My girlfriend, upon learning the monetary value of the Nobel Peace Prize:

If I won the Nobel Peace Prize, I'd buy a yacht and put gun turrets on it.

In an application of Murphy's Law, none of the too-little-padded glass things in my various boxes broke, but two plastic bottles did, one covering my scrabble set and similar possessions with cayenne, which I am still discovering in unpleasant places.

Incidentallly if anybody knows how to get a cayenne pepper stain (did you even know that cayenne pepper could stain?) out of a white dress shirt (I have pre-treated with detergent, soaked, and now laundered (but not dried) the shirt, to no avail).

(The title to this post is a timely "Cryptic Crossword" clue, thanks to Games Magazine).

The speech by Dean Koh that I quoted here is now online. The transcript has a slightly different version of this quote than I wrote down, and when I get back home and can listen to the video, I will know whether to post a correction.

UPDATE: Indeed, though the transcript is not generally accurate, it is on that one point. The correct quote is: "In fact, if there is an epitaph for your generation, it will certainly be: 'They died with their options open.'"

If any lazy mathematicians (or pseudo-mathematicians) were wondering about the "{first 10-digit prime found in consecutive digits of e}.com" banners conspicuously posted around the T here in Boston (and, I'm told, in the rest of America as well), NPR solves the case. (Link via Kristy)

Amber Taylor fights against the notion, expressed most recently by a fellow in these comments, that a gentleman (I use the term inaccurately) kicking a lady while she is (literally) down is any worse than a lady (again, the wrong term) doing the same to an incapacitated gentleman.

This is not an issue Miss Manners has confronted directly (as we say in the legal biz), probably because kicking people who are lying on the ground is so far beyond the bounds of etiquette that few people need to argue about which kicks are worse than others.

But since the notion that "the courtly notion that ladies are delicate and pure and should be worshiped and protected" (Miss Manners, 3/2/03) is "now-questionable" (ibid), I would like to weigh in. Intentionally kicking people who have committed no physical trespass against one is both wrong and rude. But intentionally kicking some people is, indeed, even more vile than kicking some others-- at least from etiquette's stuffy vantage point.

The rule, however, is not that that hitting a lady is always worse than hitting a gentleman. That misapprehension springs from one application of the actual rule, which is that hitting people who are defenseless or weaker than oneself is even more vile than hitting those who are as able and as strong as oneself. [Unfortunately, it is also less likely to result in being walloped back, which may explain why vile and craven folks go in for it.]

This rule, somewhere along the way, got combined with various generalizations-- that women are weaker than men, children weaker than adults, the elderly weaker than the middle-aged-- to produce the now-common stereotype that while a true gentleman might strike another man in a raucous and regrettable brawl, he would never raise his fist against a lady.

But when many women are just as able as many men to deliver devastating kicks to the ribcage, we must turn back to the true rule that while it is wrong to beat up the strong, social opprobrium should be heaped even more strongly on those that beat up the weak. And whatever the relative physical strength of the cad and the lady, in the case in point, the lady was lying on the ground while the cad was not. People lying on the ground are presumptively defensiveless-- thus the moral against kicking people when they are down. So this act would have been just as unforgivably vile if it were a non-lady venting her political spleen against a gentleman's ribcage as the other way around.

[Incidentally: I wish to forestall a certain line of argument in advance, which is that acts of unprovoked, intentional, physical violence are all morally wrong, and that etiquette should not differentiate between them. Whatever merit this argument has in the moral realm, it loses it in the mannerly-- precisely because the weaker are less likely to be able to defend themselves, manners steps in to help them with the job. It does not ignore the problems of enforcement.]

Thus far, as a subject, I prefer Contracts to Torts. The former is a world of ambiguous consent, mistaken promises, miscommunications, and mislaid plans-- not always a world of joy, but rarely a world of tragedy, and when it is necessary to be harsh in the name of larger justice, it is easy for a libertarian like me to get behind it. Torts, on the other hand, faces me with a world of bad apples and bad draws, sad sacks and sadder stories-- even when justice can be easily done, I find little joy in parcelling out misery.

But this Richard Posner opinion in USA v. Antoine Johnson still made me quite happy, as it draws on various principles of tort law to make sense of 4th Amendment rules about when and whether multiple wrongs can make a right (or at least a not-wrong

Maybe when (if) we get to intentional torts, I will discover joy therein. For now it is merely a dirty if necessary job.

This summer at TNR, there was much discussion (and debate) about what the "TRB" stood for in those New Republic pieces of the same heading.

Via Patrick Belton, I see that Jack Brounstein has submitted an answer. Be wary of stories like this, though-- the human urge to explain sometimes causes us to grab at the only plausible explanation rather than dig for less satisfying ones, for better or worse.