Legislative Workshop

Well, I promised to issue my opinion on the two remaining classes in my 6-class schedule this semester. I’m not in the mood to talk about immigration, but I’ll issue my preliminary opinion on the Legislative Workshop.

Every Friday, I get to go to the Capitol building and have a class with the Revisor of Statutes for Kansas. Originally, I had understood the class to be a sort of seminar where there would be speakers coming in to tell us about various legislative issues... how to track bills, how the committee structure worked, how various statutes came to be and how they went through the overall process.

It seems now that the class is going to be something more in the nature of an editing class. Mr. Revisor of Statutes is going to have us editing proposed statutes, and I have a sneaking suspicion that he is short-handed in his office and simply holds the class each Spring in order to get the office work done on time (his office drafts and revises statutes, after all).

Mr. Revisor is an adorable old man. He tries to make jokes to the class, but predictably his jokes all fall flat, and he’s somehow more endearing because of it.

The really crazy part is that I think I’ve found the only person in the world who is more dull than I am. Here are some of the things we talked about today in class... (actual quotes)

"I staff the Legislative Coordination Committee which meets during the interim period. The committee is made up of the legislature’s leadership. The committee’s job is to choose the delegates to the Interstates Uniform Law Commission, but we only do that when one of the current delegates dies or retires. We don’t meet often, so it’s a plum staffing assignment."

"The Kansas legislature passes between 800 and 1000 bills each year... It’s been closer to 800 per year for the past few years, though. I’ve got a chart of the numbers back in my office. I’ll have to remember to bring it next time."

Wow. I mean, this is one hardcore dude. He’s jammin’ and slammin’ with the Legislative Coordination Committee? Damn! He’s Xtreme with a capitol X (ha ha ha... political puns are almost on the level of science jokes!).

Even though he is clearly trying to teach us something important, his methods leave a bit to be desired sometimes. He hands out a packet of photocopied materials to each student at the start of class and the package is what we talk about during class that day. After handing out our packets, Mr. Revisor of Statutes went back to his office to get a pen. While he was gone, I opened my packet and found on the second page the following diagram:


I was laughing so hard that I had to excuse myself from the room for a moment so that I could compose myself.






I know I can make some really unintelligible charts and models sometimes, but I'm impressed. I'm now in awe of the master. I'm half convinced that he let his grandchildren loose with a marker and then put a title on it. I'm not sure what he was trying to say here, but I think it has something to do with a box of water inside the sun being blasted by fire from above and about to be hit by a boulder or something. I can't rule out the possibility that it also might be some sort of glyph for summoning the foul demons of the House leadership.

Whatever it was, we passed over the picture without much comment. I just hope it isn't on the test, or I'm going to have to add a few creative additions like maybe a frog, some big polka-dots, a hotdog with mustard, and I should probably give the sun some alien antennae just for good measure.

If his mind works anything like mine does, I bet that'd get me the 'A'.

Too much plastic & the mysteriously slow airplane

I bought my immigration law textbook at the bookstore the other day and it came with lots of packaging. Yes, I know that books aren’t really in need of packaging usually, but nevertheless this one came with shrinkwrap (I guess just to show that it was new).

The book is actually a binder with loose-leaf pages. The loose-leaf pages were bound together in a thick layer of shrink-wrap. I peeled off the layer of shrink-wrap only to discover that underneath the shrink-wrap was a second independent layer of shrink-wrap. Apparently, these pages, already protected by being inside a thick 5-ring binder, needed the additional protection of two separate layers of packaging.

As I finally pulled out the loose-leaf pages and prepared to place them in the binder’s rings, I noticed something that blew my mind. Inside the pile of loose-leaf sheets was a set of tabbed sheets which could be used as dividers in the material. These special pages were themselves covered in a shiny layer of shrink-wrap. Yes, the tabbed pages were in shrink-wrap, in shrink-wrap, in shrink-wrap, in the binder.

Can anyone say a waste of packaging? How much plastic does a book really need?

I also ordered a textbook online. I ordered it from a company in Lawrence, Kansas, which is only about 30 miles away. You can drive there on the interstate in less than a half hour, but I was lazy and thought I’d just have it mailed to me so that I wouldn’t have to make the trip over just for a book.

They shipped it by 2-day air service.

Yes, a 48-hour delivery, by air-mail, for a city less than a half-hour away by car. Wow. What, did they have to fly the book to Atlanta first? The book is supposed to arrive on Monday, and I’d better see a sticker on it telling me it visited France or something.

If it was a direct flight, then just how slow is their airplane, anyway? My car can make it there in about 25 minutes. To take 2 days, the plane would need to be going something like six-tenths of 1 mile per hour. I walk almost three times faster than that speed. I’m pretty sure that you can’t even leave the ground at that speed, and I don’t think that you can call it air-mail if you just drive the plane to Topeka. If you can, in fact, leave the ground at that speed, I need to find out where to buy me some big honkin' wings to attach to my back.

If they do what I anticipate they’ll do, and fly the book to Kansas City first to a local distributor, then they have to realize that they just sent the book 40 miles in the opposite direction as Topeka. Then once the distributor has it in KC, the delivery driver will have to drive the book BACK to Lawrence on the way to Topeka.

I’m starting to think simply driving to Lawrence would have been the better choice.

Mind over matter only matters when you don't have a lot of matter to mind

Well, I’m 1/3 of the way to my goal.

Sometime in mid-November or so of 2005, I decided that it was high time I stopped living a life of wild hedonism (ha ha ha...). To be more specific, I decided that my love affair with comfort foods was more than a little unhealthy and was putting me on the fast track to death by the age of 50. In 5 years at KU, I went from being about 150 pounds to being about 190 pounds. So I made an early New Year’s resolution and decided that I ought to start living a bit more healthfully.

I weigh myself each morning, and adjust my food intake for the day accordingly. As of this morning, I’m down 20 pounds from my top weight. Only 40 more to go. I’m really starting to miss some of the foods I gave up though.

I cooked for a week for my parents’ Christmas Open House, but during the entire process (and during the festivities) I forbade myself from eating any of the goodies. While the cookies taunted me, I munched on carrot sticks and dry celery. The holidays came and went without me eating a single pastry. I’ve even given up soft drinks in favor of water.

Though miserable, I at least have something to show for it, even if it isn’t much. Despite my screaming muscles each night before sleeping, I’ve even begun a workout regimen I’ve maintained now on a daily basis for almost two months without a single day of interruption.
20 down. 40 more to go. With any luck, I’ll need to buy a new suit in time for my brother’s wedding.

Just a few random thoughts before tax class...

1. I’m slowly being dragged, technologically, into the late 20th century, and I’m finding that I enjoy some of the things that other people take for granted now. For all of my childhood and time as an undergraduate at KU, my parents never had cable television. My mother, brother, and I wanted it, but my father said that it was a waste of money and that we wouldn’t be getting it. So we didn’t. It wasn’t until only a year before I moved out that my father relented (once his golden boy, the drug addict he invited to live in our home, suggested it).

I have cable now in my apartment, and let me tell you, it is everything I hoped it would be and more. I enjoy having the opportunity to come home and turn on the television and watch the news. I like being able to watch the Daily Show and The Colbert Report now and then. It’s exciting that I get to watch C-Span when I can’t sleep at night.

Over the Christmas break, my brother helped me pick out a cell-phone, too. Having a cell-phone is fantastic. I don’t have to worry about having a land-line. I really wish they had a plan that gave you fewer minutes, though. I probably only spend about 3 hours on the phone in any given month, and 2.5 hours of those will be calls to (or from) my brother, and since he has a phone with the same company, I don’t get charged for those minutes anyway. I’m starting to wonder whether having my own place will be like when I was at KU, though. In five years living at KU, my parents only called me on the phone about once every three months (and almost always because they wanted something - "come home and sign this insurance form" or the like). I only got 6 phone calls in 5 years that were just to say ‘hello,’ and five of them were on my birthday. So far, my parents haven’t called once in almost three weeks.

2. I’m listening to Rimsky-Korsakov’s "Scheherazade" right now, and I’m once again reminded why I love his music.

3. I hate the auto-formatting function on WordPerfect. It came pre-installed on my computer when I bought it, and for a long time, I liked how WordPerfect functioned. Unfortunately, there does not seem to be any way to turn off the auto-formatting function. If I type "news:" on a document, the program automatically turns "news:" into a link that goes to nothing. If you try to put a web address into a document, it automatically turns it into a link, underlines it, and colors it blue. You can remove the underline and make the text black again, but I can’t seem to turn off the linking. I've just ordered a new computer online (should be here in a few weeks) and made sure to switch to Microsoft Word instead.

Troubling thoughts on mortality

Despite all of the constant reminders, sometimes it is hard for me to accept just how fragile and transient life is. I received an e-mail this morning from my mother informing me that a beloved high-school teacher of mine, Mr. Ryan McKeithan, died at his home on Monday night.

Mr. McKeithan was my debate and forensics coach for the four years of my high school career. He sharpened my critical thinking skills, made me a better communicator (though I could have stood to listen to his lessons more often), and gave a lot of the nerds and geeks a classroom to call home. As long as we produced results at the debate tournaments each weekend for him, he was content to give us the run of the classroom during school to do what we wanted while he sat at his desk and did whatever it was he did back there.

He was a quiet man, filled with conviction and a steadfast belief in the methods he thought were right, even when the students disagreed with him. Even though we had our disagreements over how to be successful in high school policy debate (which I still think I won... after all, I won local, regional, State, and went on to Nationals), he never pushed his personal style preferences down my throat. He coached when needed and also knew how to stand back and let a student try to fly on their own.

Along with the tragedy of his death, I have come to the realization that I can no longer afford to think of myself as a child. To paraphrase a character from one of my favorite movies, I almost always feel like I’m living a sort of practice life and that this is all just a test for the real thing I’ll get to later. When your teachers begin to die, it’s hard to tell yourself that you aren’t getting old.

In a bit more than a week, I will be 25. What do I have to show for it, though? I have plenty of interests but still don’t know ‘what I want to be when I grow up.’ I’ve only barely started assuming adult responsibilities like living on my own, and I’m starting to get sick of handling the small things like going grocery shopping and making sure that the ceiling of the microwave gets sponged off periodically. I’ve never smoked, had alcohol, tried illicit drugs, been to crazy college parties, kissed a woman, climbed to the top of a mountain, walked along the beach, left the country for any appreciable length of time, or any number of other things I’m expected to have done by now. I lived through the 80's and 90's but can rarely identify with the pop-culture references of those decades because, in a real sense, I didn’t participate in living them.

In almost 25 years on this planet, I haven’t lived what should be 25 years worth of experiences. You never know how many years you will be allotted in the grand scheme of things. If we think that we should make every moment count, then why haven’t I so far?

What must be my shortest post ever...

I was reading the news tonight before going to bed, and came across a gem of a news article that I thought I might share. The article concerned the legal execution of Clarence Ray Allen, a 76-year old man who had to be moved from a wheelchair onto the gurney on which the state of California injected him. He was elderly, had heart problems, was legally blind, suffered from limited mobility, was deaf, and had severe (late-stage) diabetes.

My thoughts and feelings on the death penalty are a matter for another day. Well, probably not, since I have a feeling that my excursions into philosophy are a bit too dry for good blogging, even if I will indulge in them from time to time. In any case, the reason I wanted to share a part of the article was for a quick snippet of text that left me hunched over my desk and laughing so hard that I had to start gasping for breath.

The article went as follows:

"Having suffered a heart attack back in September, Allen had asked prison authorities to let him die if he went into cardiac arrest before his execution, a request prison officials said they would not honor. "At no point are we not going to value the sanctity of human life," said prison spokesman Vernell Crittendon. "We would resuscitate him," then execute him."

The irony is both delicious and tragic. Who knew such words could come out of someone's mouth without having a punchline afterwards?

The old man with his gun: A fable

Hypothetical:

You live alone in a quiet suburban neighborhood. You are not rich, by any means, but you manage to have the resources to get by from paycheck to paycheck. You have few friends and live mostly alone except for your small dog and your beloved rose-garden.

One night, with little advance warning, an old man who lives down the block has his house attacked by some teenage punks. They take a baseball bat to his mailbox, TP his house, throw eggs on his car, and generally make a mess of his place.

You feel badly for the old man, and the whole neighborhood offers up their condolences on the senseless destruction the violent young punks did to his home, and offer their support.

The old man is very rich. He’s spent a lifetime engaged in some fairly shady business dealings, worked with acquisitions and mergers, and took the fifteen million dollar buyout package when he resigned as the CEO of his company. Instead of using his money and resources to fix his home and replace his damaged goods, the rich old man buys a Kevlar vest decides to purchase a gun.

For the first few nights, he sat alone in his house, peering out of the windows and pointing the barrel of his gun at anything that moved. When the punks didn’t come back, though, he took to the streets. Not knowing where the punks were seemed to be driving the old fellow mad, and he forced his way into other neighborhood residents’ houses, rifled through their belongings, damaged their stuff, and when they complained, he pointed the gun at them until they ‘decided’ to cooperate and assist him in his search.

Finally one afternoon, the old man with his gun walks up your driveway. You didn’t invite him onto your land, and you’ve heard the bad stories about him from other neighbors. You tell him to leave, but he waves the gun at you and reminds you that you agreed to support him right after the punks vandalized his house.

As you try to again tell him to leave your lawn, the old man sees a rustling in your rose bushes on one side of the house. "It’s the vandals!" the old man screams. As you see him pulling out his gun, you yell at him that it is only your beloved dog and that he needs to stop this crazy chase.

BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! The old man, ignoring your words, fires into the prized rose bushes and shoots your pet. Your pet, never having suspected his imminent demise, lays dead behind the bush. The old man tramples the rose bush as he attempts to retrieve the corpse of the ‘punk’ he feared so much.

Holding your dog, and recognizing his mistake, the old man, still holding the gun, remarks that he is sorry that your pet had to die, but that he couldn’t take the chance that his gut instinct about the house-vandals in the bushes was wrong. He reminds you that if he’d been right, he might have just saved your house from being similarly attacked, and tells you that if he had to do it all over again, he wouldn’t hesitate to pull the trigger.

In a possibly related story, the United States bombed a village in northern Pakistan, believing a member of al-Qaeda was hiding there, despite Pakistani intelligence officials denying such a claim in advance. Eighteen civilians died, including 5 women and 5 children.

The words of Trent Lott: "I would have a problem if we didn’t do it."

The words of John McCain: "It’s terrible when innocent people are killed; we regret that. But we have to do what we think is necessary to take out al-Qaeda, particularly the top operatives... We regret it. We understand the anger that people feel, but the United States’ priorities are to get rid of al-Qaeda, and this was an effort to do so... We apologize, but I can’t tell you that we wouldn’t do the same thing again."

Fascinating science

I subscribe to a service that sends me interesting articles about scientific advances via e-mail every week or two, and I have so far been fairly happy with the results. When I was an undergraduate, keeping in touch with science was an easy affair. There were lectures to which I could go, speakers to hear, articles to read, and if those weren't enough, I had roommates who were scientists and who could fill me in on something that they had learned in class that day.

Two interesting articles were brought to my attention recently, and I thought I might share them with anyone who believes that a day where you don't learn something isn't as good as one where you do.

The first article concerns the building of a new particle accelerator and all of the super-spiffy features it will have. Among the features:

1. The accelerator will accelerate protons to 90% of the speed of light in .000002 seconds.
2. The interior of the accelerator ring is super-cooled to a positively frigid 2 degrees Kelvin. (2 degrees Kelvin = -271.15 degrees Centigrade = -456.07 degrees Fahrenheit). For a comparison, 0 degrees Kelvin is what is known as absolute zero on the temperature scale. Absolute zero is the point at which there is so little energy (heat) in the system that even atomic movement ceases.
3. The facility will use mercury as a substance off of which to knock neutrons. If you don't know chemistry, or have never handled mercury, let me tell you: Mercury is very, very heavy. The target amount of 2 tons of mercury for the facility will take up only about 1 cubic meter.

Isn't theoretical physics neat?

The second article is right up my alley and is about evolutionary pressures on the sexes regarding loyalty and monogamy. The article is presenting little in the way of new theory - much of it having been discovered in previous studies - but the article does provide a nice short explanation of how evolutionary psychology can explain curious trends in human behaviour.

If you are interested in things like that, I suggest reading Matt Ridley's "The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature." Not only is the material interesting, but any book that reports, straight-faced, about experiments where biologists glued little paper hats to finches gets an 'A' for hilarious literature.