The most amusing story I read this past year had to be a New York Times article about the rhyming Pennsylvania Supreme Court justice.

Justice J. Michael Eakin has been writing his case opinions in verse to the consternation of both his fellow justices and the people who argue cases before the Pennsylvanian Supreme Court. Eakin defends his judicial rhyming by saying that, “You have an obligation as a judge to be right, but you have no obligation to be dull.”

Here’s an example, from a dissent Eakin wrote on a prenuptial agreement case. A wealthy man gives his fiance a ring he says is worth $21,000 but is in fact cheap junk. Later they get divorced. She sues, saying that the fact that the man lied about the ring should be enough to void the couple’s prnuptial agreement. The court ruled against the woman, but Eakin weighed in with this poem which was his entire dissent,

A groom must expect matrimonial pandemonium
When his spouse finds he’s given her cubic zirconium.
Given their history and Pygmalion relation
I find her reliance was with justification.

Source:

Justices call on bench’s bard to limit his lyricism. Adam Liptak, The New York Times, December 15, 2002.

I’ve been meaning to link to David Pearce’s manifesto, The Hedonistic Imperative for some time now.

I have not had the time to really read this online book closely (in fact I strongly disagree with some parts that I have closely read), but regardless of how realistic or off-the-wall Pearce’s argument is, he highlights the sort of things that will be possible sooner than later and which society and individuals are going to have a difficult time wrapping their heads around.

Pearce argues that it will soon be both technically feasible as well as morally good to use genetic engineering to eliminate psychological suffering. He maintains that psychological suffering is simply a lousy (for individuals at least) byproduct of evolution,

Darwinian evolution has powerfully favoured the growth of ever more diverse, excruciating, but also more adaptive varieties of psychophysical pain. Its sheer nastiness effectively spurs and punishes the living vehicles of genetic replicators. Sadness, anxiety and malaise are frequently good for our genes; they’re just psychologically bad for us.

So, once we have the technology, why not rewire human physiology to eliminate psychological suffering? Well, one answer might be that maybe we don’t really want to be happy all the time. After all, some psychological pain helps us realize the negative consequences of our actions and encourages growth and development (imagine if young children were incapable of feeling psychologically painful remorse for harming living things, for example). There are also a lot of issues over just what sort of being a person who was unable to feel psychological pain would be.

But if the current market for legal and illegal mood-enhancing drugs are any indication, there would likely be a vast market for something that even came close to what Pearce is proposing.

Over the past month or so I’d read quite a few good reviews of Strategic Command: European Theater. This is an old school computer wargame, complete with hex map and counters for graphics. Since I have a bit of time on my hands this week, I downloaded a demo of the game and played for about an hour.

That was more than enough to know I wanted to give the full version a try, and at only $25 the game was a bargain.

Except that rather than offer the program for download (and from what I’ve read, its only in the 30-40 meg range), the only way to get the game is to have it physically shipped with an additional $7 charge for shipping and handling. So I’d have to pay 28 percent of the cost of the game just to have it shipped, and then I get the added enjoyment of waiting for it to arrive. Yeah, that’s so much more convenient than just hitting my credit card for $25 and offering me a link to download the game.

I’ll find something else to play.