This has been an amazing summer. In fact, the last year has been pretty darn cool. I left teaching to attend Boston University Law School last fall, and to say that I’ve been busy would be an understatement. CommunityCOUNTS did it’s part in the election, and I’d like to think that its Ask The President forum helped nudge the administration into launching its first online town hall. My work even got a nod in the ABA’s Student Lawyer.

Overall, law school has been quite enjoyable. I participated in the ABA’s client counseling and negotiation competitions, and I’ve made many good friends. I developed a code-based study routine I call the LawBot. Basically, I codify black-letter law into if-then statements. I figured, that since you never learn anything as well as when you teach it, I should teach a computer how to take my tests. My notes may have looked like computer code, but they were darn useful.

My favorite part of law school, however, has been the summer. I’ve gotten the opportunity to work with my favorite professor (Ward Farnsworth) on a new text, and I’ve had the chance to get my hands dirty interning with the Navy’s Criminal Defense Appellate Division in DC. For those Futurama fans out there, no, this Professor Farnsworth does not own an intergalactic shipping company. He is the author of The Legal Analyst: A Toolkit for Thinking about the Law and a really great guy. In fact, The Legal Analyst was recommended to me before I even decided where I was going to law school. It’s a great read, and I wish more of my classes were like those taught by Professor Farnsworth.

Anywho, I’m back in Boston and working for Farnswoth finding cases for a criminal law text he’s writing, and in a moment of down-time, I thought I’d remedy my long silence. I’m such a bad blogger. I blame twitter.

Also, you can find more videos here.

1) I was once told that blogging about my job was disrespectful. That week, a few of the things I had “complained” about magically got fixed.

2) My first job was a summer internship for the DOD. Soon afterwards, I decided I never wanted to work for the military. Now I really want to be a JAG (as well as 50 other things ;).

3) I once had a living room apartment. My “room” was separated from the rest of the apartment by a shower curtain, and my bed was an air matters. I didn’t have a TV, radio, or computer. I did, however, learn to love running, and the Sunnyvale library.

4) I’m the president and CEO of a very small corporation, and yes, we’ve even payed someone’s Social Security.

5) I was voted “most unique” by my graduating class, and I’d like to think they weren’t being mean. :\

6) The summer of my freshman year in college, I took a 3,000 mile bus ride from New York to California to confess my love to someone. I knew they didn’t feel the same way, but I felt I needed the “closure” to move on with my life, and it actually worked. That is, I got closure and a lot of time on a bus to think about what I wanted out of life.

7) I’ve filed a Freedom of Information Act and had the results cited by a columnist/blogger I really admire. Thanks Ben Goldacre

8) I was the first person on my father’s side of the family to graduate from a four year college.

9) On my mother’s side, I was a third generation teacher.

10) I once did a national radio interview on NPR’s Day to Day, and my name’s shown up in Newsweek and the Washington Post, all for a part-time project I ran out of my tiny Edinburgh flat. It involved YouTube and American politics. ;)

11) I’ve lived abroad. I was teaching physics and science in Edinburgh, Scotland. It was arguably the best single year of my life. I was there on a Fulbright teacher exchange, and I can’t say enough good things about the program.

12) I’ve had a student tell me to go F*#& myself, and once I had a student removed to stand trial for murder. I was onYouTube breaking up a fight. And for the record, the student was found guilty.

13) My first job out of college was with the US Secret Service, and for an unrelated reason, I visited the West Wing and got to see the Oval Office. It looks just like the movies.

14) I was an Auxiliary Police Officer in Cambridge.

15) I think the two most attractive qualities have to be passion and compassion.

16) Duty and honor aren’t just words to me.

17) I still get a shiver down my spine when I hear the national anthem, and for over a decade, I’ve carried around a pocket-sized copy of the Constitution.

18) I feel very lucky nearly every day.

19) I miss my students and teaching. However, I really do think I can do more with the law.

20) I’ve applied to be an astronaut. It was more about applying than getting the job, or so I say now. ;)

21) When I first registered to vote, I registered as an independent. Then I decided I wanted to have a say in the primaries. So I switched affiliation.

22) I am a startling combination of my parents. Even professionally, it looks like I’m set to follow in each of their footsteps.

23) I’m an accomplished procrastinator. The fact that I’ve gotten this far in writing this list is proof. (I should be doing something else. For goodness sake look at when I posted this.)

24) In kindergarden I was the class’s best “cutter.” I wielded scissors like a surgeon. I was, however, the worst skipper.

25) The phrase “sadly not havoc dinosaur” is an anagram of my full name.

Okay, this is just getting wicked awesome! Twittervotereport.com is soooo winning the Golden Dot this year. My hats off to the entire team. It’s just the coolest thing I’ve seen in so long. Be sure to make a twitter vote report today, and while you’re at it, why not Video You Vote too? Also, if you see any problems at your polling place in need of immediate assistance, call 1-866-Our-Vote.

Now you can find out where you are even if you don’t have GPS. Learn how to find south along with your latitude and longitude using only a few household items. I should note, that in using the home-made quadrant cited, the precision of your findings will be rather low. Don’t worry, you’ll be within a few hundred miles. ;)

Transcript:
The Tabletop Explainer
(Honda Pilot DIY Contest Entry)
How to Navigate by the Sun

Today if you want to know where you are, chances are you’ll use one of these, but we’re going to go ahead and focus on using the materials here and the sun to figure out due south, your latitude, and your longitude.

Our measurements of time are based on the apparent motion of the Sun, the stars, and the moon. Which means a lot of information is packed into your watch.

Take for instance the idea of noon. Before standardized time zones, noon was simply the time of day when the sun crossed an imaginary line connecting due north and due south, called a meridian.

Let’s look down on the earth from the north pole. Here in Somerville, noon occurs when the Sun is due south. In Beijing it’s the same thing.

Anyhow, at local noon in the northern hemisphere, the sun is due south, at midnight, it’s half a world away.

We could make a clock with an hour hand that went around once every 24 hours, but most hour hands go around twice a day. This means the hour hand moves half as fast as the sun appears to.

Meaning if you take your watch and point the hour hand at the sun, halfway between the hour hand and noon is due south. In the southern hemisphere it’s due north.

So the next time you need to find south, just take your watch hold it parallel to the ground, point your hour hand at the sun, and halfway between the hour hand and noon is due south. Now that’s if you’re in the northern hemisphere. Keep in mind, your watch doesn’t run local time. So if daylight savings time is in effect, you’ll have to subtract an hour, and thanks to standardized time zones, you’ll be off by a few minuets. Plus there’s the fact that the geometry of the situation means that things will be less precise around sunrise and sunset, but you get the idea.

Now how does something like this [points to sextant] help us find out where we are. Well this is a sextant, and it’s really just a super-protractor.

You look at one object, like the horizon, through the sighting scope and a half mirrored piece of glass lets you line up the reflected image of some other object like the sun, the sextant telling you the angle between the two. [fade to table of materials]

You can make a similar device called a quadrant from these materials here. It’s basically a protractor that we are going to affix a straw to as a sight and a string too, to help us find the vertical. You can print these plans out from the URL you’ll see here.

http://www.davidcolarusso.com/handouts/quadrant.pdf

A quadrant lets you measure the angle between the horizon and an object, in this case, the sun. So do not look through the sight. Instead, place an object behind the quadrant, and look for the shadow cast by the straw. When the shadow’s a circle, you’ve got the sun lined up.

Two numbers can describe every place on earth: latitude and longitude. These are measured in degrees from two imaginary lines, the prime meridian, and the equator.

All points at a certain longitude are the same amount of degrees east or west of the prime meridian, and all points at a certain latitude are the same number of degrees north or south of the equator.

We know from working with our watch that at noon here in Somerville, the sun is due south. That is, it falls on an imaginary line connecting north and south—a meridian. So let’s look at the noon-time sun.

Keep in mind, the sun is really far away. So anyone pointing at the sun will point in the same direction.

Knowing this, if the sun were directly above the equator, we could find our latitude by simply finding the angle between the sun and overhead.

That is, 90 degrees minus whatever our quadrant reads.

Unfortunately, the sun doesn’t stay directly over the equator. The earth has a tilt in its axis. So over the year the sun moves above or below the equator by roughly 23 degrees.

This is called declination, and we simply add or subtract it from our measurements.

Sailors used to produce books listing the sun’s declination for every minuet in the year, but today you can find this on the web

We know local noon is when the sun crosses the local meridian, and probably noticed that a meridian is also a line of longitude. So if you know when noon happened you already know you longitude.

All we have to do is convert our time to GMT, the local time at zero longitude. Every minuet the sun covers a quarter of a degree. So if your noon took place 5 hours and 4 minuets after noon GMT your longitude is 76 degrees west.

3 hours before GMT, 45 degrees east.

Of course, we had to find local noon first.

To do that, plot the mid-day measurements from your quadrant against your watch time. They’ll make a curve and the top of the curve is local noon.

I’m David Colarusso for the Tabletop Explainer.

“Why law school?” you may ask. The short answer, “I think I can do more with the law.” Only time will tell if I’m right about that.

So be on the lookout for some wicked-cool legal postings, but don’t worry, I won’t forget my roots. I have a mile-long list of would-be Tabletop Explainer episodes, one of which should be produced this week. Unfortunately, it’s not the next in the relativity series. It’s a how to I plan on entering in a video competition. Heck, I have to pay for law school somehow.

Here’s the lowdown:

Ending days before the Iowa caucuses and garnering participation from then leading candidates, including Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee, 10questions.com was the first truly people-powered forum for the 2008 presidential candidates. We allowed the public to post and vote on questions for the candidates. Candidates answered the top ten, and the public then voted on whether or not these replies actually addressed the questions.

10questions proved a valuable proof of principle, establishing viewer-chosen questions, not just viewer-produced questions, as a legitimate means of candidate interaction, and produced a good amount of earned media including coverage in Wired and the San Francisco Chronicle among many other print and digital outlets such as the political blogs of both the Washington Post and New York Times. Furthermore the participation of first-tier candidates in this format helped demonstrate such a structure’s ability to compel meaningful answers from the candidates.