Paul Jacobson Life, law and other stuff

Place your hand on the, um, BiblePosted by Paul on March 19th, 2006

This gave me a chuckle and, at the same time, is really telling:

“On Wednesday, March 1st, 2006, in Annapolis at a hearing on the proposed Constitutional Amendment to prohibit gay marriage, Jamie Raskin, professor of law at AU, was requested to testify.At the end of his  testimony, Republican Senator Nancy Jacobs said:  “Mr. Raskin, my Bible says marriage is only between a man and a woman.  What do you have to say about that?”Raskin replied: “Senator, when you took your oath of office, you placed your hand on the Bible and swore to uphold the Constitution.  You did not place your hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible.”The room erupted into applause.”

(via eclecticism)Technorati Tags: constitutional amendment, jamie raskin, marriage, nancy jacobs, ban gay marriage, same-sex

Work smarter, not necessarily harderPosted by Paul on March 18th, 2006

CNN Money has published an article by Fortune journalist, Anne Fisher, that suggests working long hours is not necessarily the key to success.  What may better, rather, is taking the time to work smarter.

“Remember the story of Archimedes lolling in his bathtub? To an observer, he’d have seemed to be wasting time. While ostensibly doing nothing, however, he discovered the principle of displacement, a cornerstone of physics. Would he have reached the same insight in a quick shower?

Unlikely. And while you might say that’s ancient history, don’t be too sure.”

It also goes a little beyond not working long hours.  Another important factor is how that time is used.  Rather than working to accomplish a large number of small things, aim to break your working time up into larger chunks of time:

“The late Peter Drucker agreed. He wrote in The Effective Executive (an eerily prescient 40 years ago), “All one can think and do in a short time is to think what one already knows and to do as one has always done.” Gulp.

Moreover, in Drucker’s view, simply working longer and longer hours won’t help. “To be effective, every knowledge worker, and especially every executive…needs to dispose of time in fairly large chunks,” he wrote. “To have small dribs and drabs of time at his disposal will not be sufficient even if the total is an impressive number of hours.”

Hmm, small dribs and drabs of time…and, just think, the BlackBerry hadn’t been invented yet.”

Going further, you may be better served by taking time away from your work more often.  It is during these breaks that we often have creative breakthroughs:

“What scientists have only recently begun to realize is that people may do their best thinking when they are not concentrating on work at all. If you’ve ever had a great idea pop into your head while you were washing your car, walking your dog, or even napping, you already know what a team of Dutch psychologists revealed last month in the journal Science: The unconscious mind is a terrific solver of complex problems when the conscious mind is busy elsewhere or, perhaps better yet, not overtaxed at all.

This brings us back to Archimedes, whose “Eureka!” moment in the bath — or, to cite another example, Isaac Newton’s discovery of gravity while loafing around under an apple tree — was a classic example of a kind of creativity known as remote association, or associative thinking. As the name implies, it’s a knack for seeing connections among things that appear on the surface to be unrelated to each other.”

At the end of the day, isn’t it more about results than how many hours a day you spend at your desk?  Google has really bought into this, not just with their practice of setting aside roughly a day a week for personal projects, but also in the way they have structured working days:

“‘We want to take as much hurry and worry out of people’s lives as we can, because a relaxed state of mind unleashes creativity,’ says Stacy Sullivan, the company’s HR director. ‘And everybody’s on flextime here, so we don’t reward face time or working super-long hours. We just measure results.’”

The full article can be found here.

(via digg.com)

Technorati Tags: anne fisher, drucker, archimedes, work smarter

Cause of Alzheimer’s disease foundPosted by Paul on March 18th, 2006

According to the Financial Times, the cause of Alzheimer’s disease has been found:

“In the past, scientists thought that plaques and tangles, unnatural accumulations of two naturally occurring proteins in the brain, caused Alzheimer’s disease. But a research team, which included members from the Johns Hopkins University and the University of Minnesota Medical School, hypothesised that there was a specific substance in the brain that causes memory decline that is present even before nerve cells begin to die.

To test that, the team used mice whose genetic make-up was manipulated to develop memory loss much in the way people develop subtle memory problems before the earliest stages of Alzheimer’s disease. Using mice that showed early signs of memory loss and had no plaques or nerve cell loss in the brain, they discovered a form of the protein that is distinct from plaques. They extracted this protein and injected it into healthy rats. The rats suffered cognitive impairment, confirming that this protein has a detrimental effect on memory.

Once the memory-robbing protein complex is better understood, drugs could be developed to stop Alzheimer’s disease in its tracks, the researchers said. Worldwide estimates of the number of people with Alzheimer’s disease range from 15m to 20m.”

(via digg.com)

According to Wikipedia:

“Alzheimer’s disease (AD), a neurodegenerative disease, is the most common cause of dementia and characterized clinically by progressive intellectual deterioration together with declining activities of daily living and neuropsychiatric symptoms or behavioral changes. The most striking early symptom is memory loss (amnesia), usually manifest as minor forgetfulness that becomes steadily denser with illness progression, with relative preservation of older memories. As the disorder progresses, cognitive (intellectual) impairment extends to the domains of language (aphasia), coordinated movement (apraxia), recognition (agnosia) and those functions (such as decision-making and planning) closely related to the frontal lobe of the brain, reflecting extension of the underlying pathological process. This consists principally of neuronal (cell) loss (or atrophy), together with deposition of amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles. Genetic factors are known to be important, and polymorphisms (variations) in three different autosomal dominant genes - Presenilin 1, Presenilin 2, and Amyloid Precursor Protein - have been identified that account for a small number of cases of familial, early-onset AD. For late onset AD (LOAD), only one susceptibility gene has so far been identified - the epsilon 4 allele of the APOE gene. Age of onset itself has a heritability of around 50%.”

At present there is no cure for Alzheimer’s disease although there are treatments available which temporarily reduce degradation of the neurotransmitters and alleviate the symptoms of the disease.

Technorati Tags: alzheimer’s, johns hopkins, memory loss, dementia

Our beautiful planet!Posted by Paul on March 18th, 2006

I received a PowerPoint presentation from a friend by email and the photos are spectacular, worth checking out.  Here is one of them:

Pretty Blue Planet-1.pps

Technorati Tags: blue planet, earth, photographs, powerpoint

Phone spam!Posted by Paul on March 17th, 2006

I just received the nth call from some telemarketing firm informing me that I had won one of a half-dozen prizes.  The guy then proceeded to “check” my details (which were all wrong and based on the same database the last bunch of idiots used).  When I questioned him about the need for me to give him all my contact details and my wife’s details, he got annoyed with me and put the phone down.

What these people don’t seem to grasp is that “winning” some prize is no consolation when my wife and I (we both have to go) have to give up 2 hours of my day to attend some stupid marketing pitch to buy some underdeveloped piece of land on the bank of some crocodile infested river which has great potential to become the next big golfing paradise or nudist community or some other fanciful development.  I am not going to buy the overpriced piece of land.  I don’t care about the lovely pink kettle I may walk away with if I am lucky and I certainly don’t want to have my details passed on to the next bunch of spammers (I mean, telemarketers).

What gets me is that I distinctly told the last bunch to delete my info from their database and yet I get this call from this guy today.  Sadly they block caller ID so I can’t even track the buggers.

Technorati Tags: phone spam

Good point!Posted by Paul on March 17th, 2006

I received this by email and it is so true!

“TO ALL THE KIDS WHO WERE BORN IN THE 1930’s 40’s, 50’s, 60’s, 70’s and 80’s !!

First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they carried us.

They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can, and didn’t get tested for diabetes.

Then after that trauma, our baby cribs were covered with bright colored lead-based paints.

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets, not to mention, the risks we took hitchhiking.

As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags.

 

Riding in the back of a pick up on a warm day was always a special treat.

 

We drank water from the garden hose and NOT from a bottle.

 

We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and NO ONE

actually died from this.

We ate cupcakes, white bread and real butter and drank soda pop with sugar in it, but we weren’t overweight because WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING!

 

We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on.

No one was able to reach us all day. And we were O.K.

We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then ride down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times, we learned to solve the problem.

We did not have Playstations, Nintendo’s, X-boxes, no video games at all, no 99 channels on cable, no video tape movies, no surround sound, no cell phones, no personal computers, no Internet or Internet chat rooms……….WE HAD FRIENDS and we went outside and found them!

We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no lawsuits from these accidents.

We ate worms and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms did not live in us forever.

We were given BB guns for our 10th birthdays, made up games with sticks and tennis balls and although we were told it would happen, we did not put out very many eyes.

We rode bikes or walked to a friend’s house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just yelled for them!

Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn’t had to learn to deal with disappointment. Imagine that!!

The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of.  They actually sided with the law!

 

This generation has produced some of the best risk-takers, problem solvers and inventors ever!

 

The past 50 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas.

 

We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned HOW TO DEAL WITH IT ALL!

And YOU are one of them! CONGRATULATIONS!

 

You might want to share this with others who have had the luck to grow up as kids, before the lawyers and the government regulated our lives for our own good.

 

and while you are at it, forward it to your kids so they will know how brave their parents were.

 

Kind of makes you want to run through the house with scissors, doesn’t it?!”

Technorati Tags: kids play outside

News updates … digg it?!Posted by Paul on March 16th, 2006

If you take a look to your right, on the sidebar, you’ll notice that we have added a news feed from digg.com, a relatively new news service that relies on submissions by its members.  At the moment almost all of the news is tech related but the guys at digg.com are going to introduce new categories in time so watch this space for developing news stories.

Want to know more about digg.com?  According to its FAQ:

“Digg is a technology news website that combines social bookmarking, blogging, RSS, and non-hierarchical editorial control. With digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allow an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do.

…

Once a story is submitted by a user it is instantly posted in the digg area queue. This is a temporary holding place where stories wait to be promoted to the homepage. To help promote stories to the homepage, simply visit the digg area and digg stories you think are cool. Once a story has received enough diggs, it is instantly promoted. Should the story not receive enough diggs, or is reported, it eventually falls out of the digg area queue. Digg works because a large group of people actively promote good stories to the homepage. Since this site’s content is user-driven, it is up to YOU to contribute.”

If you would like to see the submission process in action, take a look at Digg Spy.  Here you can watch stories being submitted almost in real-time.  One of these stories is the story about an image of a double helix in space.  Now that is an awesome sight!  When you find a story that excites you or you think other people should be aware of, you can submit the story to digg.com and, through a peer review process, the story may rise to the top of the front page or fade into obscurity.

Technorati Tags: digg spy, digg.com, dna, double helix , in space