Chez Chesler

Just wondering if anybody in Orange County, New York -- the Hudson Valley, and the beginning of the Catskill Mountains -- refers to their home as "The OC"

As I blogged in early January, Truro, Massachusetts police asked all local men to volunteer saliva samples hoping to find out who killed, or left semen in, Christa Worthington three years ago. A suspect has now been identified on the basis of DNA. But that sweep, the Truro-wide DNA collection didn't do any good. Suspect Christopher McCowen had offered his DNA to the police three months after the slaying, and his DNA was actually collected in March, 2004, 9 months before the condemned Truro-wide sweep. McCowen had a criminal background and was within Worthington's orbit. Neither was he a Truro resident. So what happens to all the DNA data that was collected from Truro residents with no closer connection to the case than their gender and residency?

As we're all enjoying the longer and warmer spring days, with sunset suddenly coming an hour later when daylight saving time kicked in, Congress has buried an extension of daylight-saving time deep in an energy bill where it will never be exposed to any sunlight. It's obvious that all daylight saving time does is take an hour of daylight away from the early morning, when few of us have any use for it, and move it to the late evening. From time to time there are proposals for year-round daylight saving time, with the objection that schoolchildren would be going to school in the dark. School days run too early for modern times, at least in the 99% of places where the children don't have to tend to the farms when they get home from school. I like that I can drop my kids off at school at 8:20am, and still have a little time back home before I have to leave to be at work in time for core hours at 10am, but I could work around it if the school day were an hour later. Instead of setting the clocks ahead an hour, why don't we do everything (except school) an hour earlier, either year round, or during whichever months daylight saving time is in effect? The effect would be the same.

BizzyBlog reports on a letter in the Arizona Republic noting that the Social Security administration issues new cards in the form of a postcard. This is apparently a security risk for things like identity theft. Why does anybody pretend that social security numbers are secure? Why is it not considered negligent for any issuer of credit and the like to pretend that knowing someone's social security number means that the knower is that person? The same is true for knowing someone's mother's maiden name, or place of birth. Even without the recent widely publicized leaks and thefts, these data can be obtained or inferred from various sources. That would always be the case when the same data is to be passed to various verifiers in plain (as opposed to one-way encrypted) form, but these may also be found from biographical or genealogical collections. This horse is long past the barn door!

It looks like Bankruptcy Reform passed today. Plenty of Todd Zywecki's analyses the he's posted on Volokh Conspiracy seem quite accurate. Credit Cards don't cause bankruptcy, they're just how we live today, the bankrupt and the solvent. Some large number of bankrupts had large medical expenses, but "large" was defined as $500 over two years. Besides, medical expenses sound like a good excuse, so that's the bankrupt's story and he's sticking to it. But there's also talk about fraud. Tom Blumer on the BizzyBlog asks if it's fraud to fail to report as an asset a half-empty shampoo bottle. The SMR report asks:

• Average debt per petition for recently made store and other credit card charges was $21,576. But the average value per petition of all household-type assets accumulated over a lifetime was $2,009. What happened to all the other stuff they just bought?

and I'm reminded of Steve Martin's problem in Cat Handcuffs. He couldn't return the $3,000 of cat toys that his cat had bought under his name, because they had cat spit all over them.

The faucets in the bathroom in the building to which my employer's offices have just been moved are marked with red spots for hot and blue spots for cold. One either likes or dislikes (or doesn't notice) the introduction of hues in the otherwise monochrome bathroom. Are the spots language-neutral, in case some visitor to the bathroom doesn't know that C mean "cold" and not "chaud" or "caliente"? Who is this hypothetical visitor that doesn't realize that he's in America and who doesn't read any English? Why do the plumbing architects assume that this visitor, who also doesn't understand the convention that left means hot and right means cold, will understand that red means hot and blue means cold?