Wednesday, June 19, 2002

15 Answers To Creationist Nonsense. To air June 26 on the National Geographic Channel.
STANLEY KUTLER complains that the search for Deep Throat trivializes Watergate history. Me, I think it was Kirsten Dunst.
Jack Buck, dead at 77. Buck broadcast the painful 1980 NL Championship Series that helped shape me into the bitter husk of a man I am today.
VIA INSTAPUNDIT: more on Caribou Coffee.
THE LATE SCOTT SHUGER on a war crime in the disputed Palestinian territorities.
REASON # 782 WHY the Internet is killing music business sales: the American Song-Poem Music Archives. Though I don't think we'll see Adam Bonin discourse on "Blind Man's Penis". (Why doesn't Adam Bonin have a blog? His wife does.)

Tuesday, June 18, 2002

PROFESSOR VOLOKH has been having a fascinating discussion of the Kyllo case, which held that heat detection equipment, when applied to scan a house, was a "search" that needed to comply with Fourth Amendment protections. Eugene has been asking what the implications are for a hypothetical emergency where police are driving down streets with Geiger counters searching for a hidden nuclear bomb (or, presumably, the manufacture of such a bomb, since if the bomb is already put together, why hasn't it been detonated already?).

To quibble with the hypothetical, I question whether Geiger counters are sensitive enough to detect radiation coming from a house while driving down a street -- if there's that much radiation that it can be detected yards away through intervening construction materials, I'd think the people in the house would be quickly sick or dead. Without getting into the kind of detail that a naughty person with a web browser might use against us, I believe it's possible to construct a dirty bomb that would irradiate a vast swath of a city without emitting so much as a rad of particle radiation in the process.

In any event, I'm curious if Professor Volokh's British readers are wondering what all the fuss is about. But sometimes that's just the way the Jell-O judicates.
RES IPSA LOQUITUR. How does one get to be an expert in "the decomposition of mice in various baked goods"? Is there a treatise one can consult? Are there competing schools of mice decomposition theory that battle it out in rival journals?
CAPTAIN SPAULDING has been dissecting Vicki Lawrence's web page once he found out that she was playing The Orleans in Las Vegas, but he somehow neglected to mention her meat-loaf recipe.
YOU JUST CAN'T BEAT Howard Bashman to the punch, but, regardless, this Judge Posner opinion is a fascinating primer on the economics of price-fixing and cartels, the appropriate standard for summary judgment, and the role of expert witnesses in litigation, as well as the importance of recognizing how many little pieces of evidence, individually not sufficient proof in and of themselves, can be built into something much sturdier when viewed in totality.