If you read it, you'll find some conflicting points of view. "Hand-write your notes." "Type everything in the computer." "Don't talk unless you're called on." "Talk as much as you feel like." "Law school is just school, about law." "Law school is like nothing you've ever done before." "Outline early." "Wait until the semester is almost over to start outlining." "Don't outline at all." What this should teach you -- and this is the only piece of actual advice here -- is that many many people have successfully approached law school in a large number of ways. Trust yourself. If you've never learned well by working in groups, don't join a study group. If you learn best by discussing with other people, do that. Know what you want, and do what you have to to get it. Because ultimately, even the people who write big expensive books that charge lots of money are not really giving advice. They're just saying, "hey, this worked for me!" Hopefully you'll learn to trust yourself. And next year, maybe you'll be able to say "Hey, this worked for me!" too.

So if it's not advice, why bother doing it? Because law school is, no matter whether you find it that way or not, hyped up to be a scary arbitrary random frightening tiring experience. Potential misery loves anecdote. So read away, and realize that for some people, law school is fun. Maybe it'll be fun for you, too. Drop the fear, and remember that your professors are not trying to kill you.

This is the final entry in my not-advice series, and I must finish it today, before I leave this town. I also have to pack. So the disclaimer is light: even if this sounds like advice, it is not advice. Got it?

Exam Tips 3: What to get out of practice exams

Follow your intuition. A woman does not need photographs or bust her man out with another woman. She can tell by how she feels inside. He will deny and make you think your crazy, but you know what is going on. Your inner thoughts can answer any Yes or No question, such as

• Why is he so concerned about his clothes?
• Why does he have all these new guy friends?
• Why is he wearing so much cologne?
• Why is he hiding his cell phone?

From: The Player's Handbook: The Ultimate Guide on Dating & Relationships by Heidi Fleiss

UPDATE: My 12 added below.

I also got about seventy trillion mosquito bites. I am a walking, itching mass. But it was well worth it. I now have two days to pack all my stuff and return to Ann Arbor.

I can't quite understand the concept of "Ann Arbor" and "law school" quite yet.

Gotta be blog spam....

EDIT: Yay! 814 blog spams. Dead. In a matter of minutes. Yay MT-Blacklist.

This reminds me. I wish there were an MT-Whitelist out there. I'm fuzzy on details, but will think about it.

Which I had, by dribbles and drabbles, been doing less and less and less of as time went on.

By the time I got back to the United States, I was a bit of a mess. I had been unhappy for months and months, with no real understanding of why. I had gone to graduate school because I didn't like any of the stupid jobs I could get with a bachelors in chemistry and math, but the only thing I found myself interested in -- really interested in, as in, passionately willing to stay up late reading about it -- was Linux and related things. And not, like, programming. Like the GPL, and the open source spirit, and Eldred v. Ashcroft, and patenting genomes and software.

I went down to visit my parents near the end of August, with these thoughts still spinning in my head. I didn't know what I wanted, or how to get it. But I went to graduate school because I didn't want any of the jobs I could get with a bachelor's. It turns out, though, I didn't want any of the jobs I could get with a PhD. I was going to work really hard to finish my PhD research that I didn't really enjoy, and then work really hard at a post-doc doing more things, none of which I really enjoyed, and then work really hard at .... Where did it end? When did I start doing things that I wanted? What was I going to do with my life? You got your PhD; you went into academia or industry. Industry, I could scarcely stomach; academia, well and good, but I just didn't enjoy doing research all that much.

When I was talking to my parents, I mentioned that one of my friends from high school had gone to law school and was now doing a fun fellowship. In jest, I said that what she was doing was very cool, but if I were to go to law school . . . .

If I were going to law school. It hit me like a bolt of lightning. The hours I spent reading briefs in Eldred v. Ashcroft instead of working through field theory. The days I spent perusing slashdot, and thinking about patents and property. How absolutely passionate I felt, the day I read the GPL and RMS's discussion of what Free Software was; subsequently finding Eric Raymond's discussion of Open Source. Suddenly, I felt my world opening up.

In a strange way, leaving a hard-core PhD program with a masters is as socially unacceptable as, say, dying young. It is a mark of failure; it's often cause for sadness. People know you're leaving, but are afraid to mention it to you, in case you'll be offended. When someone finally broaches the subject, everyone is suddenly curious: why are you leaving? What are you doing? Is there life after graduate school? Will you be okay? How does it feel to be a failure? Okay, nobody asks that last question. But you are an object of both envy and pity, and I don't know if anyone can sort out the threads of the emotions.

I knew I wanted to go to law school. Not because I didn't like any of the jobs I could get with a PhD, but because I knew. I just did. And law school, more than anything else, delivered. But more importantly, having walked away once before, I know that I can do it again. If whatever job I get ceases to be what it is that I want, I know I can walk away again. And again. And again. It's not that my degrees give me options; it's that I give myself options. As do we all, if we would only recognize the ones we have.

When does it end? When does it end? When do we start doing something that we love?

When we decide to do it. The conveyor belt, delivering you from law school to OCI to your next job, is all in your imagination. If it's not what you want to do, don't do it. And find something you want. It's that simple.

Early this morning, before most humans poked their noses out of their luxurious resort hotel rooms, the birds played and squawked and fished. Water was at high-tide and a sea lion kept poking his nose above water near where we were standing. The sun caught the edge of Mount Baker to the east before it actually crested the hill in front of us.

Musing aloud, I wondered what it would be like to live, say three or four hundred years ago, inland, for twenty years, and then walk out to sea. If you were used to herds of buffalo and elk, brown bears and brown birds, and bubbling creeks maybe twenty feet wide when it rained, the ocean would be a shock. Water, everywhere. Islands on the horizon. More water thereafter. Seaweed and long-legged birds, and sea lions. If you were a curious person, you'd wonder how much more the world had to offer that you'd never seen. You'd want to get across the water to the island, and see what was there. You'd look off into the Pacific on the other side, and ponder what lay on the other side.

If you were not a curious person, you would take one look at the sea lions (or get one whiff, more like) and say, "Devils!"

The retreat ended my time with the firm for the summer. I have three weeks before I get back for law review; I'll be out and around, many times without internet access. The blog will suffer even more than it did over the summer.

It has, in many ways, been an interesting summer. Firm life is not something I was prepared for by law school. Indeed, I suspect it's not something I've been prepared for by a summer associate position. Nonetheless, it's enough to bring me out to the ocean, after a time inland, and wonder: what lies beyond that body of water? What other creatures are there in the sea? Maybe there are no devils, just creatures variously trying to get by in environments I haven't yet imagined.

And most importantly: what sort of creature am I?

I think it's amazing that so many people I'm friends with can be so good looking. Perhaps what I really mean is that they all look good to me. But no--they're really all good looking. My friends are the best looking people there are.

It's nice to be superlative again.

3D Lennard-Jones is very hard to do
If you're stuck with it, you'll soon be feeling blue
So if you have to try it
Make your space go on a diet
And simulate Zero-D.

Zero dimensional space
It's my very favorite place
All connected manifolds, they look the same in zero-d
Zero dimensional space
It's a concept you can't erase!
Everything's different when done in zero-d!

So if you have the other verses about integrals and Ising models and particularly the bit that says "If your professors seems like Nero, simulate dimension zero!" I want to see it again.

Thank you.

Hey, neither had I. But -- I'd read about it. I glanced around and spotted a somewhat portly balding man, wearing a blue collared shirt. He was sweating in the sun and hefting a clipboard. He eyed us with interest. "So," I ventured, "that guy over there is running a study." I sketched the parameters of the study. Portly man watched us avidly. In fact, this made him seem just a little bit creepy, peering at us over his thick glasses. I could imagine what he was thinking: there they are, debating what to do with the money.

"Huh," she replied.

She kept the money and avoided the man. So that's what you get for running a crappy study where the people know they're under observation. It's particularly what you get for looking creepy. Yes, you weird old sweaty man, we're not dishonest; you're just kind of frightening. As we walked away, the man started scribbling furiously on his clipboard. I can only imagine what he wrote: Three women find money. They run. How typical.

Okay. I'm going to repeat this damned disclosure, even though I've said it a million times, because people keep calling this advice. It is not advice. It may sound like advice. But it is not advice. It is what I did; approaching law school this way meant that I was very happy my first year, and I enjoyed law school. You may not be like me. In fact, you probably are not like me. You probably don't think chickens are the worlds greatest bird. You probably don't get all distracted thinking about tangential things. You probably can sit down and work for five hours straight. If you are not like me, you should treat this as an interesting anecdote about what someone else did in law school. If you are like me, this is how I made law school fun.

This is not advice. Let me repeat, this is not advice. May sound like advice. Not advice. Do we have that? Not advice? Everyone on board? Okay. What is this not? Right! It's not advice. Even though it sounds like advice. It's just awkward to keep writing "So, this may not work for you, but what I did which worked sometimes...." I am too lazy to write that much. So it may sound like advice, when really, it isn't. Not advice. Well, then.

Exam Tips 2: Approaching the Question

Then I realize that almost nobody is going to look at this resume beyond a glance. Except to say, "You don't appear to have ties to X City." Which I don't, really. My resume demonstrates a complete lack of ties to anywhere. When I interview, my parents will be in ... um. Tibet. I have brothers and sisters. And we're all in the Northern Hemisphere. That must count for something, right?

Think about it: if you imagine that I'm going to be indiscreet in talking about my fellow classmates to someone I don't know or care about, why would you posit my being discreet about sharing your anonymous inquiry which asked for no privacy protection whatsoever? If you've already demonstrated a lack of respect for someone else's privacy, I'm not going to feel too badly about potentially violating yours.

It's just one of those things. Someone says something. You take it one way; they meant it another. You figure out the source of the misunderstanding. Maybe they weren't careful in their original formulation. Maybe you leapt to a conclusion you shouldn't have. Maybe the words -- like all words -- were capable of multiple interpretations.

But it seems like a rule of conversational construction should be that if someone says something that sounds like A, and you say something that sounds like B, and they say, "No, A is not what I meant"--as long as the evidence supports that they might not have meant A, you believe 'em. After all, they're the ones that said it. Their interpretation should be controlling. This is part of that mystical thing called "communication" whereby you recognize that language is malleable, that your interpretation and understanding of the world differs from that of the people around you, and that sometimes, your initial perception of a matter will not be exceptionally clear. This should be obvious to everyone out of middle school.

Anthony Rickey is one of those strange ducks who seems to think that his initial interpretation of someone's comments controls what they actually meant. He starts off by noting that he criticized Will for equating libertarianism with being good in bed.

This is true. Anthony made exactly that criticism. The problem is that Will never equated libertarianism with being good in bed. Basically, he just said that he'd met a lot of hot libertarian women in DC. Now, one could have inferred from this casual comment that Will thought libertarians were generally hotter, over all. That's one reasonable explanation. But another reasonable explanation is that Will met a lot of hot libertarian women in DC. (Another reasonable explanation is that Will finds intelligent women attractive, and is more likely to judge a women intelligent if she agrees with him on certain principles).

But the fact that there are multiple reasonable interpretations for a comment means that we have to decide what the person actually meant. And when you have two reasonable explanations for a casual comment that someone makes, the usual thing to do is to accept their explanation of what they actually meant. After all, Will's interpretation of what Will meant is generally considered controlling, in the absence of evidence that he was lying. Anthony's interpretation of what Will meant -- Anthony's insisted interpretation of what Will meant, despite Will's protestation, and despite a serious lack of evidence that Will lied or changed his mind (I mean, really; Will generally admits when he's been wrong--why would he change now?) really means about a hill of beans.

And yet Anthony thinks that "Baude has sensibly backed away from his original contention." Well, actually. Baude sensibly pointed out that you misconstrued his original contention. It is only in Anthony's mind -- when you equate "What I think Baude said" with "What Baude thinks he said" -- that he appears to be backing away. Your interpretation of reality is not reality. And it's highly fallacious to assume otherwise.

But all of this strays from the real point, which is "who is better in bed?" And in my mind, that is not a matter of politics or religion or any of that. As I've mentioned here before, being good in bed is also a matter of communication. And let me assure you, there's nobody who's bad in bed like the guy who assumes that because he got off, you did too. One person's reality is not the other's, and anyone who assumes otherwise in bed isn't going to be nearly as much fun. Even if he (or she) is libertarian.

(Clarification: Just so that this is clear, and to preempt one semi-obvious interpretation which I do not intend,I am not saying that Anthony's blog posts make him bad in bed. They just make him an occasionally annoying blogger. I do not assume that his blogging habits translate into bed habits.)

Or must you?

So then I started wandering whether you could prevent dissipation by, say, grabbing a tunable laser and modulating the frequency. Voila. Radio. Kind of.

Caveat: I don't know if you can tune a laser that fast. Maybe one of the laser jocks that reads this blog will know.

Then I remembered. Damn! Population inversion! That stuff is really inefficient. Drat. So much for saving power on radio transmissions by shooting lasers around the world. (There may be other negative side effects, too). But maybe it could be a super-cool spy toy.

As long as they weren't in the line of sight, the transmission wouldn't be intercepted by enemies! Yes! A use!

Then I remembered, dammit, that all you'd need to duplicate the effects of my super spy toy was a laser pointer and a working knowledge of Morse code. Damn.

Well, here kitty kitty.

Slightly apropos the crime lab visit. A friend of mine from undergrad who went to work for a forensics lab which will remain nameless, for reasons soon to become obvious, told the following horrific stories. One I heard directly from him; the other from a gregarious professor he used to work for (who was exaggeration-prone). You decide which one may be exaggerated.

At some point, several million dollars worth of cocaine, which were evidence in a case, were lost en route. Lost, how? Well, they shipped them UPS. When questioned about why they shipped evidence, let alone cocaine, via UPS, they responded that they sent all their evidence UPS, all the time. Unknown whether they sent it via super-saver ground.

Some doofus apparently collected samples for DNA tests in non-sterile plastic ziploc bags, which he handled directly. My god, it looks like this DNA matches! All of it! With each other! We're having a serial crime wave! The DNA matching dude was discovered ... after he'd been employing his novel methodology for several years. Which just goes to show that when they say that it's one to a million (or whatever the number is) that DNA matching is wrong, you need to remember that they're assuming that the samples were taken perfectly and the tester didn't otherwise screw up.