Ranga’s Blog

Source: John Struan, Irrelephant, Super Punch (Mar. 18, 2010).

March 14 is 3.14 or Pi Day, which is also Einstein’s birthday!

New Scientist and CNN have a couple of nice articles PI day, see Jacob Aron, Pi Day: Five Tasty Facts About the Famous Ratio, New Scientist (Mar. 12, 2010);  Elizabeth Landau, On Pi Day, One Number ‘Reeks of Mystery,’ CNN (Mar. 14, 2010).

[A] colossal red granite head of King Amenhotep III (circa 1390-1352 BC) was discovered in [a] funerary temple of the Kom El-Hettan area on Luxor’s West Bank. . . . [The] head[, which] is intact and measures 2[.]50m high[,] [] is a masterpiece of highly artistic quality, and shows a portrait of the king with very fine youthful sculptured features. . . . [It] belongs to a large statue representing the king standing, hands crossed over his chest and holding the royal insignia.

Source: Zahi Hawass, New Discovery at Kom El-Hettan (March 1, 2010); see also BBC News, Huge Head of Pharaoh Unearthed in Egypt (March 1, 2010).

“The Rhinodipterus specimen has a number of features that suggest it was air breathing, including a long mouth cavity and articulations of its cranial ribs, which are important in the living forms of lungfish air-gulping behaviour,” said Ms Clement from the Research School of Earth Sciences at ANU. “Yet Rhinodipterus lived in the ocean, not in freshwater, which runs counter to the standard theory that fish evolved the ability to breath air once they moved to freshwater habitats.”

…

“[A] plunge in global oxygen levels would have been a strong selection pressure on lungfish and other animals, including the tetrapods – the fish-like ancestors of land animals,” explains Professor Long. “This makes us believe that breathing air arose twice at this early time in vertebrate evolution: once in lungfishes, and once in the fish lineage leading to land animals, and ultimately to us.”

Source: Australian National University News, Oxygen Plunge Led to Rise of Air Breathers (Feb. 10, 2010); see also Alice M. Clement and John A. Long, Air-Breathing Adaptation in a Marine Devonian Lungfish, Biology Letters (Feb. 10, 2010).

The Supreme Court just issued two decisions related to Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436, 471 (1966):  Florida v. Powell, No. 08-1175, slip op. (Feb. 23, 2010) [PDF] and Maryland v. Shatzer, No. 08-680, slip op. (Feb. 24, 2010) [PDF].

The Ninth Circuit also issued a decision finding a violation of Miranda:  Doody v. Schriro, No. 06-17161, slip op. (Feb. 25, 2010) [PDF].  The majority found both a violation of Miranda and an involuntary confession.  Chief Judge Kozinski concurred as to the Miranda violation, but preferred to leave the trial court’s decision regarding the voluntariness of the defendant’s confession alone.

Source: Harry Bliss, Something Less Legal, Bliss (Feb. 23, 2010).

Source: Adventuring Company, The Showdown of a Couple of Centuries Ago (Feb. 27, 2010).

Source: Bill Amend, D&D Chess, FoxTrot (Feb. 5, 2010).

Some of his answers to the Times’ questions are quite humorous:

Were you close to George Bush?

No, I’ve never met him. I don’t know Cheney either. I have not gone hunting with him, which is probably a good thing for me.^[1]

Weren’t you invited to the White House Christmas party during your two years at the Department of Justice?

I don’t think so. That’s the way the government works. There’s the attorney general, then the deputy attorney general and then an associate attorney general. Then there’s the assistant attorney general, who was the head of my office.

So you’re saying you were just one notch above an intern, you and Monica Lewinsky?

She was much closer to the president than I ever was.

…

I see various groups are protesting a decision by a California government lawyer to teach a course with you that starts on Jan. 12, claiming he is legitimizing your unethical behavior.

At Berkeley, protesting is an everyday activity. I am used to it. I remind myself of West Berlin — West Berlin surrounded by East Germany during the Cold War.

Are you saying the citizens of Berkeley are Communists, reminiscent of those on the dark side of the Iron Curtain?

There are probably more Communists in Berkeley than any other town in America, but I think of them more as lovers of Birkenstocks than Marx.

[1] See Cheney v. District Court, 541 U.S. 913 (2004) [PDF].

Source: Deborah Solomon, Power of Attorney, New York Times (Dec. 29, 2009).

The Ohio Supreme Court has held that the Fourth Amendment does not permit a warrantless search of an arrestee’s cell phone records if (1) the search is not needed to ensure the safety of the officers; and (2) exigent circumstances are not present:

We hold that the warrantless search of data within a cell phone seized incident to a lawful arrest is prohibited by the Fourth Amendment when the search is unnecessary for the safety of law-enforcement officers and there are no exigent circumstances.

The Court distinguished cell phones from closed containers and held that an arrestee has a reasonable expectation of privacy in the contents of their cell phones because “[e]ven the more basic models of modern cell phones are capable of storing a wealth of digitized information wholly unlike any physical object found within a closed container.” Also, once the police take custody of an arrestee’s cell phone the Court ruled that “the state has satisfied its immediate interest in collecting and preserving evidence and can take preventive steps to ensure that the data found on the phone is neither lost nor erased” and “must then obtain a warrant before intruding into the phone’s contents.”

The decision is explicitly not based on any state law or state constitutional provision (”Smith has not raised a challenge based upon the Ohio Constitution”), thus no adequate and independent state law grounds that would prevent review by the Supreme Court are present. Since the Fifth Circuit’s decision in United States v. Finley, 477 F.3d 250 (5th Cir. 2007) [PDF], takes an opposite view, there is also a potential split of authority, which might make this issue ready for the Supreme Court’s review.

Source: State v. Smith, 117 Ohio St. 3d 447 (Ohio St. Dec. 15, 2009) [PDF].