Funmurphys: the Blog

Alton Brown Speaks

I am so jealous - Alton Brown is my favorite guy on the Food Network, and oddly enough there are several good shows on the network (Iron Chef and Emeril are not included). The thing I like best, even more than the light hearted humor (I especially liked the show where he shooed the women away making origami for a moment so he could show us men how to properly make our own deep fried corndogs and sliders) is the sheer inspiration as I always want to cook after watching his show. Yes, I want to get in touch with my inner man and provide food for my family.

Well, Jeff Harrell lucked into a couple of tickets to hear him speak at the Smithsonian (who knew they hosted anything relevant and happening?):

First things first: Alton Brown is both taller and chunkier in person than he looks on TV. It befits the host of a popular show about food and cooking to measure a few extra nautical miles around the equator, so to speak, and Brown carries the excess tonnage well. It’s all part of his slightly-larger-than-life persona, from his trademark wire-rimmed glasses to his spiky blond hair to his effervescent attitude.

Okay, enough of that writerly crap. On to the good stuff.

Alton Brown is funny. Seriously, he’s a funny guy. And he knows it too. His lecture — and I’m using the word “lecture” here in its most abstract sense — was a performing-without-a-net operation from the very beginning. He took the stage to enthusiastic applause and confessed that he was going to fulfill two lifelong dreams tonight: He was going to lecture at the Smithsonian Institution — “the frickin’ Smithsonian,” he said with unrestrained glee — and he was going to appear on “Inside the Actor’s Studio” with James Lipton.

I'd always heard the camera adds a few pounds, but apparently not (or perhaps Mr. Brown has put his weight on while on the road and after shooting episodes for his main show, Good Eats).

And as far as Ted Drews goes, that's a St. Louis institution of longstanding. It would be nice if it got some national recognition.

Nobel Peace Prize?

What is the one thing a leftist thinks violence solves?

Glenn Greenwald, Sock Puppet?

I feel special, since the latest two blog two blog kerfuffles involved two people who have commented here, Deb Frisch and Glenn Greenwald. Given how few people comment here, I'm just pleased as punch that a couple of titans of the left side of the blogosphere commented here. Or it could be that those two just leave a lot of comments - one used to stalk Professor Bainbridge whom I linked to, and the other seems to keep an eagle eye on links to his site or mentions of his name and responded to those from my site.

While Ms. Frisch made comments that clearly crossed the line of acceptability, Mr. Greenwald is accused of sock puppetry, which I don't think is all that big a deal - just kind of sad, really. While some bloggers are absolutely convinced, I'm not so sure, for a couple of reasons.

While the IP address Mr. Greenwald used here was from Brazil, it isn't the same as the one I've seen at Ace of Spades. So does that mean the Real Mr. Greenwald didn't comment here? Or could it be that Kevin Aylward is correct, and anybody commenting from Brazil runs the risk of being though of as a Greenwald sockpuppet? If IP addresses really were like fingerprints, how easy would my job of eliminating comment and trackback spam be!

The other reason is that this seems out of character for Mr. Greenwald who seems to have no trouble speaking his mind under his own name. I could well be wrong, but it does sound more like friends arguing from authority than Mr. Greenwald himself.

I don't agree with many of Glenn Greenwald's views on politics, but when he did comment here we were in agreement on the idea of federalism, and he expressed himself clearly and civilly. What blogs need is more of that, and less ad hominem, which is really what the sock puppet charge amounts to -- an attempt to make Mr. Greenwald lose all the arguments because he's a pathetic loser sock puppeter.

Better Government

I think we need two good, strong parties to make our government work. Otherwise, you get what we have now, which isn't pretty. So I don't want to see a purer Democratic or Republican party, which is what party partisans are always calling for - I'd like to see two sane, responsible big tent parties vie for votes while taking a long term view of the election process. Instead, what we have is one party taking advantage of the fact that the other has become, well, deranged. And the fact that the national media has joined the one party in its madness and is doing it's best to distort reality doesn't help - which is how you get a majority of people supporting private Social Security accounts but a majority dissaproving President Bushes plan on Social Security, which consisted of a nebulous plan for private accounts.

Blogging Part of American Life

According to the latest Pew study of American Life and the Internet, I'm only somewhat anomolous. It isn't my age, but my traffic - if there are 12 million bloggers, and 57 million people who read blogs, I should expect about 5 visitors per however often those 57 million people read a blog. Since I average somewhere between 10 to 20 times that daily, I feel pretty good. Maybe I'll keep this up, at least once I get back from my real vacation.

St. Louis Weather

In case you're interested, yes, I survived last night's storm. In fact, I stood outside watching the storm approach with a neighbor and my son until the rain started. With straight line winds up to 80 mph -- yes, that's hurricane force -- and lots of lightning, it was a storm of Biblical proportions. Watching it approach on radar was interesting as well, because the storm covered just the St. Louis metropolitan region, no more no less.

We had a lot of leaves and small branches down, but nothing major, and no power loss. The A/C compressor did trip it's circuit breaker, which I didn't figure out until this morning, but we are certainly more fortunate than a lot of others - half a million others that is, like my parents, who are without power. The electric company, Ameren UE has run up the white flag and asked for help from anywhere. Did I mention they are predicting 102 today?

Good Stuff

I'm just getting around to reading some of my regular blogs, so if these posts are bit old, think of them as timeless classics:

Craig at Lead and Gold examines how Hollywood's cultural blinder hurt their bottom line. Hmm, I wonder if Larry the Cable Guy will ever be asked to host the Oscars?

Rand Simberg points out this Mark Styn article about just how warlike primitive man's life was. Think mass slaughter, all the time.

Tom Maguire still manages to get blood out of the turnip, I mean great posts out of the ongoing Plame-Wilson fiasco. And just for the record, I do applaud the Wilson civil suit, and hope the televise it just like the OJ trial. I comfort myself at taking pleasure in such a spectacle with the thought that nobody got hurt (unlike OJ's trial).

Jeff at Think Sink clearly has been smitten, or he-man that he is he would never write a post like this one.

Michael Spencer has a thought provoking essay claiming that American Evangelicals have set up success as an idol."

Cori at Ranting Profs discovers, as is her wont, an underreported story.

Steve at Hog On Ice solves the mystery of why people want outside funding for their blog -- they aren't making money and they want to get paid. No word, however, on why anyone would give (or loan) them money.

I'm glad my ancestors left the old country - Cronaca reports on anti-sword feeling in Scotland. What is the matter with people over there - if you kill a criminal invading your castle, you don't drag him back inside yours, you take him to his and pretend to be a criminal.

Gateway Pundit reports on a genocide you don't hear much about.

Radiocarbon Dating and Climate Change

Last Saturday I took the kids up to the Mesa Lab to see the “Climate Discovery” exhibit at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). NCAR has a lot of graphs and other illustrations about climate change. I asked the tour guide how the climatologists sort out which is the cause and which is the effect, between carbon dioxide and temperature?

The guide brought out Caspar Ammann and Carrie Morrill, both of whom I knew from past presentations (they both have PhDs). This was a public conversation at a public event, so I can report it here. Caspar pointed out the correlated graphs of CO2 and temperature proxies, taken from the Vostok ice core (~420,000 years). He remarked that it is difficult to sort out cause and effect from the ice cores alone. As the air bubbles become trapped in the ice during compression over the first 100 years or so, some CO2 migrates by diffusion between the annual layers. The effect is that the annual CO2 and temperature signals are not as precise over very short time scales, and the lead/lag relationship between the peaks can be obscured. I didn't pursue this line of inquiry further because I plan to investigate the ice core data myself as a project for Climatology class during the upcoming fall semester.

However, Carrie told me that the increase in CO2 displayed by the Keeling Curve can indeed be attributed to human burning of fossils fuels, and here's how: The air is getting older. Carbon-14 has a half-life of 5,730 years, and it can be used to date objects up to about 50,000 years old. Carbon-14 decays into Nitrogen-14 through beta decay:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon-14

Objects older than 50k years have only the N-14 isotope. By measuring the ratio of Carbon isotopes in organic material, one can determine how many years have passed since that organism was last exposed to the air. We can measure the age of all this carbon dioxide that's building up in the atmosphere. The following article at RealClimate.org states:

How do we know that recent CO2 increases are due to human activities?

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=87

“Sequences of annual tree rings going back thousands of years have now been analyzed for their 13C/12C ratios. Because the age of each ring is precisely known** we can make a graph of the atmospheric 13C/12C ratio vs. time. What is found is at no time in the last 10,000 years are the 13C/12C ratios in the atmosphere as low as they are today. Furthermore, the 13C/12C ratios begin to decline dramatically just as the CO2 starts to increase -- around 1850 AD. This is exactly what we expect if the increased CO2 is in fact due to fossil fuel burning.”

I spent some time looking for a graph of Carbon isotope ratio vs. time that would show the “dramatic” change at 1850, but couldn't find one. If you have a link, please post it below.

If temperature rise were currently forcing CO2 rise “naturally”, we would expect newer CO2 to get flushed from the earth's surface. But it's old CO2 that's getting flushed instead, and the most obvious cause is human burning of fossil fuels.

The astute reader may wonder, How do we know that the older CO2 isn't merely coming out of the Arctic peat bogs? The bogs will flush more CO2 as the Arctic climate gets warmer, and peat bogs are really old.

Carl's answer: The trend of older atmospheric CO2 has been going on since about 1850, which is the start of the Industrial Revolution:

http://www.ipcc.ch/present/graphics/2001syr/large/02.01.jpg

Global temperature rise didn't really get going in earnest until about 1975. We've only been flushing out the peat bogs for about 30 years, not 150 years:

http://www.ipcc.ch/present/graphics/2001syr/large/05.16.jpg

Survival Gear

Paul Graham writes in The Island Test:

I've discovered a handy test for figuring out what you're addicted to. Imagine you were going to spend the weekend at a friend's house on a little island off the coast of Maine. There are no shops on the island and you won't be able to leave while you're there. Also, you've never been to this house before, so you can't assume it will have more than any house might.

What, besides clothes and toiletries, do you make a point of packing? That's what you're addicted to. For example, if you find yourself packing a bottle of vodka (just in case), you may want to stop and think about that.

For me the list is four things: books, earplugs, a notebook, and a pen.

And that brings us to the ear plugs. Mr. Graham and I bring them for the same reason - quiet. Only where he wants quiet so he can think, I want them so I can sleep. I used my earplugs just as I wanted - every night. They are the best value in weight you'll ever take on a camping trip. I have to agree with Mr. Graham's final sentiments:

There is a point where I'll do without books. I was walking in some steep mountains once, and decided I'd rather just think, if I was bored, rather than carry a single unnecessary ounce. It wasn't so bad. I found I could entertain myself by having ideas instead of reading other people's. If you stop eating jam, fruit starts to taste better.

So maybe I'll try not bringing books on some future trip. They're going to have to pry the plugs out of my cold, dead ears, however.

Summer Camp Dislocation

I'm feeling a little bit dislocated after my week at Scout Camp, so I'm trying to catch up on what happened and readjust to real life. At scout camp, you sleep in canvas tents that were new during the civil war, you cook over an open flame, and airconditioning is opening the tent flaps. Of course, you bring the latest high tech LED flashlights, hiking boots, and clothing if you're smart.

Thursday we had a couple of bad storms (I'm from the midwest, so when I say a bad storm, I mean wind that whips 100 year old oaks around like reeds, thunder, lightning, and heavy downpours) roll through. Upon my return to camp, I was informed that "we had no electricity", which made me wonder because I didn't know we had any all week, but what was meant was that the trading post was without electricity, and they weren't selling any ice. Our parent sent to Farmington, the nearest city of any size (no, I don't count Knob Lick) came back telling tales of flooding, trees down, and power out there as well. What do you know, our old style encampment fared better than modern civilization, at least in the sense we had less to lose.

One of the great joys is the near total loss of contact with the outside world, since I didn't get cell reception in camp and had to walk a mile and then find the one spot I could get reception in the camporee field. So when new parents came to stay, we always greeted their news with a sort of open-mouthed astonishment - from Israel went to war with Lebanon to the Cardinals have a five game wining streak going. I'm still trying to catch up, although it took no time at all to understand the point of airconditioning. Relearning this blog thing might take a while.

These Apples Fell Right On The Tree

My wife and I often say that our children our are clones because they look so much like us, but it extends to personalities as well. My son is very much like me in most ways, and my daughter is very much like her mother. I have simply assumed that this is true of most children. If my experience at Scout Camp is anything to go by, that isn't the case. In fact, my situation is downright rare.

I Have Returned

I have returned from my week at Scout Camp, tired and footsore. I chose eating before showering upon my return.

More Than A Food Fight

I'm always on the edge, never in the middle.

Jeff Goldstein is having a bit of a dust up with one Prof. Debbie Frisch, who used to hound Prof. Bainbridge (what is it with professors and blogging). I linked to a Bainbridge post about a readibility test, and Prof. Frisch popped in here to slag us both. Since she only slagged me, and not my children, I was quite civil in reply, and so was she in turn (she actually apologized). Sadly, I think her remarks to Jeff go way beyond acceptable insult, and indicate, well, insanity.

Get help, Deb.

Desktop Icons

My grandfather had a 2-1/2 foot cement statue of St. Francis in his garden, as did my father, my Uncle Sam and Uncle Robert, so it's something of a family tradition. But living in California I haven't had a garden except for a few years in the early 1980's when I rented a house in Menlo Park that had a backyard. The only thing I was able to grow reliably was bamboo (a prior tenant had planted it) which I attacked periodically with a shovel (and later Roundup) to little avail. But I didn't buy a statue of St. Francis because I was renting and a long way from owning a house.

Once I started working I began to accumulate knicknacks for my desk. In my first few jobs it was mainly functional items: a paper calendar (this was before the PC revolution put a calendar on the desktop on your desktop), pen holders, a ruler. Over time, and different jobs, vendors would deliver coffee cups and I had quite a collection: "the battle for the desktop" I would quip to them when they would give me a new one.

In the early 90's I had an office with a door. I would keep the lights off and set my screen colors to green letters on a black screen, it was very peaceful. My boss looked in one day and saw two glowing green eyes staring out of the dark office at him and asked "what is it you do in your Bat Cave exactly?" I still use Emacs with green letters on a black screen to do most of my writing.

I was out shopping with my wife at the Ave Maria Community Book Store and I saw a 1 foot tall plaster statue of St. Francis. It suddenly seemed like a good idea for my office. In part because it made me feel closer to my family, and in part because I erroneously ascribed the Serenity Prayer to St. Francis:

God, grant me
the serenity to accept the things I cannot change;
the courage to change the things I can;
the wisdom to know the difference.

When it was actually written by Reinhold Niebuhr. This was the early 90's at Cisco (when the Internet Gold Rush was just starting), and every time I looked at that statue it reminded me to have patience with the things I couldn't change and to focus on the things that I could.

I was in Weird Stuff Warehouse looking for some refurbished computer cables and I came across a red keyboard button marked PANIC. I had to have one, and actually bought a half dozen. One for my keyboard, one or two to keep, and a few to "install" on the keyboards of folks who would come to me with a complaint about the computer systems, "Here, let me upgrade your system with this PANIC button option, press it anytime you get into trouble. I use mine all the time." Weird Stuff no longer seems to carry it but these folks do.

A few years later after I was shopping with my wife in a craft store--the things we do for love--and stumbled upon a tipped over pail of milk..for a doll's house. Again, a reminder of another good aphorism "No use crying over spilled milk." Something I was wont to do (and am still so inclined). I keep that one perched on my desk as well.

So...what "icons" do you have on your desktop?

Hudson vs. Michigan, Walker vs. Scalia

The Post-Dispatch ran an op-ed by Samuel Walker that claimed Justice Scalia misused his research in the Hudson vs. Michigan decision that limited the exclusionary rule: that is that evidence obtained in violation of the constitution cannot be used in court.

Justice Scalia's (majority) Opinion:

This Court has rejected “[i]ndiscriminate application” of the exclusionary rule, United States v. Leon, 468 U. S. 897 , holding it applicable only “where its deterrence benefits outweigh its ‘substantial social costs,’ ” Pennsylvania Bd. of Probation and Parole v. Scott, 524 U. S. 357 . Exclusion may not be premised on the mere fact that a constitutional violation was a “but-for” cause of obtaining the evidence. The illegal entry here was not the but-for cause, but even if it were, but-for causation can be too attenuated to justify exclusion. Attenuation can occur not only when the causal connection is remote, but also when suppression would not serve the interest protected by the constitutional guarantee violated. The interests protected by the knock-and-announce rule include human life and limb (because an unannounced entry may provoke violence from a surprised resident), property (because citizens presumably would open the door upon an announcement, whereas a forcible entry may destroy it), and privacy and dignity of the sort that can be offended by a sudden entrance. But the rule has never protected one’s interest in preventing the government from seeing or taking evidence described in a warrant. Since the interests violated here have nothing to do with the seizure of the evidence, the exclusionary rule is inapplicable. Pp. 3–7.

(c) The social costs to be weighed against deterrence are considerable here. In addition to the grave adverse consequence that excluding relevant incriminating evidence always entails—the risk of releasing dangerous criminals—imposing such a massive remedy would generate a constant flood of alleged failures to observe the rule, and claims that any asserted justification for a no-knock entry had inadequate support. Another consequence would be police officers’ refraining from timely entry after knocking and announcing, producing preventable violence against the officers in some cases, and the destruction of evidence in others. Next to these social costs are the deterrence benefits. The value of deterrence depends on the strength of the incentive to commit the forbidden act. That incentive is minimal here, where ignoring knock-and-announce can realistically be expected to achieve nothing but the prevention of evidence destruction and avoidance of life-threatening resistance, dangers which suspend the requirement when there is “reasonable suspicion” that they exist, Richards v. Wisconsin, 520 U. S. 385 . Massive deterrence is hardly necessary. Contrary to Hudson’s argument that without suppression there will be no deterrence, many forms of police misconduct are deterred by civil-rights suits, and by the consequences of increasing professionalism of police forces, including a new emphasis on internal police discipline. Pp. 8–13.

Prof Walker's complaint:

First, I learned that Justice Antonin Scalia cited me to support a terrible decision, holding that the exclusionary rule -- which for decades prevented evidence obtained illegally by police from being used at trial -- no longer applies when cops enter your home without knocking.

Even worse, he twisted my main argument to reach a conclusion the exact opposite of what I spelled out.

The misuse of evidence is a serious offense in academia as well as in the courts. When your work is manipulated, it is a violation of your intellectual integrity. Since the issue at stake in the Hudson case is extremely important -- what role the Supreme Court should play in policing the police -- I felt obligated to set the record straight.

Scalia quoted my book, "Taming the System: The Control of Discretion in American Criminal Justice," on the point that there has been tremendous progress "in the education, training and supervision of police officers" since the 1961 Mapp decision, which imposed the exclusionary rule on local law enforcement.

My argument, based on the historical evidence of the last 40 years, is that the court of Chief Justice Earl Warren in the 1960s played a pivotal role in stimulating these reforms. For more than 100 years, police departments had failed to curb misuse of authority by officers on the street while the courts took a hands-off attitude. The Warren court's interventions (Mapp and Miranda being the most famous) set new standards for lawful conduct, forcing the police to reform and strengthening community demands for curbs on abuse.

Scalia's opinion suggested that the results I highlighted have sufficiently removed the need for an exclusionary rule to act as a judicial-branch watchdog over the police. I have never said or even suggested such a thing.

To the contrary, I have argued that the results reinforce the Supreme Court's continuing importance in defining constitutional protections for individual rights and requiring the appropriate remedies for violations, including the exclusion of evidence.

The ideal approach is for the court to join the other branches of government in a mix of remedies for police misconduct: judicially mandated exclusionary rules, legislation to give citizens oversight of police and administrative reforms in training and supervision. No single remedy is sufficient to this very important task.

I have to say I don't think the Professor made his case against the Justice. The Justice claims that police misbehavior is deterred internally to the police by increased professionalism and externally by civil suits. I have no doubt that the data in the good Professor's book supports that claim; however, the Justice has a different opinion of the future of deterence with a more limited exclusionary rule than the Professor. Namely, the Justice feels that the reforms have become self supporting, wheras the Professor feels that without the spur of the exclusionary rule the police, despite the risk of civil lawsuit and their increased professionalism, will backslide. The complaint in fact boils down to "Justice Scalia has a different opinion of a future course events", not the stated complaint that "Justice Scalia misused my research".

Perhaps Prof. Walker will next take up the curious case of Goldberg vs. the Star-Tribune.

However, let's look at the substance of the decision. Let's take up Justice Breyer's dissenting (minority) opinion:

In Wilson v. Arkansas, 514 U. S. 927 (1995) , a unanimous Court held that the Fourth Amendment normally requires law enforcement officers to knock and announce their presence before entering a dwelling. Today’s opinion holds that evidence seized from a home following a violation of this requirement need not be suppressed

As a result, the Court destroys the strongest legal incentive to comply with the Constitution’s knock-and-announce requirement. And the Court does so without significant support in precedent. At least I can find no such support in the many Fourth Amendment cases the Court has decided in the near century since it first set forth the exclusionary principle in Weeks v. United States, 232 U. S. 383 (1914) . See Appendix, infra.

Today’s opinion is thus doubly troubling. It represents a significant departure from the Court’s precedents. And it weakens, perhaps destroys, much of the practical value of the Constitution’s knock-and-announce protection.

... [Lots of legal citations]

There may be instances in the law where text or history or tradition leaves room for a judicial decision that rests upon little more than an unvarnished judicial instinct. But this is not one of them. Rather, our Fourth Amendment traditions place high value upon protecting privacy in the home. They emphasize the need to assure that its constitutional protections are effective, lest the Amendment ‘sound the word of promise to the ear but break it to the hope.’ They include an exclusionary principle, which since Weeks has formed the centerpiece of the criminal law’s effort to ensure the practical reality of those promises. That is why the Court should assure itself that any departure from that principle is firmly grounded in logic, in history, in precedent, and in empirical fact. It has not done so. That is why, with respect, I dissent.

Let's do what it seems all Supreme Court Justices do these days - ignore precedent and examine my own unvarnished judicial instinct. The goal of the judicial system is to punish the guilty and exhonerate the innocent. Ideally we would do so perfectly, but we undertand that nothing in this life is perfect, and so in America we like to see the inevitable tradeoffs bias the system to exhonerating the innocent over punishing the guilty.

So how does the exclusionary rule fit in? If you haven't committed a crime (i.e. innocent), then there isn't any evidence to be excluded. However, if you have committed a crime, then the evidence is excluded and you get to "get out of jail free. In sum, it perversely allows the guilty to go free but does nothing for the innocent.

At first blush the exclusionary principle seems to actually run counter to what we want a judicial system to do. However, what are the other remedies for the innocent? Civil suits? Yes, in the case of great wrongs, but for the person who suffers little economic loss and only moderate or less non-economic loss such suits don't offer much remedy. That leaves us with civilian review boards and internal policing. Perhaps I'm too hard on government agencies, but my gut tells me that in either case more than the benefit of the doubt will go the police, and only the most flagrant cases will result in any discipline to the police.

The exclusionary rule reminds of the onetime taboo against children out of wedlock -- it served the broader interests of society while being, let's face it, unjust to the individuals it was directed against.

So I have to agree with Justice Breyer, and Professor Walker, that in our opinion, the exclusionary rule (as preverse as it is) is vital to keeping the police from abusing their authority and infringing on our rights. Better that one criminal go free than 10 people have their rights trampled. It is one of those rules that arises from the wisdom of experience, and I'm sorry to say Justice Scalia's reasoning in setting aside such a bright line rule is best described as airy fairy. I have to hope that if this experiment turns out to be a bust, that is if the police escalate the number of unconsititutional no-knock entries, the Supreme Court will treat this decision with as much respect for precedence it showed others and return to the strong but unpopular medicine of the exclusionary rule.