Today in Supreme Court History: September 25, 1981

9/25/1981: Justice Sandra Day O'Connor takes the oath.

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor

Comments

[Mr. Bumble]

...and nobody seems to care.

[Dan Schiavetta]

Tennant v. Jefferson County Comm’n, 567 U.S. 758 (decided September 25, 2012): Full Court, reversing District Court, approves of West Virginia Legislature’s reapportionment of its three Congressional seats, one of eight competing plans. This short decision goes through how the Court decides whether a redistricting comports with “one person, one vote”: population differential (not dispositive; one of the rejected plans had a differential of only one person between the smallest and largest districts); whether incumbents would be forced into the same district; whether counties or cities would remain whole, etc. The approved plan had a differential of only 0.79% between the smallest and largest districts, which the Court admitted in these days of computerized analysis might be a “large” deviation, but o.k. here.

[Mr. Bumble]

I thought I was among the muted.

[apedad]

Actually it looks like a lot of people care: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_awards_and_honors_received_by_Sandra_Day_O%27Connor

[Mr. Bumble]

I was referring to this thread.
For the most part awards and honors are bullshit. See Nobel "Peace Prize" awardees.

[Syd Henderson]

The scientist awards are generally okay (well, maybe not the guy who invented the lobotomy) though sometimes another person should have been included (Lise Meitner, for instance).

[JoeFromtheBronx]

The First Monday in October was a play that was made into a film that portrayed the first woman appointed as a justice.

The best thing about the film, which got silly after a while, was Walter Matthau’s portrayal of a Douglas-like liberal. Jill Clayburgh played the first woman justice, a conservative.

There are some good lines. For instance, Justice Snow (WM) eulogized his conservative colleague:

“Stanley and I were like a pair of flying buttresses.

Leaning against opposite sides of a Gothic cathedral we helped keep the roof from caving in. If we’d both been on the same side all the time, we might have pushed the building over. You don’t have to agree with a man in order to respect him.”

Judge Ruth Loomis during her confirmation hearing, answered a statement that she has no children:

“The FBI is wrong in reporting to you that I have no children. I have hundreds. We are the parents of our ideas, and, uh, so my children, in other words, my opinions, my decisions, are the result of conception, and the delivery is sometimes painful. You may not like my children. You may find them ugly, but, by God, your ideas and mine have equal rights to live together, to grow, to change, even to die.”

Justice O’Connor had three children and a lot of ideas.

One more quote:

“Haven’t we outgrown those fears about the periodic instability of the female of the species? Eggs are not the seeds of insanity.

A woman can ovulate and think at the same time.”

I think we still have some growing to do.

[Dan Schiavetta]

Another good line, from Matthau, on banning pornography: "Crap has a right to be crap."

[Mr. Bumble]

As you would well know.

[Jerry B.]

The Judge Loomis quote sounds a bit Kamala Harris-ish.

[Sarcastr0]

OK, awardschat time!

What are some good awards, and what are some bad ones?
Limit: none of the usual partisan targets - no Pulitzer, no Nobel Peace Prize.

Art awards are always so arbitrary.
Oscars are silly, but capture the zeitgeist taken decadally or so.

Golden Globes are just silly, but I hear a fun show if you're into that.
Tonys seem to work for that set (I go to Broadway shows, but that is an award for the mavens).
Emmys I don't have an opinion.

Grammys...I can't decide on if they're pure Golden Globes sideshow or have some Oscars broadly tracking of the mainstream trends value.

Hugos I generally have some nominee I read I like better than the winner, but I also choose podcasts over being a Hugo completionist. The politics has been a sideshow.

Podcast awards have just not worked for me at all.

[Commenter_XY]

Lasker Award
Israel Prize
Copley Medal
Gruber Prize in Genetics
Edison Awards

[apedad]

Darwin Awards are the best.

[apedad]

Prime Cuts Awards (2024 is due out soon)

(2023)
https://www.cagw.org/reporting/prime-cuts

I don't agree with all their nominations but there are some that should be looked at.

(The link is red meat to the reduce-the-fed-govt folks so have at it!)

[Alpheus W Drinkwater]

I find all the award shows on TV unwatchable. If something fun happens, like Will Smith slapping Chris Rock, I'll catch it on YouTube.

[Mr. Bumble]

Gone but worthy of re-instatement:
William Proxmire's Golden Fleece Award.
Laugh-in's Flying Fickle Finger of Fate.

[Sarcastr0]

Golden Fleece was 1) partisan, and 2) just wrong.

It relied on a fundamental ignorance of how basic research works, and what was generalizable.

https://www.goldengooseaward.org/

I went to the gala last year. Studying tree knot evolution yielding a breakthrough in DNA sequencing tech. The kind of thing that'd be on the Golden Fleece.

[Dan Schiavetta]

I assume you’re talking about Proxmire’s “awards” (the earlier post is muted).

He fleeced the government (hundreds of millions to pay his state’s farmers to not grow crops) far more than his “awards”, usually a few thousand given for scientific projects that used big words he didn’t bother to look up.

[Mr. Bumble]

Let the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation or anyone of the thousands of "charitable" foundations with 100s of billions of dollars fund it if it is so worthy and NOT the US taxpayer.

[Bob from Ohio]

The billions in college endowments could fund a lot of in-house research too.

[Sarcastr0]

Says the man posting on the Internet.

Basic research of of national security import. As the Manhattan Project taught the world.

Charity is small potatoes, and usually more about harm mitigation. But props for not throwing it to ‘the market.’ Private industry has the wrong timescale and ability to deal with nonlinear timelines.

[Mr. Bumble]

Providing for the country's defense is one of the things the federal government is supposed to do, so funding by the Department of Defense to develop the Internet is justifiable you jackass.

[Sarcastr0]

The Internet was important for reasons vastly beyond national defense.
Are you saying only the DoD should fund basic research?

What about NIH? Our health tech is the envy of the world. Does that have no impact on our national security?

Cell phone tech. That's largely NSF. Why not just leave that stuff to Huawei?

Our agricultural capacity is at this point dependent on previous USDA basic research.

Our small and fast computers are Department of Energy funding, among other things. You want to fall behind on computing?

[Sarcastr0]

This is one of my favorite things to do - champion basic research.

The outcome case is stark.

But there it is not what appeals to me, personally.

Basic research is like art. It's a thing that civilizations do. It's a nationalist thing, and a human thing. And a *noble* thing.

Some folks run their lives to maximize RoI. But those folks are never the happiest ones, are they?

[Bob from Ohio]

Nothing you said explains why the federal government must fund all this research. The USA was the richest and largest economy pre-WWII with little government research spending. Somebody did research.

"Why not just leave that stuff to Huawei?"

Bell Labs existed but the federal government destroyed the Bell system.

[Bob from Ohio]

"First lady Jill Biden announced Monday that the Pentagon intends to commit $500 million to women’s health research as part of a broader White House push to increase funding for the study of women’s health.
Jill Biden attended a Clinton Global Initiative event alongside Chelsea Clinton to announce the new investment. The Defense Department money will fund research on conditions such as ovarian cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, and musculoskeletal injuries and how they impact women differently."

We don't have a fleet oiler in the ME but we can take defense funds for "basic research" that have zero to do with defense. As a present for Acting President Dr Jill

[Sarcastr0]

Womens’ health has nothing to do with defense?

I would imagine force readiness type policymakers would find this information useful.

[Bob from Ohio]

"I would imagine"

Yes, you imagine a lot.

[Sarcastr0]

You gonna addres my point at all, or....

[Mr. Bumble]

...meanwhile the only Navy oil tanker in the Middle East ran aground and is leaking oil.
Maybe time to spend some money on ships and training.

[Sarcastr0]

Haha yeah that does seem dumb! Especially given how much we spend on our Navy!!

I don’t think it’s cause by too much spending on womens’ health research by the Pentagon though.

[Bob from Ohio]

"You gonna addres [sic] my point at all"

It was too stupid.

[Sarcastr0]

Well, Bob has quit the field in a cloud of insults.

Bumble wants the DoD to do basic research when it's the Internet, but not basic research when it's womens' health.

[The Margrave of Azilia]

What do you mean *women's* health? Don't men also get ovarian cancer?

[Sarcastr0]

Bell Labs did exist. And it stopped. Know why? Profits.

Part of that is corporate culture changing. But more of it is that basic research got sufficiently expensive that only national-level efforts need apply.

Pre-WW2 there wasn't even really the distinction between basic and applied research. But see royal astronomers, etc.
WW2 had the world wake up to the benefits of basic research in a big way.

There are speeches in Congress making fun of those head in the clouds Europeans looking at atoms while we feed people and figure out how to build better buildings and roads.
We learned real fast.

Luckily a lot of them were driven here by European authoritarian and antisemitism.

[Dan Schiavetta]

I agree with everything you’ve said.

[Mr. Bumble]

Sycophant!

[Sarcastr0]

The WW2 flip from applied to basic research in America (and subsequent sustain in the Cold War) was my Master's thesis, and is a conversation I haul out to skeptical political appointees on the regular.

[JoeFromtheBronx]

Tennant v. Jefferson County Comm’n, is a weirdly timed opinion.

As Lyle Denniston noted:

"After sitting on the case from West Virginia all summer long, the Court produced an eight-page"

He also suggests ("appeared to be a novel new declaration") new law was handed down. ATTN: Steve Vladeck.

https://www.scotusblog.com/2012/09/opinion-recap-hedging-on-one-person-one-vote/

[LD, who is now over 90, has retired but still blogs.]

[Dan Schiavetta]

Thanks!

(For some reason my comment appeared not as first-level but as a reply to somebody I had muted who commented just ahead of me.)