a bland article in today’s wapo led me here. fascinating stuff, especially for those who have been in the dc area for a decade or five.

back in the day (circa 1989 or thereabouts), i accompanied my mother to a conference. it was either APHA or PAA; the organization doesn’t really matter. what matters is that while i was visiting the exhibits and booths - for all conferences have them - one in particular caught my eye. it was a group promoting clean, uniform data.* the concept excited me to no end. “you’re doomed,” my mother said, rolling her eyes.

recently she sent me a link to a presentation by hans rosling, professor of international health at the karolinska institute, and founder of gapminder. even if you couldn’t give a fig about international health and development, rosling shows an amazing, dynamic use of data the likes i’ve never seen before.

so, you data junkies, you disseminators of information via graphics, put down your slide rules. close the excel datasheet. and please, PLEASE step away from the powerpoint. instead, paste your eyes to this. and enjoy!

* according to the relevant mother, the group was the u.s. census bureau. stands to reason, although there’s more political gain to be had in manipulating data than ensuring its accuracy.

according to today’s WaPo, “clauses and commas make a comeback.” grammar returns to area highschools, eliciting sighs of relief from college english professors everywhere.

a long, long time ago, in a neighborhood far, far away (okay, i’m kidding; a neighborhood maybe four miles from where i’m sitting), my grandmother’s neighbor gave me a book that had belonged to her son.

grammar can be fun.

i still have it. and while i don’t remember everything in it, what has stuck with me is that “got” is an ugly weed of a word and the difference between lay and lie is who/what is getting horizontal. it is a fantastic book.

other random stuff:

damn, i forgot to light a yartzeit today. oma — i’m thinking about you.

the UN is sending its first all-female peacekeeping unit to liberia. this is news, but i’m not sure how to react to it. actually, what i’m not sure how to react to is the way it is presented.

when i saw the headline on the UN wire (”UN’s first women-only peacekeeping unit prepares for Liberia“), i thought, “hey, neat, an all-woman military unit.” then i noticed the IHT article ran with a different headline than the UN wire did: “India’s toughest women gear up for U.N. deployment to violence-torn Liberia.”

i like the IHT’s headline better, and i’m not sure why. it may be because the emphasis isn’t on the novelty of an all-female unit, but rather that some of india’s female troops will be deploying. to add another wrinkle, the IHT’s URL for the story is tagged “india warrior women.”

women-only peacekeeping unit
india’s toughest women
india warrior women

food for thought. they are also learning yoga and meditation techniques to help deal with the stress they will face, according to the article. that’s a fascinating idea — especially if it helps — and i’m curious: did someone come up with the idea because the unit is indian, or because it is female?

remember this?

i do, vividly. i read it in my grandmother’s tv room while waiting for 3-2-1 Contact to start.

now he has a blog.

update: james correctly notes that gaddafi’s blog doesn’t have an rss feed. what kind of dictator doesn’t have an rss feed?

casuistry: n. pl. ca·sui·ist·ries
1. Specious or excessively subtle reasoning intended to rationalize or mislead.
2. The determination of right and wrong in questions of conduct or conscience by analyzing cases that illustrate general ethical rules.

“… it borders on casuistry to contend that by evenhandedly permitting public expression to occur in unrestricted portions of a military installation, the military will be viewed as sanctioning the cases there espoused.” Justice Brennan, Greer v. Spock, 424 US 828 (1976)

stopped by this morning for a visit at the birdfeeder. the range of visitors is getting wider — in the beginning, it was mostly sparrows; now we’ve got the woodpeckers, the cardinals, the robins, some teensy tinsy birds with huge voices, and now the blue jay. i do need to snap some pix of them.

ojo: SFW if nobody is reading over your shoulder.

i wish i’d found this while i was taking my IP class. and while i know it’s boilerplate patent language, this sentence slays me:

Other embodiments will occur to those skilled in the art

and all i can say about this is, “wha..? a serial port? who still has serial ports???”

volokh, noli irritare leones, and others have articles up discussing the various legal and social ramifications of polygamy. (and it’s an odd coincidence that i’m noticing this as i’m midway through friday; although perhaps reading the book has predisposed me to notice other writings with overlapping topics.)

what fascinates me about these articles is that they mostly avoid discussions of polyamory, which seems to me to would be the motivating factor for polygamy in a western, romantic-love-notioned society. (differentiating from the economic impetus in other cultures.) rauch disposes of the issue by taking the position that as marriage is a “state grant,” making polygamy a question of public policy (and asserting that polyamory is already legal). noli approaches the question using a “changes to law” framework (consequently avoiding direct discussion of polyamory, which she seems to view rather dimly). and over on volokh, dale carpenter comments on polygamy as a strawman in the gay marriage debate.

it seems to me that the vast majority of issues raised by noli can be solved contractually. questions regarding inheritance (wills, what an idea), medical care (medical POA, advance directives, so on), custody of children (again, wills; also basic Ks), blah blah blah. (i know it’s bad form for a law student to broad-brushstroke with “blah,” but i plead insufficient sleep and daylight savings time.) makes more sense (to me) to get rid of state-conferred marriage protocols entirely. poof, bye-bye government involvement; hello more jobs for lawyers.

i don’t know if i buy rauch’s social argument that polygynous marriages would be more common than polyandrous marriages, characterizing the outcome thusly:

Other things being equal (and, to a good first approximation, they are), when one man marries two women, some other man marries no woman. When one man marries three women, two other men don’t marry. When one man marries four women, three other men don’t marry. Monogamy gives everyone a shot at marriage. Polygyny, by contrast, is a zero-sum game that skews the marriage market so that some men marry at the expense of others.

my gut reaction: yuck. this assumes that all men will marry women (and vice versa); that all men will want to marry women (and vice versa); and that everyone should get a shot at heterosexual marriage. (his argument also tracks along with the isolated, inbred polygamous fringe society in sherri tepper’s the gate to women’s country, which is neither here nor there but interesting nonetheless.) it seems to me that implicit in rauch’s argument is that polygamy would lead to the commodification of women to the detriment of society (and to the women themselves — why does no one consider that a female-scarce society could lead to women becoming more empowered rather than less?).

rauch concedes that

True, in modern America some polygynous marriages would probably be offset by group marriages or chain marriages involving multiple husbands, but there is no way to know how large such an offset might be. And remember: Every unbalanced polygynous marriage, other things being equal, leaves some man bereft of the opportunity to marry, which is no small cost to that man.

and again, this emphasis on the impact on men. *sigh*

###

is there a point to my ramblings on this subject? um. nope, doesn’t look that way. in fact, my original statement — that what fascinated me was the avoidance of a discussion of polyamory — could (should?) be addressed in its own post, rather than as a subsection of a dissection of others’ polygamy discussions. perhaps i’ll shelve that for now, at least until i’ve given the topic more thought.

okay, mom, thanks for the quick rundown on red-headed birds. sounds like a yellow-bellied sapsucker (poor guy, with a name like that, no wonder he doesn’t associate with the other birds). looks more like a red crest than a full red head (he stopped by for several minutes this morning), and the wings are definitely b&w checked/stripey.

i think his crest is about the same color red as i dyed my hair in highschool. muah!

in other news…

the mock trial is OVER. DONE. FINITO. TERMINADO. GONE. IN THE PAST. holy crap. litigation is exhausting. i have no idea how public defenders do it on the salary of a secretary; i don’t think i could.

*yawn* i feel like i could sleep for a week. shouts go out to roommie james, who decided to forego a free screening of slither in favor of being a witness (and did a good job of it), and my co-counsel’s boyfriend, who was our other witness. and, of course, the two people who agreed to be witnesses for the plaintiff. it was a thankless job, but you guys rocked.