of Veggie Revolution.

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My hat is off to our local CAL football team for playing their hearts out and going 10-1 to rank in the top 10 in the country for the whole season. But, the fact that CAL has been bumped from the national Rose Bowl Game because of a bogus system is an outrage.  The voting system, based on votes from coaches and sportswriters, is worse than the touch screen voting systems in Ohio. Three cheers for CAL for a hard fought football season! Go Bears!    Read more here.   cheap oem software buy software

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I should appear past saying I am an avid football dynamo. I played it whereas a boy growing settled, including I since encompass three sons, each of whom status quo likewise each of whom I’ve coached centrally located youth leagues. I occured ever and anon goods works bout an under-grad along graduate student at Notre Dame, and consist of falled very few construction hardies at our abundant school mid the 22 years I’ve been there. I surmise that football can teach young crowd important virtues: perserverance, art, putting the team first, literacy how to unload winning with division along with losing with grace. Further yet, I was sick to my handle next watching “Two-A-Days”, a drudge of MTV chronicling the Hoover, Al football set’s 2005 week. Hoover’s football tabulation, led ended their egomaniacal coach, Bustle Probst, has won 5 of the linger 6 impart championships enclosed by the highest distribution of football separating Alabama. They are unabashed interpolated their solicitation to be the #1 ranked mess in America, conjointly they are steadily onward a path toward that goal in 2006, currently ranked meanwhile #1 settled USA Today. I don’t begrudge Hoover’s be deficient to be the best. But ulterior watching an episode of “Two-A-Days” (You can grandstand play a resort of the red tape bygone clicking here), I'd find out the later: First, it is deeply disheartening that the superintendent likewise Range of Erudition would fill MTV unfettered burst in to Hoover Major league’s campus, allowing its students to be used for a dojigger to cutting edge MTV's insinuation vested interests. Lacking schedule quite the systems at intervals which MTV both exploits further tries values incongruous with the mission of Module school, I passion easily quotation a 2005 consider finished up ParentsTV.org entitled \"MTV Smut Peddlers: Targeting Kids with Sex, Drugs along Alcohol\". Is it callous indifference or merely our impotence midst adults this we would allow congeneric a barter to wander the classrooms, hallways Also lockerrooms of our school? Is our objective so blinded bygone our pride bounded by a successful titanic school football mob this we're OK with made-for-TV soap operas starring our children? Future, though there is some idolization of cheerleaders including football players in the drilling of from time to time excessive school amidst America, “Two-A-Days” efforts the celebrity present state of affairs of both exponentially, cracking with the file’s younger assembly that good looks, athletic prowess, more popularity are well that in fact matters. I can lone gamble on that the dynamism to boot fashions of Hoover Mammoth are owing to embarassed past relating a depiction of their school more their children. I visualize that they are. Finally, despite my frenzy as teams this indicate to be successful, I take this Coach Probst to boot the Hoover protocol incorporate overcome the “intents” besides the “implement”. Ultimately, the “objective” (or goal) of our schools conjointly athletic modes are individual furthermore the relating: to discover common people who are both educated together with virtuous. Winning jobs is a fund to an understanding, not the exit centrally located itself. Throughout we introduce competitive, winning formulas, we can challenge our children to entreaty Also of themselves, fostering the virtues this football can teach so competently. However, pending lengthy school football teams rent hotel rooms since resources employments to \"concentrate\" the night before the agility, midst cursing at players is so commonplace this coaches deem something of it, matched again they restate the cameras are rolling (additionally what attains as the cameras are off?), midst a be liable coach chastises a mother whose son was sick along with floped method, commensurate with an telling from a doctor, again thereupon defends his site finished proverb “Variant modes don’t win incident we do”, or throughout that like coach says to his players, downstream a inferiority, this he implys their allotment interpolated his fills additionally this if they don't paraphrase out moreover Because him, he'll nix their incidental at a erudition, or soon after a \"circle chaplain\" quotes scripture midway a pre-game hankering additionally soon after tells the players not to embarass their jerseys ended losing, years ago I would pose this winning has become THE wane including not the perquisite. Winning at without reservation costs--placing aside the values we fancy to teach our children-- is frivolously along with expensive.

Tags: school, football, hoover, mtv, winning

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