Sex, Suffering and Virgil

The mysterious Man Who Is Thursday has an incredible post on all of the above.

The Workers Control the Means of Procrastination!

Blogging may or may not be capable of overturning the dictatorship of capital, but it is pretty darn good at making fun of dumb ideas like a bloggers' union.

(Via Fourth Checkraise)

Is Law Cool?

I wouldn't have thought so. But Omar Ha-Redeye is trying to prove otherwise with his new group blog for Canadian law students. Encourage him!

List of Canadian Blawgs

Vancouver Law Librarian Blog has a very useful, and frequently updated, listhere.

Parental Discretion is Advised

Pith & Substance gets a "PG rating," according to this. Andy gets a "G" ("no bad words were found").

University of Alberta Law has a blog

Here. We can only hope it won't be as bad as the godawful U of T one.

Russell Brown reflections on the SCC's record in private law is mordantly amusing, and reminds me of an undergraduate paper I did on the liar's paradox. What is the law when the highest court says P, ~P and "P is consistent with ~P"?

John Wiley & Sons reaches for the hammer

Via Razib, I see that John Wiley & Sons is engaging in some heavy-handed (and dubious) copyright enforcement against a science blogger.

It seems that Wiley's Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture published some taxpayer-financed research showing that mixing alcohol (and some other less interesting substances) with fruit may improve its shelf life and antioxidant qualities. Shelley Batts, one of Seed's collection of bloggers, published a chart from the article in the original version of this post.

The result was this letter:

Re: Antioxidants in Berries Increased by Ethanol (but Are Daiquiris Healthy?) by Shelly Bats

http://scienceblogs.com/retrospectacle/2007/04/antioxidants_in_berries_increa.php


The above article contains copyrighted material in the form of a table and graphs taken from a recently published paper in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture. If these figures are not removed immediately, lawyers from John Wiley & Sons will contact you with further action.

I'm not really up on intellectual property law at all, let alone American copyright law, and I hesitate to opine as to what the law is (as opposed to what it would be if I had the dictatorial powers necessary to straighten things out.) But even if Wiley is within its legal rights, it should have to pay something in its reputation for this. The whole academic publications business survives on a business model of nothing but path dependence and inertia. To heck with them.

Update: Wiley has folded, blaming the misunderstanding on a junior staffer.

Der Untergang des Blogosphere

The Globe and Mail points me to this article claiming that October 2006 represented the peak of blogging. Since then, there has been more exit than entry. Soon enough, Josh Marshall and Instapundit will be one with Nineveh and Tyre.

Those of us with a Tory bent will find this comforting. A reactionary's hobbies should not be cutting edge. In an earlier time, such a scruple might have kept the Tory from all kinds of fun. But the contemproary globoculture makes everything a matter of antiquarian interest quickly enough. A generation ago, it would be necessary to affect an interest in Early Music or the Odes of Pindar to be considered a genuine fuddy duddy. Now, it is sufficient to be an expert on The Clash or to care about the merits of the Clinton impeachment.

Fan Linking

This Daniel Davies post on why he hates progressives is positively brill.

Very Silly Person Watch

The intelligent libertarian bloggers have correctly determined that Ann Althouse is a very silly person, and very much not worth talking to.

Pith & Substance has already been on the case, although I can't claim to have devoted as much time to it as these people.

The Professor's Back

Bainbridge has returned.