Does It Compute?

People Who Can't Type

To paraphrase Steve Jobs in his “challenges of starting Apple”

“[Lawyers] couldn’t type. We realized: Death would eventually take care of this.”

A New Twist on Attorney Signature Blocks

Everybody is familiar with those interminable signature blocks about attorney client privilege, the Treasury Dept., IRS etc.  Here’s a new one I saw the other day on an attorney’s email:

NOTICE: The National Security Agency may have read this email without warning, warrant, or notice. They may do this without any judicial or legislative oversight. You have no recourse nor protection save to actively petition your President, Congress and Senate, to revoke the USA Patriot Act (USAP Act) and any other laws that attack the 4th Amendment to the US Constitution, or to replace them through the election process at the earliest possible time.

That pretty much says it all.

Every PR Department Needs a Supply

A “newscast” on The Onion television a couple of months ago announced a new drug called “Despondex,” intended for the “approximately 20 million Americans who are insufferably cheery.” Everybody knows people like this and certainly most PR and marketing departments could use a good supply. Check it out at The Onion.

Discover Your Inner Fish

I have just finished reading “Your Inner Fish. A Journey into the 3.5 Billion-Year History of the Human Body” by Neil Shubin. Fascinating and extremely well-written.

Basically, Shubin extends Darwin’s “descent with modification” back in time and scope to a cellular level. He shows that at the outset, the basic embryos of all animals are the same, and that specific gene sequences in DNA “turn on” or off certain types of development. Thus in the embryo, the “four arches” – the gill region of a human and shark look extremely similar, they just develop differently. Humans share a deep parentage with sharks.

Studies as early as the 1800s demonstrated that all organs in chickens – and everything else, fish, reptiles and mammals – can be traced to one of three layers of tissue in the developing embryo. So the structure of the early embryo is the same in virtually all creatures.

Shubin shows that the structure of the human hand developed in the fins of very early fish 350 million years ago when they were making the transition to land. The hand structure let them “walk” on their fins, possibly to get out of the water to escape from larger predators.

He goes on to demonstrate how this works for various appendages, ears, eyes, develop. For example, if you take the gene that is responsible for developing eyes in a mouse, and splice it into the DNA of a fly the fly develops an extra eye – a fly eye. So the gene is identical, it works and does the same thing in both cases, but what comes out of it is different.

The most fascinating part is the way he can trace this sort of development all the way back to the development of multi-cellular organisms. The net result is to be able to demonstrate that we all descend not just from earlier mammals, but from worms, sponges, and sharks. 

A must read.

Made in the USA??? NOT

When was the last time that you bought anything that was NOT made in China, Taiwan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Mexico, etc?  This occurred to me when I turned over my new Kindle 2 and noticed: "assembled in China."

The US has virtually no competitive heavy industry any more. State of the art heavy industrial products such as Bullet Trains (Germany, Japan, France); nuclear power (France) are dominated by other countries. The steel industry has only partly recovered from its utter collapse some years ago. And it would be impolite to even mention the American auto industry, with GM stock at under $2.00 and the company virtually bankrupt.

As for other products:

Budweiser, "the king of beers" is now the king of Belgian beers. (and in the interests of equal time, Coors is owned by Molson (Canada) and Miller is owned by a South African brewery).

The archetypal chocolate company, Nestle's, is Swiss owned (and Nestle's also owns Perrier, Purina dog food, Friskies cat food and Gerber baby products).

Your Blackberry is Canadian (RIM) and Nokia, the leading cellphone company in the world, is Finnish.

A number of major supermarket chains are now British-owned.

As far as software companies are concerned, Lexis Nexis is owned by the Dutch (Reed Elsevier) and West is owned by the British (Thompson-Reuters). Autonomy (British) has just bought Interwoven. Open Text (Hummingbird/DocsOpen) is Canadian. The list goes on.

That the American economy is not in worse shape is due in part to the massive investment in US Treasury securities by China.

I guess that leaves Boeing (which is just about holding its own against the European Airbus) and Microsoft. So it looks like the state of Washington is the only place where "made in the USA" is still working.

Talking in the Elevator

Ross Kodner reported a conversation he heard on a train. A lawyer from Foley & Lardner in Milwaukee discussing hiring new attorneys from dissolving firms. Although his point concerns lateral hires in the midst of a deep recession, perhaps a more interesting point concerns public phone conversations as malpractice.

When I first started working in law firms in New York, on of the first things I was told was “never discuss firm business in the elevator -- you never know who may be listening.”

You could think of commuter trains as giant elevators, funneling people into their office. But in this cell phone age, the “don’t talk on the elevator” advice seems to have gone out the window. Everybody has heard people discussing intimate details, giving out credit card numbers, etc. In fact I was once on a train where a woman was loudly giving out her credit card number over her cell phone. Somebody else yelled out “what was that security code again, I want to be sure I got it right” and the car burst into spontaneous applause.

So take an entirely possible scenario. Opposing counsel (or their paralegal, assistant, etc.) overhears a lawyer discussing details of a litigation, merger, what have you. Is that malpractice?  Does the loud-mouth lawyer have any expectation of privacy at all in a crowded railway train?  I should think not. Oh, and Ross -- you should have published the guy’s name.

A New Low in Spam?

Every time there is a big natural disaster, like the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean or hurricane Katrina (although the damage there was predictable and essentially largely man-made), the spammers and scam artists come out with appeals to donate aid – which turns out to be aid to the scam artists.

Now there is something that might well be a new low. I have received a couple of emails from “President Obama” with the subject line “I have Signed the Largest Stimulus Package last Week. Would you like to Get a piece of it. If Yes, Press Here” It turns out to be from “TopSpotBrands” in New York advertising for the “Economic Crisis Grant, LLC” in Orem, Utah at 51 West Center Street #621, Orem, Utah 84057.

It’s hard to assess how low a “new low” has to be, but this is certainly a candidate.

Winning the Civil War

One of my ancestors spent four years (1861-65) in a Union Artillery brigade during the Civil War. We have a large number of his letters home. Most of them are of anecdotal interest (“I wish you would send me a gallon of Bourbon whiskey”). But the following is of significant historical importance, as it demonstrates that Slaves and/or Free Blacks played a significant military role in the eventual victory of the Union.

                    Camp 10 miles before Richmond
                    June 2nd. 1862

“...The second time that we went out we (with part of the fifth New York Zouaves) were sent to destroy a turnpike bridge 200 feet long a half mile inside of the rebel pickets. We went there, tore down the bridge and took one of them prisoner. The third time we went out we would all have been killed or taken prisoner but for the warning of two negroes. There were two regiments of infantry and one masked battery lying in ambush for us on each side of the road. The negroes met us when we had got within a mile of them and told the Col.  We then turned back. The next time we went out we went with Gen. Porter's division and drove the rebels back beyond the Richmond and Harrisburg railroad and took over 500 prisoners. “

The Essence of Christmas - 2008

Every once and a while Big Law bonuses pop up and make news. Normally, one firm announces bonuses and the rest follow suit. This year, however Skadden Arps was first out of the gate and announced it would maintain the same bonuses as last year (while dropping last year’s “special” additional bonuses). The next day, however, Cravath announced it would issue only half of last years bonuses and might not have any bonuses at all in 2009 (leading to it being dubbed “Half-Skadden” in the blogs). Other major firms (collectively, the “Half-Skaddens”) followed Cravath, although not all the announcements are in yet. So a 7th year associate at Cravath will get a smaller bonus than a 1st year associate at Skadden. We are talking about a range of about $17,000 to about $65,000 between “half” and “full” bonuses here. It is unclear whether this is a ploy to drive out younger attorneys without having to officially resort to layoffs (as both White & Case and Orrick Herrington have done) but it may well have that effect (assuming they can find new jobs, which is far from evident).

Meanwhile, at a WalMart store in Long Island, a 270 lb temporary employee died when the door collapsed under pressure of the crowds waiting for the store to open at 5 am on “Black Friday” after Thanksgiving, they rushed into the store, trampling him to death underfoot. The paramedics who tried to revive him narrowly avoided being trampled as well.

In what increasingly appears to be most serious cyclical crisis of capitalism since the Great Depression, this would seem to represent the essence (if not the spirit) of Christmas, 2008.

Catku

You may remember the "computer haiku" form.  Here are some "catkus"

My brain: walnut-sized
Your: largest among primates.
Yet who leaves for work?

The food in my bowl
Is old, and – more to the point –
Contains no tuna.

You’ve bought a new toy
Money wisely spent on me
I love the boxes.

I walk on this shelf
No real destination, just
Love of crashing glass.

The dog licks your face.
You laugh, gratified. His tongue?
I know where it’s been.

A home with a cat
Has no need of sculpture. But
It does need tuna.

What is put outside
In the rain will soon return
To walk on the couch.

The path is long, but
Leads to the mountain’s summit
You go; report back.

You think I am named
Fluffy. I am Ratkiller
To you, Foodbringer

Stealthy and silent
I hunt birds–but listen for
The can opener.

The pig, it is said,
Is smarter than cats or dogs.
Care for more bacon?

Wealth is illusion.
Power but a dream. Tuna,
However, is real.

And anyone who owns a cat owes it to themselves to read Elizabeth Marshall Thomas' Tribe of Tiger