Albert's Cell ought to take a page from Stoppard:

[...]Recalling our coin analogy, it is very likely that a coin will flip from a head to a tail orientation if a jiggling box contains 90 heads and 10 tails, but this is a less probable event if the box contains 10 heads and 90 tails. pg. 79, 4th ed.

Are elevator inspectors unconstitutional? Friend and classmate Angus Dwyer takes on this and more at the Legal Affairs Debate Club.

somehwere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain, has such small hands

e.e. cummings

Retracted. Then published. Again, an editorial failure. 24 days till new Riff-Raff. Haters can sit with the people who didn't like 3 6 Mafia.

A reader inquires:

[...]You said that Lent demands that you consider your mortality. Is that for you the 'point' of Lent, or are there other themes that resonate?[...]

Lent is somehow dedicated to trying to rationalize the impossibly un-rationalizeable: it seems somehow hopeless, that I'm supposed to find the silver lining of realizing my mortality, or learning how to cope when all signs of hope have disappeared into the (literally) desert. I suppose the consideration portion is deeply personal--were I in the desert, what would I be tempted with? If I knew I only had forty-seven more days to live, how would I pool my wisdom?

And on some level, this seems somewhat chintzy--how obvious: yes, yes, you're going to die, and, yes, it might be quite sooner than you'd like to think: we should all take a page from Horace, and therefore sieze the day. The flippant answer isn't, of course, without its merit: get over it. And, at least for me, it's part of the solution that I pose any other time of the year. But it's only now that that solution isn't precisely enough.

In this context, self-deprivation is an invitation to consider these things outside of the usual situs; that there is something poignantly un-mundane about not taking a cup of coffee in the morning, or abstaining from the piece of cake after dinner--perhaps a strike of divinity? a mark of deep academic asceticism?--that make this consideration possible. That through this observation, it's impossible to be clouded by the droll activities, the usual habits, the ennui that might otherwise be too tempting, the, really, sadness, of moving on without considering the lily.

Lent isn't about falling into irretrievable depression, or to simply be sad for forty days and forty nights: observing Lent is somehow learning how to forgive misdeeds, and coping with the most painful. The beauty is that these are all extremely personal, that the season asks only that we make pause, take a breath, consider, and, with any luck, come to terms. And even if that's impossible, anything, somehow, seems to be enough. After all, there's always hope: regardless of how difficult Lent may be, how often one might fail the fast, or give in to the every-day, the usual, the mundane, and abandon bethinking, there will always be Easter in the end, warm spring days, sprouting crocuses, Mahler's second symphony, hidden eggs and, perhaps most importantly, jubilant hallelujahs.

Continuing a blog tradition, I'd like to take exception to Jane Galt's latest post on abortion, in which she states:

Since birth control pills prevent a fertilized eggs from being implanted, a law that banned pre-implantation abortions would probably make the Pill illegal--after all, Plan B is just a hopped up version of the Pill.

This is, in some senses, a true statement, in the same way that it would be a true statement that I "had a beer" the night I ended up puking on the steps of the Vienam Veterns Memorial in New York. But just as the latter statement glosses over a copious quantity of vodka tonics in a manner that can only be described as misleading, so Jane's statement misses a great deal of nuance to present a not particularly accurate representation of reality.

This is, in many ways, an understandable error. The reason for the vast amount of confusion around the issue of whether birth control pills or EC prevent implantation is twofold: the process by which hormonal contraception of all types works is incompletely understood, and more importantly, not all hormonal contraceptives work in the same way. Of the two, it is the latter that is much more significant. People tend to talk about "The Pill" or "EC" as though all types were pretty much interchangable, when in fact this is very much not the case. Depending upon the particular combination of ingredients, the pill can work in different ways to prevent pregnancy. For most women, this is significant only in that they may find different formulations vary in the number and degree of side effects, but if you're going to draw a bright line at fertilization, then you're going to have to draw some more lines around birth control as well to distinguish what you can and cannot identify as bad.

To summarize the current state of medical research, low-dose progestin contraceptives seem to have a higher likelihood of working by preventing implantation (though this likelihood is still very low), forgetting pills increases the likelihood of ovulation (meaning that the contraceptive effect is more likely to come from a different effect of the pills), and some forms of hormonal contraception have a likelihood of working by preventing implantation that is indistinguishable from zero, even when used as emergency contraception. It is worth noting that Plan B falls into this category.

In creating this summary, I drew primarily on this article and this article, both peer-reviewed scientific research.

Since there is no way to test for fertilization before implantation, there's no way to know for certain that any method of hormonal contraception never prevents implantation. However, based upon our knowledge of the processes that control ovulation, egg receptivity to sperm, implantation, etc. there are a range of options for traditional and emergency contraception for which there is no medical evidence that they affect the processes involved in implantation, from which it seems reasonable to deduce that they work solely by other means.

While most women don't particularly care about the distinction, some women do make a conscious choice to adhere to a birth control regime that won't work by preventing implantation. In such a case, it seems clear that even if there is an unknown, undetectable, miniscule degree to which they do prevent implantation, calling them abortificants is as silly as calling coffee (which seems to increase the risk of miscarriage early in the pregnancy) one as well.

If one wants to make an intentionality argument, for such women (or for any South Dakotan woman with the intention of adhering to the law), it is very much not their intention to prevent implantation - it is their intention to prevent ovulation. Just because both these intentions are covered by the umbrella intention of not getting pregnant doesn't mean that they are the same. It's doubly dishonest to argue that they are if the person so doing is one who is insisting upon fertilization as the bright-line beginning of human life. The only way one can get to a blanket arguement against hormonal birth control is if one starts from the premise that there is something morally less worthy about a goal fo not getting pregnant than a goal of being alert in the morning.

Unfortunately, these distinctions don't often get aired public debate because many of the ardently pro-life also find birth control (even barrier methods like condoms) morally suspect and prefer to present the "bad" birth control category as broadly as possible. However, many of the ardently pro-choice feel as well that by eliding the distinctions between the various types of hormonal contraceptives, they'll benefit from people seeing EC as more like the pill (uncontroversial) and less like abortion (controversial).

A former co-blogger points out this story, about Wal-Mart's attempt to ghost-write blog posts in defense of itself. So in case anybody was wondering, my previous posts in defense of Wal-Mart (1, 2, 3) were written entirely by me. Unsurprisingly, this odd little corner of the blogosphere has yet to attract the attention of Bentonville.