Last year it was Copyright Infringement High, now it’s Copyright Infringement Elementary:

How do you think E. B. White feels about this?

FROM: [Assistant Dan]
TO: All Students, All Faculty and Staff
DATE: Thu, May 8, 2008 at 4:57 PM
SUBJECT: Smoking

Today the Law Center had its second mulch fire this spring due to a discarded cigarette. If you smoke please do so in the smoking areas where ashtrays are provided. Please use the ashtrays. These smoking areas include the east side of Williams patio; the library quad; the northwest side of McDonough podium; the center of the Tower Green; the alley behind the Fitness center.

The University’s policy for a smoke free work place prohibits smoking at the entrances to the buildings. You need to move at least 20 feet from the building entrance before lighting up. Thanks for your cooperation on this.

Assistant Dean
Georgetown University Law Center
600 New Jersey Avenue NW
Washington DC

Let it be known, “the alley behind the Fitness center” is where a homeless man was stabbed two years ago. Smoke up!

Here’s the map that helpfully lets us know where we can smoke without starting a mulch fire, marked with big smiley faces!

Click to big-ify

This is a totally reasonable system for confirming my laptop’s certification:

One, two… sigh… three, four… sigh… five, six… come on, come on… SEVEN! Yes!

List of law school GPA curves.

Justice Scalia is literally blocking my ability to leave the library through any reasonable means. What an odd irritation.

BarBri is expensive: joining BarBri can cost over $3,000, just trying to snag the books on eBay can cost you over $700. Yesterday at lunchtime the books for this summer’s New York bar exam arrived at Georgetown and by 7:30pm they were already being put to effective use:

Yes, the box is full of books. Click to big-ify.

I know ONE door that’s going to be passing the bar.

Frank Currier Doble, an engineer who graduated from Tufts in 1920, through what sounds like a slightly complicated will recently left Tufts University and Leslie University $272 million dollars to be split evenly.  Here’s a picture of him demonstrating his “Doble Safety Portable Telephone” in 1920… seems very convenient, and safe!

Unsurprisingly, when you give $136 million dollars to a school, they go all out and build you a detailed webpage (here’s Tufts’s, and here’s Lesley’s).  Tufts is going to build a new interdisciplinary engineering/biology/something building, Lesley is going to quintuple their operating budget.  Ok, just kidding, though it did literally triple their endowment.

I’m not sure why I find this interesting, but you can read Larry Bacow’s email about this whole thing after the jump. Read more »

Here’s a quick collection of some of the titles of articles I wrote for RumorsDaily back when it was a dull local college thing (not this modern day, stodgy blog):

• Why I like Hazing
• [My] Ethnocentric Journey
• Are You Homosocial?
• White Face v. Black Face at the Oscars (I’m still talking about this 9 years later)
• Haircut Advice (a barn burner, this one)
• Is the Non-Discrimination Policy About You?
• The Slow Internet, The Truth and Napster (the Truth!)
• Res-Life is Not Fine, Res-Life Should Not Fine
• National Coverage: Is Attention Really What You Want?
• Damn Commie-Nazis 
  
• What the Hell is Hazing Anyway? (I’m not sure where I was heading with this)
• An Open Letter to the World (do you think the world read it?)
• Cops, Donuts and the Mafia?
• Freedom from Electronic Censorship?
• Who Wants to be Racist? (I still ponder this one, as do others)
• Smoking is Cool, or Why Armand Mickune-Santos is Not (now it’s nine years later and I feel bad for having mocked him, he appears to be coaching a softball team today)
• Where Are All the Controversies?

Yeah, I’m starting to think I was looking for trouble back then.

US, Washington DC, Mustache Contest (2007)

US, Washington DC, Mustache Contest (2006)

US, Washington DC, Georgetown University Law Center

While filling out my mandatory federal education loan exit interview, I was asked if I would like to calculate the amount of salary I would need in order to repay my debt.  Here’s the terrifying answer:

Debt Wizard
Question: How much salary do I need to support my student loan debt?
Answer: Based on student loan debt of $185,000.00 to be repaid over 10 years at 8.5 percent interest, my estimated monthly payment is $2,293.74.

To support repayment of the debt, I should earn at least:
# $165.41 Hourly
# $28,671.69 Monthly
# $344,060.29 Annually

The “Debt Wizard” isn’t anywhere near as cool as I was hoping he would be.

Students are largely rejecting free lunches due to social stigma.  I can’t decide if this is a good thing or a bad thing.

After a lengthy knifemaker hiatus, the series returns with our sixth member of the 1981 Knifemakers Guild Directory: John (Mike) Bassney. John (Mike)’s picture looks something of a cross between John C. Reilly and Tom Selleck — in other words, like a totally awesome knifemaker. This is really our first knifemaker whose picture looks like someone I would want making my knife. He doesn’t look like a cowboy, or a family man, or a terror, he looks like the sort of guy who would take your knife order and just get right down to business. He’s even wearing what I presume to be a knifemaking apron. This guy would have gotten my business… if I would have ever ordered a custom made knife in 1981 in the greater Wisconsin region.

Something else great about John (Mike) — according to his bio, he went to SUNY Buffalo, graduated, and then moved to Wisconsin. Why is that great you ask? Well, I’m not sure, but I think this is our first confirmed college graduate knifemaker, which is something.

His motto is “I simply wish to make the best knife I can with the material available and at the same time work in line with the customer’s wishes.” That’s modern business-speak. He’s like a corporate executive. I love this guy.

John (Mike) Bassney today

Sadly John (Mike) Bassney is no longer a member of the Knifemakers Guild according to their member list. He was only a probationary member in 1981, so maybe he didn’t make the cut, or maybe he simply let his membership lapse. He might have lost interest in knifemaking altogether, it’s hard to know.

The Google record on Mr. Bassney is quite slim. John (Mike) Bassney turns up nothing that I didn’t write myself, John Bassney is likewise unhelpful.

Mike Bassney, though, does provide us with three hits. He apparently went to Painted Post High School in Painted Post, New York from 1958 to 1962. That would line up well with him graduating from SUNY Buffalo in 1968, so this is probably him. This guy thought he taught shop in Michigan during the 1970s (possible, since he ended up in Wisconsin by 1981). He still appears to live in Lodi, Wisconsin, and he has a job at a local Subway in Columbus, Wisconsin. He’s the host.

Knowing about his knife proclivities, I can surely say that this is one Subway I would never rob.

Previous knifemaker: Scott Barry
Next knifemaker: Pierce Franklin Beck, Jr.

Other 1981 Knifemaker’s Guild Directory Pages: first page, all pages, all pictures.

Delightful.

I am writing to let you know that the University sent an e-mail this morning informing some members of our community that an external hard drive containing personal information, including social security numbers and dates of birth, was stolen from a locked office on the main campus earlier this month. Of the more than 38,000 persons who received the e-mail, about 8,300 were former and current Law Center students and staff.

The information that was contained on the hard drive pertained to fees associated with the student health insurance program in which Law Center students and some staff participate. This program is administered through the main campus Office of Student Affairs.

The notification from main campus informs those affected about steps they can take to protect against misuse of the disclosed information, including fraud and identity theft. The University has established a website (identity.georgetown.edu) and a toll-free hotline (866-740-2458) that includes additional information.

University representatives will come to the Law Center to conduct an information session on Thursday, January 31, at 4:00 p.m. in McDonough 203.

This incident has prompted us to review our security measures at the Law Center. I have initiated a Law Center-wide examination of practices and policies that pertain to the collection and storage of, and access to, sensitive information kept in both electronic and paper form.

I am deeply concerned about this breach of data security. The Law Center will do everything we can to support and assist those affected.

T. Alexander Aleinikoff
Dean

For anyone curious, here are the grade distributions from one previous semester’s classes:

I’m currently in the midst of an Evidence final exam, but I instructed the robots to give you a general impression of what I’m doing. Here, through music and legos, is a seemingly accurate representation of my answer to at least one question on this test:

Incidentally, what I learned in class and what this video teaches are not identical. Who should I trust?

The first comment to this story about a community college setting up a gender-divided “meditation room” for Muslim students made me laugh.

Georgetown University Law Center recently started using a series of snazzy panoramas on its homepage. The panoramas are flash-based for some reason, so I’ve collected them in one non-flash-based place. They make Washington, DC seem downright livable.

Click to big-ify

After recently mentioning IQ tests, I was primed to see this list of people with the world’s highest IQ scores (including Chris Langan who, at 195, must be the world’s smartest bouncer).  In an effort to add myself to the list, I took the IQ test provided by another blogger.  With the exception of one that I was uncertain about, I thought I got them all right.  Since I didn’t immediately receive a phone call from MIT, I guess I missed a few.  I got a 132.

If you have 40 minutes (it only took me 20, but the maximum time limit is 40) you should take it too so we can finally know exactly how many IQ points smarter or stupider than you I am, based entirely on an online IQ test whose questions only involve shapes and colors.

Get thinking.

The new 2007 Cooley rankings (previously discussed here) are out and there’s some movement! While the Thomas M. Cooley School of Law remained at #16 and Georgetown stayed stable at #2 (phew!), it looks like some schools have made some dramatic improvements in total library square footage. Emory jumped from 58 to 44 (top 50!) and Boston University leapfrogged from #36 to #22.

Good job guys, keep up the construction!

Also, for your own edification, here’s Cooley’s dean.

UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law paid a consulting firm to come up with a new, more memorable, name for the school. $25,000 bought them their new name: UC Berkeley School of Law.

Money well spent!

PS.  I’ve wrested control from the robots.

The Thomas M. Cooley School of Law had a problem — US News and World Report consistently ranked Cooley in the fourth tier, putting Cooley near the bottom of US legal education facilities. This obviously put a dent in their recruiting options.

So what’s a poor law school to do? Come up with their own ranking system of course!

In 1996 the president of the Thomas M. Cooley School of Law established the Cooley rankings. This alternative ranking system takes into account a number of reportedly underrepresented factors such as Total Minority Enrollment, Full Time Resident Tuition, Number of Professional Librarians, Library Seating Capacity and Total Law School Square Footage.

And guess what? Surprisingly, the ranking system invented by the President of the Thomas M. Cooley School of Law favors the Thomas M. Cooley School of Law! The school jumped from being ranked somewhere in the 150-200 range, to being ranked 16th, just behind UC Berkley and well in front of Stanford and Cornell!

In other good news, Georgetown University Law Center jumps from 14th to 2nd in the Cooley rankings. Georgetown must have a lot of library seating capacity.

I will likely never have a finite Erdős–Bacon number which is found by adding one’s Bacon number, with one’s Erdős number. The Bacon number is based on the number of degrees one is separated from Kevin Bacon in terms of film appearances, while the Erdős number is based on the number of degrees one is separated from mathematician Paul Erdős based on mathematical scholarly article authorship.

While my Bacon number is 3 (I appeared in Snakes on a Blog with Kenan Thompson who appeared in Snakes on a Plane with Rachel Blanchard who appeared in Where the Truth Lies with Kevin Bacon), it seems unlikely that I will ever achieve an Erdős number. This will leave my combined Erdős–Bacon number somewhere in the infinity-plus-three range.

For comparison, Danica McKellar (Winny Cooper) has an Erdős-Bacon number of 6, which I find very impressive.