Via Sullivan, a report that members of an Amish sect in Kentucky have gone to jail over orange triangles on their buggies:
The orange triangles are required on all slow-moving vehicles, according to Kentucky state law.
Nine me
n in the western part of the state have refused to use them. They belong to the Old Order Swartzentruber Amish.
According to court documents, this sect follows a strict code of conduct, called Ordnung, which "regulates everything from hairstyle and dress to education and transportation." They believe that displays of "loud" colors should be avoided, along with the use of "worldly symbols." Swartzentruber Amish believe such symbols indicate the user no longer trusts fully in God.
The Swartzentruber Amish use reflective tape, but refuse to use the orange triangle.
[A friend of the men] says there is another problem with the orange triangle for the Swartzentruber Amish. The triangle is a symbol of the Holy Trinity - God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost. Swartzentruber Amish believe in the unity of God, says Via, which motivates their refusal to use the symbol, in addition to the other reasons.
But...jail? Well, yes:
After the appeal of their 2008 conviction was denied, Menno Zook, Danny Byler, Mose Yoder, Levi Hotetler, David Zook and Eli Zook refused to pay the small fines associated with their conviction. All six are currently serving sentences ranging from three to 10 days in the Graves County Jail, according to the jail's website.
So, Pinky, are you pondering what I'm pondering? Exactly. Does the first amendment extend to preventing the government fining people for not putting orange triangles on their horse-drawn buggies? As an academic question, I find this fascinating. As a practical matter, I think the state pursuing this is ridiculous. But as a philosophical matter, I say render unto Caesar: if you want to use roads provided by the state, accept the rules that come with it.
Thoughts?
NPR reported this morning that Brazilian police arrested a man carrying packages of cocaine in his intestines adding up to a full kilo:
The Irish guy was reportedly taken to the Santa Misericordia Hospital where the capsules were removed from his body. How exactly? That isn't clear from the press coverage....
Surgical removal of the packages is one option. But as doctors reported in the Canadian Journal of Surgery two years ago, surgical removal is far less likely than it used to be. Cocaine-filled packages can rupture during surgery, endangering patients, and there are other complications.
The NPR posting includes the guy's CT scan, which is either a lovely bit of representational art or deeply disgusting. Or both.
Right-wing Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin is tired of willfully ignorant Republicans:
[Perry] was trying to be self-deprecating, but it’s disturbing to see that he thinks being a rotten student and a know-nothing gives one street cred in the GOP. Is it so important to defy the MSM by flaunting affection for anti-intellectualism? Just imagine if Sarah Palin had said all that — the conservative cheerleaders who gave up on her (but are still rooting for Perry) would roll their eyes in disgust.
Moreover, what Perry is doing here is telling moderate Republicans and those voters genuinely concerned about his electability to buzz off. He doesn’t need them, and he doesn’t intend to make it easy for them to vote for him. He’s telling them he is happily impervious to mainstream sensibilities. It’s the sort of thing that a Texas pol, not a presidential candidate, would do.
I'm not only tired of GOP anti-intellectualism, I'm terrified by it, because someday we'll have another Republican president. I hope that he or she has more respect for brains than most of the current batch of GOP candidates.
One of my friends, Nature Nerd Naomi, reported that she saw frost on her roof this morning. She lives about 40 km away. And Chicago Tribune meteorologist Tom Skilling says yesterday was the coldest September 14th in 37 years:
Temperatures failed to reach 16°C
at the city's official O'Hare observation site Thursday, topping out at 14.4°C
instead. It's the coolest reading which has occurred there since late May and a temperature which equals the normal high on Oct. 28. But even more significantly, a review of weather records here indicates the reading was the chilliest to occur so early in the "meteorological" fall season in the 37 years since 1974.
Thursday isn't likely to be much warmer. Though readings are likely to creep into [around] 17°C
at the area's warmer observation sites, the predicted O'Hare high of 14°C
is close to the record low Sept. 15 maximum of 13°C
set in 1993.
So just a few days ago, as I turned my air conditioner on to cool down from 30°C heat, I hoped for an early fall. But wow, I didn't expect temperatures to plunge so quickly.
Of course, on Tuesday when I'm back in San Antonio and it's 36°C, I'll be missing the cooler weather again.
Apparently my creativity isn't alone in its suffering this time of year. I'm also finding it a lot harder to learn Japanese than I expected.
Anyone else feeling a little leaden the past couple of weeks?
For the last three years running—including, it seems this one—my ability to find passably-interesting topics to write about plummets in September and picks up again mid-October.
Any hypotheses about why? I haven't got any, except maybe that the shortening days do something.
Which is all just a longer way of saying, chirp...chirp...chirp...
It happens every year, and every year it surprises me: from mid-August to mid-October, the days get shorter quickly. Three weeks ago I was waking up to daylight; this morning, I realized I was waking up to twilight. In three weeks it'll be dark at that hour. Right now, every day, the sun rises a minute later an sets a minute earlier.
Nothing profound or particularly surprising here. Just an observation.
On this day in 1986, I got my first PC: an original, 1982-vintage IBM PC, with a 1 MHz 8088 processor, 256 kB of RAM, twin 360 kB drives, a 30 cm 80 x 25 character green monochrome monitor, and a steel clickety-clackety keyboard.
The laptop I'm writing this on, 25 years later, has a 3 GHz Intel Core 2 processor, 4 GB of RAM, an internal solid-state 250 GB drive, a 36 cm 1280 x 800 pixel monitor with 16 million colors, and a silent keyboard. And this laptop cost less than half what the PC cost in nominal terms, which makes it about one-sixth the cost in real terms.
Twenty five years of computing, and I still don't have a fast-enough computer.
From the Hoboken Ferry:
27 June 1998, Canon EOS Rebel with Kodachrome 64, 35mm, about here.
The view on 20 October 2001:
I don't have all the details, but it looks like an employee at one of the hospital's vendors did something really stupid:
A medical privacy breach led to the public posting on a commercial Web site of data for 20,000 emergency room patients at Stanford Hospital in Palo Alto, Calif., including names and diagnosis codes, the hospital has confirmed. The information stayed online for nearly a year.
Since discovering the breach last month, the hospital has been investigating how a detailed spreadsheet made its way from one of its vendors, a billing contractor identified as Multi-Specialty Collection Services, to a Web site called Student of Fortune, which allows students to solicit paid assistance with their schoolwork.
Gary Migdol, a spokesman for Stanford Hospital and Clinics, said the spreadsheet first appeared on the site on Sept. 9, 2010, as an attachment to a question about how to convert the data into a bar graph.
One can easily see how this happened: someone on the billing contractor's staff was taking a class of some kind and decided to use real, live, HIPAA-protected data for a project. My law-school Wills instructor, Jerry Leitner, would explain this by the "omnibus explanation," the thing that explains nearly every human endeavor that ends badly: stupidity.
The article mentions Stanford got fined $250,000 from the breach. I wonder if they'll be able to get a contribution award from the contractor?