READIN

Sunday, December 18th, 2005

This afternoon I'm going to watch "Brokeback Mountain" -- I've been really looking forward to this movie ever since I saw the trailer, when we went to watch "Capote" 2 months ago or so. I am thinking that this movie coming out could signify a new moment in mainstream acceptance of male homosexuality; for at least half a century the homoerotic subtext of the American Old West mythology has been made explicit by people like Burroughs and Pynchon -- lots of really intelligent authors with big names and small readership. But it seems to me like this is the first time it is crossing over into mass culture. Frank Rich's op-ed piece today, on the movie and what it signifies for the culture, is well worth reading -- unfortunately it is "Times Select" so you will have to spring for a newspaper if you want to read it.

posted morning of December 18th, 2005: Respond
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Friday, December 16th, 2005

🦋 Deviations

I want to list briefly the things I believe I did wrong while on jury duty.

• The judge directed us not to deliberate over the evidence until all the testimony had been heard. I as-good-as-ignored this instruction, weighing the testimony as I heard it for believability and judging its implications with respect to other testimony I had heard. I am totally clueless, how I could avoid doing this.
• While I listened to each witness testifying, I was directing as much or nearly as much attention to the lawyer who was asking questions, as I was to the witness. I was trying to figure out with each question, what the attorney's intention was in asking that question, what effect or spin was sought. This was not counter to any specific instruction from the judge but it did not seem quite proper to me. OTOH the defense attorney was spinning like mad, and if I were not permitted to grok this I feel like I would be at a disadvantage in trying to adjudicate the truth or falsehood of what I was hearing.
• The judge instructed us furthermore, not to deliberate over the evidence while we were outside the courtroom. Again I did not pay attention, and mulled the case over in my head at home. As I noted in my previous post, I thought at home about my approach to the case; but also each day about what I was to make of the evidence I had heard so far.
• There were three counts we were to rule on: aggravated assault with intent to cause serious bodily harm, aggravated assault with intent to cause significant bodily harm, and aggravated assault with intent to cause bodily harm. (They are similar counts -- the second is less serious than the first, the third less serious than the second.) The judge's instruction was that we should find the defendant innocent or guilty of the first charge, and only if we found him innocent on the first should we rule on the second charge, and likewise for the third. All of us on the jury, and I was no exception, decided to rule just on whether he was guilty of "aggravated assault" and then make a decision about the magnitude of the offense. This seems to make more sense to me than the way we were instructed to rule, but that's why I am not a judge.*
• I felt from the beginning of deliberations that my prejudice was correct** and the defendant was guilty of assault. I tried to convince the other jurors of that, and several of them sided with me. But the three that I mentioned before seemed implacable. So prior to the second day of deliberation, I convinced myself that I could vote to acquit if that were the only way to reach a verdict. I justified this to myself by saying it would be better to acquit the defendant when I believed him guilty, than the opposite, and that he did not pose a danger to society free; but I believe the pattern of thinking I was engaging in might equally well have led me to vote to convict an innocent defendent in a different situation.

**This is such a quandary to me! I definitely formed a judgement within the first couple of hours of testimony, that the defendant was probably guilty -- I could think of a couple of bits of evidence that would change my mind but as the trial went on and it became apparent that none of them were going to be forthcoming, my judgement hardened. So what I am saying is, "All the evidence served to confirm my prejudice." But I have no way of proving that that I actually listened to the evidence and ruled fairly -- since I would have voted the same way had I totally ignored the evidence and gone with my gut response.

posted evening of December 16th, 2005: Respond
➳ More posts about Jury Duty

🦋 Where I've been commenting lately

I've been spending almost all my blog time of late at Unfogged. Some substantive comment and a lot of chat. It's a really nice place to hang out; if you haven't been there before, take a look.

posted afternoon of December 16th, 2005: Respond

Weird. I just looked at my GMail and noticed that I have 100 unused invites -- this prompts me to wonder when GMail is going to come out of Beta, and when they are going to go off the invitation-only model -- presumably these two things will happen at once. I reckon everybody who wants a beta GMail-box already has one, but: if you don't and you want one, drop me a line. It's a great mail service.

posted afternoon of December 16th, 2005: Respond

Thursday, December 15th, 2005

🦋 Due Deliberation

A few weeks ago I served on a jury, hearing an aggravated assault case in Newark. I have been wanting to write a narrative of the experience, this is a first stab at that.

I was standing, 3 hours into our deliberations, banging on the table and yelling at juror #8 that he had to listen to what I was saying, instead of just mindlessly repeating his same refrain, which was essentially "He [the defendant], is not a criminal, so I cannot find him guilty." I was kind of on edge for the rest of the day, and yelled or almost-yelled at #8 once more that afternoon.

That was not the proper way to go about juroring, I knew even as I was doing it and realized more clearly on my way to jury duty the following morning, to resume deliberations. I had been telling myself a story, during the testimony and closing statements, which pitted me against the sleazy defense lawyer; now that the testimony had ended I was transferring the antagonist role onto a group of 3 jurors, with #8 as their ringleader, who wanted to find the defendant innocent.

When I listen to the above paragraph -- and when I understood that morning what I had been doing -- it makes me seem really unsympathetic and like somebody I would read about who is going about his jury duty from a prejudiced and ignorant standpoint. But wait! -- thing is, the defendant was guilty. And the defense lawyer was sleazy. I take the fact of our eventual guilty verdict as vindication of my thinking the defendant was guilty, if not of my attitude during testimony. And going back to my memory, I believe that I can separate out the prejudiced personal narrative from what I was actually hearing, and feel like the verdict was proper.

On the second day of deliberations, things were a lot calmer. I apologized to #8, and he was gracious. I made what I think was my biggest contribution to the deliberations, which was to say: I think almost all of the events surrounding the punch, which were called into question by various bits of evidence, are extraneous -- if the punch was thrown in self defense, the defendant is not guilty of assault, and if it was not, then he is guilty of assault. I was able to get every other juror (including #8) to agree to that formulation, which meant that what we were deliberating about was brought into much clearer focus -- a lot of the tension of the first day had been caused by going around and around on the truth or falsehood of a lot of details which, because the evidence did not clearly support or refute, people were able to personalize and build narratives around. [That sentence is not clear and needs some editorial work.] Agreeing to my formulation made #8's notion that "he is not a criminal" recede a bit, so it was more about the facts in evidence.

More later.

posted evening of December 15th, 2005: Respond

Tuesday, December 13th, 2005

🦋 Dream Blogging

Microdream: As I arrive at work in the morning, an invisible claw closes around me and lifts me cradled into the air, where Ben Wolfson or a hologram of him is standing next to me and reading an announcement from my dentist, instructing me to remember to come to my appointment this morning (which I had forgotten). But the appointment is only minutes away and I, Country Doctor-like, do not see how I can possibly make it in time.

I wake up thinking, "Oh crap, do I have a dentist appointment this morning?" But I do not; the dream must have had something to do with tonight's Unfogged meetup (where Ben will not be) -- not sure what though.

posted morning of December 13th, 2005: Respond
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Saturday, December 10th, 2005

🦋 The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

We just got back from the movie -- it was both unexpectedly delightful, and disappointing. Nice how they adapted it to the screen -- I was really surprised and happy that there was no voice-over. But the dialogue was a bit weak, really -- that it was anachronistic was the least of its problems. A high percentage of lines in the script did not ring true as what that character would say at that moment; and a related problem was that the characters were not very well developed. I'm not sure whether to blame this on the writers or the actors, who were (with the exception of Georgie Henley as Lucy) not great.

This is coming out sounding a little like a pan; but I enjoyed the movie. It had a lot of weaknesses but it communicated well the joy and immediacy that is in Lewis' books. And the problems with the script were mostly in the first half of the film -- in general the second half (starting about when the children get to Aslan's encampment) was much stronger, and the cast really came together and started convincing me.

One niggling problem: I have always thought of the Pevensie children as younger than they were portrayed in this movie. Like I would have thought Lucy was about 4 or 5 and Peter no older than 13 -- the characters here were from 8 or so to 16 or so. And I'm not sure why they tied the movie in to the historical moment so strongly with the first scene, of the Pevensie family in their bomb shelter. It might be a good idea to do so but I think it would have required some development in the rest of the movie to ring true -- otherwise it just seems tacked on. (It knocked Sylvia for a bit of a loop; she thought we were watching a preview for a different movie until the scene about 5 minutes in, where the children come to the Professor's house.)

The visual effects and animations were in general great -- Aslan in particular, breathtaking. The only exception was the bit where the children are on the breaking ice in the stream, which looked pretty cheesy to me. (And note: this is something that was not in the book, appears to have been added in just to show what cool tricks they could do with CGI. That seems to me like a mistake.)

posted evening of December 10th, 2005: Respond
➳ More posts about The Chronicles of Narnia

Sylvia and I are off to watch the movie of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe this afternoon.

posted afternoon of December 10th, 2005: Respond
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Friday, December 9th, 2005

🦋 School blogging

I have finished my first class in my Master's Degree program, "Operating Systems W4118". I did well in the class (that is, I did extremely well on the homeworks, middling well on the midterm, and crashed and burned on the final, and got an A- overall). I really liked the homeworks, which consisted of adding features to the Linux kernel code, and wished they would have been more in depth and more challenging. (This is not to say they were not challenging.) It seemed like I was learning more from the hands-on stuff in the homeworks, than from the lecture and readings, which seemed pretty cut and dried. This could also be why I did not do as well on the tests as on the homeworks.

Hacking code is a core skill of mine and I enjoy it; but what I was thinking about getting better at by going to school, was more the rational analysis than the coding. So I do not think I approached this class in quite the right way. Something to think about while getting ready for next term, when I am planning to take "Network Systems W4119".

posted evening of December 9th, 2005: Respond

🦋 Echoes

Bedtime stories for the past week or so have been chapters of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Reading Chapter 11 tonight (in which the children and Mr. and Mrs. Beaver begin their journey to the Stone Table and meet Father Christmas), I realized the narrative is reminding me a lot of The Phantom Tollbooth. It struck me while Father Christmas was giving his presents to the children, that that was like Milo getting his presents from the Mathemagician and Azaz -- and thinking about it, I am sure Juster modeled his book in some respects on Narnia.

I read all of the Narnia books when I was quite young, and possibly had some of them read to me; my memory of them is faint but I do remember liking them. I am reading to Sylvia from a very nice edition that we bought when we visited the Eric Carle Museum in Amherst, MA. A really great discussion of the Narnia books has been taking place over the last few days in the comments to this post on Unfogged.

posted evening of December 9th, 2005: Respond
➳ More posts about The Phantom Tollbooth

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