which muppet are you

A personality test is a bit out of character for the blog, but I'm too much of a muppets fan to resist. Props to Nicoleallee for the link.

You Are Scooter

Brainy and knowledgable, you are the perfect sidekick. You're always willing to lend a helping hand. In any big event or party, you're the one who keeps things going. "15 seconds to showtime!"

The Muppet Personality Test

greenland's glaciers melting quickly

A Scientific American article, Scientific American: Gravity Measurements Confirm Greenland's Glaciers Precipitous Meltdown, contains results confirming that Greenland's glaciers are melting quickly. The article mentions two methods of confirming the melt rate. First, gravitational measurements using the distance between two satellites are tracking the glaciers' loss of mass.

By measuring this distance change, scientists can derive a picture of mass concentrations on the planet's surface. "We were able to do that every 10 days for Greenland," Luthcke notes. "What we see is a massive amount of mass shedding that far outweighs an interior growth."

. . .

In perfect agreement with previous results, these new GRACE measurements revealed that the same three glacial systems--including Kangerdlugssuaq, now one of the fastest moving glaciers in the world--are racing to the sea. "The glaciers are accelerating," Zwally says. "We are now losing 20 percent more coming out each year than goes in as snowfall."

Additional data confirming the observation comes from a second techinque: laser altimetry.

This USGS article estimates that, if the complete ice sheet of Greenland melted, global sea levels would rise by about 6.5 meters. (Throw in the entire Antarctic and you get something crazy like 80 meters.) In a fairly quick web search, I wasn't able to find information on the rate at which the study suggests ocean levels will rise, or estimates of the contributions the three glacier systems would make, however.

shaving cream geyser

It's rather impressive, really. The steel cap must have rusted through, allowing a slow leak. 

a taxonomy of case law

Coppertop and I have been hard at work--well, OK, maybe not "hard" at work, maybe more like "occasionally barely" at work--on a comprehensive taxonomy of American legal claims. Surprisingly, it appears that nearly all claims fall into one of three categories:

1. Mine! No Mine!
   
2. I didn't do it!
3. Make him stop!

We are still trying to determine what these categories say about the development and applicability of the legal system.

when hibernate doesn't

I just discovered an interesting . . . bug? . . . feature? . . . let's call it a "trait" of Windows XP. If you want it to go into hibernate, it'll ask for confirmation. As far as I can tell, while it's waiting for you to say "yes, I really do want you to hibernate," it stops watching the clock for power save mode. So what's the practical upshot? Suppose, hypothetically speaking, you were in a meeting. At the end of the meeting, you hit the key sequence to hibernate (Fn-F4 on my machine, your mileage may vary.) You forget to click on the little box that asks "do you really want me to hibernate".[1] You then close the lid and slip the machine into your briefcase. When you get home, you find a rather warm briefcase and a machine still patiently awaiting confirmation, even though the trip home was long enough that a machine on battery power should have suspended itself.

I wonder how long a machine will stay in this mode. For example, would it run the battery all the way down, losing whatever work's in RAM? I'm afraid to try it with this machine right now because it sees constant use and breaking would be a Bad Thing, but maybe that's an experiment for the future.

[1] You can disable this confirmation box, but I haven't because I wouldn't want the machine to accidentally hibernate in, say, the middle of taking notes. Hypothetically, of course.

softest reminder

Just a reminder to the readers in law school: don't forget to download the new version of Softest and your exam files. You can find directions here.

and now for some good news

I spend a lot of time blogging about problems and potential problems, mostly because they're the things that stand out, but sometimes it's important to remember that good things happen in the world.

Consider, for instance, the One Laptop Per Child project. It's custom-designed laptop hardware and software, made especially for children in rural areas of developing nations. Target price is that it'll sell for $100 or so, to governments that will issue them to school children. People around the world are getting involved in creating it. The laptop has a sunlight-readable screen and some extremely innovative wireless networking capabilities that will bring communications to places that barely have electricity or nighttime illumination.

There's also an article in Scientific American, Scientific American: The Social Welfare State, beyond Ideology, summarizing empirical research that indicates you can have both a successful economy and strong anti-poverty social programs:

On average, the Nordic countries outperform the Anglo-Saxon ones on most measures of economic performance. Poverty rates are much lower there, and national income per working-age population is on average higher. Unemployment rates are roughly the same in both groups, just slightly higher in the Nordic countries. The budget situation is stronger in the Nordic group, with larger surpluses as a share of GDP.

How do these countries do it?

The Nordic countries maintain their dynamism despite high taxation in several ways. Most important, they spend lavishly on research and development and higher education. All of them, but especially Sweden and Finland, have taken to the sweeping revolution in information and communications technology and leveraged it to gain global competitiveness. Sweden now spends nearly 4 percent of GDP on R&D, the highest ratio in the world today. On average, the Nordic nations spend 3 percent of GDP on R&D, compared with around 2 percent in the English-speaking nations.