Best Wishes for a Good or Meaningful New Year

May you have a good new year - assuming, of course, that you follow or recognize the Gregorian calendar.

Let me put it this way: may you have a good new year - perhaps even a dynamic one - when your new year arrives.
And if your new year promises not to be a good one (we know that not every year is filled with blue skies), may the new year at least make sense to you and have some sort of satisfying meaning for you.

Peter Tillers
The dynamic evidence page

Homeless(?) Student at Cardozo Law School!

Ah yes, so there is (unless his homelessness is a hoax). But the fellow seems to prefer being homeless.

• Tip of the hat, I guess, to Steve Simon.

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The dynamic evidence page
Evidence marshaling software MarshalPlan
It's here: the law of evidence on Spindle Law. See also this post and this post.

The Law School Bubble?

See the interesting article, William D. Henderson & Rachel M. Zahorsky, The Law School Bubble: How Long Will It Last if Law Grads Can’t Pay Bills? ABA Journal (online)(January 1 [sic], 2012).

History of Bayesianism, on YouTube

"A one hour presentation of 'The Theory That Would Not Die' given by the author [Sharon Bertsch McGrayne] at Carnegie Mellon University in October 2011 is available on CMU’s Youtube channel." Hykel Hosni, "What's Hot in ... Uncertain Reasoning," 6 The Reasoner 11 (Jan. 2012).


Go here for a video of a talk by McGrayne on another occasion -- and this video is not marred by distracting background noise.


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The dynamic evidence page
Evidence marshaling software MarshalPlan
It's here: the law of evidence on Spindle Law. See also this post and this post.

Acedia, or The Noonday Demons of Solitary, Sedentary Workers

John Plotz,Their Noonday Demons, and Ours NYTimes Sunday [sic] Book Review (Dec. 23, 2011):

By some miracle, you set aside a day to tackle that project you can’t seem to finish in the office. You close the door, boot up your laptop, open the right file and . . . five minutes later catch yourself thinking about dinner. By 10 a.m., you’re staring at the wall, even squinting at it between your fingertips. Is this day 50 hours long? Soon, you fall into a light, unsatisfying sleep and awake dizzy or with a pounding headache; all your limbs feel weighed down. At which point, most likely around noon, you commit a fatal error: leaving the room. I’ll just garden for a bit, you tell yourself, or do a little charity work. Hmmm, I wonder if my friend Gregory is around?

This probably strikes you as an extremely, even a uniquely, modern problem. Pick up an early medieval monastic text, however, and you will find extensive discussion of all the symptoms listed above, as well as a diagnosis. Acedia, also known as the “noonday demon,” appears again and again in the writings of the Desert Fathers from the fourth and fifth centuries. Wherever monks and nuns retreated into cells to labor and to meditate on matters spiritual, the illness struck.

[snip, snip]

...[N]ow that solitary unstructured brainwork has returned with a vengeance, we may be suffering an epidemic of early medieval acedia.

 

 




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The dynamic evidence page
Evidence marshaling software MarshalPlan
It's here: the law of evidence on Spindle Law. See also this post and this post.