right? right?

Members of the legal fraternity could start with the second right.

On the other hand, as reported on the Globe and Mail’s web site

The Harper government is preparing to carve out a new role for Canada as a champion of religious rights abroad …

Early in 2012, the Tories will finally flesh out a campaign promise to install the Office of Religious Freedom within the secular confines of the Department of Foreign Affairs …

The article adds

The new Conservative office – which will publicly criticize regimes that mistreat religious minorities – is in part a workaround

I’m feeling lazy this Friday — something to do with too much holiday merriment, I’m certain. So today’s fillip is pretty much a do-it-yourself flip to the week’s end. All I’ll do is point you to a site that gathers sites, some of which in turn gather sites. . . .

My target website is Open Culture, and, as you might suspect from the name, it’s a place where you can find free access to a lot of interesting stuff. As Dan Colman, site founder (and incidentally Director & Associate Dean of Stanford’s Continuing Studies Program), says:

Open Culture

My parenting partner and our progeny were creative with their gifts this holiday season. I thought I would share some photos of their labour. Since many Slaw readers are library folk, you might enjoy seeing “The Coffee Book Table”.

The Coffee Book Table is a storage cabinet with a drawer. The Mireaus have been brainstorming on titles to add to the books. So far we have come up with:

• A Table of Two Cities
• Aesop’s Tables
• A Tall Table
• Tables from the Crypt

Any other title ideas? . . . [more]

Much of the time when I enter WolfamAlpha I feel the way archeologists must have felt confronting Egyptian hieroglyphics before the deciphering of the Rosetta Stone or—to cast things the other way and into the future—the way the scientists in 2001, A Space Odyssey felt in the presence of the monolith. I know it’s magnificent but I don’t know how to work it—not properly, at least.

The latest instance of my admiring frustration has been caused by WolframTones, which, as the tagline has it, is “an experiment in a new kind of music.” It’s a sonic working out of . . . [more]

Language debates fascinate me. My local hockey team gets me going, whether winning or losing. Now both interests are combined.

You may not have heard, but the appointment of new Habs coach Randy Cunneyworth is creating quite the stir in Quebec. So much so that it has become a question of politics. In his editorial, Henry Aubin, journalist for the Montreal Gazette, writes strong words to this effect:

The club’s federalist ownership is inadvertently blowing fresh oxygen on the cooling embers of sovereignist fervour. Defence of the language is what powered sovereignty in the 1970s, and Molson’s Canadiens could be

I just attended the 30th annual Christmas Bureau Breakfast. This local charity has been providing festive meals to Edmonton families in need since 1940. The breakfast, hosted by Fraser Milner Casgrain LLP, and sponsored by The Westin Edmonton, Sobeys and IGA was a wonderful event this year.

Field Law has been supporting the Christmas Bureau since the war years and we have participated in the Breakfast since its beginning. I am proud that our firm supports this worthy organization with an annual Craft auction as well as cash donations from lawyers and staff.

Many lawyers and law firms . . . [more]

What does the Byzantine musical symbol kai apothes look like? Unicode knows. Because we human beings do love to “scribble, scribble, scribble” that computer industry standard boasts “more than 109,000 characters covering 93 scripts,” according to the Wikipedia entry. Fear not, however: I’m not about to regale you with tens of thousands of squiggles. No, I’m going to let you do it yourself.

Actually, I’m pointing you to Shapecatcher, a modest little website that invites you to draw any shape you like and promises to find you the unicode character nearest in outline. So, for example, I gave . . . [more]

Ann Cavoukian – the Ontario Privacy Commissioner – has written an excellent op-ed in the Financial Post entitled Beware of ‘Surveillance by Design’. 

It starts off with:

I feel the need to raise a growing concern regarding the lack of understanding of a key privacy issue – the ease of data linkages in an ever-increasing online world.

In this day and age of 24/7 online expanded connectivity and immediate access to digitized information, new analytic tools and algorithms now make it possible, not only to link a number with a name, but also to combine information from multiple sources,

Remember the “new math”? Everything you knew and the way you knew it were wrong. You had to be able to calculate in base 3 or base 7. You either couldn’t do your homework or couldn’t help your kids with theirs.

Well, this isn’t that.

New Math is a website where Craig Damrauer makes language sub for numbers and comes up with some wry products. For instance:

Or, to pick something likely even closer to our hearts:

More of a hmmm than a haha. But there are funny equations, true equations, and truly odd equations, and because

you should go . . . [more]

The Globe & Mail recently reported on the decision of a senior manager at a Service Canada to ban all forms of visual holiday cheer from all outlets across Québec. While Québec has become an increasingly secular society, this manager’s decision prompted a public (and Twitter!) outcry and was quickly reversed.

In short order, the Government was accused of ruining Christmas:

“Why do the Conservatives want to steal the magic of Christmas from employees of Service Canada?” said NDP MP Alexandre Boulerice.

In an effort save Christmas for all Québeckers (and Canadians) and return the “magic”, Minister Diane Finley issued . . . [more]

The Attorney General for England and Wales, Dominic Grieve gave a very interesting speech on December 1 entitled ‘Contempt – A Balancing Act: balancing the freedom of the press with the fair administration of justice’ to journalism students where he commented on his approach to contempt of court.

‘Citizen journalists’ should not think they are immune to the law of contempt, that there is a certain belief that so long as something is published in cyberspace there is no need to respect the laws of contempt or libel. While he accepts the danger posed to the administration of

I suspect a few of you will be wondering the malls over the next few weeks looking for a gift for the special lawyer in your life. To save you from buying yet another bad tie (it’s the thought that counts!), here are four great online gift guides that should help you find a gift that will be welcomed and used by your favourite someone.

My good friend Reid Trautz just released his 7th Annual Holiday Gift Guide for Lawyers. Reid works on this all year and he always has some interesting suggestions. This morning, AttorneyAtWork released a slightly . . . [more]