Via Stuart Buck, I came across this attack on school-funded computers. I have criticized government-laptop-handouts before, but like other attacks on such programs, this one seems to go overboard in places. For example:

(Maybe the most insidious effect of computers in the classroom is that they encourage the moronic sentiment that learning can be "fun" – is this a culture that undervalues fun and overvalues hard work?)

A professor once asked me, apropos of why I don't party or why I spent Friday nights in the library or some such thing, what I thought I was, some sort of ascetic? I said that no, I was actually a hedonist. We just had very different ideas of fun.

So, I'm Raffi. Those of you who've read Crescat for more than a year might remember that I spent much of law school writing about food and various other things on this blog, and on my own Waddling Thunder. For the last year, I've been clerking at the Delaware Court of Chancery, and thus haven't blogged. I can't possibly say enough good things about that experience. Everyone should clerk. Even those misguided enough to clerk at a federal court.

I finished clerking last week. In October, I'll start practicing corporate law at my Big Law Firm in New York. Åt least until then, I'm going to blog. And I ought to have plenty of things to blog about. Next week, I leave for a short stay in Iceland, with an old college friend. Afterwards, I'm off to Paris for three weeks, including a week at the Ecole Ritz Escoffier, a legitimate, professional, culinary school. When I'm not at the Ritz Escoffier, I'll be attending the morning demonstrations (three hour lectures, for students, but open to the public) at Le Cordon Bleu, the other big culinary school in downtown Paris.

I'm also going to eat, obviously, and I think I've got a short stint at a bakery lined up too. Of course, I've also got plenty of non-privileged things to say about clerking, and about other things that have been percolating. Plus, who knows what else.

Anyway, I'm glad to be back online. This is a fun medium, and I missed it. I hope people enjoy my efforts for the next month or so.

The last time anybody at this blog opened up a discussion about evolution, we were swamped with a very odd array of very argumentative commenters, probably a result of this blog's odd position in the network of the blogosphere. In any case, Jonathan Adler and Jim Chen explore whether Justice Scalia's dissent from the denial of cert. in Tangipahoa v. Freiler is "The most scientifically irresponsible" passage in the U.S. Reports. It's this that they don't like:

The only aspect of the disclaimer that could conceivably be regarded as going beyond what the rehearing statement purports to approve is the explicit mention–as an example–of “the Biblical version of Creation.” To think that this reference to (and plainly not endorsement of) a reality of religious literature–and this use of an example that is not a contrived one, but to the contrary the example most likely to come into play–somehow converts the otherwise innocuous disclaimer into an establishment of religion is quite simply absurd.

In Epperson v. Arkansas, 393 U.S. 97 (1968), we invalidated a statute that forbade the teaching of evolution in public schools; in Edwards v. Aguillard, 482 U.S. 578 (1987), we invalidated a statute that required the teaching of creationism whenever evolution was also taught; today we permit a Court of Appeals to push the much beloved secular legend of the Monkey Trial one step further. We stand by in silence while a deeply divided Fifth Circuit bars a school district from even suggesting to students that other theories besides evolution–including, but not limited to, the Biblical theory of creation–are worthy of their consideration. I dissent.

The dissent’s repeated assertion that the thermal imaging did not obtain information regarding the interior of the home, post, at 3, 4 (opinion of Stevens, J.), is simply inaccurate. A thermal imager reveals the relative heat of various rooms in the home. The dissent may not find that information particularly private or important, see post, at 4, 5, 10, but there is no basis for saying it is not information regarding the interior of the home.

My research into this suggests that infrared radition is surface radiation: it emanates from surfaces, down to a depth of about 1/1,000 of an inch. See MIKE LLOYD, THERMAL IMAGING SYSTEMS 2-5 (1997). As a result, an infrared image only reveals the temperature of a surface, not the temperature of the space behind the surface. So the device really did reveal only the exterior temperature of the home, not the interior of the home.

Of course, it is possible to draw reasonable inferences about the likely interior temperature of a home from the home's exterior temperature profile. Assuming a steady state system, we can make reasonable assumptions about how houses are usually built (for example, that there are no heat sources in the walls themselves) to find out information about the interior temperatures. But that information is only as good as the assumptions themselves.