Kinsella Law

Cool program: CaptureWiz 1.1: “Capture anything on your screen and print, save, e-mail, or sticky-note it quickly with this virtual camera” (free to try).

Honda put together this extremely cool ad to highlight the inner workings of one of its new cars. You will think it’s got to be computer generated or special effects, but it’s actually real.

Advice for the LawLorn is an interesting lawyer-advice column by Ann Israel. For example–“I’m a fifth-year IP associate. Is in-house truly nirvana like recruiters have been telling me?”; “Should I take the free ride at University of Michigan Law School or pay full fare to go to Harvard Law?”; and my favorite, the law student in the “top 95%“: “I graduated bottom of my class from a fourth tier law school, and I have failed the bar exam four times. Should I just kill myself and get it over with?”

Cool article on buzzword proliferation–If Using Buzzwords is How You Roll, Don’t Be Surprised by the Hatin’, by Nathan Johnson. Writes Johnson: “What is it about certain words that makes them so popular? Do you know what “krunk,” “off the chizain” and “fo shizzle” mean? Possibly. Would you use them in polite conversation – say, in a business meeting, during a parent/teacher conference, at church, during a job performance review? If you don’t know, let me tell you: No, not unless you were joking. Yet, I’ll bet you think you know what equally nebulous terms like “robust,” “end-to-end,” “turnkey” and “scalable” mean. A seemingly infinite number of corporations use them every day to describe products and services.”

Interesting article about “whether patents are an impediment to the industry, a necessary evil or just a high-visibility nuisance”. As a patent-lawyer friend said about this article, “It’s good that this is becoming a more mainstream public policy debate, but scary how ill informed and even illogical the debate is.”

What can I say–that’s the title I came up with for the latest patent to issue for my company, Applied Optoelectronics, Inc. Hey, I haven’t had any published articles to blog lately, this was the best I could do. More patents here.

New Harvard Study Heats up ‘Global Warming’ Debate–yes, HARVARD (another article: Greenhouse gases not culprit, study suggests). A few choice snippets:

A new scientific review of climate history contends that the earth was warmer during the Middle Ages than it is today, supplying ammunition to one critic of the environmental movement who claims concern over “global warming” has been “sheer folly.”

A team of Harvard University scientists examined 1,000 years of global temperatures and reviewed more than 240 scientific journals from the past 40 years and concluded that despite man’s influence on our environment, current temperatures are not as warm as during the Middle Ages.

“This new study merely affirms the obvious: climate alarmism based on a few years’ or even a century’s data is sheer folly, reminding us again that geological cycles spanning millennia do not share the rush of agenda-driven scientists or activists,” Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the free-market environmental think tank Competitive Enterprise Institute, told CNSNews.com.

The Harvard study is set to be published this spring in the journal Energy and Environment. According to the study, a global medieval warming period lasting from about 800 to 1300 A.D. was followed by a Little Ice Age between the years 1300 to 1900. The study also states that the earth has been warming slightly since 1900.

The study is significant because it refutes the notion that current temperatures are the warmest ever and calls into question much of the warming effect caused by the so-called greenhouse gases from industrial plants and automobiles.

Green groups will be “devastated and panicked” by this new research, according to Horner, which he insists was not tainted by special interests or politics.

I LOVE IT!

A recent study of the controversial Atkins diet has concluded that the diet works, but simply because “people on [low-carb diets] are consuming less calories”. However, the study indicates that the diet also may not be unhealthy, as some critics have contended. A few snippets:

In the increasingly polarized battle over America’s bulge, counting calories trumps cutting carbohydrates, according to new research that debunks the nation’s hottest diet craze.

A sweeping analysis of studies dating back to the 1960s suggests people on low-carbohydrate regimens such as the Atkins diet lose weight merely because of the reduction of calories, not some miraculous metabolic process. […] “There’s nothing magical about carbohydrates,” said Dena Bravata, a Stanford University social science researcher and lead author of the study. “Low-carb diets are effective in the short run, but it’s because people on them are consuming less calories.”

The review, the first of its kind, appears in today’s issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. It analyzed 107 articles containing data on 3,268 participants.

[…] But Bravata’s analysis of all existing studies found little evidence exists on the efficacy and safety of low-carb diets. Only five of the studies evaluated diets lasting longer than 90 days, and Bravata said adverse effects may not have shown up within the short period of the studies. She noted that losing weight typically leads to an improvement in some heart disease risk levels.

[…] Emphasizing that there is insufficient evidence that the Atkins diet is safe or unsafe, Bravata acknowledged that people having success on it might continue it as long as they do so under monitoring by a doctor. She said that for some people, Atkins is clearly “an effective strategy.”

The Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises was arguably the most important thinker of the 20th century. His magnum opus, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics is a comprehensive and systematic treatise on economics, social philosophy, and the social sciences, and the foundation for sound, truly scientific economics.

Also groundbreaking and fascinating is Mises’ Epistemological Problems of Economics, originally published in 1933. In this book Mises seeks to put the declining classical view of economics as a deductive science on a firmer foundation, and to show why positivism and empiricism is the wrong approach to understanding economics. This treatise, out of print for many years, is now brought back by the Mises Institute in a 3rd edition, with a comprehensive introduction by Jörg Guido Hülsmann, senior fellow of the Mises Institute and Mises biographer. Hülsmann’s introduction is a brilliant tour de force, and well worth reading in its own right.