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In an article in the New York Times today, Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler, Mark Bittman compares meat to oil:

Like oil, meat is subsidized by the federal government. Like oil, meat is subject to accelerating demand as nations become wealthier, and this, in turn, sends prices higher. Finally — like oil — meat is something people are encouraged to consume less of, as the toll exacted by industrial production increases, and becomes increasingly visible.

We hear from time to time that there are drawbacks to the kind of meat production industry that has developed in the United States and elsewhere, but this article follows the relationships between those drawbacks clearly and succinctly. Bonus points to Bittman for quoting Tyler Cowen, one of the authors of the illuminating blog Marginal Revolution:

“I just don’t think we can count on market prices to reduce our meat consumption,” he [Cowen] said. “There may be a temporary spike in food prices, but it will almost certainly be reversed and then some. But if all the burden is put on eaters, that’s not a tragic state of affairs.”

I wonder if we’ll see follow-up comments from Cowen on his blog, as sometimes happens after he has been quoted in the press.

Bittman is the author of the very useful cookbook How to Cook Everything, among other things. His byline on the NYT article indicates that although he’s written a vegetarian cookbook, he’s not a vegetarian, in an apparent effort to fend off any allegations of anti-meat bias.

*Update — 1/29/08: And here is Tyler Cowen’s follow-up. He wonders whether, if one considers the environment and animal cruelty, is it better to eat cows or pigs, if one is going to eat one or the other.

I've installed Movable Type 4 on the server that hosts this blog. In the process, I dumped my semi-custom template set and went with a MT default template and style. I've learned to leave template and style design to those who have the time to do it right. I'm also going to go with a sans-serif typeface for a while, since I've been very serif-oriented for the last five years. Now I just have to write something.

This site is also at "www.mcfp.org" now, but blog.tph-lex.com will still work, too. (Two names, one place.)

The odometer in my 2000 Honda Civic hit 77777 during my trip home today. Unfortunately, money did not come pouring out of the glove box.

I've gotten out of the habit of writing here. I don't like the stylistic approaches I find myself taking most of the time that I write here, and I think that to find a new voice I'm going to have to practice writing for something other than nearly-instant publication.

So, I'm going to try to find time to go do that. And when I have, I'll be back.

I've been noticing that it seemed like a dry spring that warmed rapidly. It wasn't just me. Apparently climatologists are worried that we're on our way to another dry, dangerous summer. (Denver Post: Outlook grim for snowpack.)

A few days ago I smelled what was probably a brush fire. A few weeks ago one burned just a few miles from here. I just hope this summer won't repeat the summer of 2002.

The New York Times has an article today, "Debate Revives as 9/11 Dust is Called Fatal." It tells the story of a 34-year old detective who died of a lung malady. The coroner reported, "It is felt with a reasonable degree of medical certainty that the cause of death in this case was directly related to the 9/11 incident." "A reasonable degree of medical certainty," the article notes, is "coroner language for 'as sure as I can be.'"

According to the article, some people suggest that the mix of chemicals in the air after the collapse of the World Trade Center somehow accelerated the development of cancers and other respiratory maladies.

One of our relatives has been diagnosed with lung cancer. She's a non-smoker with no risk factors. So far as we know, she's never lived somewhere with high concentrations of radon, and her two sisters are in good health. But she works in Manhattan and spent a lot of time breathing that post-collapse air. It seems like 2001 was too recent for cancer to develop, but it's the only risk factor that we can come up with.

Lots of people like the fact that Denver's mayor, John Hickenlooper, doesn't take himself too seriously.

Great pictures of Mayor Hickenlooper in a city pool. In his dress clothes.

Technorati Tags: Denver, Hickenlooper

Today I learned that my new legal assistant once worked part-time for my old firm, some five years ago. That firm only has maybe seven employees in Denver at a time. How's that for coincidence?

Lately I've had oil on my mind. As in petroleum. As oil prices have increased in the United States over the last six months or so, I've heard more on the radio and encountered more online about the notion of "peak oil" (Google for "peak oil").

Late last week, I encountered Tom Evslin's weblog post that suggests that nuclear power will probably be necessary to provide power for electrolysis so that there can be a non-petroleum-based fuel source for hydrogen-powered vehicles.

Then, Gary Becker and Richard Posner posted their entries on the topic of nuclear power. [Becker.] [Posner.] Prof. Becker proposes that the time has come to permit new construction of nuclear power plants; Judge Posner says he doesn't think that a complete case has yet been made to support such a change in policy.

"Peak oil," as I understand it, means that point in time at which oil production ceases to keep up with demand regardless of technological advances. The result would be steadily increasing prices, as demand for oil is increasing but inelastic. (In other words, our demand for oil is generally increasing, but we're bad at restraining that demand for oil because we can't easily make tradeoffs to other sources, nor can we easily give up transportation and electricity.)

I'm not in a position to evaluate the economic realities of petroleum supply and demand, though I do know that I pay more for gasoline, electricity, and heating gas than I paid in the past. I know that at some point petroleum supply will not keep up with demand, and I wonder whether we will then be ready to transition to other power sources. I suspect that we won't quite be ready when the time comes, that it will come in my lifetime, and that for a while, it will hurt. I don't yet think it'll be the disaster that some predict, in which the entire economy fails overnight for want of gasoline and electricity. But I expect it will hurt, probably badly.

The website for Denver's KMGH Channel 7 has this slideshow of two Seaworld penguins going through the metal detectors at Denver International Airport. [Link via Bruce Schneier.]

TSA didn't subject the penguins to a pat-down, but some of the onlookers wanted to.

I guess that just goes to show that under the right circumstances, penguins can fly.

Today I received a note envelope from West Group with a note card that said,

Dear Valued west.thomson.com Customer,

Please accept the enclosed $20 gift card as a thank-you for purchasing on west.thomson.com. …

There was no gift card accompanying the note.

But I suppose I can't complain. I didn't shop on west.thomson.com. I haven't shopped on west.thomson.com since the end of 2002. And this year, when my 2005 Colorado Court Rules arrived in the mail, I returned them to West and cancelled my subscription, because I have other up-to-date copies of the Rules. I hope other, more genuine, West customers got gift cards with their notes, though.

It's April 1. Get ready for fake technology announcements from all corners of the web.

Of course, there's a bunch of folks expecting one company to make a very real product announcement, and rumor has it that they're on track to do just that.

Every time I cycle my RSS reader, very little changes. What do you mean, practically nobody blogs late on Saturday nights?

There's a cold front coming our way. It's been really windy all week, and today is no exception. Looking at the national weather maps, I see it's very windy all across the southern U.S., with red flag warnings stretching from Texas to North Carolina.

Our electricity has gone out twice this morning. That's unusual — our power system is usually pretty wind resistant. Steady 60 mph winds in the middle of winter have seldom resulted in blackouts, and the National Weather Service station nearby is only reporting gusts in the 40 mph range. After today's outages, the power has usually been restored within two minutes, which suggests to me that the problem is at a substation and not in the local distribution network. Either way, the failure gets routed around pretty darn quickly. The substation for this area sits out by the highway in an area where the wind comes shooting over a hill, so it wouldn't surprise me if that's where the problem lies.

It's still annoying.

It's also a good example of the variety in Colorado weather at this time of year. Right now the temperature is 65F, but winds are steady at 28 mph gusting to about 40 mph. Tonight it's supposed to be 24F and we're due for 2 to 4 inches of snow. Tomorrow the high temperatures will be in the 30s F.

It has been unseasonably warm, I suppose. Next week will be more normal, ranging from the 30s to the 50s. We sure could use the precipitation.

Have you seen this great advertising strategy 3M's using to promote its Security Glass?

(via Rick Bruner's Executive Summary)

That marketing approach is, of course, a little more difficult for lawyers, who can't publicize their confidential work.

I've decided I need to try to gain back the muscle weight I had before I left law school — or better yet, before I went to law school. I've never been a large or especially muscular person, nor have I ever been very athletic (I like skiing but don't get to do that nearly often enough). Recently I've been feeling too much like a stick figure, since I no longer walk almost everywhere I go every day. When I noticed that my encounter with pneumonia in January had taken another five pounds off of me, I decided I'd better do something about it sooner rather than later.

Of course, it still took me a while to get started, but Monday afternoon I embarked on a pretty good workout that was a little heavy on the strength and toning exercises. I emphasized lower-body exercises just because I have no weights. It didn't feel like too much at the time. In fact, it felt pretty good. I made an effort to cool down and stretch afterward, too.

Apparently, I overdid the exercises or I didn't cool down and stretch very well. Over the course of yesterday and even today, I've been very, very sore. Today was even worse than yesterday, though now it seems to be getting better slowly. Even so, I stand up and my quads, hamstrings, and lower abdominal muscles laugh at me. Harshly.

Next time I need to take it a little more easily.

My hosting provider had blocked all Movable Type comments scripts because it was slammed by spammers.

Using instructions from the provider I have implemented a work-around, and comments now work again.

Yesterday I went to an opthalmologist to be checked for glaucoma risk. My optometrist had referred me because she didn't like the look of my optic nerves. I'm rather young to have glaucoma, but the thinking is that if things look the least bit sketchy, it's best to at least do some tests to establish a baseline from which one can track the eyes over time. So I drove up to Boulder and visited the very efficiently-run offices of an opthalmologist and two optometrists. (I imagine the office is fairly profitable, since the staff seem well-trained, handled much of the examination themselves and left the MD to evaluation and counseling roles.)

The first diagnostic tool was an ordinary intraocular pressure check using the Glowing Blue Plastic Rod Against The Eye. If it's done right you don't notice that something is touching your cornea, and it was done right. Pressures were normal, though a little on the high end of normal. You see, many kinds of glaucoma are caused by the fluid pressure inside the eye being too high, putting stress on the optic nerve and cornea.

Next was a very fancy computerized retinal tomography ("Heidelberg Retinal Tomograph") that used retinal imaging to develop a three-dimensional image of the optic nerve's attachment to the retina. Strictly speaking, according to its manufacturer, this device is a "Confocal Laser Scanning System for Quantitative Three-Dimensional Imaging of the Posterior Segment." Whatever one calls it, this is a very slick machine. It is also no doubt very expensive, since my three-minute visit with it cost my insurance carrier well over a hundred dollars. But it meant I avoided having my eyes dilated or enduring a long and tedious field-of-vision test, and it did give a very fast and detailed first impression of what's going on in the backs of my eyes.

The next part of the exam is the part that sends shivers down my spine to think of it. See, like many people, I'm very protective of my eyes, and the thought of sitting there passively while something touches the surface of my eyes just creeps the hell out of me. The next test involved a device called a "pachymeter." Its name sounds like it should be used to measure elephants. It's actually used to measure the thickness of the cornea. For this test, the medical technician numbs the eye with an anaesthetic drop and then — and this is the part that sends shivers down my spine a full day later — touches the cornea with the probe with enough pressure that the cornea bends slightly, in ways not at all like how it bends during ordinary eye focusing, and space seems to warp and wiggle. I don't have too many issues with space wiggling as long as I don't get sucked into a singularity or lose the effects of gravity, but the thought of being repeatedly touched on the cornea just gives me the creeps. Fortunately the anaesthetic worked, but after it wore off several hours later it felt just a little sore, like, well, like I'd been poked in the eyes a few hours before.

Fortunately there is nothing prompting immediate alarm, though we will have to keep track of the eyes over time. I'm considered a "glaucoma suspect." The immediate practical implication is that I will have to be poked in the eyes repeatedly. I'm glad that part happens only once per year.

I tried to use Zempt 0.4 to post that last entry. It posted the title but not the entry text. Odd.

Suffice it to say I've been afflicted with at least one respiratory ailment all week and, between symptoms and the effects of medications, have been practically useless for most of the week. I saw the doctor today, though, and maybe by the end of the weekend I'll feel like I'm in one piece again.

Fix one thing, break another....

I've updated the site to MT 3.14, but I've run into a few problems and I've reverted the site to a generic MT template set rather than try to update what I had. I still can't get archiving to work right. I use individual, monthly, and (for the moment, at least) category archives. The "preferred" archive selection radio buttons in the "weblog config / archiving" page don't work -- they're all set to active. Even though I've turned off weekly archiving, the permalinks for posts still point to the old weekly archives instead of the individual archives. I'm guessing it's just a tag I need to change.

But if it's just a tag I need to change, then why does even the CMS "Edit Entry" screen "View Entry" link point to the non-existent weekly archive?

Amazon.com sent me an email notice that I could get a $15 rebate on "Quicken Lawyer Home & Small Business Legal Suite 2003."

Heh.

I'm working on a (paying!) research project right now, so I haven't been a heavy reader of blogs for the last few day, let alone writing one. I'll be around more later in the week. How do lawyers who have to bill time in careful increments manage to blog as often as some do? Wow.

It started to snow late Monday night, and continued until this morning. As of this morning, my town had officially reported 29 inches of snow. We made one trek (three blocks) to the half-functional grocery store, but otherwise we've been stuck at home. I may post a few photos later.

Denver International Airport has become home to a lot of stranded passengers. This is spring break season, when a lot of people come through the airport to reach Colorado's ski resorts, and the airport also serves (for now) as a United hub. I wonder what sort of impact this will have on United. [KUSA 9news report]

Meanwhile, I know I haven't blogged much of anything lately. I've been away from the computer, and I also tend to avoid simply linking to other resources without saying anything more. I also intend to say little to nothing about events in the Middle East, but I'm spending time paying attention to those events that I might otherwise have spent reading and writing on other topics.

I seem to have got cookies working properly so that the comments page will remember who you are if you want.

Please let me know if you encounter any problems with that function.

From now on, I think I have to do things like that in smaller chunks.

I don't post as often as some do, but every once in a while I post something that's astonishingly long.

I expect to put the heavily revised version of my first entry on Creative Commons licenses here tonight.

Jonas mentions the report of a certain bar and restaurant owner who got fed up with his laptop computer and shot it in the bar.

"In police reports, Doughty said that he realized afterward that he shouldn't have shot his Dell but that at the time it seemed appropriate."

I have to say that I'm not surprised that this happened. It got my attention, though, because it happened just about five miles from here.

I can't be the only one who cringed during Will Bailey's description of the scaled tax system on The West Wing last night. He described the percentage brackets as percentages of taxable income instead of marginal rates. I wonder whether Sorkin did it that way because it would take too long to explain it accurately or if he did it that way because he didn't know better. I've got a hunch it's the latter, but I'm not going to run the videotape back and check the whiteboard math to see.

(Yes, we have a VCR. I realize that may appear quaint to some of you out there....)

Shoes washing up on a beach near-- well, probably near someone:

ANCHORAGE (AP) - Thousands of pairs of Nike basketball shoes are washing up on beaches from Washington state to Alaska after spilling from a container ship in Northern California.

...

"Nike forgot to tie the laces, so you have to find mates," said Dr. Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer who tracks sneakers, toys and other flotsam across the sea. "The effort's worth it 'cause these Nikes have only been adrift a few months. All 33,000 are wearable!"

I guess the "air" really does have a purpose. Meanwhile, the idea that these shoes might be wearable even after months in salt water makes me wonder what kinds of chemicals they treat them with.

The New York Times reports that the U.S. Air Force Space Command is contemplating arming some of its intercontinental ballistic missiles with conventional weapons. I imagine that an ICBM with an appropriately designed, guided, conventional re-entry vehicle could be a very effective rapid-delivery system. But remember, launching even one of these things sets off alarms all over the world. Talk about tooth-grinding anxiety as the Space Command tries to convince Beijing that, no, it's not nuking anybody, certainly not China, no, it's just delivering conventional weapons to North Korea, yes, really.

Prof. Brad DeLong has been assailing Bush's proposed budget since it first appeared. To check himself, DeLong's been trying to find an economist who thinks Bush's fiscal policy makes sense. He can't find anyone.

Scary.

BeSpacific relays a CNN report that someone cracked into the records of a contractor who handled Visa and Mastercard transactions for merchants, obtaining data on up to 2.2 million accounts. That's 1/3 of one percent of all Visa and Mastercard accounts. Looking at it another way: for each Visa or Mastercard-branded credit or debit card you have, the odds are 1 in 300 that someone who shouldn't now has your name and account number because of this incident.

They seem to know which cards were compromised, and say that they have notified the issuing banks of what cards are affected, but it could take a while to sort things out.

The CNN article doesn't say how much information was stolen. Because the company only handled the merchant side of transactions, it's most likely that the company only possessed the customers' names, card numbers, and card expiration dates. Let's hope it's limited to that, because the theft of more detailed information like addresses and Social Security Numbers would enable thieves to open new accounts in the names of other people.

This morning, cameras began tracking traffic in central London to determine whether the owners of cars driving there have paid the new user fees for those roads.

The £5 per day user fee extends to an eight-square-mile area of central London and covers driving between 7 a.m. and 6:30 p.m. Cameras will photograph vehicles, and "[t]he images will be fed into computers that will then match the license plates of those cars photographed against a list of drivers who have paid for the trip." [NYTimes article] The article doesn't explicitly say that the computers will use number-recognition software and accomplish the match-up automatically, but that strikes me as the only way effectively to enforce this system by camera. Cars spotted who haven't paid and who don't pay by 10 p.m. will find that their fee increases to a fine of £10 that night, then to £20 at midnight, then £80 after that. Motorists who fail to pay three of those fines may have their cars clamped or towed.

The avowed goal of the system is to push people to use public transit. However, many have argued that the alternatives aren't very appealing.

"Underground and rail networks are operating at capacity," Angela Bray, a Conservative member of the London Assembly, wrote in a letter to The Guardian this weekend. "If a traveler actually gets on to a train, he or she can expect conditions so overcrowded that they would breach E.U. laws on transportation of cattle." [NYTimes article]

A BBC News article on the topic quotes another objector:

... Conservative mayoral candidate Steven Norris said he would scrap the congestion charge and concentrate instead on better traffic regulation.

He said: "The crazy thing about the scheme is that even if it works it doesn't work.

"It shifts a lot of traffic around but it doesn't actually reduce pollution, it doesn't actually reduce the number of vehicles significantly overall, and it does it at enormous cost to people who aren't necessarily wealthy simply because they run a car."

There seems to be no talk about whether the camera system is invasive, a topic that would probably be central to debates about such a system in the United States.

Another article: The Times of London

This post is mostly linkage. Sundays are usually really quiet, but there's a lot going on out there today.

BoingBoing has several interesting posts: This one on Google buying Pyra Labs, this one on "Live from the Blogosphere," this one describing how Bruce Schneier (a cryptography guru) decimated the marketing assertions of a company marketing new encryption software. Keep scrolling there to find the posts about the lobby group "Noise Free America" and a few notes on chemical and biological warfare agents.

Ernie the Attorney's wife Monique has joined the blogosphere with her products liability blawg. Welcome!

Law Prof. Jeff Cooper has some musings on the death penalty and how the recent Eighth Circuit Singleton decision, which held that a government may medicate someone in order to make him or her constitutionally executable, seems to indicate something wrong about the death penalty itself.

Seth Finkelstein has more thoughts on censorware.

Sam Heldman points to an Alabama Supreme Court decision on talk-radio defamation. 'Someday, the reasoning behind such a holding might be that an allegation that one man is likely to perform oral sex on another does not constitute saying something bad about somebody. That, however, was not the basis for the Alabama Supreme Court's holding. Instead, it was essentially the also-correct "come on, it was talk radio for pete's sake -- nobody expects literal truth on talk radio!"'

There's more news of note out there, but my mother is at the Denver International Airport on a delayed layover that could last for quite a while, so we're going to go meet her for lunch. Priorities -- Mom comes well ahead of blogging!

I've upgraded this site to Movable Type 2.6 and converted to a SQL-based database. If anyone runs into trouble with it, let me know.

I've been upgrading my desktop computer's operating system over the last few days, which has kept me in computer-tech mode instead of computer-user mode.

Soon I'll be upgrading the Movable Type install to version 2.6. I hope that goes smoothly.

Right now, though, I'm too busy to mess with that. I got a call-back interview for an in-house position that I'd really like, so I've got to touch up my writing sample and do a bit of reading up for that. I'm also working on some documents related to DMCA 17 U.S.C. sect. 512 take-down notification, a topic on which I think I will add a few points shortly.

A friend of mine noticed that the Kronos Quartet is turning 30 this year. Kronos has been a pioneer in exploring what can be done with two violins, a viola, and a 'cello, commissioning numerous works by modern composers. I've got a couple of their CDs, and while some of the music can try the ear, some of it has a way of drawing the attention and engaging both the ear and the mind. They've also given impressive performances of works from earlier in the 20th century.

The discussion of the staging aspects of a music performance most caught my attention as I read that article. The article quotes Harry Sumrall of the Performing Arts Library, saying, "Before Kronos came along, if a classical string quartet showed up for a recital you could expect people in formal dress, and very bare or non-existent stage sets and lighting. ... The reason Bach didn't perform with a lighting design is that technology didn't exist. They've brought classical music out of its shell. Kronos wasn't taking attention away from the music, they were expressing it in the same modern context that classical musicians had always done."

That reminded me of times back in high school, when my friends and I worked on the lighting and stage crew for many a 'classical' concert. When small ensembles performed, we often invited them to try the experience of performing the pieces with unorthodox staging or lighting. The band director even programmed a small-ensemble concert that encouraged this kind of creativity. That gave us the opportunity to add something to the expression of the music, to add to the vibration of strings or of columns of air, and to discover how the performers would in turn respond through subtle changes in their expression, phrasing, or dynamics. Even when the school added a new computerized lighting control board, we sometimes still used the old control board covered with manual sliders; once we had "tuned the instrument" by rigging the lights as we wished, we could "play" that control panel with a great deal more creativity and spontaneity than the computer could allow. I miss being able to participate in that kind of intermingling of creativity so regularly.

I've been running Movable Type for about four months, but I only now realized that the date-based archives templates weren't allowing people to comment or use TrackBack. Since I'm not using individual archives anymore due to duplicativeness and space limitations, that meant that anyone following an RSS feed landed at an entry with comments and TB turned off. That's bad.

And now, it's fixed. I copied the commenting and TB tags from the main index to the date-based archives.

John Snyder, the President of Artist House Records, and his son Ben discussed the future of media entertainment and why the RIAA and MPAA have got it wrong in a paper they submitted to the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences on Thursday. The paper appears here, at Salon.com.

(I'd credit the link, but I don't remember who I got it from. Sorry!)

It's good to know that someone in that business is pushing for more creative thinking.

Something just seems wrong about National Geographic Magazine planning a swimsuit edition. Yeah, they've couched it in historical terms -- "swimsuits: 100 years of pictures" -- but even so, it seems very out of place.

People following copyright, technology, and digital rights management issues have wondered a lot about Sony lately. Sony has a record label (or so), a motion picture production company, and a large electronics business, so it's a company on both sides of DRM issues. Will it produce the electronics with functionality that people want -- and, I should note, with substantial non-infringing uses -- or will it produce equipment with very limited capabilities designed to keep people from ever copying its media products? Or, perhaps, is that choice something other than binary?

Doc recently linked to this Newsweek article, wondering if Sony would buck the major media houses' overprotective tendencies in order to energize its electronics business. Today, Cory Doctorow (BoingBoing) excerpted and commented on this Wired article by Frank Rose, which discusses in much more detail the direction Sony might go from here. Sony doesn't seem to plan to leave the media business, as one might expect from its CEO's remark that he doesn't want Sony to go back to being only "a box company." Where will Sony's DRM initiatives lead?

Lately I've been running around to a lot of events, and I've had friends visiting town. It's been good to see my brother and some of my other friends from home. I've also been getting called for job interviews, and I'm very happy about that. Hopefully something will come of it.

It's been a quiet weekend here. I'm not complaining, because the coming week will be busy.

I've been tweaking the CSS for the blog. If I don't accomplish anything else here, at least I'm learning a bit about CSS and XHTML.

I also spent part of the weekend studying will and trust drafting. I didn't study wills and trusts in law school except in my first-year property class, so preparing for the bar exam provided me with my first significant exposure to the topic. I found it interesting. The Colorado bar exam's coverage of wills and trusts does not include estate taxes, however -- there's no taxation at all on the Colorado exam. Taxation continues to be a significant consideration in the organization of large estates, so I'm going to have to spend some time studying that. I find even so-called "simple" wills intriguing, though, because of the intensely personal nature of the choices that they can involve. People generally don't like thinking about death, and the kinds of decisions people may have to make about what happens to their property and family when they die are very challenging emotionally. Many people never even try to find out what happens if they die without a will, leaving their family members taken aback by the distribution of property that results when they die.

Many non-lawyers out there might not know that state laws about "intestate succession" govern who inherits what when someone dies without a will. For example, imagine an unmarried man with no children who dies in Colorado his 60s leaving his mother, two sisters, two nieces and a nephew. Imagine that he has no real estate, but he has a respectable amount of retirement savings and some treasured personal property. Imagine further that he seemed to have vaguely indicated his intent to leave certain pieces of property to his nieces, sisters, and nephew, but he never wrote anything down. Who gets what? Under Colorado law, all of his property passes to his mother. C.R.S. sect. 15-11-103(2). If she rejects it, it is divided equally between his sisters. This may upset members of the younger generations, especially younger family members who had developed personal attachments to some of the heirlooms they had expected to receive. No one knows exactly what the decedent wanted to happen to his property when he died, but everyone's pretty sure that this wasn't quite it.

In my view, time spent helping people address those emotionally challenging questions and getting their wishes properly established on paper so that they and their families can avoid that kind of scenario would be time well spent.

NPR's Talk of the Nation Science Friday program this afternoon included an interview with Bruce Perens, the well known open-source advocate. Host Ira Flatow also interviewed Michael Robertson, the founder and CEO of Lindows.com. I was driving and didn't hear all of either interview, but I did hear Bruce tell an amusing anecdote about a conversation he once had with Steve Jobs. You can find a page with links to RealAudio recordings of segments of the show here.

I seem to remember that year or two (or more?) ago, a lot of people raised the question, "Why don't more girls take an interest in mathematics and computer science?" An article (free registration required) in the New York Times by Karen Stabiner raises the question again. It's still worth asking. Meanwhile, see if you can find the quotation where a word was most likely either used or transcribed incorrectly.

While browsing the internet the other night, my girlfriend came across the site of Lip Balm Anonymous. The site's author does appear to intend that we take him seriously. I don't dispute the possibility that a person could develop a psychological affinity, even a compulsion, for waxy lips. However, some of the author's rants go far enough over the top that it becomes difficult to take him seriously. For me, the site conjures memories of girls in high school who indeed seemed to be compulsive lip-balmers. Some of them didn't get the idea that Carmex is a cold sore treatment and not a lip balm. This severely ticked off our band teacher, who worried that the salicylic acid in Carmex would corrode our instruments. I suspect that a compulsion to wear lip balm would probably be rooted somewhere other than most substance-addictions, since lip balm generally doesn't alter one's state of consciousness; the lip-balm addiction sounds more like some form of obsessive-compulsive behavior. But what do I know? I'm no psychiatrist or neurologist. Maybe in some people the feeling of smooth waxy lips triggers a response as calming or euphoric as the feelings that well-known addictive substances trigger.

Once I got back to Colorado, I spent a few days feeling too ill to focus on much of anything. I'm finally feeling like I've got my head on again instead of having misplaced it somewhere.

For the last week or so, I've been visiting my family in Wisconsin.

As I prepared to leave Colorado, I told myself that I'd update my blog regularly and read all the blogs I ordinarily read. I uploaded my aggregator blog list to one of my servers so that I would be able to download it and use it in Madison. Instead, I rarely use the computer for more than a few minutes a day. This is probably a good thing, since I ordinarily spend so much time in front of it. I'll catch up once I get back to Colorado this weekend.

I've been reading some of the discussion on digital identity (see, e.g., AKMA), but I have to confess that I tend to get a little lost in the discussion. It's a high-context conversation, and I'm not exactly up-to-date on all of that context. Far from it. The context includes the entire multifaceted question of what the internet is, so it's hard to get my brain around all of the interrelated ideas at one time.

AKMA says that the desirable end for a mass audience of internet users (not commercial interests) is "accountable, persistent, reliable online identity," with some accommodation for anonymity. When commerce gets involved, I'd take the requirements a step further; commercial interests want almost always to be able to attach an online identity with a real, flesh and blood human. Anyone involved in commercial transactions online needs to establish that connection with an urgency that increases according to the value and risk of the transaction. If the transaction goes sour, one can (usually) find the flesh-and-blood person and haul him or her into court. You can't do that with an online identity that exists only detached from any corporeal equivalent.

The question is how to have it both ways -- to make business and other identity-important transactions on the internet relatively low-risk prospects (perfection may not be necessary) while not requiring a one-for-one correspondence between online and offline personalities. It may mean that one can have only one online personality for business purposes. Is that unacceptable? Are there other ways we can balance the various risks?

I'll keep watching the discussions to see what I learn. Meanwhile, I hope that I find some good background material so that I can get a better understanding of where the online conversation on the identity topic has come from and where it is going.

I've been tweaking the blog to use weekly archiving instead of individual, changing both the preferences and the templates. I don't think anything is broken.

Yet.

Update -- Looks like the changes made the XML/RDF feed behave as though all the entries were new, at least as far as Aggie is concerned. My apologies.

Okay, let's see if I can actually post here regularly.

Movable Type appears to be occasionally writing improper HTML, leading some browsers to ask if you want to download a file when visiting blog.tph-lex.com. A rebuild of the site usually fixes the problem. I'll try to figure out what's up, but I'm hoping that MT 2.51 will just take care of the issue.

Update: When they occur, the errors appear to affect Internet Explorer (tested with version 6), but they do not appear to affect Mozilla (tested with version 1.1). 11:09 a.m. MST 31 October.

Quite a few out there have been talking about the Digital ID World 2002 Conference happening in Denver this week. Unfortunately I can't attend even though I live in the Denver area, as being newly-graduated and not yet employed means that I have a zero cash flow. It looks exciting, though, and many fascinating people will be there. Since several of them are bloggers, I think we can expect to hear a bit about the conference from them.