To Kill a Mockingbird is available for free?

Last night, after Jeannette returned home from her monthly book club meeting she mentioned that she was thinking about reading To Kill a Mocking Bird and Anna Karenina .  She was particularly interested in reading these books as as ebooks.  I gave her a few suggestions about legal sources for both books and she set off to find them.

After only a few minutes I was surprised when she said she'd found and downloaded both books.  Given the publication date of Anna Karenina I wasn't surprised that this book was easily accessible.  On the other hand, given that the author of To Kill a Mocking Bird, Harper Lee, is still alive and that the book is still very much still subject to copyright (and has only been available as an ebook since 2014 after a legal battle about copyright) I found it quite surprising when Jeannette said she found it available as an ebook on the Internet Archive, a site that typically seems to be quite vigilant about only posting materials that are either out of copyright or posted with the permission of the rights holders.

I guess it's possible that this was posted without the approval of Ms. Lee or the publishers and it will be removed shortly?  Of course, given the news about a new sequel/prequel to the book I suspect there has been renewed interest in the title and that such an easily available source would have been brought to the attention of the publishers and the Internet Archive - so the continued existence of this version of the book (now more than 12 hours after we first found it) is baffling.  According to the Internet Archive's statistics the book has been downloaded more than 34 000 times as of the writing of this post.

Do you think if I check back on this item tomorrow it will still be there?

Could this version of the ebook possibly be approved by the rights holders, a thought I am only willing to consider because of the high regard in which the Internet Archive is generally held?

Cameron - 6
Neil - 0

What happened to those memories?

For a while I've been thinking about what the types of books I tended to read at certain points in my life.  While I think I have a pretty good handle on the types of things I've been reading for the past five years, as I head backwards my ability to recall the types of things I was reading really falls of.  It gets particularly iffy when I think back to my late elementary school years.

I think the problem that I have with my elementary school years is that the few books that I do remember reading were likely a little abnormal.  By the end of grade six, for instance, I remember having read the Michael Crichton books Jurassic Park and Sphere.

But I don't think I was only reading mass market thrillers.  At some point after grade four and before junior high I read a number of Hardy Boys books, as well as some Farley Mowat (and for the American side of the spectrum Johnny Tremain).  And of course there also Lois Lowery's classic dystopian tale The Giver.

At some point, maybe around the time I was reading Jurassic Park, I recall a kid at a science camp being asked what he was reading.  I still remember feeling a little juvenile and inferior when he responded with "The new John Grisham."  It also seemed a somewhat pretentious response, but that mostly came from the delivery.

Not that I think it had anything to do with fellow camper's comment, but at some point around the end of elementary school and the beginning of junior high I started reading John Grisham novels.  But when was this and how does it fit into the timeline?  And why can't I fit this into my personal reading trajectory.

Maybe what shocks me the most is that I know that from late elementary school through to the end of high school I was doing quite a bit of recreational reading - unfortunately I can't seem remember pull too many of the titles on demand (though I do think I am pretty good at knowing whether or not I've read a book if it is presented to me).  Maybe the problem is that reading choices were really quite haphazard and that my development as a reader wasn't quite as linear as I might like to imagine it being.    It's probably this lack of linearity and coherence that makes it hard to recall.  Reading choices didn't flow from any particular prompt or necessarily lead to further reading in an area.

I should probably just accept that idiosyncratic choices were nothing more than that, and that it doesn't really matter that I didn't work my way though categories of works in any particular way.  Maybe I should just consider myself lucky that  was able to sample widely and didn't prematurely limit my tastes by labelling myself a fan or aficionado of a particular genre (an affliction I am still stuck with today).

A Few Quick Notes 569

-Somehow the temperature has managed to squirt up to 13, and may even be on it's way up to 14 or higher.  This temperature, along with the sun and blue skies, are contributing to a very spring-like feeling today in Wolfville.  I would fine if was like this for the next few days, but I think it might slip back below zero in a few days.

-I made some banana bread for breakfast/brunch this morning.

-I love reading bound theses.  Because they are typically double spaced and because the text is printed on only one side of each leaf one can really feel as though they are making quick work of the text.  Last night I had gone through 60 pages before I even realized what I was doing.

In the particular thesis I am reading I am surprised by the number of exclamation marks used by the author.  His subject seems to be constantly surprising or amazing him.  And before you start to think thoughts about "the youth of today" you should know that this thesis is from 1960 and was written by someone who received their BA in 1944.

Because I can I will include  a quote from this thesis (though this passage does not include an exclamation point).  This quote comes after his description of the committee structure of other provinces, provinces in which there were typically more committee memberships than members of the legislature.

At the other end of the committee spectrum is Newfoundland, which has fewer standing committee places than legislative members.  In a 36-member House there are only six standing committees with five members each.  These are internal economy; nominating; standing orders and library; miscellaneous private bills; municipal affairs; privileges and elections.

For those of you who are curious, I don't think any of these committees, with the possible exception of Nominating, exist in the same form today - though most Newfoundland committees are still relatively small.

 Oh, this passage reminded me that I think we forget about some of the practices from the not to distant past that were at one time common:

There are certain disqualifications to voting that are found in all provinces and which make certain persons ineligible for nomination to the assemblies.  Judges of the federal and provincial courts may not be entered on the electoral lists.  Persons wholly or partly of Indian blood and “ordinarily resident on an Indian reservation and entitled to receive any annuity or other benefit under any treaty with the Crown in the right of Canada” are disqualified to vote.  Some such phrasing is found in the election laws of every province, with the proviso that Indians who served in World War I or II, or were subsequently on active service with the Canadian forces, may vote.

And then there is also this one:

In British Columbia an adequate knowledge of either English or French is necessary to be a voter, and the registrar of voters may require the applicant for voting to appear before him to demonstrate his language ability.  This is, perhaps, a vestige of the provision which prevented voting by Orientals in British Columbia until World War II. 

-Back to work.

Does the romance novel have a non-fiction equivalent?

Romance novels are everywhere in North America.  New or used, they are easy to come by.  Obviously they are filling some kind of demand.

But let's say you want something that's accessible, cheap, and easy to read that's also non-fiction what are the options?

My first thought is that the newspaper might be the non-fiction counterpart of the romance novel, but I am not entirely satisfied with that comparison.  Maybe magazines?

In the end magazines and newspapers both have the problem that their articles are much shorter than a romance novel, and I guess I am looking for something that is about as long (a very arbitrary requirement I know).

Is it possible that the romance novel just doesn't have a non-fiction analog?  Is such a thing needed?  Could we create something to fill this void?

Oliver Sacks agrees (or is it the other way around?)

For the past few days I have been haphazardly picking at Oliver Sacks's The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat (a book I first started reading in 2003).

Last night, while reading the section on Tourette's Syndrome I was struck by his discussion of a concept that seemed to parallel something I posted about a few days ago - our inclination to overlook concepts/ideas that aren't appropriately named.  Of course, Sacks's take on concepts without names, or johnny-come-lately re-remembered names, is a little more elegant than mine.

The day after seeing Ray, it seemed to me that I noticed three Touretters in the street in downtown New York.  I was confounded, for Tourette's syndrome was said to be excessively rare.  It had an incidence, I had read, of one in a million, yet I had apparently seen three examples in an hour.  I was thrown into a turmoil of bewilderment and wonder: was it possible that had been overlooking this all the time, either not seeing such patients or vaguely dismissing them as 'nervous', 'cracked', 'twitchy'?  Was it possible that everyone had been overlooking them?  Was it possible that Tourette's was not a rarity, but rather common - a thousand times more common, say, than previously supposed?  

Sacks also includes a nice footnote with another example of such an instance.

A very similar situation happened with muscular dystrophy, which was never seen until Duchenne described it in the 1850s.  By 1860, after his original description, many hundreds of cases had been recognised and described, so much so that Charcot said: "How come that a disease so common, so widespread, and so recognisable at a glance - a disease which has doubtless always existed - how come it is only recognised now?  Why did we need M. Duchenne to open our eyes?"

I can't help but wonder how many unnamed concepts are floating about whose naming would be of great use in my day to day life?

Did anyone else know about this?

I am currently in the midst of reading a Canadian Parliamentary Review article by former Speaker Peter Milliken.  Though just a few paragraphs into the article I was a little taken aback to find out that while in office Milliken routinely organized dinners for MPs.  According to Milliken

As Speaker of the House of Commons, I made use of a variety of tools, not all of which are found in the Chamber, to allow me opportunities to reinforce the Members’ perception that I was in office as Speaker to serve all regardless of party affiliation. For example, I instituted an ongoing series of dinners to which, in due course, every Member of the House was invited. Members from each of the parties represented in the House were invited to each dinner, always in different groupings. The effect of this was to encourage informal social contact between Members from the different parties with a view to fostering an atmosphere of greater collegiality and, by extension, greater civility in the House.

 Assuming these dinners had the effect Milliken suggests they did and given the relatively raucous nature of recent parliamentary sessions, I wonder how the last parliament would have behaved had these dinners not been held?

In the vein of the Durham Report quotes

I am in the process of skimming through a book, The Least Examined Branch: The Role of Legislatures in the Constitutional State, on the roles of legislatures in constitutional democracies when I came across the following passage in the forward:

This distinction between judicial and legislative roles is not therefore between principle and policy, because both institutions can and should act in principled ways. It is rather between ruling narrowly and legislating broadly, whether the rulings are a matter of principle or policy. This distinction is fundamental to understanding the difference between how courts and legislatures are typically designed to work and how they work best in supporting a constitutional democracy. Legislatures most often make egregious mistakes when they try to rule on single, high-visibility cases for politically expedient purposes. Courts correspondingly most often make egregious mistakes when they rule in ways that go far beyond what can be confidently inferred from the merits of the actual case or cases at hand.

I think that this is probably a pretty good way of thinking about the respective roles of legislatures and the judiciary. I am a little embarrassed that I hadn't explicitly thought about such distinctions before now.

Edit: The more I think about it the more I realize that this perspective is a little ahistorical, at least in the Canadian/Westminister tradition. Private Bills, for quite a while, were a major component of the legislature's work. And I can't help but think that issues relating to the setting of precedents are reasonably somewhat relevant to the rulings passed down by the judiciary.

Maybe my early excitement was a bit hasty.

Isn't this the kind of thing an author should know?

I just started re-reading an article and was somewhat taken aback by the first and second sentences.

This paper critically examines the literature on the nature of the capitalist state. It mainly, if not exclusively, deals with Marxist approaches to the state.

I really would have thought that this was the type of issue on which the author could have made a much more conclusive statement.

I wish I had known about this years ago

A few minutes ago I was looking at a few articles through the Cambridge Journals website when I noticed a small RSS icon at the bottom of the page. After a little investigation I learned that I could subscribe to a feed for the journal I was looking at at the moment. This feed contains links to the articles and content published in the journal.

With a little more investigation I learned that I could subscribe to an aggregated feed containing content from any and all of the Cambridge Journals journals I am interested in. After quickly browsing their offerings I selected about a dozen journals that seemed relevant to my studies. Once a week I should be receiving updates about newly published articles in these journals.

Now that I have subscribed to these feeds I realize that I should have know about these features years ago and that I should probably find similar services from other major publishers and sign up to those feeds.

It is definitely a little embarrassing that I only just found this service.

And how did people get information before RSS feeds became so widely available?

Reading and stuff

Yesterday, as part of my preparations for my upcoming comprehensive exam, I went to the library and borrowed a few books. The book that I have started to read is Thomas S. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed., apparently the popular edition of the work.

Though I had heard of Kuhn and his famous paradigms before yesterday, I really didn't know much about Kuhn or his work (not that I know all that much now).

Anyway, the first thing that I learned about Kuhn is that he was trained as a physicist. Given that I have only encountered his work in the context of the social sciences this surprised me. I guess that as the book was classified in the Qs I should have had a hint as to the nature of the author's subject and training.

On a related note, I also didn't really know that Kuhn's focus is largely hard science/s (i.e. physics and optics and whatnot). That his work is so frequently discussed in the social sciences seems to have been something of a coincidence, rather than Kuhn's goal when writing the book (though this is not to suggest that he didn't think about the social sciences in the development of his ideas). The following paragraph from the Wiki article on the book seems to sum things up nicely:

In 1987, Kuhn's work was reported to be the twentieth-century book most frequently cited in the period 1976-83 in the Arts and the Humanities and the Times Literary Supplement labeled it one of "The Hundred Most Influential Books Since the Second World War." The book's basic concepts have been adopted and co-opted by a variety of fields and disciplines beyond those encompassing the history and philosophy of science.

Anyway, all of this was just to say that I am enjoying the book so far. In some ways it reminds me of reading Orwell or Huxley as a teenager.

I guess I should probably get back to work.

Score
Cameron 56
Neil 0

The Next Phase

Just a few minutes ago I received a copy of my reading list for my comparative politics comprehensive. As expected, it is a little longer and more intense than I might have liked (it is 13 pages with 25-30 citations a page). And this is for a test that I am supposed to write in May.

On the upside, I have read a few of the articles on the list before (and I recognize most of the authors). Maybe most importantly, I do have some control when it comes to the areas on which I am to be tested. So even though the list is 13 pages long, I will only be responsible for a subsection of the full list.

In any event, I definitely have a lot of reading and studying to do between now and May.

I have already started to download a few of the articles and tomorrow I will head in to the library to pick up a few books. Hopefully by tomorrow I will be fully immersed in the studying process. Yum. Should be exciting.

Score
Cameron 52
Neil 0

A Few Quick Notes 496

-After some early morning snow and slush today turned out to be a rather nice winter's day. Though it was cold this evening, the air was clear and the were sidewalks relatively dry.

-We managed to win our Ultimate game last night. This was a particularly impressive feat for two reasons. Firstly, because we were short females we had to pick one up from another team, which meant that we had to take a 7 point penalty. Secondly, even with our extra female player we only had two females, meaning that they didn't have any substitutes during the game. Hopefully we play as well next week.

(Update: Jeannette was upset that I did not mention that she was one of the two female player mentioned above. Both of these players played hard the entire game and score many of our points. Jeannette has suggested, and I agree, that she likely scored about one third of our points.)

-I have managed to do a fair bit of studying this weekend, which is good as my first comp is just around the corner.

-Our salad diet is still going strong. Furthermore, for the first time in my life I have also been doing a good job of integrating fruit into my diet. Actually, I may be over doing it on the fruit front, though this will likely come back into line now that one of the great citrus sales of the year has ended.

-I guess I should get back to work. The Durham Report awaits me.

A Few Quick Notes 492

-Today, much to my surprise, was actually quite nice, if a little chilly.

-I am presently in the midst of making some focaccia-like bread. Instead of following a proper recipe I just added some olive oil and herbs to some rolled bread dough. While it may not be great, it should at least be edible.

-A few days ago John Cusack was asked what he thought was going to happen in 2012. He told them to Mayand their own business.

-Our collective salad kick is still ongoing. Yesterday I stopped by the grocery store and purchased carrots, celery, sliced cabbage, radishes, green onions, and red onions. Today I supplemented our today supplies with another 10 lbs of carrots.

Of course, I haven't just been buying supplies but also consuming salads. Twice today I had salads that contained six Canada's Food Guide servings of vegetables.

I suspect that if that if I am able to maintain this rate of consumption I will be burned out on salads by the end of end of the month.

-Though I have already put in a fair bit of work today, I should probably try to do some more reading before I call it a night.

A Few Quick Notes 491

-As has been standard so far this winter, today saw us get some rain and have temperatures hovering just above freezing. Talk about fun weather.

-As suggested by our last post, we had salads with our dinner tonight. This means that everyone had at least one salad today and some of us had two. It should also be noted none of us over-indulged in the main course, which was chili. Of course, all of this salad consumptions means that I am likely going to have to make a run to the carrot store tomorrow to pick up a few more carrots and some celery (which happens to be on sale this week).

-I have been doing a fair bit of studying today, though I guess I could have been a little more diligent.

-It seems that there is some new graffiti on the cement wall across from my bedroom window. I guess none of us noticed this going up yesterday.



Unfortunately, this new addition to the wall, at least in my opinion, isn't as nice as what is to be found under it. That the graffiti has taken a turn for the worse is unfortunate as I have to spend a fair bit of my time looking at it. I guess at this point I wouldn't mind if the building decided to remove everything and start from scratch.

-Oh, and I should note that in addition to increasing my salad consumption I am trying to put a little more emphasis on doing more chin-ups, a pursuit that fell by the wayside this summer shortly after a accidental self-inflicted rib injury.

A Few Quick Notes 481

-Today was a relatively grey day. As I spent most of the day indoors I hardly noticed that this was the case until just before sunset.

-It seems that for the first time in Montifax history we have reached a number of posts for the year that is greater than 365. Given that so many of these posts were filled with sweet nothings (such as my series of posts about yesterday's lunch) I am not sure that this is all that much of an accomplishment.

-At some point this afternoon I became interested in knowing how much time I spent away from Newfoundland in the first decade of the 21st century. It turns out that I spent 60 months or 5 years not in Newfoundland between 2000 and 2009. Another fun fact is that I haven't spent a full 12 months in Newfoundland since 1997 (I have always been away for at least two months of each year). And even though I have spent so much time away Newfoundland is still where my permanent address is. Talk about a hat trick of fun facts.

-A good chunk of my day has been spent reading.

-And I guess I should try to ensure that a good of my evening is spent reading.

A Few Quick Notes 477

-Though not particularly wet, today was definitely quite grey and cold. Not surprisingly, it seems that we might be in for some more snow in the coming hours/days.

-In my previous post it was mentioned that today I attended a talk given by Liberal MP Siobhan Coady. I should have mentioned that this talk was one of several today given by Liberal MPs. It seems that the Globe and Mail has already reported upon the talk given by Bob Rae. As strange as I found it to be a part of a campaign-style speech, I think that I find it even stranger to have been party to a nation-wide communications strategy on the part the Liberal party.

-I have decided to go for the turkey: three public lectures in three days. Tomorrow's lecture subject is South Africa's role in the world.

-For dinner tonight I made a pretty less-than-satisfying chicken stir-fry. Unfortunately, I still haven't been able to pin-point exactly where things went wrong.

-Because he Jesse Thorn asked nicely and because it is one of the most engaging interviews I have heard on his show in a while (and this isn't to suggest that there has been a shortage of engaging interviews) I feel that I should mention the recently released The Sound of Young America episode that features an interview with Judd Apatow (of Hollywood fame).

The Sound of Young America


[Embedded audio]

-I guess I should try to read a few more pages of this transition to democracy/democratization stuff before I call it a night.

One day - two classic assessments of Canadian federalism

Today has been a day for reading classic works relating to Canadian federalism.

This morning I started things off by finishing off the JCPC's 1937 ruling on the Labour Conventions case. As many will recall, one of the key findings of this ruling was that

“the Dominion cannot, merely by making promises to foreign countries, clothe itself with legislative authority inconsistent with the constitution which gave it birth.”

Of course, one of the classic lines from this ruling is the following:

“While the ship of state now sails on larger ventures and into foreign waters she sill retains the water-tight compartments which are an essential part of her original structure.”

It seems that over time our court rulings have lost the figurative language employed by the members of the JCPC in the early 20th Century. I can't imagine finding a similar passage in a current Supreme Court ruling ( though I guess it is possible that I haven't really read enough of them to know how everybody writes).

A little later in the day I moved on another, though earlier, classic text: The Durham Report. As I have read part of this report before I wasn't too surprised to come face to face with a strong assessment of the contemporary situation near the beginning of the report. Anyway, without further ado, here is one of Durham's famous, and still resonant, lines:

“I expected to find a contest between a government and a people: I found two nations warring in the bosom of a single state : I found a struggle, not of principles, but of races; and I perceived that it would be idle to attempt any amelioration of laws or institutions until we could first succeed in terminating the deadly animosity that now separates the inhabitants of Lower Canada into the hostile divisions of French and English.”

A Few Quick Notes 474

-After a several day period of clear skies it seems that Halifax is now, once again, sheathed in clouds. The prediction is that this cloud cover will soon lead to rain, which would be a less than well-received turn of events.

-This morning I made an early trip to the grocery store so that I would be able to take advantage of an excellent butter sale, the first such sale in months. I had to go early because in such circumstances the butter tends to move quickly, particularly on Tuesdays as students get a ten percent discount. As it turned out, I was able to pick up 5 pounds of butter without much hassle.

-Yesterday, by taking two trips to the law library, I was able to pick up a few old Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (which was Canada's highest court of appeal until 1949) rulings that I need/ed to read. Though they turned out not to be all that difficult to find, I had been allowing myself to neglect this task for the past several months.

-While at the law library I was reminded that I really don't like the way the Dalhousie law library is run, particularly in relation to non-law students. For instance, instead of automatically granting graduate students the full loan period for a book their system has a shorter loan period as the default (you have to know to ask for the extra time if you want it). Also, study rooms and certain databases are unavailable to non-law students. Such practices seem to run contrary to the idea of an academic library (providing access to information and furthering the creation of knowledge in an academic community), but they are also more restrictive than those of non-Dalhousie libraries to which I have access through consortial arrangements.

-I guess I should get back to work now that I have bragged about my butter score and vented about the Dalhousie law library.

A Few Quick Notes 473

-We had another great day in Halifax today. For better or worse, I didn't really experience much of it directly and instead had to grasp its beauty through a series of windows.

-Much of my day today was spent reading/studying and grading. Unfortunately, I spent less time doing either of these two activities than I might have like.

-Last night we went to the apartment of some friends for some homemade pizza (mine was cheese and tomato free) and games. I think a good time was had by all in attendance.

-Hopefully I will get a chance to read some of today's paper tomorrow as I didn't get much of a chance to read it today.

-I'm once again incredibly tired. Hopefully I will be able to make it to bed early tonight.

A Few Quick Notes 472

-Though it was somewhat chilly today, it was nice to finally have a day that wasn't overcast and rainy.

-I took advantage of the improved weather to conduct a major cleaning operation on our balcony. In addition to sweeping up a number of leaves and twigs I also washed quite a number of my pots and disposed of my frost-killed plants. Though I can't say that the experience was particularly fun, I am glad to have taken care of the mess that was beginning to be a little embarrassing.

-Our spike in blog traffic seems to be continuing. Strangely, the spike in traffic seems to be happening at the same time that we are having fewer people come to our site through search engine referrals. The whole thing still doesn't make too much sense to me.

-I spent a good chunk of the day reading, and then another chunk grading. Hopefully I will be able to devote several good chunks of tomorrow to similar pursuits.

-I'm beat.