Maybe I'm just in a cranky mood today, but two issues have been bothering me recently.

1) Every now and then, I hear a speaker make a major factual error. (For some reason, this seems to happen a lot with keyword advertising law talks.) The most recent example: a recent speaker on Internet keyword advertising said (1) Google indexes keyword metatags (WRONG), and (2) no Internet keyword defendant has ever won on the use in commerce issue (WRONG and WRONG!). I probed the speaker offline about the latter mistake and the speaker was working from slides prepared in mid-2006 that apparently had been poorly updated. Note to conference organizers: if you're going to have someone speak on keyword advertising issues, you might make sure they aren't using 2 year old material.

Don't get me wrong; mistakes can happen to anyone, and I'm sure I've made a few in my time, but I'm not sure what to do in these circumstances:

* Should I point out the error(s) to the speaker in the Q&A (assuming there is Q&A)? It's awkward to publicly put a speaker on the spot like that, and when it comes to factual errors, there is always the risk of the Q&A degenerating into a public he-said/she-said irresolute discussion.
* Should I point out the error(s) to the speaker privately after the event? This will at least correct the speaker's misperception, but the audience walks out of the event with misinformation.
* Should I just ignore it? After all, I've got plenty to do, and I can't fix every problem.

Let me know if you have a preferred solution to this problem.

2) With some frequency, a person forwards my email without my permission to third parties who were not the intended audience. This is especially pervasive at Santa Clara University, where there appear to be absolutely no norms against forwarding private emails to non-recipients because I see it numerous times a week. Of course, this forwarding can be problematic in at least two ways. First, the non-recipient may not like the email's content, especially if it is about them. Second, I try to be pretty careful with what I say in email, but this norm creates a Panopticon phenomenon of inhibiting my ability to speak the truth. So I'm toying with the following solutions:

* adding a legend to the front of my emails saying "DO NOT FORWARD THIS EMAIL FURTHER"
* stop sending email that discusses third parties at all

If you have any thoughts about this problem, I would welcome them as well. Send them by email... :-)

PETA is funding a $1M prize for the "first person to come up with a method to produce commercially viable quantities of in vitro meat at competitive prices by 2012."

I don't know much about in vitro meat, but I can see why it would be so controversial. In vitro meat reduces or eliminates the ethical/animal rights and environmental justifications for vegetarianism, which makes eating meat a more justifiable decision. On the other hand, any health concerns about eating meat would remain, plus for many existing vegetarians, our diet is so ingrained in our lifestyle that we can't fathom eating meat under any circumstance. (And, for "vegansexuals," that includes intimacy with a meat-eater).

At minimum, it's easy to see why the PETA move would be controversial among its members and employees. After all, it runs completely counter to the "meat is bad" mantra that has been thoroughly instilled into them. Personally, I have no interest in eating "in vitro meat" but I applaud PETA for taking an aggressive approach to address some of the major social ills associated with meat manufacturing.

I think of Santa Clara County as mostly urban/suburban. After all, it's home to one of the 10 largest cities in the country (San Jose) and one of the world's largest and most vibrant economies (the Silicon Valley). However, it's also a place of amazing beauty and unexpected wilderness areas

As part of my continuing birthday celebration, yesterday I went on an organized hike to Coyote Ridge, operated by the Silicon Valley Land Conservancy. Coyote Ridge is hardly untouched wilderness; it's adjacent to a garbage dump and the 101 freeway, and it's been thoroughly invaded by exogenous plants and animals. Even so, just 20 miles from downtown San Jose, it provides habitat for all kinds of fauna, including badgers, coyote. elk and eagles, and many rare flowers that grow in its serpentine soil.

Fortunately for me, today the wildflowers were at their peak. It's hard to capture the beauty of California ablaze with wildflowers, but take a look at these Flickr photos nonetheless. As you will see, I love California poppies!

I'm celebrating a big birthday this year. For the kids' birthdays, Lisa has been making neat cakes from the Coolest Birthday Cakes website such as a schoolbus cake, a Curious George cake and a Very Hungry Caterpillar cake. (See my exam question about this website). Lisa asked me what kind of cake that I wanted, and I said I wanted a "Slinky Cake." If you think about it, this is a very tall order, especially because there were no templates at the websites.

Despite the challenge, Lisa outdid herself with her version of the Slinky Cake:

See the full 4.4MB version.

I'm backlogged as usual, but reading through the August 2007 issue of VegNews, I saw that Christine Garcia of the Animal Law Office was named one of the 25 most fascinating vegetarians by VegNews. I'm a little unclear on the state of her practice; her website says that she is not taking any new clients until mid-March 2007. Looks like her website could use some updating. But the vignette about her practice was nevertheless inspiring, especially this part:

"I offer a vegan discount to clients. Anyone who seeks my services is entitled to a sliding discount depending on how many days a week they pledge to adopt a vegan lifestyle....I implemented this because I hated representing people's animals, then going out to lunch with them and seeing them eat more animals."

This is the first time I've heard of a lawyer offering a vegan discount, but I respect someone who puts dollars behind her beliefs.

Oh come on, not again. The NYT once again is trying to suggest that blogging kills bloggers. See the last time this topic came up. Hey NYT, I venture to say that working for the NY Times is, per capita, far more hazardous to one's health than blogging. Why don't you write THAT story?

Maybe I'm just a killjoy, but I don't think that bloggers' April Fools jokes are funny. I feel like we as bloggers have to work really hard to develop credibility, and the whole point of an April Fools joke is to abuse that credibility to get readers to buy into the implausibility of the gag. As a result of April Fools, the blogosphere is awash today with lots of not-credible information, and we as readers are struggling to sort truth from fiction. It makes for a tough blogging day.

I think the problem is especially acute with legal-related April Fools joke. The problem is that at this point, there are so many true stories of ridiculous legal claims and other tomfoolery that it's impossible now to disbelieve anything. In this respect, I'm reminded of the Coca-Cola advertising campaign where Coke executives were thinking about suing Coke Zero for "taste infringement." This is supposed to be funny--putatively, there isn't such a thing as "taste infringement," is there?--but in fact such a claim is hardly inconceivable and, if brought, would not be all that funny for the defendant or consumers generally. More generally, it's almost impossible to create a ridiculous enough fictional legal claim as the basis of an April Fools gag when reality far outstrips our wildest imagination.

So my recommendation to bloggers: if you want to keep me as a reader, don't abuse my trust with an April Fools gag. Rather, if you want to do something humorous, entertain me and your readers with the numerous real-life stories that are even more outrageous.

If you are interested in the topic of law professor lateraling, you've probably already seen Paul Secunda's series at Concurring Opinions. That series is worth checking out to see all of the comments. However, for your convenience, Paul has glued the series into a single PDF that includes some of the choicest comments in the footnotes. I believe that Paul's article is the most comprehensive discussion on the very mysterious topic of lateraling, so many thanks to Paul for trying to lift the veil. And congratulations to him on his successful move to a school dear to my heart!

After seeing this set, I bet you'll be ready to join the peace movement too. Sorry that Lisa didn't edit out the more revealing bathtub shots and the duplicates. Some bonus pictures of Dina.

Today I received the following correspondence:
__

March 4, 2008

Via Regular and Certified Mail

Eric Goldman
Ericgoldman.org
Santa Clara University School of Law
500 El Camino Real
Santa Clara, CA 95053

Via E-Mail

Eric Goldman
Ericgoldman.org
egoldman@gmail.com

Re: WBG Builders

Dear Sir or Madam:

This office represents WBG Builders. Attached please find a print-out from Ericgoldman.org which references WBG Builders. We ask that you kindly remove your reference to WBG Builders in your posting. Please note that the article to which you link no longer exists and/or does not mention WBG Builders.

Very truly yours,
Nash Law Firm LLC

Alan A. Reuter, Esquire

Enc.
___

See the original post in question about WBG Builders (with link fixed). Notice that this letter was sent on official law firm stationery by regular mail, certified mail and email--same content, received 3 times (all in the span of about 1 hour, as it turns out). I imagine many recipients would find repeated delivery of a letter like this intimidating and would happily comply to avoid further interactions with a lawyer.

Also interesting is that the letter requests that I fix a dead link by removing references to WBG Builders. Huh? Even if the link is dead, there's no need to change the text. And as it turns out, it was easy enough to fix the link.

Instead, this approach suggests to me that perhaps WBG Builders is trying to do some reputation management and may not want consumers to know that it might sue them for saying things it doesn't like. But absolutely consumers should know this in forming their opinions about WBG Builders, and any effort to scrub the Net of undesirable WBG Builder references is both distressing and doomed to fail.