Idea Lawyer Blog

Real crime, real passion, real jail time - but the victim was an avatar...!!!

Divorce me and You're Dead!

Thanks to K.R. for submitting this story....

I confess I enjoy watching the broadcast show "MythBusters," vicariously rigging all manner of apparatus winches, clamps, rotary arms, timing circuits and generally playing around within the arena of physics.
If you haven't seen the show, they start with some myth and the questions about the properties at play. (Example: Can a man stop a samurai sword by clapping it in his hands?) Then state the proposition they intend to test and the challenges. ( Can man clap hands together at sufficient speed to stop descending sword given speed man with sword can slice down? Test hand clap speed and strength, test sword swinging speed, do the math, and find an answer.

I ran my own "mini-mythbuster" on Sunday. The myth: hanging a large carpet vertically on a wall is a two person job.
Dimension 8 feet by 8.5 feet. Weight- bloody heavy! When rolled up, it was liftable to carry but not hoistable from a ladder to the desired height. It was empirically determined that one could not climb the ladder, flop it against the wall, hold with one arm against the wall and hammer with another. Second, it was flopping when unrolled.

What to do? The solution took 4 hours, using only the limited tools at hand (ladder, hammer, eight 3 inch nails, and four 8 foot lengths of stud wood, and a never-been used staple gun which triggered the hunter- gatherer instinct when I saw it was ON SALE at a drastically reduced at the Hardware Store).

What did I learn? Because of the limits (physical strength, available tools) most of the time I spent thinking about the problem. No, I did not use the Internet (do they have this stuff on YouTube under "pig-headed DIY") - honestly, I just thought by myself, trying to envision how to overcome the weight and flop problems. When the solution appeared, the execution did not take long. I see a future for me ---- in sticking to my day job :)

noon- the carpet and the intended wall

2:45- not much progress can be seen, but I have an idea

4pm: job done

photo credit: me and my iphone

Title dilemma
Tree of Carping?
Can one hear kvetching murmurs on the gentle breeze?
"This branch-- its really getting under my scales"
Or, the accurate but too -long- for- a- Flckr tag:
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Actinopterygii
Order: Cypriniformes
Family: Cyprinidae
Genus: Cyprinus
Species: C. carpio

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photo credit: the author

From 2008, plagued by campaign spam and spin of viral messages and robo-calls, a look back to a time of ink and inches:

In 1922, Roscoe Pound and Felix Frankfurter undertook a detailed quantitative study of crime reporting in Cleveland, Ohio, newspapers for January 1919, counting column inches. They found that whereas, in the first half of the month, the total amount of space given over to crime was 925 inches, in the second half it lept to 6,642 inches. This was in spite the fact that the number of crimes reported had increased only from 345 to 363.

They concluded that although the city's much publicized "crime wave" was largely fictitious and manufactured by the press, the coverage had a very real consequence for the administration of criminal justice. Because the public believed they were in the middle of a crime epidemic, they demanded an immediate response from the police and the city authorities. These agencies complied, wishing to retain public support, caring "more to satisfy popular demand than to be observant of the tried process of law". The result was a greatly increased likelihood of miscarriages of justice and sentences more severe than the offenses warranted.[20][21]
His long research into the power behind government in the United States led him to state "The real rulers in Washington are invisible, and exercise power from behind the scenes."
excerpted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Frankfurter
footnotes
[20] Jensen, Klaus Bruhn (May 10, 2002). A Handbook of Media and Communication Research: Qualitative and Quantitative Methodologies. UK: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-22588-4. p. 45–46
[21]Pound, Roscoe; Felix Frankfurter (1922). Criminal Justice in Cleveland. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Foundation. p. 546

"Future lawyers should be more aware that law is not a system of abstract logic, but the web of arrangements, rooted in history, but also in hopes, for promoting to a maximum the full use of a nation's resources and talents."

-Justice Felix Frankfurter
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Frankfurter

Is that a gourd bar pick-up line? Guess my weight and take me home?