Peter Tillers
The dynamic evidence page
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.
"[Defense counsel] denied that the twin stand-in was intended to get the alleged victim to identify the wrong man, according to the newspaper’s review of the transcript. 'This honorable court asked for Mr. White [accused's name was "White"], and that’s who’s at the table today, Mr. White,' she said."
Colleges] are not simply for the education of students. This is an essential function, but the raison d’être of a college is to nourish a world of intellectual culture; that is, a world of ideas, dedicated to what we can know scientifically, understand humanistically, or express artistically. In our society, this world is mainly populated by members of college faculties: scientists, humanists, social scientists (who straddle the humanities and the sciences properly speaking), and those who study the fine arts. Law, medicine and engineering are included to the extent that they are still understood as “learned professions,” deploying practical skills that are nonetheless deeply rooted in scientific knowledge or humanistic understanding.
The Ontario Court of Appeal has ruled that the victim of an alleged sexual assault may not have to remove her niqab while testifying as long as the fairness of a trial is not compromised.Muslim Woman Wants to Appear Veiled in Canadian Court The World (Dec. 8, 2011):
The Supreme of Canada has heard the case of a Muslim woman who wants to appear veiled in court while she testifies against the two men she has accused of sexual assault.
NYTimes article on the biggest and baddest black hole yet
and
Wikipedia article on black holes
and
Hubblesite on black holes (highly recommended)
President Obama will be attending a fund-raising event this evening on 12th Street. As a result, there are police barricades in the area, which will be set up as early as 5 pm. [They were set up in the morning.] The police will clip the locks and remove any bicycle in the area.
For those of you who have already brought your bikes to school, we are reserving an area in the third-floor lounge for bicycle storage until the close of the building this evening. However, please be aware that we do not have bike racks available, and that storing it here will be at your own risk, since there will be no security presence.
I then wondered whether it is really necessary to remove all bicycles -- without advance notice and without, I assume, due process or just compensation (did he ever get the hang of that due process stuff?) -- and to do so two hours before the President's scheduled appearance.If you have not yet arrived at school but were planning on riding your bicycle here, we suggest that you use an alternate form of transportation.
State courts around the country have found many ways, some unusual, to deal with the cuts. In Mount Gilead, Ohio, the Morrow County Municipal Court, like many others, is now working a four-day week. And that is not as large a hardship as the county experienced in 2009, when the court announced that it could not take new case filings for three months, until the end of the budget cycle, unless litigants brought their own paper for the court to use. Money for paper had run out.John Schwartz Critics Say Budget Cuts for Courts Risk Rights NYTimes (Nov. 26, 2011).“Even though paper is inexpensive, it’s still enough to shut us down,” said Judge Lee W. McClelland. Ultimately, he said, people in the community donated enough paper so that “we were able to limp through the year.”
“We also got about three rolls of toilet paper,” he said. “Obviously, they were confused about what kind of paper we needed.”
