Twitter Updates for 2010-03-08
- Reading "Born to Run." So good! So inspiring! #
- http://twitpic.com/178efd – First NYC run of the year in shorts! #
So did people here about this John Roberts retirement rumor thing? Radar posted this item about how the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court was considering retiring, and then quickly retracted it.
The Above the Law blog claims that Radar got this from a law school exercise. Apparently Georgetown University professor Peter Tague began his class Thursday by announcing that Roberts would resign the next day, “but halfway through our lecture on the credibility and reliability of informants,” a student from the class told ATL, “he revealed that the Roberts rumor was made up to show how someone you ordinarily think is credible and reliable (ie a law professor) can disseminate inaccurate information.
ATL postulates that this is how Radar got their erroneous scoop — by students texting and tweeting their friends — and the LA Times buys it.
I’m a bit skeptical, however.
More »
This week NPR and the Center for Public Integrity highlighted the case of Laura Dunn, a former University of Wisconsin student who says she was raped April 4, 2004, by two members of the men’s crew team. The case, which was picked up by a number of blogs, is said to show how campus judicial systems fail sexual assault victims.
But both NPR and CPI ignored significant facts that didn’t fit their narrative — facts uncovered and made public by an investigation by the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights.
Reading the reports by NPR and CPI, you wouldn’t know that Dunn originally said a portion of their sexual encounter was consensual; that she “hooked up” with one of the men twice more after that night; and that according to police, she significantly changed her story about an encounter with one of the men at a fraternity party a year later.
Here’s NPR on the how the story began back on April 4, 2004:
That night, Dunn was drinking so many raspberry vodkas that they cut her off at a frat house party. Still, she knew and trusted the two men who took her back to a house for what she thought was a quick stop before the next party. Instead, she says they raped her as she passed in and out of consciousness
In fact, Dunn said that a “portion of the sexual activity was consensual, but she believed that Students B and C had sex with her without her consent.” (OCR report, p. 5) (The men say she was flirting with them, and initiated a threesome)
It took Dunn fifteen months to press charges. Before then (but after the alleged assault), Dunn acknowledges she went over to “Student C’s residence twice to engage in consensual physical contact.” On one of those times, “Student B” was there and Dunn and Student B watched television together (p. 6).
More »
So one of the things we had to do for our yoga teacher training program is write a brief (one-page) essay on both books one and two and three and four of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, one of the classic yoga texts, perhaps written by Sri Patanjali anywhere from 5,000 B.C. to 300 A.D. It was just meant to be a personal essay to I think basically show you had read the book and thought about it a little. Anyway I thought I’d share my take on the first half of the Sutras here.
More »
Hello! Yeah, I’m on an irregular posting schedule these days. You could say this blog is on life support. To some extent Facebook and Twitter have supplanted unfocused personal blogs like this one. But whatever, I still like having it out there as an outlet for me. Plus, without it where would all the people discussing broken necks go? So anyway. Yeah, I was laid off in November. I worked for a little bit at a well-known Internet gossip site (that I can’t name, sorry), but that wasn’t for me. So just finished my yoga teacher training at Sonic Yoga in Hell’s Kitchen! We’ll see if that’s something I could possibly pursue full-time (I’d likely have to really cut my expenses to survive on that income), but it was a great experience.
What else. I have been using a time-management technique I read about in the Wall Street Journal to stay on track during my “funemployment.” The Pomodoro Technique! You basically set a tomato timer (or an iPhone app, but I like to hear ticking down of a tomato timer) to 25 minutes. That is one Pomodoro, during which you have to stay absolutely focused and on track. No checking emails, Facebook or nytimes.com! After one Pomodoro you get to take a five-minute break, and after four you get a longer break. So back to my Pomodoros!