In criminal matters, a lawyer is duty-bound to defend his client to the best of his ability. There are only a few specific scenarios in which it is considered OK to quit representing a defendant. For example, what if the defendant tells the lawyer that he plans to lie on the witness stand? Allowing perjury is unethical, but so is divulging your client's secrets. Wouldn't that be a good time to just quit?
Unfortunately, it's not that easy. As mentioned above, an attorney can't withdraw in the middle of litigation without the judge's permission, and it's indisputably unethical for an advocate to directly inform the judge that his client is a liar. What usually happens in these cases is that the lawyer approaches the bench and asks to beg off the case for vague "ethical reasons." The judge, knowing exactly what's going on, typically denies the request, because the jury would smell a rat if the lawyer were to disappear right before the defendant took the stand. The judge, continuing the Kabuki-style exchange, informs the advocate that he has satisfied his ethical obligations and must continue. In some courts, the lawyer can protect his sense of ethics by simply putting the client on the stand and instructing him to "tell the jury his story," rather than specifically prompting the lies.
Slate looks at various reasons why a lawyer can and should quit a case -or not. Link
Photographer Todd McLellen's latest project involves disassembling machines and appliances, sorting and shooting the parts, and then throwing them all in the air as if the gadget is exploding! At his website (click "new work") you can see more photographs, and a fast-moving video of the process. Link -via Buzzfeed
Artist Tanya Clarke takes old plumbing fixtures and turns them into light installations! The "drips" are hand-sculpted glass containing energy-efficient LEDs. Link | Product Site -via Dark Roasted Blend
They might have to start calling them something else. Three resorts in Britain have banned bumping in their bumper car rides.
Staff at all three Butlin resorts in Bognor Regis, Minehead and Skegness are instructed to ban anyone found guilty of bumping into each other in the electric cars equipped with huge bumpers.
Bemused customers who assume that the ‘no bumping sign’ is in jest are told to drive around slowly in circles rather than crash into anyone else for fear of an injury that could result in the resort being sued.
Telegraph columnist Michaal Deacon, who has just returned from a holiday at the Bognor Regis resort, said the experience was like “trundling round an exitless roundabout”.
“I’m not convinced that the dangers were great, given that the bumper cars were equipped with bumpers,” he said. “Seat belts, too. There were no airbags for the drivers, but it can be only a matter of time.”
No one in Britain has ever successfully sued a ride owner over injuries sustained in a bumper car ride. Link -via Arbroath
Joe is a young paraplegic rabbit. Liam designed a way to put wheels on him so he can get around without dragging his hindquarters. This is just one of the many cute stories at NeatoBambino you might miss if you don't check it out every day. Link
Jenny and Dave Prager brought us First Impressions of the USA last month. Some of the response they received from global visitors to the USA concerned the common greeting, "How are you?" Lakshmi says:
“When I set foot at the Dulles airport in DC, the immigration/customs guy asked me how I was doing — and I was taken aback. Am I supposed to know this guy? Does this guy know my cousin? And so, is that how he knows that I would be here at the airport today? Did my cousin ask him to take care of me until he could pick me up at the airport? If so why didn’t my cousin tell me? I looked like a deer facing headlights.”
She wasn't the only one who was confused by the phrase, as well as "thank you", "you're welcome", and the constant smiles of Americans. Read more at Our Delhi Struggle. Link-Thanks, Dave!
Walt Disney Imagineering is updating the features of the Haunted Mansion. Here's a look at how they are changing the beloved "hitchhiking ghosts." -via Boing Boing
An explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in the USSR (now Ukraine) during a safety test became the worst nuclear accident in history on April 26th, 1986. Twenty-five years later, the area is still uninhabitable. The Big Picture has posted 34 pictures from that disaster and its aftermath, continuing to the present. This picture shows a helicopter spraying decontaminant a month after the accident. Some photos may be disturbing. Link -via the Presurfer
by Michael Berry H.H. Wills Physics Laboratory, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK
The applications of mathematics can be bizarre. Soon after I arrived in Bristol in the 1960s, a senior colleague called me, saying that someone in the veterinary school needed help with mathematics — or was it physics? — and I seemed just the person to help. Cursing inwardly, I agreed to see the fellow. He was Peter Darke, a graduate student near the end of a Ph.D. studying horses’ hearts.
He showed me a paper by Gabor (Dennis Gabor, who invented holography) and Nelson1 and asked me to explain it. It took a while to understand. The idea is that a heart is like a little battery, pushing weak electric currents in a three-dimensional pattern round the body. The battery has a strength and a direction: it acts as a current dipole, represented as a little arrow — the heart vector. During each heartbeat, the vector (tip of the arrow) draws a loop - the heart loop — whose shape is a powerful diagnostic of health. Therefore it is useful to measure this loop, in a way that doesn’t involve killing the horse. Gabor’s paper gave the theory of a way to do that, inferring the heart vector by measurements of the electric potential on the surface of the horse. It is an ingenious application of Gauss’s theorem.
The Darke/Holmes study, which used the Berry approach to integrate over the surface of a horse.
Peter had spent three years preparing to implement this idea. He enveloped his horse in a coat he had made, of several hundred potentiometers, with electronics to measure the potential at each of them, fifteen times during each heartbeat, and he had arrived at the point where he had a huge file of all these measurements. But there was a difficulty: he knew only the most elementary high-school mathematics and so had no way to understand the formulas in Gabor’s paper. His specific question was: does the theory apply to a real horse, or only to an ideal cylindrical horse? Unlike the physicists’ mythical ‘spherical cow,’ this was real.
I learned that the formulas work for a horse of any shape, but they do assume uniform conductivity — a better approximation, apparently, for horses than for people. (Actually, it doesn’t have to be accurate: who cares whether the loop describes the real dipole inside the real horse? To be useful for diagnosis, it is necessary only that the loop be reproducible.)
The formulas involved integration, and Peter didn’t know what an integral was, so it was hard to explain how to add up all those measurements. A complication was that what had to be inferred was a vector, so he needed to know, at each point on the horse, the components of the perpendicular to the surface of the horse with respect to the three symmetry directions of the horse. After some discussion, we made a ‘cos-theta-meter,’ and I left him to it, and never saw him again.
Further detail from the Darke/Holmes study.
But a year later, I received two papers from him,2 reporting the outcome of all that arithmetic. To my surprise, he had indeed calculated fifteen vectors for each heartbeat, and thereby deduced the heart loops for several horses in different states of health. At the end of the paper were the usual acknowlegements to colleagues and funding agencies. For technical help, he thanked me; and for financial support, he thanked the Horserace Betting Levy Board (financed by racecourse gamblers).
The moral of this is that applications of mathematical knowledge can be unexpected; you may find yourself taking a surface integral over a horse.
References 1. “Determination of the Resultant Dipole of the Heart from Measurements on the Heart Surface,” D. Gabor and C.V. Nelson, Journal of Applied Physics, vol. 25, 1954, pp. 413-6.
2. “Studies on the Equine Cardiac Electric Field. I. Body Surface Potentials, II. The Integration of Body Surface Potentials to Derive Resultant Cardiac Dipole Moments,” P.G.G. Darke and J.R. Holmes, Journal of Electrocardiology vol. 2, 1969, pp. 222-234 and 235-244.
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This article is republished with permission from the July-August 2010 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. You can download or purchase back issues of the magazine, or subscribe to receive future issues. Or get a subscription for someone as a gift!
Visit their website for more research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.
You have to wonder about the culture that creates a market for a toy like this. If you are afraid of your children using chemicals, why would you be interested in a chemistry set at all? Link -via The Daily What
How many plastic containers does your family go through? Multiply that by millions of families, and you see why they have to be made so fast that this video is slowed down to show us how it's done. This is from the TV show How It's Made. -via J-Walk Blog
There have been 47 people to hold the office of vice-president of the United States so far. How many can you name in ten minutes? That's the challenge in today's Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss. I guessed I'd probably name five (plus the three giveaways), but scored 21 of them. I bet you can do better than that! Link
