Lab Monkey

In his book The Nine, Jeffrey Toobin gives a few details of Supreme Court Justice David Souter’s decidedly low-tech life. Souter has no cell phone or voice mail. He does not use email. He was given a television once but never turned it on. He moves his chair around his office throughout the day so he can read by natural light. Toobin says Souter lives something like an eighteenth century gentleman.

Sure, maybe it sounds romantic, but it’s also probably indicative of how little the legal profession, especially judges and justices, understands and is willing to understand technology.

This is crazy:

The case focuses on a patent that covers the concept of adjusting the dosage of a drug, thiopurine, based on the concentration of a particular chemical (called a metabolite) in the patient’s blood. The patent does not cover the drug itself—that patent expired years ago—nor does it cover any specific machine or procedure for measuring the metabolite level. Rather, it covers the idea that particular levels of the chemical “indicate a need” to raise or lower the drug dosage.

The patent holder, Prometheus Labs, offers a thiopurine testing product. It sued the Mayo Clinic when the latter announced it would offer its own, competing thiopurine test. But Prometheus claims much more than its specific testing process. It claims a physician administering thiopurine to a patient can infringe its patent merely by being aware of the scientific correlation disclosed in the patent—even if the doctor doesn’t act on the patent’s recommendations.

The main problem is that the really bizarrely overreaching patent claims are making both the lawyers and the judges focus on how broad the patent is, rather than the implications of medical patents in general. In a sense, the crazy patent is making “normal” medical patents seem reasonable, even though the latter isn’t obviously reasonable at all.

These ideas are amazing and spot-on, and the cover art is well done.

Chad Orzel has some examples of the types of math questions that Orange County school board member Rick Roach couldn’t answer on a standardized test. It’s crazy how simple those questions are, and that Rick Roach couldn’t get any of them correct without guessing is embarrassing.

Writes Chad:

This is yet another demonstration of a problem I’ve been banging on about for years: the innumeracy of intellectuals. Mr. Roach holds three college degrees, and clearly considers himself an educated person, but even a lack of practice at taking tests can’t really explain this level of failure.

The problem is, having horribly flubbed a really basic math test doesn’t shake Mr. Roach’s self-image as an educated person, because it is socially acceptable for an “educated person” to know next to nothing about math. Where in a sane world, complaining that this sort of math is hopelessly impractical and not the sort of thing we should be testing would lead educated people to point at Mr. Roach and laugh (as I’m doing above), In this world, alas, it gets him the central role in sympathetic blog articles hosted by one of the nation’s premier newspapers.

If you can’t do arithmetic and basic algebra, I’m sorry, you are not educated, the same way that you wouldn’t be educated if you couldn’t read and write.

A nice rant against free web services. I particularly like the distinction he makes between free software and free web services:

I love free software and could not have built my site without it. But free web services are not like free software. If your free software project suddenly gets popular, you gain resources: testers, developers and people willing to pitch in. If your free website takes off, you lose resources. Your time is spent firefighting and your money all goes to the nice people at Linode.