Ralph Waldo Emerson

I recently encountered online a fascinating discussion of one aspect of the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

I will simply offer the link, to Jeff Carreira's essay.

Carreira quotes Emerson thus: "A man is a method, a progressive arrangement; a selecting principle, gathering his like to him, wherever he goes. He takes only his own out of the multiplicity that sweeps and circles round him."

If you wish to read that in context, you can of course go here and use Amazon's marvellous "click to look inside" feature.

Right after the two sentences that interest Carreira, Emerson gets more visual and metaphorical. But I leave that to your investigation.

There is a certain sort of thinker who begs to be known by three names. Even if the folks who knew him just called him "Waldo Emerson," it would seem to us in the 21st century wrong to just call him by two names. Plain wrong....

Fourth Estate

One sometimes hears the phrase "Fourth Estate" employed casually as a synonym for "the press."

Or,sometimes not. In one of the bulletin boards where I go to vent, a conservative fellow expressed his unhappiness that the "Third Estate" had sided with Obama. Evidently he, too, meant "the press," tried to seem elegant, and ended up saying something very much at odds with what he meant.

Both terms derive their continued significance from 18th century French history. When Louis XVI called the "Estates General" together to address the budget crisis in May 1789, his expectation was that they would meet and deliberate separately. The first estate was the clergy, the second the nobility, the third the lower classes (in practice, the most well-off of the non-nobles, the bourgeoisie).

Once convened, though, things went badly awry for Louis, within two months the Third Estate was calling itself the Constituent Assembly and deliberately ignoring the other two -- and a mob supportive of that revolutionary decision was heading for the Bastille.

Presumably he didn't mean to concede that the "3d estate" is on Obama's side. But that would mean that Obama is playing the part of who ... Marat? Who is Louis XVI this time around?

As to the 4th estate, the usual story is that years after the French Revolution, British parliamentarian Edmund Burke, giving a speech in the House of Commons, looked up at the gallery and saw reporters busy scribbling down his words. he said: "Yonder sits the Fourth Estate, and they are more important than the other three."

In our own day of blogger and citizen journalist, the "Fourth," to the extent it ever had a distinctive social/institutional identity, may be sinking back into the generality of the 3d. We can say "yippee!" or we can say "alas," since the two reactions are equally futile given the fact.

NotNasser's casting idea

You may as well know, since I have nothing to hide in such matters, that when I comment within the blogs of others, I do so using the nom de plume "NotNasser."

[And when I edit on wikipedia, as I believe I've mentioned, I use Christofurio -- but that's another story].

Why do I use "NotNasser"? Because I once had the onerous duty of reviewing a very silly book by a fellow named Nasser Saber. There was an exchange of e-mails after the appearance of my review in which Saber accused me of misquoting him. The accusation was false. In essence, he had mis-remembered his own punctuation.

Anyway, after I had satisfied him that my quotation had been accurate (and that, if it made him look silly, he might just have deserved to look silly) he told me that his next book in the series would deal with the substance of my critique (not just with punctuation I imagine) at some length.

Fine with me. Years have gone by, and I await in diminishing hope my evisceration in Saber's next display of literary swordplay.

In the meantime, and in his honor, I will make my appearance in other people's blogs as ... NotNasser.

Anyway, having said all that, I'd like to quote myself. In the very amusing blog "Dealbreaker" there is now a debate underway over who should play Bernie Madoff in the inevitable movie. My own proposal, in NotNasser persona, is as follows:

If he has no more anti-Darwin movies on his "to do" list: Ben Stein.

Can't you just hear him calling his sons into his office for that fateful showdown?

"Bueller A? Bueller B?"

The Patent-Blog 'Outing'

Yes, there is a corner of the blogosphere devoted to the debates over patent and copyright law. It includes, for example, blogs like this one.

Such blogs split into two opposing camps.

There are those, like "Patent Hawk," who think that IP is a crucial means of rewarding innovation, that some sneaky corporate interests are always trying to piggy-back off of other people's innovative ideas, and that accordingly patent rights need to be strengthened (the public domain narrowed) pro bono publico. Greed is good.

Then there are those (we might as well call them "patent doves"!) who believe that intellectual-property claims have gone much too far, that "trolls" are using patent claims to disadvantage productive businesses, and that a lot of the ideas now claimed as someone's property belong more properly in the public domain.

One of the more prominent of the patent doves has called himself Patent Troll Tracker, and for a long time kept his 'real' identitya secret. But he has been outed as a California lawyer named Rich Frenkel.

The 'outing' exercise itself is inside-baseball, but the intellectual complexities of the underlying debate are fascinating.

Consider the meaning of the word "obvious." A simple enough word, of transparent (self-referential!) significance, right? Maybe not. The U.S. Supreme Court wrestled with this last year, in KSR v. Teleflex.

The pertinent statute says that no patent shall issue when "the differences between the subject matter sought to be patented and the prior art are such that the subject matter as a whole would have been obvious at the time the invention was made to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which said subject matter pertains."

That seems to require the courts to engage in an exercise of hindsight. "It was obvious that peanut butter would mix well with jelly between two pieces of bread, wasn't it?"

Anyway, I'm just glad I can enjoy a PB&J sandwich now and then without paying whoever made the first one. That'll conclude my IP cogitating for now.

On Not Pressing the Question

As the disclaimer on this blog makes plain, I speak here for myself, not in any way for my employer. That said, I'd like to share a story relating to that employment.

On Friday, August 3, two committees of the Senate, having jointly investigated a scandal at the Securities and Exchange Commission, issued their report. I won't go into the particulars -- it would bore some of you, and those of you whom it would interest already know of at least the general outlines. For now, just take it as a given that there was a scandal, and that the New York Times ran a very prominent story on the Senate report Saturday morning.

I was supposed to play catch up or (better) leapfrog with the Times. So over the weekend I read the report, (700 pages) and on Monday I started making some phone calls to flesh out my story. From my reading, I knew that the Senate staffers had taken a rather negative view of the Inspector General (I-G) of the SEC, Walter Stachnik. So, playing the journalistic game according to Hoyle, I called the I-G's office.

I expected a standard responsive comment. You know the type. "I believe all my actions were appropriate and any implication to the contrary by the investigators is misguided," or words to that effect. Regular news readers encounter quotes like that all the time.

I didn't get that sort of statement, though. Instead, the secretary at the I-G's office told me that Stachnik no longer worked there. This was news to me, though I rather assumed at this point that it had been properly announced perhaps weeks before and I had simply missed it. I asked whether he had left forwarding contact information. The secretary said, "No, he's retired." So I now had a mental image of Mr. Stachnik on a Florida beach.

If I had the proper bloodhound instincts, I would no doubt have pressed to learn how LONG he's been retired. I might then have discovered the real buried scoop in this situation ... that Stachnik "retired" on the previous Friday ... the day the Senate committees put out their report. As Ned Flanders, from The Simpsons, might have put it: "What an amazing coincidinkalidink."

But I didn't think to press the nice lady on the other end of the phone for a day of departure. I just asked whether a successor had been appointed. "No, not yet."

This, then, is in the story I wrote on the underlying SEC scandal for our website and news service. "Mr. Stachnik has since retired from his post as inspector general, and that office said on Monday ... that there has been no new appointee."

Rather lame, but it's there. Even before we posted that story, I had written a comment on Greg Newton's blog, informing him that Stachnik was retired. But there were other things to do, and I didn't pursue the particulars.

They've come out since. An anti-naked-short-selling activist, David Patch, probably tipped off by either my comment on Greg's blog or by my story proper, called Stachnik's office the next morning and did the pressing I hadn't done. Then Greg did so himself.

The SEC hadn't announced Stachnik's retirement, there was none of the usual "thank you for your years of dedicated service" stuff. I didn't know this, either, until it started popping up in the blogosphere, because I had simply assumed I had just MISSED the official announcement and that with a little surfing I could find it.

"Never assume anything, the word divides into three parts" as Felix Unger once explained. Well, new proof of that principle. I couldn't find it because uit had never been issued.

For those of you who read Newton's follow-up Wednesday morning, I'm the "Mr. F" he references.

[Mental note: when you hear something unexpected, press it.]