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Thursday, August 21, 2003

Don’t RTFM!   When I set Rhoda the Roomba free on her nightly quest for cat hair tonight, she didn’t seem her usual spry self. She would get stuck in one spot, halting and lurching, not doing anything useful whatsoever. I turned her over and examined her bottom (this is when I decided to name her “Rhoda,” not “Fred”). Her brushes were all gummed up with cat hair and carpet threads. I cleaned those out, but she was still misbehavin’.   Desperate, I dug out the manual and proceeded to clean out her vacuum chamber, her rotary brush, and finally to remove and thoroughly clean her set of rotating brushes. All went well until then. The steps shown here from page 14 of the manual just didn’t work. Since I had found one other thing wrong in the manual, I decided look for another method. Aha! There’s that ^ screw to remove – a feature that had changed since the manual had been published. Since I deal with errata daily, I understand how this can happen. Here’s the rule: When something in the printed manual doesn’t work after 5 minutes, the manual is wrong. 7:48:20 PM    comment []

As the elected chief justice of Alabama, Roy Moore has been insisting that law is based on The Ten Commandments, so it’s only natural to place a 5,300 pound block of granite commemorating them in the State Judicial Building. Ignoring for a moment that one law is the First Amendment, we can use Google to find some historical laws that won’t cost Alabama taxpayers $5,000 a day (and double that after the first week), some commemoration of law history that predates The Ten Commandments. Unknown to Roy, we’ll type “history of law” into the search line and see what comes up…   Oh, lookee at hit #2!   The Timetable of World Legal History ... This case is considered by the legal profession to be the most important milestone in the history of American law since the Constitution. 1804: Napoleonic Code. ... Description: Timetable of world legal history. Category: Society > Law > Legal Information > Legal History wwlia.org/hist.htm - 45k - Cached - Similar pages Wow! Let’s check it out… ·                       2350 BC: Urukagina's Code ·                       2050 BC: Ur-Nammu's Code ·                       1850 BC: The Earliest Known Legal Decision ·                       1700 BC: Hammurabi's Code ·                       1300 BC: The Ten Commandments ·                       1280 BC: The Laws of Manu Urukagina’s Code is no good, because nobody’s ever found it, kinda like weapons of mass destruction. Ur-Nammu’s Code, maybe another search could dig that up. That “earliest known legal decision” is about some guys who murdered a wife-beater at the temple, so there’s a religious connection (the wife walked on a technicality, but the murderers were slaughtered in front of the victim’s house – I bet Roy would like that!). Hammurabi’s Code is way too complicated. It would take a lawyer to figure out its 282 clauses and a pound-per-law equivalent would take 149.460 pounds of granite! The Laws of Manu institutionalize “class warfare” because members of India’s higher castes were punished more severely than the lower ones, who couldn’t be expected to know any better. That’s cool, but I bet it would kinda stick in Roy’s craw. Still, we’ve provided him with some options if he wants to celebrate the history of law. Now let’s surprise Roy and show him our findings. I bet he’ll be really embarrassed at first to see so much law that predates the ones he thought were first. But being a judge and therefore a rational man, he’ll almost certainly corrects the false information he has spent his entire career propagating… 6:09:45 AM    comment []