Not too long ago I invited you to think about Greenland, our second largest neighbour. Now I’d like to invite you back to look at it, because a very — very — large piece of its ice cover is about to fall into Nares Strait opposite Ellesmere Island. How large is very large? The piece of ice in question is the tongue of the Peterman Glacier, and the amount destined for a dunking in the next few weeks is something like 5 billion tonnes in weight and an area the size of Manhattan, according to a report in the New . . . [more]

…resolve disputes between domain name holder and trade mark owners, that is. ICANN — Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers — is on the road at the moment, gathering views about their planned expansion of top level domain name space. Evidently the main issue that the public has hammered the travelling committee with has to do with the way in which disputes between domain name holders and trade mark owners are resolved. According to a report in the New York Times from earlier this week, “Brokering Peace Between Brand Owners and Domainers” by Saul Hansell, all the . . . [more]

Author and marketing guru Seth Godin has a post today on his blog that rings true for anyone selling anything – including lawyers.

He talks about products where a buyer’s perception of them may not be the reality – leading to frustration after the product is purchased.

His conclusion:

“There are lots of things you can do to make the sale. They often are precisely the opposite of what you should do to generate word of mouth. I know, you can’t have word of mouth unless you have a sale, but a sale that leads to pain is hardly worth . . . [more]

What do the experts do in order to cite long URLs, especially in printed publications where the reader will be seriously challenged to type out into a browser the line-long (or more) address?

Is it acceptable to use services like www.tinyURL.com or www.bit.ly to provide a short, typable URL for one’s sources? The former at least says that the links one creates do not expire (probably as good a promise as one would get for the original site/cite).

The McGill guide says that one could cite an article just by the top level of the domain where it appears, e.g. . . . [more]

As you may have read in various news reports, one David Jonathan Ross is suing the Minister of Public Safety and Solicitor General of British Columbia and the Attorney General of Canada because, he claims, the R.C.M.P.

attended at his residence near Hope, British Columbia. He alleges that he (and possibly others) was under investigation and was subjected to surveillance techniques that included “neurophone, advanced neurophone and subliminal messaging”. He says that, as a consequence, he suffers from headaches, sleeplessness, loss of normal brain function and related consequences.
Ross v. British Columbia (Public Safety), 2009 BCSC 930

Not surprisingly, . . . [more]

Today, Sunday, turned out to be a day where I felt newspaper deprivation acutely, so I remedied it by buying the Sunday NY Times, as I sometimes do — though not since its price in Canada got hiked to a startling sum just under $9, evidently. The Magazine contains an interesting interview with US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (“The Place of Women on the Court” by Emily Bazelon), which prompted one of those chains of associations that can entrain you when you’ve the Times to draw upon. Herewith, the highlights in something of a ramble, starting . . . [more]

One of the many marvels of the marriage of electronics and music is the wide (almost wild) variety of instruments that have become possible. We all know the spooky sound of the old theremin and the tinny rattle of the Moog as harpsichord. But have you heard (or even heard of) the Chapman stick? If you haven’t, it’s the duty and the pleasure of this fillip to relieve you of your ignorance.

The thing itself — seen to the left (click on it to enlarge it) — looks essentially like an oversize guitar fretboard or perhaps a sitar in the . . . [more]

The United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary’s confirmation hearings on Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to be associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court begin Monday morning. She will be on Capitol Hill undergoing questioning by the senators during the next week.

Of all the news outlets planning coverage, perhaps the most interesting is Associated Press. Their plan is to have live coverage via Twitter feed @AP_Courtside. They will be taking it a step further by taking questions and directions on coverage for their blog from their readers via Twitter, according to their blog post yesterday at Yahoo! . . . [more]

This message will hopefully reach you before you select your cottage and beach reading. A fun little site called Bookseer will help you find your next novel. Not recommended if you are seeking the next great legal text (and yes, I tried). . . . [more]

We’re four years old today. Since July 8, 2005, there have been 4,457 posts on which you’ve made 5,869 comments. Over 100 writers have contributed to our enterprise. And we’ve garnered some praise and prizes that give us great pleasure.

Of course, it’s all because of you, our readers. You’re the reason we started and you’re the reason we’re still here. On behalf of all of those who have written for us, let me thank you for reading what we write. Please keep doing it. And tell your friends about us. We’ve got more years to go yet. . . . [more]

…against shaving your head with both hands as you drive?

Ontario Ombudsman André Marin caught this guy on his iPhone in a video (guess who’s got a new 3GS) shaving his head with both hands as he was driving. It’s hard to make out the details in the vid, but I’ll take Andre’s word for it — which came via his Twitter strream, by the way. But only after he’d got out of his car. . . . [more]

These news items likely aren’t worthwhile putting as separate posts, so this is a silly season round-up of odd notes from the legal media.

We’re Staying in Dayton

Despite what we speculated last year about the outsourcing of jobs from Dayton, Lexis told the local paper last week that it has no plans to move and that 3,000 jobs in town are safe.

Amazing ROI in Legal Publishing

Want to quadruple your money in 55 months? Sounds like a Madoff line.

Well, in 2004, a London fund put £750,000 of fund money into a Lexis spin-off, a MBO . . . [more]