I’d give it a 9. I worked hard at Stein, McEwen & Bui. I also worked on Blackprof.com. Near the end of my summer I went to the American Bar Association Annual Meeting in Honolulu, Hawaii. There our SBA won “SBA of the Year” for the second time in a row. I had practically nothing to do with this as I was learning to surf:

Also I read a great book called “Quicksilver” by Neal Stephenson. It is the first in his Baroque trilogy and I loved almost every single one of its 900+ pages. In it, Stephenson captures in the adventures of its characters the emerging scientific and economic progress of Europe during the seventeenth century. Highly recommended to my one reader, who checks my page approximately every six months.

So i’m not really a car guy, but the Maybach Exelero really does it for me. So much so that I created a couple of 1024×768 background images for my desktop. Click the pictures to the right to download.

I’ll have to be satisfied with just pictures for now because 1) it’s a one-off car for Fulda Tyres and 2) Maybachs cost more than decent houses.

http://www.thefactz.org/economics/p2p_summary.html - interesting overview of statistical studies of filesharing’s effect on the sale of music.

Two exams down, one to go. Instead of studying for my final final, I though I’d take a break to just post some random thoughts I’ve been having. I’ve noticed that when I’m studying 16 hours a day, my brain just won’t shut off during the rare two or three seconds I’m not cramming something into it. During those pauses, my brains pukes up the wierdest crap. Here’s some of it.

• There’s this movie called Equilibrium with Christian Bale that is an great action movie with a brain. It’s sort of a fast-moving 1984 by way of The Matrix. I saw it this summer but I can’t get the coolness of a Gun Katana out of my mind.
• A December Rolling Stone issue on John Lennon has changed my mind about his peace protest stuff. I always thought he was hippie in the worst way; but his ‘bed-in’s with Yoko were a reflection of his refusal to take peace ‘to the streets’ so to speak. He had a lot of criticism of peace movements that seek to achieve their goals through violence, physical or otherwise. I think I can share that view with him. Also, he and Yoko remind me a LOT of my friends Chris and Masako.
• I spent way too much time researching Fantasty Football moves this semester.

Actually, looking over that list it seems those are just more things I’ve been cramming in to my brain, not things my brain has puked up. Maybe I need to spend less time acquiring and more time reflecting. No time for that right now, though. It’s back to work.

Nippon Telegraph & Telephone (NTT) can make you dance. They use a technology called “galvanic vestibular stimulation” which sends low-power electric currents into the subject’s inner ear, giving them their irresistable urge to move in a specific, controllable direction. Using a joystick, NTT has made individuals walk in a pretzel shape.

NTT has also made the pulses time with music, causing a disorienting effect similar, perhaps, to drugs. Not surprisingly, some people like it, some hate it. The technology might be pretty cool for games, though, as it could add sensation of balance and perhaps g-forces to, say, racing games.

Yahoo News! has the whole article.

My Legislation professor, Joshua Schwartz, is buddies with SCOTUS Nominee Samuel Alito. Below are some of the comments he made in class today about his friend.

“Honest.”

“A very good guy that I am proud to call a friend.”

“Isn’t that great. ‘Hey dad, Sam Alitio was a Supreme Court Justice at your age - what are you doing with your life?’ But Bush called him ‘highly qualified’ because he had 12 Supreme Court arguments, I had 13, so I guess that makes me highly qualified as well.”

Schwartz also said something to the effect that he is glad Alito was picked, but that if “any of you is a Senator, you’ll have to follow your conscience.”

SCOTUSBlog has a great collection of information about Judge Alito, including summaries of some of Alito’s most important decisions.

Yes, it was worth the 30 hours I spent making it. More photos here and here.

While trying to figure out how many total Zip Codes there are in the United States, I found this cool java applet that graphically represents zip codes. Like most things I learn lately, I came by this at a Wikipedia entry.

I thought I’d make my own contribution to the rumor mill surrounding Supreme Court Nominee Harriet Miers.

This morning I was talking with my Antitrust professor Richard J. Pierce, Jr. about Miers’ undergraduate degree in mathematics. He mentioned that GW’s Associate Dean for International and Comparative Legal Studies, Susan L. Karamanian, is “best friends” with Miers and thinks she is a great choice. Pierce characterized Karamanian as rather “liberal” with the implication left dangling.

Karamanian and Miers probably know each other from Locke, Liddell, & Sapp, LLP where they both spent over a decade.

Most of everything else that anyone knows about Supreme Court Nominee Harriet Miers can be found at this wikipedia entry. How do they stay so current?!?!

According to Wonkette, a Gregory S. Paul, from Baltimore, MD, has published an article in the electronic Journal of Religion and Society studying the effects of religious beliefs on a society. As written up in the London Times under the title “Societies worse off ‘when they have God on their side’, Mr. Paul believes the effects are wholly negative.

Strangely, Mr. Paul is acredited in the article only as “Gregory S. Paul, Baltimore, MD” and described in the Times article as a “social scientist.” After some initial sleuthing, I discovered that there is a famous freelance paleontologist and illustrator named Gregory S. Paul in Baltimore, MD. (wikipedia mini-bio).

Is Gregory the Paleontologist also Gregory the Social Scientist? Ask yourself if a “freelance” (degree-less?) anthropologist might make any of the following statements found in the paper:

No democracy is known to have combined strong religiosity and popular denial of evolution with high rates of societal health. Higher rates of non-theism and acceptance of human evolution usually correlate with lower rates of dysfunction …

When the theory of biological evolution removed the need for a supernatural creator concerns immediately arose over the societal implications of widespread abandonment of faith

More research to follow….