Deleuzean Potato

This story was on the BBC a couple of days ago. I'm sure Nora will like it, as she's expressed a similar concern with Lola's cat, Tofuty. I'm sure the health effect the Vegan Society claims actually does exist. I strongly suspect, though, that it's largely the result of the average vegan paying more attention to their diet than the average non-vegan. I'm also sympathetic to Ms Allen's claim that it's "unethical" to subject one's children to an unhealty environment. It's concievable that childrens' dietary needs might be so much more different than adults' that raising one's children vegan from birth is unfeasible. But I'm not as convinced as Ms Allen is about the evidence. It would be really nice if I could see citations to studies, but I'm too lazy to find them myself.

Dean purchased a Geiger Counter last quarter. He's been
playing with it. He left it in the RAS office for a week, counting cosmic rays. He sent a bunch of data to Steven, who then showed it to me. Steven and I looked at it over the weekend, eventually producing this (link to fullsize):



We puzzled over this for a bit, because we thought we had done something wrong to the data. Turns out, that is the graph we wanted. The malfunction was with the data: the resolution was too low for the signal Dean was looking for. Steven later histogrammed Dean's data (again, link to fullsize to save bandwidth):



Steven also put up some statistical figures on the data. The histogram looks very Poisson, which is what we expect for a low-probability event like this. Assuming it is a Poisson, those figures should be enough to figure out something. I just can't remember enough stat, and can't quite think at this point what information we're looking for. Perhaps more in an update.

Nora sent me this, from the Onion. I don't know whether to laugh, or feel insulted:

"Jason was everything I wanted in a boyfriend as recently as three months ago," Bird said. "I used to dream of meeting someone who knew how to have fun and didn't let himself get weighed down by formalities and obligations. But my dreams never had the part where that person doesn't call for a week, then drops by at 3 a.m. with a broken mannequin torso under his arm."

Under the original wording of the 1976 Copyright Act, copyright lasted for life of the author plus 50 years for most works, and a fixed term of 75 years for corporate authors or works for hire. Congress extended these terms with the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act of 1998. The problem comes in when they made the extension retroactive; in addition to applying to all future works, it also applied to all currently existing works still under copyright. Eldred sued the government, protesting that this violated the finite terms aspect of the Copyright Clase, and that it violated the 1st Amedment. The Supreme Court granted certiorari for Eldred v. Ashcroft. We read and discussed the case in class. Someone asked if it would be permissible for Congress to do the opposite, to cut the term of existing copyrights. Surely in that case, the copyright holders would throw a fit. It was speculated that they would try to argue that this was illegal under the Takings Clause. I countered with the argument that the Sonny Bono Act constituted a Taking of my (member of the public) property (future public domain work).

Steven (correctly) pointed out to me that copyright isn't "property" in quite the same way that physical property is. "Intellectual Property" is just a metaphor; it doesn't reflect reality perfectly. Steven then points me to
Wheaton v. Peters, saying about as much. The Takings argument should be just as valid one way as the other. It shouldn't be valid either way, but I can't help but notice that Wheaton Peters was the first Copyright case the Supreme Court handled under the US Constitution. The trend since then has been towards considering Copyright to be a property right, primarily due to the use of the phrase "Intellectual Property" and the underlying metaphor.