Palsgraf v. Long Island R. Co. that is. My 1L sense is tingling. I have this strange suspicion that this is an important case and that my torts professor is likely to include it in an exam questions.
Archives for September 2004
Americans: Close-minded, conservative, and prudish?
Recently, an American ex-pat I know suggested that the majority of Americans were “close-minded, conservative, and prudish,” and expressed regret at the possibility of returning.
This got me thinking a bit about how I feel about America. I’ve always been interested in politics, but over the past few years I’ve become progressively more involved, and more interested in the American political process. I have to say, that participating in it more actively has actually had the opposite effect to what I might have suspected — I’ve actually become less jaded.
I think that only someone who is not in America would ever make sweeping statements about the “majority” of Americans. This country seems to be very polarized these days, on a host of issues. I also am not so sure that this is a bad thing, necessarily. Certainly, being so bitterly divided that we cannot engage in honest discourse is a bad thing. However, engaging in dialog is a good thing, and so long as we are free to engage in that dialog, I think there is hope. It is when we stop allowing the expression of ideas – even those we despise — that we run the risk of truly becoming close-minded.
As Churchill said, “Democracy is the worst form of government, excepting all the others.” Democracy, and especially American democracy, is rife with problems. All governments of men are flawed. What is wonderful about democracy is that it gives us all a voice to stand up and to point out those flaws so we can work on correcting them. In fact, I think it’s our duty in a democracy. As Benjamin Franklin noted, our founding fathers gave us, “[a] republic, so long as you can keep it.”
So are we close-minded? You tell me. The people I know aren’t. Even most of the conservatives I know are not. Sure, I have met a few neo-cons who tow the party line. I’ve also met a few socialists who tow the party line. But more, I’ve met honest people, who care about their lives and their governments. These people have real, honest differences about what they feel is best for our country. Having honest differences of opinion is not being close-minded. The key is to keep our minds open to discourse, willing to look at – and consider – evidence from the opposing view which may change our own opinions. The common fallacy on the left (disclaimer: I’m a self-declared liberal) is that being close-minded is somehow limited to those on the right. In reality, I’ve met a great deal of close minded people who couldn’t even consider the conservative view-point. In fact, true conservatives — not necessarily the neo-con style of the current administration — have a great deal in common with liberals. The ACLU fights vigorously to stop governmental abuses of the Constitution through vehicles such as the PATRIOT Act. And so does Bob Barr. Conservative isn’t dirty word anymore than liberal is.
I’m also skeptical of the label of “prudish,” mostly because it seems to just be salacious, without really raising any actual point. I can easily generate examples of “prudish” America: we allow naked females in our movies, but full frontal nudity of a man is likely to draw a stiff rebuke from the MPAA Ratings Board (pun intended). So what? We also host the largest adult entertainment industry in the world. Or is it that our nation was shocked and titillated (I’m on a roll!) when Janet Jackson shows us a bare breast? I think it’s just another example of just how diverse America is. Yes, there were a number of Americans who felt that was a horrible incident. But again, a number of Americans just plain didn’t care.
It’s easy to some sweeping generalizations about the population and then infer that America is X or Americans are Y. The reality is that America is complex. There are a diversity of lifestyles and a diversity of opinions. We don’t often agree on the issues, but that is one of the greatest aspects of America; we don’t have to agree with everyone. And we are all free to participate in the system, which is, I guess, the entire point of my rant. Instead of grousing about America and Americans, if you are one, participate. Work for change. Right the wrongs. Correct the injustices. Or work to preserve a traditional way of life. Whatever issues matter most to you, pursue them, support them and tell others about them. That’s what it really means to be an American: the idealism that ideas are good things, and that no matter what we do, we are free to think and consider whatever ideas we want. For now. So do what you can to encourage and participate in discourse.
Catching Some Zs Part II: I am Darth Vader
So last night I returned to hell, er, the sleep center. I was resigned to spend another night wired up, strapped in, tossing and turning, and in general getting no rest.
As luck would have it, I got the same technician and the same room. Ah, just like home.
The process was essentially the same. Electrodes were attached to the now hairless portions of my body where they were the last session. Portions of my scalp were scrubbed with grit and electrodes were attached. This time, my technician was taking no chances: she brought out the duct tape. No, not really, but she did tape each electrode down extra firmly and also taped the wires into place.
But lo! No nose plug this time. “What gives?” I ask. Ah, this time it’s the “CPAP” study. I believe this stands for “Continuous Positive Airway Pressure.” If you’d like to simulate it, have a friend drive down the highway at about 80mph. Now stick your head out the window straight into the wind and breath. Ah… refreshing!
This wind-tunnel breathing is accomplished with a mask that fits over your nose and is then connected to machine that delivers pressure constantly, forcing your airways open, so that you don’t stop breathing and all.
So there I was. Wired. Masked. Just relaxing and getting comfortable. Same drill as before, only now, instead of not being able to move, I couldn’t breathe either!
I was instructed to close my mouth and breath through my nose. I did. But I couldn’t seem to get enough air, so I started breathing through my mouth. Let me tell you, this is one weird feeling. With your mouth closed, it’s almost normal. Like breathing in a wind gust. But when you open your mouth, air comes rushing out, and you feel the pressure. It’s bizarre.
So the technician came on the intercom and asked, “Is your mouth closed?”
“No, I can’t get enough air just through my nose.”
“Ah, I’ll try more pressure.”
And with that, the machine made a whirring noise and suddenly the tube tightened and now I couldn’t not breathe through my nose if I wanted to. I found it extremely easy to get enough air in through my nose, but it was almost impossible to breathe out my nose, against the pressure. It occurred to me this would be a decent way to teach circular breathing.
“Is your mouth still open?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I can’t breathe out my damn nose!”
“Okay, the pressure’s too high.”
The cacophony from the machine subsided, and now I found it possible to breathe again, both in and out, through my nose. Not that it was comfortable, it wasn’t. And I swear, it felt like it took forever to fall asleep.
And then something absolutely f’d up happened.
I woke up.
And it was morning.
I hadn’t woken up once the entire night. And I actually felt good. I wasn’t tired, and I am always tired when I wake up in the morning. I mean, always. I felt rested and refreshed and all those things normal people claim they feel when they wake up! Now, don’t get me wrong, morning people are still freaks.
But now I can really appreciate what a good night’s sleep can do. And hopefully, when I get one of these little contraptions for myself, I’ll be able to get a good night’s sleep at home.
Catching Some Zs Part One: The Awakening
Apparently, some 12 million American’s suffer from sleep apnea, and as luck would have it, I’m one of them. I fit the general risk group: I’m male, I’m overweight… I’m not over 40 yet, but I’m not as spry as I used to be. Additionally, my father has horrible apnea (and ironically, is quite thin).
So it really didn’t come as much sup rise to me that my wife complained about my snoring. But when she mentioned that it often seemed like I was gasping for air at night, and one night I actually woke up gasping for breath, I had a thought, “Perhaps, I should consult my doctor.”
And so began my journey into the world of the sleep study.
About two weeks ago, I had my first study. The goal is to monitor your sleeping, determine what is wrong, and then try some treatments to see what works best. My doctor ordered a “split study” which means they do the monitoring for half the night, then try treatments for half the night. Oh, to be so lucky.
The sleep study is held at the sleep center, which here in a major city is located in a hotel downtown. The hospital has an entire floor of the hotel which serves as the sleep center. Which is better than being in a hospital room. I suppose.
The room looks pretty normal. Except the IR LED array that functions as a “light”. You and I can’t see it, but it does light up the room for the “eye in the sky” camera that points down at the bed. Oh, and then there’s the data harness and various machines on the nightstand. It all looks a little odd, but nothing too intimidating.
Little did I know that a “sleep study” means becoming a cyborg for the night. First, eight electrodes are taped (yeah, taped) to various parts of your body. These measure your breathing and muscle contractions during the night. That’s not too bad, although for a guy like me with just a little bit of hair, well, I wasn’t looking forward to taking these electrodes off.
Nothing, and I mean nothing could have prepared me for the hell that was the head wiring harness. Eleven electrodes get attached to your head, you know, for brain activity. Which there’s a lot of when you have 19 electrodes attached to you and a person watching you sleep. Trust me, your mind wanders.
First, the technician scrubs each electrode point on your head and face with some noxious grit that seems like it should only be used in one’s garage after changing the oil on your car. Then the electrodes are taped in place, and the wires are taped in place, so now your head movement is restricted, and you feel like this should all be giving you super human strength or intelligence.
Then comes the nose thing. You’ve seen it in the movies. That plastic tube draped over the ears and under the nose? In hospitals it delivers oxygen. In the sleep study it catches snot. Er, it measures the pressure of breathing through your nose.
Ah, so now you’re totally wired. Lay back, oh, don’t forget this clip on your index finger! That measures the oxygen level in your blood. Now you’re laying in bed. On your back. Never mind that you usually sleep on your stomach (or side). The doctor would like to get some readings while you’re on your back. The technician tucks you in and plunges you into darkness. Then, you hear the voice:
“Open your eyes. Good. Close your eyes. Good. Blink five times in a row. Good”
You cycle through a number of commands designed, I’m sure, to calibrate the brain wave readouts with are no doubt being cataloged in a file in the master control room. After about five minutes, you’re done.
“Goodnight!”
Yeah, good night. Ha! You will never experience a more miserable night of sleep in your life.
You lay there. On your back. Wearing an inordinate amount of uncomfortable wiring, all of which makes it impossible to move. I rolled over, slowly, trying hard not to displace a wire. Then came a knock at the door.
“Um, come in?”
Seems I’d dislodged an electrode on my head when I moved. Great. Now I’m paranoid about moving. So all night, you are uncomfortable, self-conscious, and wired… I’m amazed that anyone comes out of this place sleeping “normally”.
Well, eventually morning came. If you’d like to simulate the experience at home, tape a dozen wires to your head, another half-dozen or so to your body, grab some fishtank tube and wrap it around your nose, then lay back, and have your spouse stand over you with a video camera.
Sweet dreams!
Well, as luck would have it, they need to get 2 hours of continuous sleep for the study to be accurate. And it took all night for them to get that from me, so they never got to the second half of the “split study”. Hoorah! That means I got to go back!! Whoo hooo!!
And the results? Frightening. Turns out I was actually not breathing 47 times per hour! And by “not breathing” I mean, I would stop breathing completely, for 10 seconds or longer. The result was that I was “aroused” in the medical sense of the word (meaning I might not remember being awake, but my brain came out of sleep) 506 times during the night… nine of those times were for 15 seconds or more. And I do remember those. Every goddamn second of them.
Next: Part II, I am Darth Vader.
A New Look…
Well, you know you’re a geek when you’re completely stressed out, overworked, and what really calms your nerves is hacking the templates for your blog.
So here it is, a new “look and feel” for Preaching to the Perverted. Let me know what you think.
Slammed!
Well, I don’t think I could possibly get any busier. I’m positively and absolutely swamped with work. This week is the start of classes at work, which means there is an inordinate amount of work to complete and not nearly enough time to get it all done before classes start. In addition, the reading for law school is begining to get longer, so there’s more to read and even less time to read it in!
Wow. I mean, I worked all weekend, now I just got home a few minutes ago, and now I’m going to bed. To get up tomorrow at 6:30 A.M. to start the whole process over. *sigh* I’m a glutton for punishment.
George W. Bush Bounty!
The World’s Shortest Blog has an awesome bounty going. They have a collection (currently at $1220) which goes to the first person to ask George W. Bush, in a public forum, one simple question: “How many times have you been arrested, Mr. President?”
I do so hope that someone does this, on film.
[Via BoingBoing]
Just for the Record
If I’m in a coma, keep me on life support for one year. After that, turn it off, cause I’m probably not coming back.
If I’m brain dead, under no circumstances am I to be kept alive artificially.
My organs are to be donated where possible, but my body is not.
I do not want my dead body displayed in any way at a wake or funeral. My wife and immediate family can have a private viewing, if they want to say goodbye.
I am not to be buried. I am to be creamated. My wife may decide what to do with my ashes, I’ll update this if I come up with a specific thing I want done.
No organ music at my funeral. If it’s not in my CD collection, don’t play it. I would prefer a celebratory funeral.
Hopefully, I while people will be sad that I’m gone, they will be happy to have known me in their lives. Please, concentrate on the happy. And even if you hated me in life, you can be happy that I’m dead.
Also, please don’t spend a lot of money. Tell the funeral director to shove it. Have everyone bring their favorite food, and spend the time with friends and family, not looking at some bogus, expensive, lavish display that is so far removed from what is important in life. Seriously.
Okay, enough with the living will. Torts will do that to you.
We’re Not in Lake Wobegon Anymore
Garrison Keillor asks, “How did the Party of Lincoln and Liberty transmogrify into the party of Newt Gingrich’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk?” Read his excellent essay.
[Via BEB]
Reviews for 1L: Outliners
There are several products marketed towards the law student, designed to make you more productive in note taking, outlining, briefing, etc. There are three products that I looked at for this exercise, all are “outliners” if we use that term liberally. For this review, I looked at StoreLaw Outliner, Juristudents, and NoteMap.
First, a note about outliners in general. Some people really don’t really like outliners, and to be honest, I used to be one of those people. That’s because I really didn’t have any projects that required it. Generally speaking, whenever I would outline something, I was fine using Word, just cutting and pasting points around. For small outlines, that might be just fine. But on the whole, when I started working on larger outlines, I found it began to be really inefficient. Here are some features I think are key to a decent outliner:
- The ability to easily, on the fly, create new outline nodes
- The ability to easily reformat the outline (I, II, III, A, B, C, etc.)
- The ability to easily reorder the outline (grab nodes, and just drag and drop them into new positions).
First up is StoreLaw Outliner, an outliner/note organizer from the legal powerhouse, Thompson West. The price is decent; you can pick it up for around $65. I think that’s the cheapest thing you will ever buy from West, so maybe you’d better take advantage of it. The first problem with the StoreLaw Outliner is, well, it’s not much of an outliner. You can create your own outlines, but it’s really cumbersome to do so. Want to create a new topic, you right click, select new topic and then you get a pop-up. Way to break concentration and flow. Oh yeah, and grab something and try to move it. You can, but it’s not nice. You get no indication of where you are in the outline, just a little hand, and the program is pretty slow and not very responsive. You can use up and down arrows on the toolbar, but forget power outlining. For creating your own outlines, StoreLaw scores a big fat zero.
However, StoreLaw is from West, so you should expect something, right? Well, they provide a number of “pre-fab” outlines, based on the common textbooks for any given subject. Use the Prosser text for Torts? No problem! Just load up the West outline and you’re good to go! Unless, um, your professor jumps out of order, or skips a section, and now you’re back to trying to drag things around.
Now, because StoreLaw is geared towards students, it does have a nice feature, which allows you to keep notes organized. When you are in an outline, you can have tabs for case brief, class notes, key points, and secondary source notes. Those extra notes sections are associated with the outline node, so if you do manage to drag it someplace useful, your notes follow.
You can also export your notes, and the outline to Word, which is nice for printing, or um, probably something else.
Overall, I find StoreLaw to be slow and annoying. However, if you really dig on pre-canned outlines, this might be the right product for you. I have a Criminal professor who uses his own course packet, and a Torts professor who has his own order to Prosser, so it’s not as useful to me. Coupled with the shortcomings of the outliner, I don’t think much of StoreLaw. Rating: One Gavel.
Next up, we have another “for law students” product called Juristudents. Like StoreLaw, Juristudents is reasonably priced at $49 and comes to us from an (obviously) smaller company called Stare Decisis. Juristudents scores some major bonus points for being cross-platform. Yes, 98% of all law firms use PCs, and the vast majority of law students are going to work for law firms. But hey, props to the Mac users, they deserve good software too.
As an outliner, Juristudents suffers from many of the same problems that StoreLaw Outliner has, but takes them one level further. Creating new topics in the outline with Juristudents also involves the popups (hmmm, someone’s using a bad tree control for their outlines), and I couldn’t find any way to rearrange topics in the outline.
Juristudents does allow you to insert case briefs and statutes into your outline, and view them in conjunction with your class notes, which is nice. It’s more limited than the pane viewing found in StoreLaw, but like StoreLaw, it will also allow you to export your outline to Word, if you’re into that sort of thing.
Overall, Juristudents shows promise, but it is still a little rough around the edges. The get big bonus points for being cross platform, but I think I’ll wait for the next version. Rating: One-and-a-half Gavels.
Finally, we have NoteMap from CaseSoft. CaseSoft is a maker of software for lawyers, not students, so this one carries a lawyer price tag at $149. Yipes! However, NoteMap is the only one of the three that is a real outliner. You can create outlines very quickly and easily, no popups to create new topics, subtopics, etc. Just type. In this respect, NoteMap is far superior from an organizational standpoint. You can reorder nodes just by dragging them, and NoteMap has some grey lines that indicate where you are in the overall outline, which is nice if you outline goes fairly deep. You can also mark nodes in your outline, and attach comment “sticky notes” to topics as well. The default style for outlines (fonts, etc.) are, well, ugly, but you can easily change those.
What NoteMap lacks is the multipane viewing for classnotes and case briefs. Personally, I take my class notes directly in NoteMap, because it allows for a natural flow and easy re-ordering. It also has a feature that allows you to link a file to a node in your outline, so you can still link case-briefs or other outlines to your notes. You just can’t view them all in one frame. To give you some insight into how I use it, I create my briefs with a template in Word (sigh) and then link them to my class notes outline. So when I need to look at the brief, I double click on the link, and there it is. It’s not as elegant as the multiple panes, but it’s functional.
NoteMap is a vastly superior outliner to the other products, which is why I tend to like it best. It’s flexible enough that I use it for other projects, it’s not just for note taking (I use it in Legal Writing/Legal Methods/Lawyering Skills/Whatever for outlining memos, etc.)
That said, it is a whole lot more money. If I were rating it against the others just as an outliner, I’d give it three stars) but here, it’s just above the other two, mainly because of a personal preference for more outlining freedom.
Rating: Two Gavels.
Clearly, the software geared towards aiding law students needs a lot of work. However, they all beat the hell out of Word, and if you need (or want) something beyond law school, NoteMap makes a good deal of sense.