Blog of law articles

Hi kids!

Speaking of the 11th Circuit and Judge Barkett, she just issued a very well-written forum non ruling, affirming Judge Ungaro's dismissal involving the West Caribbean Airways plane crash that went down in the mountains of Venezuela.

One interesting fact I didn't know -- Martinique is technically still an official Department of the Republic of France.

(To be honest, everything I know about that island I learned by watching Bugs Bunny).

Did you all see this fascinating WSJ article on how certain neurons in our brains are hard-wired to respond to particular celebrities:

In their most recent work this year, the research team reported that a single human neuron could recognize a personality through pictures, text or the sound of a name -- no matter how that person was presented. In tests, one brain cell reacted only to Oprah Winfrey; another just to Luke Skywalker; a third singled out Argentine soccer star Diego Maradona.

It gets more particular than that:

To start, Dr. Fried and his colleagues showed eight epilepsy patients 80 images of celebrities, animals, common objects and landmarks while recording the electrical activity of neurons wired to electrodes. They flashed each image for a second, shuffled the sequence into random order and then repeated it. They did that six times.

"You would present hundreds of stimuli -- faces or celebrities or famous landmarks -- and the neuron would respond to only one or two," Dr. Fried says. "The incredible specificity was striking."

In the magazine rack of the mind, some cover girls have a neuron all their own. Testing one patient, the researchers found a neuron that reacted instantly when shown almost any picture of Jennifer Aniston. This cell ignored other celebrities. It gave the cold shoulder to pictures of the actress with her former husband Brad Pitt. "The cells seemed to respond to the idea of Jennifer Aniston," says Dr. Koch.

Testing a second patient, the researchers found a neuron that responded only to Halle Berry. The cell's electrical activity jumped no matter how the actress was posed or how she was dressed. Again, this neuron showed no interest in other celebrities or to any other images of common objects or places.

Subsequent tests turned up single neurons in patients that fired selectively to pictures of former President Bill Clinton, The Beatles, or basketball player Michael Jordan. Each of these individual neurons behaved in a way that made the researchers believe that the cell was responding to a distillation of experience. "The neuron is responding to a concept, not a picture," says Dr. Quian Quiroga. Moreover, each neuron acted as a trigger for recalling the concept they helped encode.

You know, that research really explains a lot -- and I mean a lot.

Well it's Columbus Day on Monday and many offices will be closed (certain temporary judicial bunkers located deep beneath the sprawling FIU campus excepted) so I hope you have glorious plans that include something more than showing up at work on Monday in shorts and flip-flops.

Me I have a lot on my plate -- reading some interesting new books, checking out the students at Florida Coastal School of Law, and learning what it means to be "motorboated."

As always I plan to stay healthy and put my hands on something that feels good this weekend -- I hope you all do too.

Have a great weekend!