Can you solve the case of the missing “I’m feeling lucky” feature? For starters, check out this screenshot taken from our iPhone 5 earlier in the day (Jan. 30, 2016):
Did you notice that the “I’m feeling lucky” feature on Google search is gone? Where did it go? More to the point, did you ever–even once–use this option? (We never used it either!)
We understand why so-called “security” checkpoints at airports are so slow and horribly inefficient? But why are airline boarding procedures (which are implemented by the for-profit private sector) so slow and horribly inefficient? This short video (it’s only two and one-half minutes long) explains why.
Via kottke, check out this crazy table of cartoon characters drawn by artist Jaakko Seppälä. The diagonal from top left to bottom right (shaded gray) portrays a variety of familiar cartoon characters; the rows contain re-interpretations of these characters based on the cartoon styles of the cartoons in the shaded area in each column. Genius!
Because our large business law class meets only once per week (on Mondays), we are going to combine Lessons 1 & 2 into a single lecture. In addition, we are going to re-enact Mark Zuckerberg’s fall 2003 “Ad Board” hearing at Harvard College. (Some background: Before he launched Facebook, Harvard sophomore and computer genius Mark Zuckerburg created a website called Facemash. In brief, Facemash presented the user with two randomly-selected student I.D. photos of women students enrolled in Harvard and then let the user choose which one was “hotter.” Mark’s website quickly went “viral”—in a matter of hours, the site attracted 450 visitors, who had voted on their classmates’ photos at least 22,000 times.) We will thus need several student volunteers for this in-class assignment:
1. Complainant #1 (the role of Leyla Bravo, student and president of Fuerza Latina): Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to deliver a short “closing argument” to the Ad Board. Specifically, from your (Fuerza Latina’s) perspective, what did the respondent Mark Zuckerberg do wrong?
2. Complainant #2 (the role of Kevin Davis, Director of Residential Computing for Faculty of Arts and Sciences Computer Services): Your mission is to deliver a short “closing argument” to the Ad Board. Specifically, from your (the college’s) perspective, what rules or legal duties may the respondent Mark Zuckerberg have possibly violated or breached?
3. The Respondent (the role Mark Zuckerberg, hacker): Your mission is to deliver a short but compelling “closing argument” to the Ad Board in your defense. Did you do anything wrong, and if so, what type of punishment would be a fair one?
4. The Ad Board: The Class as a whole will play the role of the Harvard Ad Board. At the conclusion of the closing arguments, the class will deliberate in small groups and will vote to determine what punishment, if any, to impose on the respondent, hacker Mark Zuckerberg.
Or is it?
Cheers! This lighthearted beer ad actually teaches an important lesson regarding statutory and constitutional interpretation–a fundamental lesson often lost on naive “originalists” or textualist legal scholars: a word or term of art like “party” (or “speech,” “arms,” “natural born,” etc.) can have multiple meanings.
Tim Urban invites us to think about history in vertical terms in this thoughtful blog post. (By the way, we discovered his post via jason kottke, one of our favorite bloggers of all time.) Mr Urban presents a beautiful botanical metaphor (in bold below) in order to compare and contrast “horizontal history” (i.e. familiar timelines of historical events presented in chronological order) and his original conception of “vertical history” (i.e. the vertical visualization of the overlapping lifespans of great historical actors in a given era; see, for example, the table above). Mr Urban writes:
Normally, we learn about history’s storylines in isolation. We might have a strong sense of the history of physics breakthroughs or the progression of western philosophical thought or the succession of French rulers—but we’re not as clear on how each of these storylines relate to each other. If you think of history like a tangle of vines growing upwards through time, studying one type of history at a time is like following the path of one particular vine while ignoring the other vines around it. It’s understanding history in a vertical sense. * * * Mozart wrote his Requiem the same year the US forefathers were writing the Bill of Rights and that Beethoven had a love-hate relationship with Napoleon—but using the lifespan diagram, you can see both of these stories visually.
She is the highest paid “judge” in the world. In reality, she’s a private arbitrator who pretends to be a real judge on her famous court TV show, but that is not why she might be a fraud, at least not according to this critical blog post by Alex Mayyasi (via Priceonomics). According to Mr Mayyasi’s Priceonomics post, Judge Judy “reiterates the theme of responsibility and accountability over and over … On her show, she gives a tongue lashing to defendants who make excuses and reprimands victims who exercise poor judgment.” But in reality, after she admonishes guilty defendants and orders them to pay for what they’ve done, it’s the producers of her show who end up paying for those damages. (See the sample letter below the fold.) Nevertheless, we respectfully disagree with Mr Mayassi’s analysis. It’s true that when defendants agree to go on Judge Judy’s TV show, they do so in exchange for avoiding liability in their original court cases. But that said, there is still some positive probability that the defendant in any given case will prevail. Moreover, win or lose, the defendant is still assuming the very real residual risk that Judge Judy will embarrass him or her before a national audience. By accepting this risk (i.e. by willingly subjecting themselves to the possibility of such ridicule and embarrassment from Judge Judy), the defendants are, in fact, assuming responsibility for their actions, at least on some level. What do you think?
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