Is there a Matrix in your future?

Today's discussion with the Rationalists was quite interesting, if at times mentally intense. The questions was whether a robot can have a mind. I learned about crystalline protien structures embedded within neurons and the importance they play in the mechanical production of thoughts in the human brain. Amazing stuff. Somewhat assuringly (perhaps because I've been exposed to too many dysfunctional visions of the future involving artificial intelligence in science fiction), we were assured that true artificial intelligence is generations in the future.

Of most interest to me -- both from a "what will the future bring" perspective as well as a more humanistic concern -- was the Turing Test. Here's how the test works: imagine that you are at your computer, getting Instant Messages from two sources. You know that one set of IM's is coming from a human being, and the other set of IM's is coming from a computer responding to you autonomously (that is, without a programmer or user there; it is operating only on its own programming and algorithims). You have a certain amount of time -- five hours, say, to ask both "persons" whatever questions you want. If, at the end of that time, you cannot distinguish between the real human being and the computer, then that computer is so functionally similar to real intelligence that as a practical matter, there is no need to split hairs any further.

There are some significant logical problems with such a test, for purposes of identifying whether you are dealing with true artificial intelligence (amusingly, the test may be more effective at measuring the intelligence of the interrogator than either test subject). But I thought the test does reveal something else important from a philosophical perspective.

What questions would you ask if you were interrogating a computer in order to determine if it had achieved true intelligence? What kinds of subjects would you want to discuss? Theology? Ethics and morality? Phenomenology? The kinds of questions you ask will reflect what you think gets to the essence of what it is to be human.

Emmy Awards

The Emmy Awards are on (after the game's end), and there are shows on that I've never even heard of. Shatner is giving an acceptance speech for best dramatic supporting actor, using his Star Trek inflections -- my goodness, he really talks that way. And Donald Trump and that high-pitched actress from Will & Grace are singing the theme from Green Acres. Not a good night.

Second Loss

This afternoon, Green Bay lost its second game for a start of 0-2. They lost to the Cleveland Browns, quarterbacked by Trent "College Boy" Dilfer, who I have always called a stiff. Of course, I also predicted today that Jamal Lewis was set up for a monster day. (He rushed for 9 yards.)

This is surely not how Brett Favre wanted his last season to go. Life-threatening sickness in his family; legal issues in his family; his hometown and summer home gets wiped out in a hurricane; and to top it all off he's got no defense and a questionable offensive line and his top receiver knocked out for the season. I'm sure he was hoping he could end his career like that Elway guy, with a brand-new Super Bowl ring. That appears to be out of reach at this point.

So football isn't going so well.

First Loss

The University of Tennessee just lost to arch-rivals the University of Florida. So much for the quest for the national championship. Going undefeated is pretty much the only way to win that objective anymore -- and that means beating tough opponents along the way. Vol fans can still hope for an SEC championship but will need some help along the way.

Massive depression will strike the entire state of Tennessee and manifest itself all over the place by tomorrow. I'm glad, though, that I bought an orange tie to wear to my court hearing Friday morning.

Moroccan Lamb over Couscous

Ingredients:
1 lb. lamb shoulder
1 white onion
4 stalks celery
1 clove garlic
2 cups couscous
2 tbsp. butter
Flour
White wine
Olive oil

Spices:
Garlic powder
Salt
Black Pepper
Tarragon
Cumin
Paprika

Fillet lamb meat; cut into small morsels.

Sift flour with all spices, mixed to taste. Don't be shy with the paprika.

Cut onions, celery, and garlic clove. Sautee over medium-high heat with a dash of olive oil.

While vegetables are on the heat, dredge meat through flour. Braise floured meat with olive oil until medium rare. Transfer meat to vegetables. Reduce heat to medium, add white wine, and cover, stirring occasionally.

In saucepan, add 2 cups water, butter, and salt. When butter has completely melted and water is at constant boil, add couscous. Stir couscous until it absorbs all water (about 5 minutes). Fluff with small metal fork.

Serve meat-and-onion mix in separate bowl from couscous, along with green vegetable of your choice (I like grilled asaparagus).

Ideally, the meat will have a subtle but powerful and savory flavor, and the couscous should make your mouth feel happy.

Some interesting statistics about the office

Cases appearing on the case control docket: 125
Cases with statute dates within one year, not appearing on the case control docket: 7
Cases still appearing on the case control docket which are closed: >15 (estimated)
Cases bearing multiple names on different docket control sheets: 5
Cases in which attorney of record is in office but do not appear on any docket control sheet: 10 (estimated)
Cases in which responsible attorney is no longer associated with office (and no other attorney is listed): 6

Cases assigned to The Great Man which have not been assigned to any paralegal for support: 1
Cases assigned to Son Of The Great Man which have not been assigned to any paralegal for support: 0
Cases assigned to Southern Gentleman Laywer which have not been assigned to any paralegal for support: 0
Cases assigned to Happy Bachelor Laywer which have not been assigned to any paralegal for support: 0
Cases assigned to Transplanted Lawyer which have not been assigned to any paralegal for support: 21

Highest number of cases assigned to any one attorney: 92
Lowest number of cases assigned to any one attorney: 2
Number of cases not assigned to any attorney or paralegal: 10

Number of plastic spoons in office: 0

Amount of desire I have to remain associated with this place: 0

From today's confirmation hearing

SENATOR KENNEDY: Ah, Judge Roberts, do you know how to, ah, make shadow animals? I mean, with your hands?

JUDGE ROBERTS: Yes. Yes, Senator, as a matter of fact, I do. Here. [Demonstrates.]

Props to my man Eugene Volokh and (I presume) one of his students for the original core concept of the joke.

Is it real, or is it satire?

It's from The Onion so that's kind of a clue -- but it reminds me of a comment that our friends from California who also moved here made a while back. They mentioned that their experiences with churches here is that people aren't any more or less religious here in Tennessee than they were in California. What they are is more focused on punishment and pain for sinners.

So as it often does, The Onion hit precisely the right note.

Nashville

Yesterday, I thought, "Nashville. Maybe that's the place to be. Bigger city, more jobs, more pay, more opportunities."

This morning, I thought about what winter would be like in Nashville (since it seems our air conditioner has lost freon -- again), and I didn't think it could possibly be better than here inKnoxville. Yes, winter's going to suck everywhere. But here we have mountains and the river. Nashville is on the plateau and the landscape is pretty flat. It must get windy there. And with more pay comes a higher cost of living; with the bigger city comes the problems of a more urban area, which The Wife and I would prefer to avoid.

But, jobs in more rural areas are very hard to come by. So I don't know what to do.

Mediation failed

Biggest case I'm working on, with the easiest liability. Stupid procedural issues get in the way of making people deal with facts. It's very frustrating.

Well that's nice to know

I spent all morning and the early afternoon preparing for the mediation tomorrow. I spent the late afternoon cleaning up other work that simply could not wait any longer. About 5:00, Happy Bachelor Lawyer wanders in my office and asks if I know anything about the summary judgment motion being heard Friday. "No," I say, "I didn't know there was such a thing."

For those of you who are uninitiated in the law, this is kind of like, "Hey, did you know you had to lift and carry five tons of boulders from your front yard to the White House? And did you know it had to be done twelve days ago?"

So I read all the papers and pleadings and come up with a good argument for why the thing should be put off or referred to another court. I write the whole damn argument in about ninety minutes, using my Mad Typing and Research Skillz. Happy Bachelor Lawyer sees me going at my top rate of about 110 words a minute, stopping only to copy citations from the critical cases and rules of civil procedure, and says it looks like I have a direct line from my brain to the computer. (Don't I wish.) And in less than a buck-forty-five, we've got something in place and filed electronically with the court.

So I have a beer or two after work with Happy Bachelor Lawyer and Bird Lady and Southern Gentleman Lawyer, while I'm waiting for The Wife to finish her paralegal class downtown. We trade stories and dissatisfactions with work. And as I'm walking back to my car to go pick up The Wife, who pulls up besides me but The Great Man? And I'm thinking, "Aren't you supposed to be flying to the Virgin Islands to meet with a client right about now, like your memo said? What on earth are you doing in Knoxville?" But I don't ask him that.

"Listen, TL, don't worry about my letter today. You're in until at least December." Whew. That's a load off! "Say, how do you think Southern Gentleman Lawyer is going to take my raising his rent?"

Ugh.

And there's still no plastic spoons

EYLC got his two weeks' notice on Friday. Today I found that Happy Bachelor Lawyer is being cut free immediately. Southern Gentleman Lawyer, a completely independent entity, is getting his rent raised. Son-of-the-Great-Man appears to be emerging unscathed, to the surprise of exactly no one. And everyone is reflexively protecting Bird Lady, even though no one can describe exactly what it is that she does. Bad Attitude Paralegal is of the same mind as me -- it's hopeless here.

The Great Man wrote me a memo today which I'm sure he thinks is cordial and pleasant. Unfortunately for him, it is not; it is condescending and unsettling. It also suggests that I need to make arrangements for myself in about a month. Now, no one believes that anything around here will change in any meaningful way. But I do not intend to wait around and see.

I need to get out and move on. Everyone worth their salt here feels the same way.

Hate to be Right

I sarcastically predicted that I'd have until Monday until I got cut off at the knees in my attempts to reform the way this office is run. Turns out I was right. How did this happen? I worked on a reply brief and prepared for a mediation rather than assemble data for a silly, useless chart.

This place sucks. I need a new job.

At last!

We got a new (to us) car today -- the Blue Bullet, or "B.B." for short.

It's a 2002 Saturn SL-2, four-door with some but not a ton of options. We were only looking for an adequate car, and this seems to fit the bill. It's a step up from the Hunk-O-Junk but we still have some more economic climbing before we can be back in the BMW club. Surprisingly, we had very little haggling to do over the price; the dealer came back with an offer within $500 of what Edmunds.com said a private party sale should be, and our financing options were such that there was very little negotiating room on the price anyway.

It's a great relief to have a second car at last. The Wife and I work on opposite ends of town so every day I have to drop her off at her work before she starts, and I have to leave my work in time to pick her up when she is done for the day. Now, we can each drive ourselves home and to work. More gas and insurance, to be sure, but much less stress on both of us. Two working adults should have two cars.

I'll update later, when I have more time, with a picture of our new car. The Wife got a mascot for the car -- an orange plastic lizard she named "Frankie" who now lives on the dashboard.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Meet Your Flying Spaghetti Monsters!

Just finished the draft with my old law partner; conducted via cell phone and website with other players from Los Angeles, Chicago and New York. So here's the team (starters highlighted):

Quarterbacks:
Brett Favre -- GB
Eli Manning -- NYG
Jake Plummer -- DEN
Patrick Ramsey -- WAS

Position Players:
Anquan Boldin -- AZ
Chris Chambers -- MIA
Alge Crumpler -- ATL
Warrick Dunn -- ATL
Braylon Edwards -- CLE
Marvin Harrison -- IND
Steven Jackson -- STL
Ashley Lelie -- DEN
Greg Lewis -- PHI
Jamal Lewis -- BAL
Derrick Mason -- BAL
Travis Taylor -- MIN
Brian Westbrook -- PHI

Kickers:
Shayne Graham -- CIN
Lawrence Tynes -- KC

Team Defense:
Carolina Panthers

Our rivals shall be touched by His noodly appendage!

Big worries

The Great Man announced the day before yesterday that he intended to leave the office in about a month. No one knows exactly what that means, but he did make it clear that someone (that is, me) would have to start taking over the administration of the firm. I had my doubts that the firm was being administered in the first place, and it has been driving me absoutely nuts.

Of course, having these duties put on me leaves me in a very similar situation to the one I left behind in California. There, I had all of the management decisions on my lap, and three other cooks adding their own spices to the broth, which left me with little power to implement my decisions. The advantages of that situation were that 1) it was a firm I had built myself, for better or for worse, so I felt a personal stake in the outcome; 2) as a part owner, I had real power to implement my decisions and only had to seek consensus from my law partners to do so, which was not so onerous a burden most of the time; and 3) however bad our problems got, my partners and I were still going to be friends.

Here in Knoxville, I have none of these advantages. This isn't my firm and aside from my own responsibilities to my clients and my desire for a steady paycheck, I don't feel any ownership or personal stake in what happens to the firm. I have management responsibilities but no real power to implement my decisions other than persuasion. I am friendly but not friends with the Great Man, and our relationship is professional rather than personal. The same is more or less true for everyone there. And some of the results of the laissez-faire attitude about management are unprintable here.

So I get to stop being friends with everyone. That's bothersome to me, but if this firm is to have any chance of turning around from the direction it's been headed, someone needs to take charge. That means making some unpopular decisions because everyone doing just what they want to do is not working for me. The Great Man himself is going to be quite unhappy with what I have planned, because it will necessarily hit him where it hurts, at least in the short run. There's also already great resistance to my efforts to manage certain personnel who shall remain nameless (for now). I'm told to anticipate resistance to changing our filing protocols, much less actually making people do work all day long. I joked with The Wife that I'll have until Monday before The Great Man overrules my decisions.

If I get cut off at the knees, though, I'm laying down all of this responsibility. He's either going to let me do this right or he's not going to let me do it at all. And I'm not going to stop looking for alternative career venues, either. I didn't think management was fun in California; why should it be any better here? If I must get stuck doing this job wherever I go, damnit, I ought to do it somewhere that I'm happy. And I've been thinking that maybe that means going back to California.

The Divine Plan revealed

Everybody's favorite assassination advocate, Pat Robertson, has a few thoughts suggesting that maybe God had a reason for Hurricane Katrina after all -- and apparently, it's making sure the balance of power on the Supreme Court goes His way.

I'll state the obvious: Pat Robertson is a serious whack job. Hard to believe he actually seriously ran for President once. Does anyone take him seriously anymore, and if so, why?

Chicken shit

I'm sick of the amount of chicken shit going on.

This feels like a chicken shit office. No one seems to be doing any work. No one seems motivated to do anything. My own clients rebel against me. When I ask for help getting things done, there's always something more important that someone else is doing that takes priority. The result is I'm neck deep in paperwork, behind the 8-ball on all my cases, and no one but me gives a damn. What seems to matter to the Great Man is dealing with a chicken shit vendor dispute, offering a chicken shit service that we should have never subscribed to. Such new cases as I do get seem to be getting in are big piles of chicken shit on top of that.

There aren't even any plastic spoons since no one seemed to notice that the spoons were running out last week, with the result that I'm eating yogurt with a fork because that's the only utensil anywhere.

Of course, there is plenty more chicken shit going on, too. I'm frustrated with chicken-shit work from my students. They want to argue about their chicken shit opinions about chicken shit political issues which have nothing to do with what I'm trying to teach. They just want a degree to be handed to them, with no work, no learning, and no criticism. Anything less than a perfect score, every week, is somehow my fault.

And here's the smelliest pile of guano out there. It's been a week since Hurricane Katrina made landfall and there has been a chicken shit response to it -- at all levels of government, municipal, state, and federal. I heard an editorial on NPR today indicating that a response to a disaster is a complex, difficult thing and we should cut the relief effort workers some slack. I'm sure that's true, but there can be no justification for letting a million people live hip-deep in filth and anarchy when they are supposed to be citizens of the richest, most technologically advanced, country in the world, the country with the most infrastructure and the most resources at its disposal. If what happened in Louisiana had happened anywhere else in the world, we would call it a "failed state" and debate about whether the UN needs to come in and help restructure things.

And here's the thing about it. Once the water levels drop and you can see the streets again, we'll get a body count, be astonished, and mad for a while that the levees could have been built taller and stronger but weren't. And there will be some desultory finger-pointing about that. But then people will start rebuilding their city again -- still below sea level, still right underneath a lake -- and everyone is going to forget all about this and nothing will change. This picture to the right is from the Red River Flood of 1997 -- a whole city (Grand Forks) got taken out then, too. Have the levees and dams been rebuilt any better? Have the buildings and houses been relocated to a place that makes sense? Has anyone else, even in Grand Forks, done anything more than say, "I wonder whatever happened to all them sandbags?"

There's just way too much half-assed, chicken-shit, I-don't-give-a-damn attitude out there. And the thing is, it's contagious. The more I bang my head up against it, the more I stop caring myself.

Triumph of reason

I think one of the reasons why we get along so well with our friends Pam and Andrew, who are quite faithful, is that they do not proselytize to us but instead are willing to accept us for who we are and not pass judgment. Of course, they understand the difference between being a good person and being a church-going person; not everyone in Tennessee seems able to draw that distinction. I have already come across some people who discover my lack of faith in the divine and immediately distrust me -- one receptionist who worked at the firm said that she doubted she could work with someone who did not believe. (She found out, to her even greater discomfort, that believers were outnumbered by skeptics in the office, and that she was the only believer in the office who cared about the issue at all.)

But, while we have found good friends, we should have more than one other couple that we are friends one. So this morning, The Wife and I went to a lecture and roundtable discussion sponsored by the Rationalists of East Tennessee. This is a group of people who try to address the world on a rational, scientific basis and as a result attracts a lot of atheists, strong agnostics, and other religious skeptics. One guy had a T-shirt that read "You don't need God to be good." There were a lot of interesting and very friendly people there. In essence, this seems kind of like a group designed to provide some of the social and community benefits of a church for those who do not believe in a deity.

The speaker was Marty Carcieri, an old lecturer of mine from U.C. Santa Barbara. He is now a professor of political science at the University of Tennessee, and he recognized me almost immediately. He and I had sparred a little bit back when I was an undergraduate and quite a bit more strident and doctrinaire in my political thinking; it was quite gratifying to see that apparently, I made enough of an impression that fifteen years later, he still remembered me. He and I agree on the subject of his lecture today -- Gonzalez v. Raich, the medical marijuana case from several months ago -- and I offered to help out on the article he is thinking about writing on the subject. I hope he takes me up on the offer.

I'm intrigued by the group. Pretty much everyone there was bright and intellectual; everyone was friendly and pleased to meet others who shared the same set of values. Being so surrounded by very public and ostentatious displays of religious faith, it's easy for a nonbeliever like me to feel a little bit oppressed and lonely in a place like Tennessee. Having some other people who feel more or less the same way I do is comforting and assuring.

Best of all, skepticism about the divine appears to be about the only thing that the members of the group agree on. There was plenty of vigorous and interesting discussion about the issue, and most of it was intelligent and well-informed. While the issues in the Gonzalez case are mainly legal and political, some of the group who have non-legal backgrounds (there were several scientists, for instance) were quick to grasp the concepts in question and work through them to various conclusions. Now, there are a few overly zealous and theoretical disciples of Ayn Rand and while there is certainly room for Randian thought in a political debate, "Randies" can get to be tiresomely doctrinaire themselves. But aside from that, the community of people appears to be blessedly free from any kind of orthodoxy and eager to accept new people.

Next week they have a book club meeting, and I'll probably meet The professor at that. We got to meet his wife, and she's in to NFL football, which was also funny -- she's a San Francisco fan but sadly predicted that the 49'ers would be the "19'ers" this year. So I hope we become social friends with them. If the discussion level at the book club is as good as it was at the roundtable, I think I'll join the group.

Washington is about to get really ugly

Chief Justice William Rehnquist just died.