So as many of my readership found out (all three of you), I’ve broken down and joined Twitter. I explained my break down to bdotdub thusly:
even curmudgeons need to experience life outside the cave every once in a while. we’ll see how it goes. remember: the sun burns.
That’s not the whole story. I realized that I’m losing touch with a lot of my friends, mostly due to my hectic schedule, somewhat due to being selfish, and a little because I don’t have an adequate mechanism to shoot random ideas at people and get some back. While I think the idea of writing a less-than-140-character message expressing a random idea that probably no one will care about is a useless one, the idea of having a friend read my thought and think about that idea, having implicitly just communicated with me, is not a bad one. I get the same in receipt.
That, and it takes little effort to either send or receive, so the addition of it to my day is non-intrusive.
I’m still on the fence on calling them “tweets” though. I do hate that they’ve corrupted the use of ‘#’ to indicate a topic to which to send “tweets”. I hope that ‘#’ will never leave my mind as the IRC chat room symbol.
Alas, if you’d care to, you can now follow me at minusnine on Twitter.
”Naples did absolutely nothing wrong,” Dombroski said. ”We just didn’t do anything right.”
- High school football coach Rich Dombroski, from A 91-0 Football Game Tough for Both Sides to Take.
Even when one is down, realism is where the truth lies. It may not help the situation, but finding a place to lay blame when the reality is clear is generally non-productive.
(Or, at least that’s the theory I’m testing recently).
The New York Times has written an overview of some of the more important cases appearing in the Supreme Court’s docket this term. There were three paragraphs that made me laugh. Emphasis mine.
Environment
Federal courts in California have issued injunctions limiting the use of sonar in Navy training exercises off Southern California on the ground that it harms marine mammals. In Winter v. Natural Resources Defense Council, No. 07-1239, the Bush administration argues that the training is vital to national security and that the courts should not interfere.
In Summers v. Earth Island Institute, No. 07-463, the court will consider who has standing to challenge environmental regulations. Winter and Summers will be argued on Wednesday, and decisions are expected by the spring.
While I haven’t read the brief myself, I suspect that Summers v. Earth Island Institute was included in the article just to be clever in the last sentence. Though, I would have been more impressed had the author managed to get Fall in there somehow as well.
In Entergy Corporation v. Environmental Protection Agency, No. 07-588, the court will consider whether the Clean Water Act authorizes the E.P.A. to use cost-benefit analysis.
This is kind of ridiculous. The actual SCOTUS question is, does some obscure law “limit EPA’s weighing of costs and benefits only to the Second Circuit’s ‘cost effectiveness’ test?” So, in other words, “Does the EPA have the ability to act rationally or should it be punished for doing so?”