Need to buy a typewriter?

Tonight I was at OfficeMax, buying some back to school supplies with my daughters. I was surprised to see that there is still a typewriter section at the store. There are actually two models to choose from. This is going to sound like an "old man" story, but when I started practicing law 30 years ago, the firm of 45 lawyers had no computers. Every secretary worked 0n an electric typewriter. Even in 1990, when I brought my own computer to my law firm, people were wondering why an attorney would have a computer. Now I work at a firm with 14 attorneys, and every attorney has a computer--there is one typewriter (for forms and labels). It makes you wonder, at this rate of change, whether anyone has the ability to predict how the world will look in ten more years.

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Stressed out men prefer larger women

According to this article at Scientific American, stressed out men prefer larger women.

The stressed out guys preferred a larger body size than their relaxed counterparts – but that was not all. “Men experiencing stress not only perceive a heavier female body size as maximally attractive, but also more positively perceive heavier female body sizes and have a wider range of body sizes considered physically attractive,” explain the authors.
The authors offer an evolutionary explanation. These sorts of explanations are always interesting, but whether they are legit or merely just-so-stories remains to be seen.

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NASA vs. Air Conditioning the Desert?

Dollars are fungible (and see here). So what's the better value? Space exploration or a 10 year military occupation? Believe it or not, the U.S. has been spending a similar amount on each, year after year. Come to think of it, does endless war have any value to anyone other than politicians and military contractors?

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How Rights Become Privileges: MO Amendment 2

The 2012 Missouri primary had several important lessons to impart. The first, which I may have discussed in previous election years, is that the way to bring the "correct" voters to the polls is to have an apparently innocuous but important candidate or issue and a loud, contentious issue or candidate that only seems to matter to one side. In this primary cycle, there was a preponderance of hotly contested Republican seats, and a very dangerous, never advertised Tea Party constitutional amendment. Republicans came out to vote overwhelmingly, and the Amendment passed resoundingly. The full body of the amendment is at the bottom of this article. Basically on the ballot it read as if it was just reinforcing the first clause of the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

  • In reality, it says that people have the right to worship the (singular, Christian) Almighty God (but not all those others) including to pray whenever their conscience dictates (such as during science classes).
  • Public meetings can now be started with exclusionary prayers as long as the officiant is invited by someone.
  • I have not yet figured out how the mandatory publishing of the Bill of Rights in schools will be twisted, but I expect as a precedent to posting the Ten Commandments adjacent (as an alleged inspirational source)
  • Students cannot be punished for refusing to do assignments that might conflict with their faith (evolution, geology, astronomy, etc).
So I expect Missouri to soon be incurring legal fees on the order of replacing several major bridges, or (more likely) in lieu of funding science education for a decade. [More (Including the language of the Amendment)]

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