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Academic

The Yin Blog

Random thoughts on law, politics, game theory, sports, books, television shows, and movies. - From Tung Yin, Associate Professor of Law at Iowa. \r\n

Post Frequency: 0.9/day

Last Entry: March 31, 2011 at 17:08:59

McGwire looks smarter than Clemens

Posted on August 19, 2010
Now that former baseball star Roger Clemens has been indicted for obstruction of justice, false statements, and perjury for allegedly lying about steroid and HGH use during testimony before Congress, it looks like former slugger Mark McGwire was much smarter...

Thanks for nothing (almost), or when form generated letters sound silly

Posted on August 17, 2010
I got this letter in the mail today from Caltech -- the palace of horrors where I suffered four years in exchange for a B.S. degree: The bold-face text is in the original. And it's entirely true, the last donation...

Useful things to do with old casebooks!

Posted on August 16, 2010
Thanks to "burned" CIA operative Michael Weston (from Burn Notice), I've discovered a new use for old casebooks! In a recent episode, Weston had to go into prison to protect an inmate from being killed. Knowing that the bad guys...

Cinema interruptus

Posted on August 15, 2010
We just got back from a week in Vancouver, B.C., about which I'll have more to say later. In the meantime, I'll share this story. . . . We were staying in downtown, just a few blocks away from a...

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Why can't we be like [insert country of choice]?

Posted on July 31, 2010
A friend of mine posed the question on Facebook as to why we can't have a rational immigration policy, like Canada or Australia. Without defending our dysfunctional politics, I've increasingly come to believe that comparisons of the U.S. with other...

Adventures in composting, Portland-style

Posted on July 30, 2010
In an effort to live up to its reputation as a "green" city, Portland has decided to try a new system of garbage collection that will force residents to compost. It used to be that our trash and recycling bins...

Was this consensual mating?

Posted on July 27, 2010
I have a fascination with hybrid animals, like ligers, but I also wonder how many of these unusual offspring matings are in any sense consensual. I mean, I realize that consent in the animal world is going to be judged...

This may explain things

Posted on July 20, 2010
I found this site that analyzes your writing and tells you who you write like. So I plugged in a few different pieces of writing. A couple of paragraphs from a symposium article comparing the Obama and Bush Administrations' on...

One year ago . . .

Posted on July 17, 2010
. . . we made it to our new home state of Oregon. Not to Portland, mind you. We spent the night in Pendleton in the eastern part of the state. We were driving only about 200-250 miles a day...

Thoughts on the Lynne Stewart resentencing

Posted on July 16, 2010
Convicted defense lawyer Lynne Stewart was resentenced today to 10 years in prison, up from the 28 month sentence that the government had successfully appealed. I noticed this observation from the New York Times:But what seemed to weigh heavily on...

"Inception" -- why no mention of "Dreamscape"?

Posted on July 16, 2010
The new Christopher Nolan movie "Inception" opens today, and it's been getting pretty good reviews. It's about Leonardo DiCaprio as some kind of psychic who can get into your dreams and steal your secrets. From the previews, it looks like...

Portland may not be a "manly" city, but I'd rather live here than the "manly" cities

Posted on June 25, 2010
According to some ridiculous listing by the Mars chocolate company, Portland is the least "manly" major city in the country (at #50 out of 50). The survey methodology uses "manly criteria like the number of home improvement stores, steak houses,...

Law school grade inflation

Posted on June 22, 2010
Retroactive grade inflation at law schools is in the news. The way I see it, as long as a school uses a fairly conventional grading scale (ie., 4.0 or ABCDF) and it discloses the mean grade on the curve, especially...

My first game at the baseball stadium as a dad

Posted on June 15, 2010
What a deal! Sunday was a fundraising event at PGE Park for my son's elementary school, and it was "Kids Eat Free" day. And as an extra bonus, the first 2000 kids got free baseball mitts. My son had been...

USC, the NCAA, and an analogy to the SEC

Posted on June 11, 2010
As virtually all college football fans must be aware, the NCAA has dropped a 2000 lb JDAM on USC for its failure of institutional control over its sports programs. If USC does not succeed in its appeal, it is facing...

Obama and the BP spill

Posted on June 09, 2010
Like many others, I think it's kind of ridiculous to blame President Obama for not having cleaned up the BP oil spill, especially as if he could personally do something about it. At the same time, I was reminded of...

Books where one character makes all the difference

Posted on June 02, 2010
After being blown away by the epic movie "Red Cliff," I decided to read the historical novel "Romance of the Three Kingdoms," which encompasses the events in the movie and more. It's a 14 century novel set from 180-260 AD...

2010 TV roundup, part 1

Posted on May 24, 2010
I haven't watched the "Lost" finale yet (last night went to "The Celebrity Apprentice") and tonight is "24" time, so "Lost" will have to wait until Tuesday night . . . . Meanwhile, it's been a week, and I'm still...

Congrats to Jim Huffman!

Posted on May 19, 2010
Congratulations to my colleague Jim Huffman, who won the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate last night! Oregon's a pretty blue state (though it used to have moderate Republican Senators like Mark Hatfield), but if this is the year, with anti-incumbent...

Maybe Jack Bauer should wear a hooded robe and carry a scythe in the "24" movie

Posted on May 18, 2010
In the history of television, has any character intentionally killed more people than Jack Bauer has? I mean, seriously . . . . Okay, Stephen Saunders (the British terrorist in season 3 of "24") did kill several hundred people when...

To bar or not to bar . . . .

Posted on May 18, 2010
Since graduating from law school, I've lived in four states: California, Oklahoma, Iowa, and now Oregon. I passed the California bar exam in 1995 (my admission year is 1996 because I put off getting admitted so as to avoid paying...

FlashForward cancelled, V renewed -- perfect!

Posted on May 16, 2010
ABC had two high-profile sci-fi series this past season, "FlashForward" and "V." Both were serialized dramas with heavy pre-season promotion. "FlashForward" was based very loosely on the novel of the same name by Canadian author Robert Sawyer and posits a...

My prediction for the final two of "The Celebrity Apprentice"

Posted on May 15, 2010
Today is Saturday, a day before the mass firing tomorrow on "The Celebrity Apprentice," when Donald Trump is going to fire one of the five remaining celebrities at the beginning of the show, put the other four through interviews with...

Waterboarding and swimmers

Posted on May 12, 2010
While watching an earlier episode of "24" where traitorous CTU analyst Dana Walsh gets waterboarded by some private military contractors working for the ex-President, it occurred to me that Walsh is played by actress Katee Sackhoff, who apparently was quite...

"24" and torture porn

Posted on May 12, 2010
(spoilers for the 5/10/10 episode of "24" . . . .) Maybe I've become wussified after a relatively benign season 7 and season 8 in regards to torture, but I found Jack Bauer's interrogation of the Russian agent during this...

Oops, innumeracy in the Oregonian!

Posted on May 08, 2010
In a news story about how Multnomah County, Oregon, is "uniquely toxic" for racial minorities, the Oregonian made the following assertion: Minorities in Multnomah County fare worse on measures such as child poverty, rent burden, incomes and education than minorities...

Maybe Rahm Emanuel is onto something. . . .

Posted on May 05, 2010
Ann Althouse has declared that it's "talk like Rahm Emanuel day": Come on, everybody! It's exciting. It's liberating. Somebody not talking straight to you? "Take your f***ing tampon out and tell me what you have to say." Funny enough, Rahm...

Apple is the new Microsoft?

Posted on May 04, 2010
Back in the late 1990s, Microsoft was constantly pilloried by its Silicon Valley competitors (like Apple and Sun and Oracle) as some sort of monopolizing, evil Borg-like monstrosity that sought to assimilate or crush everyone else by leveraging its Windows...

"24" and gender-biased revulsion at bad acts

Posted on May 04, 2010
Spoilers up through the 5/3/10 episode of "24" follow . . . . With last night's episode of "24" ("Day 8, 11 am - 12 pm"), we finally have an end to the horrendously absurd Dana Walsh storyline. I don't...

"Red Cliff" is awesome (but only if you get the international version)

Posted on May 03, 2010
We just finished watching the international version of "Red Cliff" on DVD over the past two nights. Why two nights? Because it's an epic movie lasting nearly 5 hours. Directed by John Woo, it took five years of preparation and...

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