My astronomy correspondent sent me this very cool image of the Earth and the Moon, as seen from near the sun:

I don't understand memorials and monuments. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say I don't understand how other people think about memorials and monuments. It just doesn't make much sense to me.

I have the good fortune of having lead a peaceful life. Other than my parents, no one really close to me has died. Perhaps if I'd experienced more tragedy, I'd understand people's reactions better. What I'm saying is that I'm perfectly willing to admit that I just don't get it. Still, there are things that just seem wrong.

I remember hearing many years ago that someone was proposing a memorial for the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, which is where he was assassinated by James Earl Ray in 1968. Part of the planned memorial was a laser beam, projected across the hotel grounds, that followed the path of the bullet that killed King.

To my way of thinking, this was completely the wrong way to honor Dr. King. The shooting at the Lorraine hotel had nothing to do with who King was and what he stood for. King did his great work in countless churches and gatherings, in marches and speeches and discussions with leaders all over the country. That's what was important to Martin Luther King, and that's what we should remember about him. That's the part of his life we should honor.

It's not that King's assassination is unimportant. It says a lot about America that we had a guy like Dr. King in this country, and that he was murdered. But his murder wasn't about him, it was about our relationship to him. It was about what other people did to him. Specifically, it was about what one man with a gun did to him. These people wanted to build a memorial to Dr. Martin Luther King, but it seemed to me they were building a monument to to the accomplishments of James Early Ray.

(The Lorraine Hotel is now the National Civil Rights Museum, which seems like a much better much better way to honor Dr. King and his work.)

I got to thinking about all this after reading Scott Greenfield's brilliant post about the controversy over building a Mosque near Ground Zero. Scott argues that Ground Zero and the location of the Mosque are worlds apart by Manhattan standards, and that people who don't actually know the area from personal experience shouldn't be telling folks in Manhattan what to do. In particular, he's not impressed by the 9/11 families' claims that the former site of the twin towers is "hallowed ground."

(Scott also doesn't like the phrase "Ground Zero," and frankly neither do I. Ground zero is technical slang for the location on the Earth's surface directly below an aerial explosion such as nuclear bomb. Its use for the site of the World Trade Center towers has always struck me as incorrect.)

I felt bad for people who lost loved ones in the terrors of 9/11, but I've found the whole "9/11 families" phenomenon a little disturbing. Again, as with the proposed memorial for Martin Luther King, it's because the 9/11 families were brought together and united as a group by something that had nothing to do with them or the people they lost.

(Many of them would have known groups of the other families before 9/11 because their loved ones worked together. That does have to do with who they are and what they were about, so it's not what I'm talking about here.)

After 9/11, I'm sure the families of the victims naturally came together in sharing their grief. But somewhere along the way, I think that unity got turned toward ends that were somewhat political. I don't know where it started. Maybe reporters asked the family members for their opinions so many times that they selected people to speak for them, and those people became leaders. For some of them, it became a purpose in life, a reason to go on. But I'm sure other people saw that any claim of a connection to 9/11 was a way to draw attention and political power to themselves.

Then there was all the money. The September 11th Fund collected donations and eventually provided $500 million to the families, but that's small change compared to the $7 billion they got from the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund. The latter was a government program, and it was far from a simple act of charity. Among other things, it was a bailout of sorts for the airlines whose planes were hijacked: In accepting money from the fund, families agreed not to sue the airlines. Naturally, the airlines wanted this fund to be as large as possible to discourage lawsuits. You can bet they lobbied Congress hard for this.

Lawyers scrambled to represent the families. Politicians learned that they could get publicity by calling for more compensation for the families. Pundits attracted attention to themselves by commenting on how terrible it all was.

When people started talking about a memorial at the site of the towers, I began to get the same feeling I had from the proposed Martin Luther King memorial. The people in the towers on 9/11 were insurance brokers and underwriters, bankers, tourists, car rental agents, lawyers, accountants, computer technicians, doctors, travel agents, and restaurateurs. They were husbands, wives, parents, siblings, and children. They had no idea 9/11 was coming, they had no plans to make a sacrifice or take a risk that day. So why honor them as if they did? Why unite them as if they had a common cause?

(This doesn't apply to the first responders -- police officers, firefighters, and EMTs -- who showed up to help. They risked their lives to help others. This was a cause they all shared.)

If we're going to honor the victims of 9/11, we should honor them for who they chose to be, not for what Al Qaeda made them. We shouldn't turn the site of the World Trade Center into a monument to the vision of Osama bin Laden.

I'm probably projecting my own values into the situation too much, but I can't help feeling that the 9/11 families have had their grieving process hijacked by the media, the politicians, and to some extent the American people. I'm not saying that their grief is unnatural or fake, but part of the grieving process is socially constructed. We do some things because people expect it of us, and when 300 million people are aware of your loss, you've got to feel some pressure.

The reverence people have for the site of the twin towers really surprises me. I don't really get it. People talk about preserving the footprint of the towers, and not building anything there. It all just seems so technical and dry. I don't understand the attachment to the location. I can understand why the location is painful and emotional and maybe cathartic to visit for people who lost a loved one, but I can't understand the reverence.

I've tried to imagine how I'd feel if, say, my wife was killed in a car accident. How would I react to the location of the accident? I think I'd hate driving past the site, and would probably avoid it for a few years. But I wouldn't revere it. It wouldn't be hollowed ground for me.

And yet... When my father died, my wife and I took his ashes back to Kentucky where he was born. The last few hours of driving were off the interstate, on state roads winding through the hills and farms of eastern Kentucky, and I became accutely aware of passing small crosses that had been placed on the side of the road. I assume these were markers of locations where someone had been killed in a car accident.

I can kind of understand that. If someone I loved had died in one of those accidents, it would seem strange that the road appeared so normal. Here this important and terrible thing happened, and everything about the place is completely ordinary. It wouldn't seem right.

On the other hand, I still don't think I'd put up a marker. The location was the result of random chance, and it had nothing to do with the person who died.

All of this is not to say that there shouldn't be a monument to the people murdered at the World Trade Center on 9/11. I'm just not sure that this should be it. I haven't been following the planning of the 9/11 memorial, so I don't know much about this, but it looks like they're setting aside eight acres of Manhattan for the memorial, and they won't be rebuilding any commercial buildings where the towers stood.

Somehow, it all seems like too much. By comparison, when the Eastland rolled over in the Chicago River in 1915, over 800 people died. The only memorial is this plaque (although there are plans for a slightly larger exhibit). Of course, almost four times as many people died on 9/11, and they died not in an accident but in an act of war, which does make a difference. Still, the 9/11 monument is half an acre larger than the National World War II Memorial.

I can't escape the feeling that some people see memorializing 9/11 as a business and political opportunity, that some people who claim to represent the 9/11 families are really representatives only of their own self-interest, and that some people who claim to be honoring the dead are really trying to attract attention to themselves.

Or maybe I don't know what I'm talking about. Like I said, I really don't understand how other people think about memorials and monuments. It only makes sense, therefore, that the things other people plan won't have much appeal to me, nor should they. When it comes to building the 9/11 memorial, no one should give much thought to pleasing someone who feels as I do. Nothing they do there is going to upset me much.

Still, I wish they'd do something. It's been almost nine years since the towers fell. That's four years longer than it took to build the towers or almost a third of the time they were standing. Looking at the construction site webcam as I write this, night has fallen, and imprints of the towers are just two dark holes in the ground. It sure looks like what Osama bin Laden wanted.

I had met my friend Fritz at a local pizza joint for some lunch, when we noticed something suspicious at another table: A couple of pasty-looking white guys, they had briefcases on the table and were exchanging things them while speaking in hushed tones. They wore paramilitary outfits -- matching blue shirts and pants and matching blue jackets -- and we could see suspicious shapes under their jackets, which had the letters I, C, and E on the back. I guessed that was a hidden reference to some sort of terrorist organization, possibly even the dreaded narco-terrorists, since everyone knows that "ice" is street slang for crystal meth.

We were concerned for our well-being and for those of other restaurant patrons, so Fritz counted quietly -- one...two...THREE! -- and we both leapt up and drew our weapons. Thanks to the exciting new gun laws here in Chicago, I was armed with my recently purchased Smith & Wesson 9mm pistol and Fritz had one of those blocky H&K USP pistols.

I yelled "Freeze! Don't move!" while Fritz screamed "Hands up!" We had caught them cold. Both of them jerked their hands up as their eyes got real big, and I think one of them pissed his pants. Fritz maneuvered around behind them, and I started going through the contents of their briefcases, which turned out to be mostly shipping manifests of some kind. They had circled some items in red. Clearly, they were smuggling something into the country, possibly components for a dirty bomb.

When I questioned them, they claimed they were part of some government agency called "Immigration and Customs Enforcement" which seemed like something they made up to explain the lettering on the jacket. For one thing, everyone knows that it's called the "Immigration and Nationalization Service." More importantly, Chicago is hundreds of miles from any international border. They tried to explain this with some bullshit about O'Hare International Airport being nearby, so I shoved them both to the ground and Fritz stood on their heads for lying to us.

As it turned out, their story kind of checked out, so we had to let them go. Boy were they pissed off! All because we made a little mistake. They even threatened to arrest us, but what could they do? We hadn't actually shot anybody, and that's what counted, so we did absolutely nothing wrong.

As you probably guessed, none of that actually happened. I was just fantasizing about what it would be like if ordinary folks could get away with stuff just like law enforcement officers do. I was inspired by Brian Tannebaum's post about some ICE agents who did pretty much that exact same thing to the Boveda family last week, and then explained that it was okay because nobody got hurt.

I'm thinking I could turn this into a series. Maybe next time I'll fantasize about getting caught on video beating a helpless person senseless and getting away with it because the police felt the video didn't show enough context to establish that I didn't have a good reason.

Wow! Vinay Deolalikar, a Hewlett Packard researcher, has published his proof that P≠NP. It may not mean much to most of you, but P versus NP is the greatest unsolved problem of theoretical computer science. A complete explanation of the problem would be lengthy, but let me see if I can summarize it.

P represents a large set of computer science problems that are known to be solvable in polynomial time. This means that however large the problem gets -- expressed as n, the number of items in the problem -- the time it would take to solve it is bounded by some constant multiple of a power of n.

For example, for any given computer, sorting of items is bounded by n². That is, we can write an expression that includes a constant multiple of n² that will always be larger than the execution time of the solution. For example, 0.001*n² seconds would always enough time to sort a list of n names, no matter how big the list got: A million names, a billion names, 6*10²³ names, whatever.

(Sorting is actually much more efficient than n², but it's not as efficient as n, so n² is the closest power.)

On the other hand, there are also problems that are not known to be solvable in polynomial time. For example, there's the traveling salesman problem: Given a set of cities and the travel times between all of them, find the shortest route that visits all cities. The brute force approach of trying all possible combinations is bounded by n!, so solving it for 10 cities takes time proportional to 10*9*8*7*6*5*4*3*2*1. Smarter approaches have lowered the time to 2ⁿ. Still, there is no constant power to which n can be raised which will always be larger than 2ⁿ, so there are no known polynomial time solutions to the traveling salesman problem.

The traveling salesman problem is only one of many problems which are classified as NP-hard for which it's possible to create hypothetical algorithms that solve the problem in polynomial time by using a magic guessing step called an oracle that always chooses the correct next step. (I've always assumed the oracle character in The Matrix referred to this kind of oracle.) This oracle is a stand-in for a really smart solution that we haven't figured out yet. The NP-hard problems are related, so that if we find an algorithm that makes one of them solvable in polynomial time, all of them will be solvable in polynomial time. If that happens, then there will be no problems in the set NP that are not also in the set P. In other words, P=NP.

Most complexity theorists think that the reason we haven't found an algorithmic replacement for the oracle is that none exists. The set NP contains problems that can never be solved in polynomial time. In other words, P≠NP. However, this has never been proven.

Until now. Maybe.

I'm not nearly smart enough to analyze Vinay Deolalikar's 100-page paper in which he claims to have proven P≠NP, however the smart betting, according to Steven Landsburg, is that it is

a) not crazy (which already puts it in the top 1% of papers that have addressed this question),

b) teeming with creative ideas that are likely to have broad applications, and

c) quite likely wrong.

That last is just a guess, based on the long history of this problem. Unlike the hoard of crazy people who have announced solutions, Deolalikar's solution might be for real. But the odds are against it.

And in breaking news, while I was writing this, Deolalikar removed the paper from his website.

Radley Balko has been covering the issue of citizens who take videos of cops and get arrested for it. It's only illegal in a few states (including Maryland and Illinois) but that doesn't mean you can't get arrested for it anywhere. In Radley's latest piece, he interviews two prosecutors and the head of the Fraternal Order of Police, and they say some of the stupidest things I've ever heard.

Start with Joseph Cassilly, a prosecutor in Hartford County, Maryland:

"The officer having his gun drawn or being on a public roadway has nothing to do with it," Cassilly says. "Neither does the fact that what Mr. Graber said during the stop could be used in court. That's not the test. The test is whether police officers can expect some of the conversations they have while on the job to remain private and not be recorded and replayed for the world to hear."

In the Graber case, he was making a helmet cam video while riding on his motorcycle when a motorist cut him off and jumped out waving a gun. This crazy motorist turned out to be Maryland State Trooper Joseph David Ulher, driving an unmarked car and dressed nothing like a cop. This was all caught on the helmet cam.

Now Cassilly is prosecuting Graber for violating the wiretapping laws. Apparently, Cassilly thinks a cop somehow has a right to privacy even when he intrusively inserts himself into a video that started recording before he got there.

The second badgelicker is right here in Illinois. Here's the background:

Crawford County State's Attorney Tom Wiseman is currently bringing five felony charges against Michael Allison, a 41-year-old construction worker who recorded police officers and other public officials he thought were harassing him.

Now here comes the crazy:

"The only person doing any harassing here is Mr. Allison, who was harassing our public officials with his tape recorder," Wiseman says. "They may have problems with some bad police officers in some of your urban areas. But we don't have those problems around here. All of our cops around here are good cops. This is a small town. Everyone knows everyone. If we had a bad police officer here, we'd know about it, I'd know about it, and he'd be out. There's just no reason for anyone to feel they need to record police officers in Crawford County."

You say something as stupid as "we don't have those problems around here. All of our cops around here are good cops," and you expect us to just take your word for it? And obviously there was a reason for someone to "feel they need to record police officers in Crawford County," because somebody did. That feeling may not be justified, but without the recording, how would anybody know?

The king of the badgelickers is Jim Pasco, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police. His job is to stand up for the cops regardless of whether they're right or wrong, so he says the stupidest things by far:

Pasco, who supports these arrests, says he's worried that video could be manipulated to make police officers look bad. "There's no chain of custody with these videos," Pasco says. "How do you know the video hasn't been edited? How do we know what's in the video hasn't been taken out of context?

When a witness testifies that the defendant assaulted him, how do we know he's not lying? I think this is one of the reasons we have trials and lawyers and judges and juries, to figure out these kinds of things.

With dashboard cameras or police security video, the evidence is in the hands of law enforcement the entire time, so it's admissible under the rules of evidence. That's not the case with these cell phone videos."

Really? So if I witnessed, say, three gang members beating down a cop on a subway platform and I recorded it on my cellphone, I could testify to what I saw, but the video would be totally useless to the prosecutor? No one has ever made a case off an unofficial video? How stupid does Pasco think we are?

But what about cases where video clearly contradicts police reports, such as the McKenna case in College Park?

"You have 960,000 police officers in this country, and millions of contacts between those officers and citizens. I'll bet you can't name 10 incidents where a citizen video has shown a police officer to have lied on a police report,"

And if it's illegal to make videos of police on the job, we'll never be able to.

(Actually, I'm pretty sure I could just search The Agitator and Simple Justice for the word "video" and come up a lot more than 10 incidents.)

"Letting people record police officers is an extreme and intrusive response to a problem that's so rare it might as well not exist. It would be like saying we should do away with DNA evidence because there's a one in a billion chance that it could be wrong."

Uh, the malfeasance rate among cops is a lot higher than 1-in-a-billion. Just here in Chicago, we've had cops taking bribes, cops robbing stores, cops running hookers, cops working for street gangs, cops running jewelry theft rings, and cops killing people for money. On average, seven Chicago police officers each year are prosecuted for crimes. Are we supposed to believe that these guys wouldn't fudge their reports?

Heck, my last traffic ticket, the cop changed his story between the time he stopped me and the time he testified in court. It was probably an honest mistake, but if I'd been rolling video, he wouldn't have gotten away with it. Video doesn't just catch lying cops. It also catches honest mistakes and keeps them from corrupting the justice system.

"At some point, we have to put some faith and trust in our authority figures."

Yes, at some point we do, but why rely on faith and trust in the kinds of situations where we can have evidence? 

I mention Michael Allison's case to Pasco, and ask if he supports the Illinois law.

"I don't know anything about that case, but generally it sounds like a sensible law and a sensible punishment," Pasco says. "Police officers don't check their civil rights at the station house door."

Maybe not, but there is no right to privacy in a public place. That's why it's called "public."

We're talking about the right of ordinary citizens to make video recordings in a public place. In general, if you or I are out on the street and we discover someone is making a video of us, there's nothing we can do about it. Anybody can roll video at any time as long as they're not trespassing. How do you think all those celebrity gossip shows get videos of Lindsay Lohan behaving scandalously? How do you think 60-minutes can do ambush interviews?

Finally, isn't it ironic to hear cops and badgelickers talking about other people being "intrusive"? These are the guys whose job it is to butt into everyone else's business. They pull cars over in traffic and ask the driver for identification. They detain random people on the street and pat them down for weapons. It's more-or-less what we pay them for, but I have no sympathy for their complaints when it's their turn.

Deep inside the cynical exterior of a Miami criminal defense lawyer...beats the heart of a true believer. Brian Tannebaum wins his case, and shows us that sometimes not even the federal government can send a man to prison for doing nothing wrong.

This was not about an acquittal, a framed verdict form on an office wall, or an "attaboy" from my colleagues. This was about how the government can create criminality from stupidity, from naivety, from a desire to send a message to society that is mired in an environment of blame.

I think that if I was on that jury, I would have second guessed myself a bit too: Am I missing something, or could the feds really have gone to all this trouble when they don't have a case?

It was a year ago today that my father passed away. During the last few months, he spent a lot of time listening to his music CDs, and I figured it would be a nice idea to post some of the songs he liked. I hope you hear something you enjoy.

I'll begin with his all-time favorite singer, Mahalia Jackson, singing "When the Saints Go Marching In":

Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass perform "A Walk In The Black Forest":

Tom Jones sings "Green Green Grass of Home":

Jim Neighbors sings "Dream the Impossible Dream":

Marty Robbins sings "Red River Valley"

Roy Orbison sings "Blue Bayou":

Mahalia Jackson sings "How Great Thou Art":

Jim Neighbors sings "Go Tell It On The Mountain":

Roy Orbison sings "Pretty Woman":

Marty Robbins sings "I Walk Alone":

Since this is a bit of a memorial for my father, I reckon someone's got to sing "Amazing Grace." Again, here's Mahalia Jackson:

It's hardly the greatest infringement of free speech I've ever heard of, but this doesn't sound right:

The manager of a North Chicago sandwich shop learned in a Lake County courtroom this week that the difference between a joke in poor taste and an inflammatory remark is about 75 bucks.

Arjunsinh Sindha, 64, said he feels as if he was treated unfairly when he was fined $75 after he was found guilty of disorderly conduct for asking a Pakistani-born customer if he was a terrorist.

...

Khan reported Sindha's comment to North Chicago officials and Sindha was issued a ticket under a city ordinance for disorderly conduct.

I can't tell from context if Sindha is a jerk or just a talkative guy who went a bit over the line, but either way I'm pretty sure this falls well within his right to freedom of speech. Cops have always stretched the definition of disorderly conduct to include whatever happens to piss them off, but speech restrictions like this are supposed to be based on time, place, and manner of speech -- e.g. screaming your head off late at night in a hospital zone -- not on the offensiveness of the words spoken.

I'm trying to put together a music playlist, and so I'm appealing to you, my Gentle Readers, to help me find songs of a certain type. I'm calling them protest songs, but that's probably not a very good description. I'm not talking about, for example, '60's anti-war chants, and I'd like to avoid an excess of Dylan.

The only way I can think of to explain what I want is to give a few examples of the kind of song I mean. Probably the defining member of this type of song is Old Crow Medicine Show's "I Hear Them All":

Another good example is the classic Jimmy Cliff song "The Harder They Come":

For something a little more hard core, I'll take "Guns Of Brixton." But not the Clash version. I prefer this haunting cover by Nouvelle Vague:

That's not to say I don't mind a little anger. Or a lot of anger, as in Bruce Cockburn's "If I Had a Rocket Launcher":

I don't know if there's really a common theme running through those songs, but if you know of other songs that you think I'd like based on this list -- or even if these songs just remind you of some other songs -- let me know in the comments.

Thanks.

There's been a lot of discussion in the criminal defense bloggosphere about the role of the criminal defense lawyer. Basically, prosecutors are supposedly charged with seeking justice. The question naturally arises then, are criminal defense lawyers also supposed to seek justice? And if so, what is their duty to their client?

As near as I can tell, it started with a comment left by John Kindley at Defending People, which he expanded into a post on his blog (followed by several more) which quotes Vincent Bugliosi, which lead to a rebuttle by Mark Bennett and comments by Scott Greenfield, Jeff Gamso, Norm Pattis, Gideon, and probably a whole bunch of other bloggers (feel free to drop a link in the comments if I missed you).

I figure I might as well take a shot at it and explain what I think criminal defense lawyers are supposed to be doing. Naturally, I see a science angle. And it has something to do with toilets. I'm going to digress a bit before I come to my point.

You may have heard the science factoid that toilets in the southern hemisphere flush clockwise and toilets in the northern hemisphere flush counter-clockwise. The supposed reason for this is the Coriolis effect, which is caused by the Earth's rotation.

Basically, everything on the surface of the Earth revolves eastward in a circle around the planet's axis. However, objects closer to the equator have to follow a longer path than objects that are closer to the poles. Since everything has the same amount of time to complete a rotation, the objects taking the longer path -- those closer to the equator -- must be moving faster.

Now imagine an object that starts near the equator and begins moving northward. At the equator, both the object and the land beneath it are moving eastward with the Earth's rotation. As it moves north, however, it passes over land that is closer to the pole and therefore moving eastward slower than at the object's starting point. The object will still have it's original eastward velocity, so it will tend to get ahead of the land below and begin to drift eastward. Similarly, an object moving southward will be starting with a slower speed and therefore fall behind, drifting to the west.

In the southern hemisphere, the exact same thing happens except that the directions are reversed because the rotational speed at the surface declines as you get closer to the south pole.

When you flush a toilet, all the water in the bowl flows toward the center. The water in the northern half of the bowl moves south, and therefore Coriolis forces push it to the west. The water in the southern half of the bowl moves north and gets a shove to the east. Thus, the story goes, the water is pushed in a counter-clockwise direction, and that's the way toilets drain in the northern hemisphere. And vice versa in the southern hemisphere.

At least that's the theory. But does it really happen? Do toilets really flush in different directions in different hemispheres?

No, as you can easily determine for your self by watching a bunch of different toilets. The reason is simple: Toilets are too small.

The Coriolis effect works quite well with very large things because the speed difference is much greater over large distances.  The low pressure zone in the center of a hurricane pulls air in from all directions for hundreds of miles, and the northern and southern edges are far enough apart that the Coriolis effect induces a gigantic spinning cyclone with air speeds that can easily reach over a hundred miles an hour. Even better, hurricanes spin clockwise in the south, and counter-clockwise in the north, exactly as we'd expect from the Coriolis effect.

On the other hand, the surface of the water in a toilet is less than a foot across. When you do the math, it turns out that as the toilet follows the Earth's daily revolution, the maximum possible speed difference between opposite edges is only about three inches per hour. That's so small that it's overcome by water movement caused by vibration of the floor or air currents stirred up by somebody moving around in the same room as the toilet. Even worse, the currents set up in the toilet when it fills (or when certain other materials are added to the bowl water, if you know what I mean) can persist for hours and have enough inertia to resist Coriolis forces. Finally, imperfections in the shape of the bowl can cause the water to flow in a preferred direction that has nothing to do with Coriolis forces. So, in theory, the Coriolis effect is there, but it's too small to detect in a real-world toilet.

Scientists have tested this under laboratory conditions, however, and it really does work: When the run the test in the southern hemisphere, the water picked up a gentle clockwise swirl every time. Repeating the experiment in the northern hemisphere, the water swirled counter-clockwise.

The experimental setup is interesting (meaning I'm finally getting to the point of this post). The scientists wanted to eliminate all sources of water motion that might hide the Coriolis effect. They began by setting up their apparatus on a base that isolated it from vibration and in a room with no vents or heat sources to cause air motion. Instead of an off-the-shelf toilet bowl, they carefully constructed a funnel about six feet across and as near to perfectly round and smooth as possible.

The scientists knew that after filling the bowl with water, they'd have let it sit for several hours to allow the residual currents to die down. But just to make sure the residual currents didn't contaminate the experiment, they did one more thing: They filled the bowl in the opposite of the expected direction of spin, so that the water was initially swirling the wrong way. If any of that swirl remained when the drain was opened, it would not cause a false positive result.

A criminal trial is a bit like that experiment. It's a highly artificial environment created to get an answer to an important question. It's isolated from the real world, and an attempt is made to remove distracting influences which might lead to an erroneous result. As for criminal defense lawyers, they're that swirl in the wrong direction.

You see, by starting with the water swirling in the wrong direction, the scientists added an influence that would have produced the the exact opposite result from the hypothesis they were testing. This opposing swirl would have to be overcome by the forces hypothesized to be at work in order to get the expected result.

That's the role that criminal defense attorneys play in our justice system: They oppose the government's theory that their client is guilty. This opposition is necessary so that if the government achieves the result it's hoping for -- a guilty verdict -- we can be confident that it was arrived at for the right reasons.

If my explanation of the role of criminal defense attorneys doesn't seem very original, that's because it's not. It's basically a variation on "putting the government's case to the test" or "ensuring procedural due process." I'm sorry if you were expecting something more enlightening or profound. I've no reason to seek a novel explanation when the existing explanations are so good. But I do hope you found the science of toilets and hurricanes a bit entertaining.

I'm not saying that this is the only role a defense attorney should play in the system. There are other ways to serve justice in the larger sense, and there are other ways to serve their clients, and doing either of those things need not compromise their role as the opposition.

Nor am I saying that this is what motivates criminal defense lawyers on a personal level. They may serve out of compassion for the oppressed, abhorrence of the urge to punish, thirst for social justice, or desire to be a badass. But whatever their reason and whatever else they do to serve clients or justice, they also serve the purpose of justice simply by standing in defiance.

Do note, however, that the need to swirl the water in the wrong direction has nothing to do with whether or not the Coriolis effect is an accurate theory. Similarly, the criminal defense lawyer's role does not change with the defendant's guilt or lack thereof.

(Note for science geeks: Wikipedia has a more accurate and rigorous treatment of the Coriolis effect, including a description of the conditions under which Coriolis forces are significant in a physical system. My description of the experiment is from my memory of a book or article I read a long time ago. If you're like me, you're probably wondering how the water would have drained from the funnel if they did the experiment at the equator. Fortunately for both of us, the scientists wondered the same thing. As expected, the water drained quietly away with no significant rotation in either direction.)

This is the seal of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, of which I am not an employee or representative:

I am not trying to deceive you into thinking I am an agent or representative of the FBI, nor am I trying to assert any authority, FBI-like or otherwise. No matter what those goofballs at the FBI think.

(Hat tip: Popehat, Gideon, Mark Bennett, Jeff Gamso, and Scott Greenfield)

P.S. You can tell I'm not an FBI agent because in my picture I don't look like one. This is what an FBI agent looks like:

Hey girls -- and I'm talking to you teenagers here -- you want to know how to dress so that cute boys will notice you? Just check out this survey by the The Rebelution ("a teenage rebellion against low expectations") and find out what clothing boys think is a stumbling block for a girl who seeks a modest appearance. Then dress like that.

Some sample results:

• 70% of guys think that showing any cleavage is immodest.
• 71% of guys think seeing even an inch of skin between the bottom of a girl's shirt and her pants is a stumbling block.
• 48% of guys think a purse with the strap diagonally across the chest draws too much attention to the bust.
• 40% of guys think that shirts or dresses (long or short-sleeved) with slits in the sleeves are a stumbling block.

On the other hand, sweatshirts with messages across the front do not draw too much attention to the bust. So there.

Remember: Use this knowledge only for good.

(Hat tip: Lindsay Beyerstein)

This bit of embarassment to my whole gender has already been shredded here and here and here, so let me just offer a constructive suggestion:

Dear Anne,

Congratulations on your wedding day. I wish you and Robert all the best.

Kind regards,

Andrew

Would that have been so fucking hard?

Economists generally believe that extremism is probably a mistake. That's because every choice involves a trade off. You'll start with the easiest trades first, but as you push to greater extremes, you'll have to trade off more and more things of value. For example, if you set out to own the fastest production car in the world, it will probably turn out to be uncomfortable, loud, hot, and astonishingly expensive.

You may be that rare person for whom those trades offs are worth the trouble to get the fastest car, but most people would be happier with something a little slower that offers more in turms of comfort and amenities.

One common form of extremism is fear of failure. If no woman has ever turned you down when you asked her out on a date, you've probably been too careful in choosing who to ask out. If you had been a little less careful, you probably would have been turned down a few times, but you would have asked out a lot more women and gone out on a lot more dates.

Similarly, if you've never missed an airplane, you've probably spent too much time waiting around in airports, and a heart surgeon who's never lost a patient has probably turned down patients he could have saved.

Lately, Mark Bennett and Norm Pattis have both been questioning Gerry Spence's claim to have never lost a criminal case. I don't know if that's true or how he defines winning or how many cases he's taken, but I'm pretty sure of one thing: If Gerry Spence has been turning down every case he thought he might lose, then some of the cases he passed up were cases he would have won.

The defense has rested in the corruption trial of Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich without letting the jury hear his testimony. Other people are discussing what it's fair to assume about Blagojevich's guilt based on his not testifying [be sure to read Scott Greenfield's scathing response in the comments below], but I'm wondering how we're hearing about so many details about the inner workings of the defense team.

Last week, criminal defense lawyer Stuart Goldberg was quoted in People discussing his meeting with actress Lindsay Lohan to discuss the possibility of representing her:

"My impression of Lindsay is that she's a fragile lost child - a sleeping beauty with her head in the sand. I found her not fully forewarned of the consequence of her actions," Stuart V. Goldberg, who was contacted by Lohan after her attorney resigned, tells PEOPLE.

"I'm concerned that she's not disciplined or tethered enough to the reality of adult consequences," he says. "She doesn't seem to have the awareness of what's going to befall her."

New York personal injury lawyer Eric Turkewitz called him out about client confidentiality:

Why the hell is this Stuart Goldberg, apparently a Chicago criminal defense lawyer, talking about what he heard or saw in the confidence of his practice? And why would any future client ever trust him to keep a secret?

I had all that in mind as I read a report in the Chicago Sun-Times about the decision that Blagojevich should not testify:

But sources told the Sun-Times that despite the public show of discord, all the members of Blagojevich's legal team -- and the former governor himself -- actually agree that Blagojevich should not testify.

The decision, which appeared to stun prosecutors, one of whom stared toward the former governor as he learned of the defense's intent, is said to have come late Monday after a night of wrangling.

During preparations with his own lawyers and others, Blagojevich showed signs that he would have trouble answering questions clearly and succinctly and might not be able to withstand what is expected to be a withering cross examination, sources said. The defense also took into account the possibility that the government, which put on a quick case after only six weeks, had rebuttal witnesses ready, potentially including convicted businessman Tony Rezko.

How are Sun-Times reporters are getting information about legal decisions from inside the Blagojevich camp? Lohan's lawyer appears to be a publicity-hungry fool who's trying to attract attention to himself by talking about his celebrity almost-client. But Blagojevich is being defended by Sam Adams, who already has a big reputation for not being particularly foolish.

The Chicago Tribune is also reporting a similar story, so unless there's some way in which this leak is part of the defense strategy, it sounds like somebody on the defense side is leaking privileged information to the press.

If I had to guess who's talking too much, the obvious culprit is Rod Blagojevich.

If you've ever spent time editing digital audio recordings, you know that they can become hard to understand when you compress them just a little too much...

(The story follows a short commercial.)

Scott Greenfield wrote today about a case involving a police officer who caught one of those lucky breaks in court that cops seem to get so often:

It seemed as if things couldn't get any worse for Police Officer Patrick Pogan, when his arrest of Christopher Long, a cyclist in the Critical Mass rally, for attacking him was covertly videotaped.  Only 10 days on the job and he was shown to be a violent attacker and liar.  He had a great future ahead of him on the NYPD.  Except for that video.

Finally prosecuted.  Finally convicted, though not of the vicious assault on Long, because cops have to be allowed some latitude in vicious harming people, but convicted of filing a false instrument.  And yesterday, Patrick Pogan was sentenced to life.  No, not life in prison.  Not life on probation, Not life in community service.  He was given a conditional discharge by Justice Maxwell Wiley, which is a non-sentence sentence that says, go back to your life and have a nice day.  You've suffered enough.

So a jury convicted him, but the judge gave him no punishment whatsoever. Scott concludes his post this way:

Yet there must be a consequence when a police officer is caught, irrefutably, lying.  There must be a message that lying cops will not be tolerated.  Give him 30 days.  Give him probation.  Give him something.  The message must be that a cop cannot lie without consequences.

Instead, Patrick Pogan got life.  His own life, to live whatever way he chooses, as he's now free to move on without consequence.  The message has been sent.

It's another in a long line of good points from Scott Greenfield. But with all due respect, Scott made a mistake when he titled this post "The Big Shove Cop Gets Life." When I read that title, I assumed he was talking about another case which he blogged about last year, linking to the original report by Sara Jean Green of the Seattle Times:

Witnesses have provided conflicting accounts of when two King County sheriff's deputies identified themselves to an Edmonds man who ran from the deputies. He suffered life-threatening skull fractures when his head struck a concrete wall as one attempted to arrest him early Sunday in Belltown.

Seattle lawyer Sim Osborn, who has been retained by Christopher Harris' family, said both deputies wore black uniforms and yelled to Harris from a half-block away in a darkened alley. He said one witness reported the two deputies didn't identify themselves as law-enforcement officers until after Harris began running down the alley sometime after 1 a.m. Sunday. Osborn said Harris stopped running a few blocks away, apparently after realizing the two men chasing him were deputies.

There's video of the incident. It happens in the first few seconds, and it's unpleasant to watch:

(Scott and I recently had a discussion in his comments section about the distinction between a mere accident and a conscious disregard for human life. This incident seems like a clear case of the latter.)

At the time, the police were still investigating, and everything was up in the air. I wondered what happened to Christopher Harris and the deputy who shoved him.

It turns out that Sara Jean Green followed up on this story a year later in an article that came out last May. The cop who shoved Harris -- now identified as King Country Deputy Matthew Paul -- seems to have gotten away with it:

After reviewing the chase and apprehension of Harris, prosecutors found no basis to charge Paul with a crime. After an internal investigation cleared the deputy of wrongdoing, the King County Sheriff's Office called the incident "a tragic accident."

In other words, to use Scott's terminology, Deputy Matthew Paul got life. His own life. He gets to go on as if nothing happened.

As for Christopher Harris, he wasn't so lucky:

Sarah Harris goes through the motions of her day trying hard not to think about what life was like a year ago -- or what it would be like now if not for "the incident."

She feels guilty leaving the house, even if only for a couple of hours to visit her mom or sister, to run errands, or go grocery shopping. She still cries every night.

Her husband, the first boy she kissed and the only man she's ever loved, suffered a catastrophic brain injury when his head slammed into a concrete wall after a brief footchase with two King County sheriff's deputies on Mother's Day 2009. He's now confined to bed, unable to talk, walk or do anything for himself.

Christopher Sean Harris spent six weeks at Harborview Medical Center, where his family was encouraged to remove him from life support because doctors didn't think he'd ever come out of a coma. But he did, and was transferred to an Edmonds nursing home in June.

Sarah Harris, who worked as a manager for Nordstrom and dreamed of becoming a buyer for the department store, gave up her job to care for her husband.

...

Doctors can't put their finger on Chris Harris' condition, Lamb said. Based on brain scans, they say he shouldn't be able to move or make sounds. Yet, he can respond to simple commands and appears to have symptoms of "locked in" syndrome since he's aware of what's going on around him.

He even recognizes loved ones -- his mother, his uncle, old friends from high school -- who visit.

"He'll stare at someone for a really long time, and then you'll see the change in his eye," Sarah Harris said. "It clicks, and all of a sudden he knows who he is looking at."

I guess, in a different way, Christopher and Sarah Harris got life too.

Hey Kids! Want to know how to smuggle large amounts of dope without getting caught? Police Lieutenant Andrew G. Hawkes will show you how. Of course, he's selling his training materials to police officers only, so you'll have to get past his security questions without breaking any laws, which may be tricky.

Even so, there are a few handy tips on his web site:

Tip #3: "If you really want to be successful at highway drug interdiction then turn OFF your radar.  DRUG HAULERS DON'T SPEED!"

In other words, most highway cops are looking for speeders, so don't speed.

Indicator #18:  "Passengers that DON'T know each others' names is a strong indicator of drug trafficking."

So, you should exchange names and check everybody's memory before hitting the highway.

Tip #36-  "Be sure to turn on the A/C unit to see if the vents blow air, if they do not then that may mean there is a load of dope inside of it."

So, don't put so much dope in your ventilation system that it blocks the air flow.

Personally, I'm fascinated by this sort of thing. If anybody out there has a legally-acquired copy of the book and the bonus videos that they don't want anymore, I'd love to buy them off of you.

(Hat tip, Scott Greenfield)

My wife and I were in Louisville, Kentucky this weekend, and while we were stopping at a gas station mini-mart next to our hotel, I spotted this anti-drug poster in the window:

Larger ImageAnti-drug poster in the window of a gas station in Louisville, Kentucky.

The image is a little blurry because I took it with my phone, but the text reads, in part, "Trapped. Controlled. Alone. Also known as meth addiction."

On the inside, as we were paying for our Diet Coke and snacks, I spotted this display of pot smoking paraphernalia under the cash register:

Larger ImageDrug paraphernalia on sale in the same gas station

My first thought was that they were sending a mixed message, but perhaps the real message they are trying to send is "Don't use crystal meth, because there are much safer drugs you can use, like marijuana."

There's been round-the-blawgosphere turmoil about Lee v. Lampert, in which the 9th Circuit basically said that the AEDPA's time limits for filing a habeas petition still apply even though pretty much everyone agrees that the defendant is actually innocent. That is, Lee is innocent, but he just didn't submit the paperwork on time. There's plenty of coverage by Gideon, C&F, Gamso, and Greenfield.

I think that unless the U.S. Supreme court overturns this ruling or the Governor steps in and moots the case with a pardon, this case is probably headed for some crazy legal shenanigans, as the defense tries to find a judge who will go along with some sort of pretextual constitutional issue that will allow the facts to be reconsidered so that justice can be done.

This tends to support my observation that the machinery of justice is missing an important part:

This is an ridiculous situation. Our court system apparently has no simple, honest method of dealing with the possibility that a criminal court followed all the correct procedures and -- perhaps due to facts unavailable at the time -- still reached an erroneous conclusion.

The closest we come to such a method is probably a habeas petition, which is going to be a problem...

I haven't been writing as much as I'd like to lately, but fortunately, there's plenty of other good stuff to read. Mirriam Seddiq has a terrific article about what she's learned practicing criminal law in several different jurisdictions. Her description of Baltimore (and the Baltimore police) is priceless.

Following up on my earlier post about the Supreme Court ruling against Chicago's handgun ban in McDonald v. Chicago, the case has been sent back to the lower court to figure out the details, so it's not quite time to arm ourselves yet.

An attorney involved in the case advised against Chicagoans running out and purchasing handguns until a lower court rules on the matter later this summer.

"Obviously I'm elated by the court's decision, said attorney David Sigale. "(But) I think it would be prudent to wait."

Sigale said he expects the U.S. District Court to take up the case again in the coming weeks and issue the city directives on the handgun ban and a number of specific ordinances regarding re-registration and pre-registration.

Naturally, Mayor Daley is planning to fight this:

Daley has scheduled a news conference for 1 p.m. today to discuss the ruling.  The City Council could consider new gun control measures as soon as Wednesday, Daley said last week.

City Hall has been drawing up plans after the justices heard arguments in the case in early March and appeared to indicate they would rule against the city.

In an interview with the Tribune, the mayor said his primary goal would be to protect police officers, paramedics and emergency workers from being shot when responding to an incident at a home.

It's nonsense to think that the loss of Chicago's handgun is going to endanger cops or any other first responders. Illinois will almost certainly keep its background check requirement, which means that only people with no significant criminal record will be able to possess a handgun legally. The aren't likely to suddenly commence a life of crime.

Let me put it another way: Last weekend in Chicago, 54 people were wounded by gunfire, 10 of them fatally. Since ordinary Chicago residents can't own handguns legally, most of those shots must have been fired by people who had guns in violation of Chicago's tough handgun ban. It's hard to imagine that more guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens would have made things any worse.

"If the ban is overturned, we will see a lot of common-sense approaches in the city aimed at protecting first responders," Daley said. "We have to have some type of registry. If a first responder goes to an apartment, they need to know if that individual has a gun."

It sounds like the usual obstructive behavior. If the mayor can't make it illegal to own guns, he'll figure out a way to harass people who own guns legally. There will probably be lots of paperwork. As Scott Greenfield points out, this could drag on for decades, because the Supreme Court's ruling was remarkably lazy:

McDonald did one thing only, holding that the right enunciated in Heller applies to the states.  As with the mystery paragraph of Heller, the Court reiterated that the decision doesn't preclude regulation and limitation.  This leaves open the next hundred years of piecemeal litigation over each and every inch of imaginative legislation to see where the line is drawn.  We're so far away right now that we can't even see the line, no less know what the line precludes.

Heck, as Eugene Volokh points out, the Court hasn't even cleared up whether the right is truly fundamental, and whether limitations are subject to strict or intermediate scrutiny.  While these legal issues aren't particularly interesting to non-lawyers, they play a huge role in framing laws to restrict the applicability of Heller and its progeny.  More decisions needed to flesh out the right mean more years before anybody really understands what can and can't be done.

...

And if anybody doubts that McDonald is merely another baby step in a very, very long journey, consider that it took 214 pages to conclude that the right is incorporated.  Just wait until the Supremes have to struggle with some of the tougher questions, like whether children under the age of 6 months living in a home for which an application to possess a firearm has been made will have to pass a physical examination to demonstrate competency in firearms handling.  Yes, the possibilities are endless.

Meanwhile, getting back to Mayor Daley's rantings, this sentence gives pause for thought:

He said he also wants to save taxpayers from the financial cost of lawsuits if police shoot someone in the house because the officer felt threatened.

This is absurd. The courts know how to handle lawsuits over police shootings, and police officers have always been allowed to shoot when they reasonably feel their life is in danger. If the handgun ban is struck down, threatening a police officer with a gun will still be a crime, even if the gun is legally owned, and the police rules for use of force won't change, just has they haven't changed anywhere else in the country where people can own handguns.

What Mayor Daley is really worried about is that the City of Chicago has been paying out millions of dollars in damages for the illegal or dangerous conduct of its police officers, and Mayor Daley sees the impending fall of the handgun ban as an excuse to drum up some sort tort protection. It's incredibly cynical.

The Supreme Court has spoken:

Court rules for gun rights, strikes Chicago handgun ban.

In another dramatic victory for firearm owners, the Supreme Court has ruled unconstitutional Chicago, Illinois' 28-year-old strict ban on handgun ownership, a potentially far-reaching case over the ability of state and local governments to enforce limits on weapons.

So, anyone know how soon I'll be able to buy that pair of Desert Eagle 50s I've been wanting? They're so pretty.

I had a frustrating science discussion with a friend the other day. Somehow, our conversation had turned to the subject of cooking -- about which I know nearly nothing -- and my friend mentioned that someday he'd like to have an induction cooktop. He told me that when you place a pan on an induction cooker and turn it on, the food will begin to sizzle almost immediately.

To me that sounded like trouble. My intuition was that a fast-heating cooker would result in cooking temperatures that were way too high. I tried to explain why, but my grasp of physics and engineering is sketchy at best, and I wasn't able to get my point across.

Now that I've had time to think about it, and done some research, I think I know how to explain it. So I figured I'd post it here and maybe someone who understands the principles better will stumble on it and straighten me out.

The idea behind an induction cooktop is that the cooking pan is positioned right over an inductive electrical coil that's just under the surface of the cooktop. An oscillating current is passed through the coil, reversing direction a few thousand times a second. The current creates a magnetic field that oscillates at the same frequency. This field is just large enough to pass through the metal base of the pan, allowing the rising and collapsing magnetic fields to induce eddy currents. The metal of the pan has a natural electrical resistance, so the induced eddy currents cause the pan to heat up.

The advantage is that the cooking pan itself is the source of all the heat used to cook the food. There's no open flame or red-hot heating coil, and neither the cooktop nor the induction coil heats up. (The cooktop does come in contact with the heated pan, so it will warm up from conduction, but it's usually made of something that absorbs heat slowly.)

Imagine a pan sitting on a stove that hasn't been turned on. If the pan has been there a while, it should be at room temperature. This is not as simple a situation as it seems, because the pan isn't just at the same temperature as the room, it's also in thermal equilibrium with the room. That is, there is no net heat flow between the pan and the room, so the pan stays at a constant temperature.

This is not to say that the pan is thermally isolated from the room. The warm surface of the pan radiates heat out into the room, and the warm parts of the room radiate heat into the pan. Similarly, if any part of the pan is warmer than the air around it, heat will be conducted into the air, and vice versa. The point is that the pan and the room still exchange heat by the usual means -- radiation, conduction, convection -- it's just that the heat flowing into the pan is exactly matched by the heat flowing out of the pan.

This is a necessary condition for any object that is staying at a fixed temperature. If the heat flows in and out didn't match, the object would experience heating or cooling.

Now fire up the burner under the pan. The flame is a new source of heat that is transfered into the pan. However, simply turning on the burner does nothing to change the rate at which heat flows out of the pan. Since more heat is flowing in than out, the pan must heat up.

When the temperature of the pan rises, that affects the heat transfer between the pan and the surrounding room because a hotter pan will transfer more heat into the relatively cool room. Since the room stays at about the same temperature, the rate of heat transfer back into the pan stays about the same. (When you cook something, the kitchen probably does heat up a bit, but only by a few degrees, which is negligible compared to the cooking pan, which heats up hundreds of degrees.)

Eventually, the rate at which heat is shed to the surrounding room will be high enough to exactly offset the new heat flowing into the pan from the burners. At this point the pan will once again be in thermal equilibrium with its environment -- which now includes the burner -- and the temperature of the pan will stop changing.

The process is pretty much the same for an induction heated pan, except that instead of heat flowing in from the burner, the heat is generated within the material of the pan by induction. The pan's temperature still starts increasing, and stops only when the temperature of the pan increases to the point where heat transfer to the room is high enough to exactly offset the rate at which heat is being generated in the pan.

(I'm pretty much hand-waving away the effects of the food in the pan by assuming that there's just enough food to give us that sizzle we were talking about. Maybe it's just a few slices of bacon.)

Over a broad range of conditions, the amount by which an object changes temperature is proportional to the amount of heat energy transferred. So, for example, raising the temperature of an object by 5 degrees will require a transfer of 5 times as much heat energy as raising its temperature one degree.

Similarly, the rate at which the temperature changes is usually proportional to the rate at which energy is transfered. Any change in energy over time is called power, which is usually measured in watts. The higher the power, the more energy is transferred per second. So the less time it takes to heat an object to a given temperature, the greater the power of the heating mechanism.

For our purposes, let's assume that a typical gas stove can heat a pan to the sizzle temperature in one minute. Let's also say that when my friend says an induction cooker makes the food sizzle almost instantly, he means within 5 seconds. Since that's 1/12 the time it takes the gas burner, that means that the induction coil must produce heat in the pan at 12 times the rate at which the burner transfers heat.

Actually, since the shorter time span allows less time for the heat to flow out of the pan into the room, quicker heating is also a more efficient way to reach the same temperature. The magnitude of this effect is very dependent on the system under consideration. In the interest of keeping the math simple, I'll assume that the induction system has 10 times the power of the burner.

Now let's pull another number out of thin air and assume the burner is transfering heat at 1000 watts. Then the induction coil must transfer heat at the rate of 10,000 watts to achieve the desired heating speed.

That gets the pan to the sizzle point, but the heating process doesn't necessarily stop, since the heating only stops when the pan is in thermal equilibrium with its environment, which now includes a 10000 watt burner.

As near as I can tell from a little Googling, on a typical gas stove, a dry pan can heat to about 500°F. In other words, if the burner is transfering heat to the pan at 1000 watts, then when the pan reaches 500°F, it's transfering 1000 watts to it's environment. So how hot does the pan have to get to shed 10 times as much energy?

It's hard to say, because it depends on details of the heat transfer mechanism, which I'm not very sure of. However, since a gas burner heats a pan hot enough to cook food, I think the induction stove with 10 times the power is going to get way too hot for normal cooking.

I've since looked up a little bit of thermodynamics and learned that in the worst case, getting rid of 10 times the heat could require a full 10-fold increase in temperature difference between the pan and the room, meaning the pan wouldn't stop heating until it hit about 3000°F. That's more than enough to turn the pan into a pool of white-hot molten metal, melting its way down through the stove.

On the other hand, I think the best case would be if the process is dominated by radiative cooling, in which case the radiated energy increases as the fourth power of the the temperature, which my rough calculations show would require a temperature of only 860°F. That's still way above normal cooking temperature. If you turned the lights out, you'd see a faint red glow like a branding iron.

When I was trying to explain my concerns to my friend, I didn't present it nearly as clearly as I have here (and I realize this is still not a model of clarity). He didn't see the problem, and he kept pointing out the induction process heated the pan much more efficiently than an open flame, so not as much energy was needed.

But that misses the point. The amount of waste heat is irrelevant to the problem. In order to heat the pan 10 times faster, the induction cooker simply must pump energy into it 10 times as fast. This means that when the pan stabilizes at its equilibrium temperature, it's going to have to emit 10 times as much energy into the surrounding room. This far higher energy emission rate can only occur if the equilibrium temperature is also far higher.

My point was that something was missing from our mental model of how induction cooking worked, because our mental model predicted a top-end cooking temperature far too high for normal cooking. No engineer would design an induction cooktop to overheat food so much. There's no point to it.

We did manage to come up with a couple of theories. My friend pointed out that induction cookers only heat the bottom of the pan. This means the burners need less than 10 times the power to get to the sizzle point 10 times as fast, because they are bringing less of the pan to that temperature.

My theory was that the induced eddy currents would occur on the surface of the pan, the inside and the outside, without directly heating the interior thickness of the metal. Since the food sizzles when the surface touching it reaches the sizzle point, this again reduces the amount of mass required to be heated, thus reducing the required energy and requiring less power to reach the sizzle point quickly.

A bit of research on the web seems to indicate that both of these theories are true. Induction cookers don't heat the pan sides directly, and eddy currents do indeed hug the surface. However, it turns out that neither of those is the real solution to the overheating problem.

When heated by an induction cooker, each type of pan reacts differently, depending on its shape, size, and construction materials. To achieve optimum cooking and energy transfer, an induction cooktop has to be able to adapt its performance to each pan. Fortunately, the effectiveness of a particular frequency can be detected by measuring the rate of energy consumption of the induction coil, and the induction wave can be modulated until the energy transfer is at the desired level.

The point is that, contrary to what I had been imagining, an induction cooktop is not just a coil that blasts out a magnetic wave. The inductor's resonance circuit includes a switched power supply that is controlled by a microcontroller -- a small computer -- that continually monitors the coil current and adjusts the induction wave form from moment to moment according to a programmed formula.

Once you have a computer on board, lots of things become possible, like changing the wave if the pan is moved to a new position, or shutting off the power when the pan is removed.

Or detecting when pan overheats. In a modern induction cooktop, each induction coil has a temperature sensor that detects when the cooktop, and therefore the pan, gets too hot, at which point it cuts off the power until the pan cools.

Hey, does everybody remember those viral dance videos from OK Go? They did them for songs like "A Million Ways" (the one in the back yard) and "Here It Goes Again" (the one with the treadmills). If not, you might want to follow those links to take a look (they won't let me embed them).

Those are great fun, and I have a lot of respect for the amount of work OK Go puts into entertaining their fans...

But now take a look at the Nicholas Brothers in this scene from Stormy Weather:

Fred Astaire once called this "the greatest dance number ever filmed."

I think if you wanted to do something like this today, you'd probably have to use CGI...

A little while ago, my wife and I noticed that our ragdoll cat, Dozer, had taken to sleeping on the floor right in front of our china cabinet. We wanted to make him more comfortable, so we put down a cat pillow for him, right in the spot where he liked to sleep.

Anyone who owns a cat could've predicted how that would turn out:

Larger ImageDozer Meets the Cat Pillow

People complain about reporters asking asking crazy questions, but those are sometimes the ones that get the most interesting results.

For example, in the video below, the reporter goes through the trouble of setting up an ambush interview on a Congressman, and then asks him a really dumb generic question: "Do you fully support the Obama agenda?"

I mean, seriously, couldn't he have phoned that one in? Ambush interviews are supposed to be for hitting people with questions they really don't want to hear, like "We have a witness who says you sold your BP stock because you received inside information from the CEO. How do you respond, Senator?" or "Is it true you just spent a week in Argentina with your mistress?"

A good ambush interview is wasted on a pointless question like "Do you fully support the Obama agenda?" which any seasoned politician can answer with a platitude like "My voting record speaks for itself." There's no way you can get a good story out of that.

Unless, that is, you get a response like this guy got from Democratic representative Bob Etheridge:

Of course, this is all over the internet. Yet, as Ethical Alarmist Jack Marshall points out, the news media is missing the story:

Today, the day after a video surfaced showing North Carolina Congressman Bob Etheridge grabbing, restraining, and wrapping his hand around the neck of a young man who dared to ask him a question on a Washington D.C. sidewalk, "The Daily Beast's" #4 story was the revelation that former Ebay CEO and current G.O.P. candidate for governor of California once shoved an Ebay subordinate in a moment of anger and paid six figures in damages. The story about a sitting U.S. Congressman assaulting a U.S. citizen without provocation on a public street doesn't appear anywhere in the liberal-leaning news aggregation site's news summary.

Meanwhile, The Washington Post relegated coverage of the Etheridge attack to its blogs, most of which made the focus of their coverage the "mystery" of the assaulted student's identity and that of his companion. This theme was picked up elsewhere too: Who were these guys? Were they Republican operatives? Right Wing hit men disguised as students? Was this a plot?

Here is the complete list of people who could have been the victims of Etheridge 's assault whose identity and motives would change his culpability: nobody. It doesn't matter if the student Etheridge assaulted was really Karl Rove on his knees, or Ann Coulter in a mask, or Lindsay Lohan in a desperate cry for help. It doesn't make one bit of difference. A U.S. Congressman assaulted a citizen in public.

Really, shouldn't that be the big story?

Some people have suggested that this is a Republican dirty trick of some kind, buttressing their arguments with the fact that the face of the on-camera interviewer is blurred out, and he has not been identified. As some Democratic party hack puts it:

"Motives matter, and I think you can see who was behind this," said DNC spokesman Brad Woodhouse just now. "This was a Republican party tracking operation. If it wasn't a party tracker or intern, why is the face blurred and why is the source hidden? You know if it had been a right wing blog, they'd identify themselves and they'd be booking this person on TV all day. Republicans know if they admit their involvement in this game of gotcha it will undermine their credibility. One minute this guy is interviewing a member of Congress on camera and the next a video is released with his face blurred out? If that doesn't tell you this is a Republican Party hatchet job nothing will."

I was inclined to buy this scenario at first. I know if I had been the interviewer and gotten a video this great, I sure wouldn't have taken my name off of it. It does seem a little suspicious.

(Note that I was just buying the scenario, not the argument -- assaulting people on the public street doesn't become okay just because they're members of the opposition party.)

But then, I got to thinking...If this was a setup, what exactly was the plan here? How could these supposed Republican party operatives have known the Congressman would go off like that?

And here's another one:

"It was pure Gotcha, try to trap a congressman, because they refused to tell them who they were, what school they were from," [Democratic Consultant Brad] Crone said. "And if you're working on a project, tell the truth."

Crone's got a point. It's not required by law or anything, but most real reporters give their names and the name of the organization they work for. I know I try to do it when I interview someone, but I sometimes forget. Maybe the kid forgot too.

Or maybe he intentionally withheld his identity.

But so what? If this was a "Gotcha," what was the plan? How was asking a simple, vapid question a "trap"? Most public figures would have politely asked for a name and then walked off if they got no response. Again, for this to be some sort of Republican plot, these two guys would have had to somehow predict that Etheridge would go nuts like this.

I'm not buying it. Etheridge assaulted some guy on the street. That's the story.

Update: Jamison Koehler discusses the legal definition of assault in D.C.

Nick Gillespie notes that Peter McWilliams died ten years ago today. McWilliams was a resister of the War On Drugs. He was also one of its casualties.

McWilliams was very sick with AIDS and cancer, and the medicines he used made him nauseated, which he was able to ameliorate by smoking marijuana. The DEA charged McWilliams with various crimes in connection with a medical marijuana operation. Forbidden by the judge from mentioning his medical condition in court, he was forced to plead guilty and hope for leniency. While out on $250,000 bond for sentencing, and refraining from using marijuana as a condition of the bond secured by his mother's house, he apparently vomited and choked to death.

I only know of McWilliams through his amazing book, Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do: The Absurdity of Consensual Crimes in a Free Country. It's a passionate cry for freedom, the simple human freedom to do what we want as long as no one else gets hurt. Go ahead and click the link. That's not an Amazon page, that's the entire book, posted online for free the way McWilliams wanted it.

This book has been a huge influence on my personal moral philosophy. I had already come to an intellectual conclusion that things like the War on Drugs were wrong, but I hadn't really internalized the idea. Then I read a section in Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do where McWilliams describes getting a ticket for a traffic violation and later getting busted for smoking marijuana. He points out that the traffic violation presented a genuine danger to his fellow human beings, but using drugs harmed no one other than perhaps the user, so despite what the cops and the legislature and almost everyone thought, the traffic violation was the greater crime. In fact, using drugs was no crime at all. I realized that this crazy idea was something I could believe. And it changed everything.

The other thing I remember about McWillaims is his astonishment at the types of people who fought on the dark side:

I write these things and feel myself in mortal combat with a gnarly monster; then I remember the human faces of the kind people who tried to make me comfortable with small talk as they went through my belongings as neatly as they could. Then I remember, painfully, that the War on Drugs is a war fought by decent Americans against other decent Americans, and these people rifling through my belongings really were America's best -- bright young people willing to die for their country in covert action. It takes a special kind of person for that, and every Republic must have a generous number of them in order to survive.

But instead of our best and our brightest being trained to hunt down terrorist bombs or child abductors -- to mention but two useful examples -- our misguided government is using all that talent to harass and arrest Blacks, Hispanics, the poor, and the sick -- the casualties in the War on Drugs, the ones that, to quote Leonard Cohen again, "sank beneath your wisdom like a stone." It is the heart of the evil of a prohibition law in a free country. After all, picking on someone with AIDS and cancer is a little redundant, don't you think?

On the way out, one of the DEA agents said, "Have a nice day."

I believe the comment was sincere.

I never know what to make of that. Oh, I understand what McWilliams was saying, and I think it's probably true. It's a mistake to think these people are stupid, and it's probably unhelpful to think of them as evil. But sometimes that just makes it all the more hopeless: How can these "decent Americans" not understand that they are hurting people for no reason?

Peter's gone now, but in his short time on earth he influenced a lot of people, and his ideals live on in so many of us. I wish he was still here to see some of it.

Chances are, you don't enjoy movies as much as you think you will. That's because movie tickets present us consumers with a tricky problem of incomplete knowledge. We want to buy tickets to movies we'll enjoy, but the only sure way to know how much we'll enjoy a movie is to watch it, and we can't do that unless we've already bought a ticket.

So we try to make an educated guess. We watch trailers, read reviews, and talk to friends who've already seen it, hoping to get enough information to make a good estimate of how much we'd enjoy it if we bought a ticket. Then we compare our estimate of our enjoyment to the cost of the movie -- including the price of the ticket, the cost of snacks, and the value of our time -- and decide whether or not to give the movie a chance.

We'll never be able to estimate exactly how much we'll enjoy a movie we haven't seen -- we just don't have enough information -- so there will always be an error factor. That is, our estimate of our enjoyment is conceptually equal to our actual enjoyment plus a random error factor (which can be positive or negative).

If the error factor is random, you'd think that would mean we would find ourselves enjoying movies more than we expected or less than we expected with equal probability. But it turns out that that only happens if we ignore our estimates and just go see every movie we can. We get a different result if we only go see movies for which we estimate a high enjoyment value, because the movies we overestimate will tend to have a higher estimated enjoyment value than the movies we underestimate.

For example, if you estimate your enjoyment of 100 movies and split them into two groups by rank -- the highest 50 and the lowest 50 -- the higher group is likely to have more overestimations, and the lower group is likely to have more underestimations. So if you go and see all the movies in the top half, you will see more movies which you overestimated. In other words, you will see movies which you enjoy less than your estimate predicted you would. As I said at the top of this post, you don't enjoy movies as much as you think you will.

This is a variation on a phenomenon called the winner's curse. The name comes from the observation that in an auction, the person who bids highest is likely to be the person who overestimates the value of the auctioned item the most.

I was reminded of all this a few days ago by a post I first saw at Gideon's a public defender blog about a new American Psychological Association paper which shows that lawyers overestimate their chances at trial which has made the rounds of the legal blogosphere. Here's a bit from the abstract of the paper:

The study investigated the realism in predictions by a sample of attorneys (n=481) across the United States who specified a minimum goal to achieve in a case set for trial. They estimated their chances of meeting this goal by providing a confidence estimate. After the cases were resolved, case outcomes were compared with the predictions. Overall, lawyers were overconfident in their predictions

This makes sense as another example of the winner's curse. Lawyers and their clients are more likely to take a case to trial when their estimate of the outcome is high, but because overestimations result in higher estimates, those are precisely the cases which they are most likely to be overestimating. Whereas the cases they underestimate are more likely to look like losers, so they're more likely to settle before trial.

In other words, the cases lawyers take to trial are those in which they have the most confidence, but those are also likely to be the cases in which they are most overconfident.

Unfortunately for my nice little story, the winner's curse is also something of a paradox. The problem is that lawyers presumably know about the winner's curse -- maybe not by that name, but the concept isn't exactly a dark secret. More importantly, the lawyers will have experienced the winner's curse. They will see the outcomes of the cases the take to trial, and they should be able to use that knowledge to adjust their estimates to eliminate the curse. And yet this recent study shows that doesn't happen.

It's not just lawyers. Economists have studied the winner's curse in artificial simulations and in the real world for years, and there is some evidence that people consistently fail to compensate for it. It's a bit of a mystery. The most obvious non-economic explanation is that people are a bit stupid, but that's unsatisfying because it accomplishes too much: Once you assume that people are stupid, you can use that to explain any behavior you don't understand.

The APA paper doesn't mention the winner's curse, but a section called Metacognitive Realism does discuss several possible causes for overconfidence: It could be a side effect of zealous representation, a result of the need to display confidence to attract clients, distortion due to the perception of control, or simple wishful thinking.

I don't know enough about psychology to begin to guess whether any of those theories are correct, but I know enough about economics to notice something that's missing. Lawyers are supposed to represent the interests of the client, but they wouldn't be human if they didn't also consider their own interests. Depending on the fee arrangements, many lawyers get paid more when a case goes to trial, which gives them an incentive to go to trial when it wouldn't be best for the client.

So if lawyers are following the path of higher earnings, we'd expect the rate of overestimation to be higher for lawyers who make more by going to trial.

The APA study doesn't report fee arrangements directly, but we can try to make a few guesses from the data in the paper's Table 2, which I used to prepare this data:

Success rate	Criminal prosecution	Criminal defense	Civil plaintiff	Civil defense
Estimated	72.8	50.1	65.1	65.1
Actual	67.1	43.7	51.6	62.6
% Overestimated	8	15	26	4

Some criminal defense attorneys have a fee structure that brings in more money when they take a case to trial, but as far as I know all prosecutors work for a fixed salary, so the overestimation rate should be higher for criminal defense attorneys than for prosecutors, and indeed the data seems to confirm this, with defense attorneys overestimating their chances of achieving their goals by 15% to the prosecutors' 8%.

For the civil bar, I'd expect to see a similar result, since plaintiffs' attorneys often work on a contingency basis (which aligns their interests with their clients) but civil defense attorneys usually charge by the hour and therefore make more by going to trial. However, the data goes the other way, with plaintiff's lawyers wildly overestimating their chances at 26%, while civil defense lawyers only miss by 4%.

Whatever's going on, I guess it's more complicated than my simple economic theory. Or maybe I'm misunderstand the data. Or else I'm misunderstanding how lawyers earn money from legal work. In any case, it's getting late and I'm going to bed.

Heck, maybe plaintiff's lawyers and criminal defense lawyers are all just romantic dreamers...

Jeff Gamso has a fascinating post about the probabilities behind a DNA match.

If you do felony criminal law (from either side of the aisle) and I tell you the number is 6.17 quadrillion, you probably assume that I'm talking about DNA.

The number will reflect just how unlikely it is that the DNA in the whatever left at the scene could have come from anyone other than the defendant. There are four things you need to know about that number.

If you want to know what those four things are, read Jeff's post. I want to talk about something else. It's that number, 6.17 quadrillion. There's an important proviso that's missing, although Jeff touches on it at the end of his post:

Next time you're on a bus or a plane or a train or in a restaurant or movie theater or anywhere where there are a bunch of people, look around.

You never know when your not-twin, the one whose DNA profile is the same as yours, might be in the crowd. Despite the odds of 1 in 6.17 quadrillion. Hell, it might be one of the jurors.

If you pick a person at random off the street -- or one of the random readers of this blog -- the odds of someone else having that person's DNA are not 1 in 6.17 quadrillion. They're only about 1 in 500. That's because about 1 person in 500 was born as one of a pair of identical twins.

Identical twins occur when a single zygote in the mother's womb splits into two separate zygotes which develop into two separate individuals. Since all the cells in the zygotes trace back to a single zygote and therefore a single fertilized egg, they have essentially the same DNA.

All of this makes me wonder why this problem doesn't come up more often in news stories about trials. If a criminal defendant has an identical twin, claiming he committed the crime would explain the DNA evidence. As a bonus, it would also explain things like photo arrays, line-ups, and lots of other eyewitness testimony. I guess a defendant might be reluctant to accuse his closest brother of a crime, but I would think that a pair of identical twins creates enough reasonable doubt to protect them both.

I've heard that claiming someone else commited the crime is sometimes called the SODDI defense, which stands for Some Other Dude Did It. I'd think we'd occasionally hear about the METDI defense: My Evil Twin Did It.