Professor Laurence Tribe has recently made some interesting observations on the usefulness of analogies from the physical sciences in understanding constitutional law and the role of the Supreme Court. [FN1] Tribe's observations are made more valuable by his good sense in not pushing them too far: he does not suggest that constitutional law is "just like" quantum mechanics, or that lawyers can derive concrete legal answers from the paradigms of modern physics. Rather, he suggests that just as classical constitutional thought was strongly influenced by Newtonian paradigms of clockwork precision, regularity, and objectivity, [FN2] so modern constitutional thought might gain from an appreciation of post-Newtonian concepts like "observer effects" and the ability of objects to influence one another at a distance by distorting the very fabric of the space they occupy.

Tribe makes a number of interesting points, but he does not discuss one aspect of modern science that seems particularly applicable to current constitutional debate. That aspect is "chaos" theory, invented by mathematicians and widely used by scientists, which has to do with the discovery that even seemingly simple and determinate systems are capable of displaying apparently random-and genuinely unpredictable- behavior.

This sounds interesting...

chaos.PDF (application/pdf Object)

This commercial is badass. I don't know much about Areva. But this commercial is just really fucking cool. Reminds me of something Edward Tufte would do.

I guess this is part of the campaign to build new nuclear reactors. You know what? It worked. I'm now pro-nuclear. That pretty cartoony happy-fun nuclear commercial has me sold. Also, I want to play sims now.

Areva TV Ad: Super Cool

Perhaps a neat game for kids but I would like to know what these atoms are and what molecule I'm trying to make...

bliesch.com - atome

There is no question the insurgents and other anti-American parties will take over the government once we leave. But that will happen no matter how long we stay.
 
Also, the U.S. will not leave behind a liberal, constitutional democracy in Iraq no matter how long it stays.

Lieutenant General William E. Odom, U.S. Army (Ret.), is a Senior Fellow with Hudson Institute and a professor at Yale University. He was Director of the National Security Agency from 1985 to 1988. From 1981 to 1985, he served as Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence, the Army's senior intelligence officer.

Nieman Watchdog - What’s wrong with cutting and running?

I came here today because I believe that American democracy is in grave danger. It is no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse . I know that I am not the only one who feels that something has gone basically and badly wrong in the way America's fabled "marketplace of ideas" now functions.

It is important to note that the absence of a two-way conversation in American television also means that there is no "meritocracy of ideas" on television. To the extent that there is a "marketplace" of any kind for ideas on television, it is a rigged market, an oligopoly, with imposing barriers to entry that exclude the average citizen.

Gore peppers this speech with some annoying political swipes, but the core message is something that I have strongly believed for what is now a very long time.

Al Gore tells it like it is

In this battle, the White House has clearly sided with the churchgoing masses against the Republican Party's own whiny Beltway intellectuals.

Slate agrees with my recent take on Miers. Orin Kerr disagrees reasonably, but I think Kerr should give it a week or two and then see what it looks like.

The Volokh Conspiracy - Gods v. Geeks:

The Republican-controlled Senate overwhelmingly approved a measure Wednesday that would set standards for the military's treatment of detainees, a response to the Abu Ghraib scandal and other allegations that U.S. soldiers have abused prisoners.
"Our enemies didn't adhere to the Geneva Conventions," he said, referring to the international agreement on the treatment of prisoners of war. "Many of my comrades were subjected to very cruel, very inhumane and degrading treatment, a few of them even unto death.
"But every one of us -- every single one of us -- knew and took great
strength from the belief that we were different from our enemies, that we were
better than them, that we, if the roles were reversed, would not disgrace
ourselves by committing or countenancing such mistreatment of them."

'Bout god damn time. You cannot chunk the Geneva Convention claiming its quaint without replacing it with a better standard and expect people to "just trust you" while huge abuse scandals are going down.

Senate sets standards on detainees / Lawmakers defy Bush to overwhelmingly OK McCain bill in response to Abu Ghraib

As a psychology graduate working in animal- behaviour labs, Seligman discovered "learned helplessness" and became a big name. Dogs who experience electric shocks that they cannot avoid by their actions simply give up trying. They will passively endure later shocks that they could easily escape. Seligman went on to apply this to humans, with "learned helplessness" as a model for depression. People who feel battered by unsolvable problems learn to be helpless; they become passive, slower to learn, anxious and sad. This idea revolutionised behavioural psychology and therapy by suggesting the need to challenge depressed people's beliefs and thought patterns, not just their behaviour.

Now Seligman is famous again, this time for creating the field of positive psychology. In 1997 the professor was seeking a theme for his presidency of the American Psychological Association. The idea came while gardening with his daughter Nikki. She was throwing weeds around and he was shouting. She reminded him that she used to be a whiner but had stopped on her fifth birthday. "And if I can stop whining, you can stop being a grouch."

Seligman describes this as an "epiphany". He vowed to change his own outlook, but more importantly recognised a strength — social intelligence — in his daughter that could be nurtured to help her withstand the vicissitudes of life. Looking back on "learned helplessness", he reflected that one in three subjects — rats, dogs or people — never became "helpless", no matter how many shocks or problems beset them.

"What is it about some people that imparts buffering strength, making them invulnerable to helplessness?" Seligman asked himself — and now he's made it his mission to find out.

Excellent article on controlling your own reality.

So what do you have to do to find happiness?

On the one hand conservatives are extremely vocal about decrying the pernicious influence of the country's most prestigious universities on the intellectual elite. They're inclined to use the names of certain institutions almost as swear words: Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Berkeley, and the University of Chicago. But when it comes time to nominate a supreme court justice, who do they regard as ideally qualified? Graduates of Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Berkeley, and the University of Chicago. Huh? (Remember, one definition of 'stupid' is repeatedly doing the same things and expecting a different result.) It's hard not to think that what depresses them the most about Harriet Miers are the initials "SMU." That's right. Harriet Miers got her law degree at Southern Methodist University in Texas. How awful. How gauche. How disappointing. Especially if you're an intellectual who got your degree from Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Berkeley, or the University of Chicago.

In many ways Miers represents what the populist side of the Republican party wants... An evangelical christian who isn't a member of the intellectual "elite."
The spin that will develop is that she is poised to go in there and fuck the system by providing a perspective that is untainted by moderate religious views and those terrible educational institutions in this country who produce such useless people. She will bear the standard of the culture war, and the talk radio people will get this shortly and run with it. The right wing blogosphere is mostly populated by professional lawyers who are going to be offended by this nomination, but they are slowly starting to fall in line for political reasons.
Its not about the "strict constructionalism" of Thomas and Scalia for most Republicans. They don't really understand all that stuff, and they don't like it when Scalia does something like argue that the President can't detain U.S. citizens indefinately without trial. Its about power and its about policy. Its about what we want and not what the law says. Its about tearing down all those smart ass fuddy duddies in the cities with their ivy league degrees and their tolerance for homosexuals. Its about fucking the Liberals and ACLU, and instutionalizing all of the prejudices of small town America, federally.
This is the culture war. This is their moment. They are slowly starting to realize it, and its going to turn into a really bloody confirmation battle.

If Miers wins, they win, they have their populist on the court.
If Miers looses, they win, because they'll have the whole right wing base wipped up into a tizzy about how opposing this nomination is anti-american. A loss here will be a mandate for a massive conservative electoral turnout headed into the 2006 election season.

Put on your seatbelt.

Instapun***K.com Archives:

Reid, who was raised in a small Nevada mining town and worked his way through law school, alluded in an interview to Miers' struggles as a young woman working part time to pay for her education after her father was incapacitated by a stroke.

"She overcame difficult family circumstances to become the managing partner of a successful 400-lawyer Dallas law firm," Reid said.

Elonka offered this link on Miers, which is frankly the first really positive comment I've seen on her that didn't involve her religion.

The Seattle Times: Nation & World: What this Democrat sees in nominee