Dave Sherohman

The US Supreme Court has ruled that the October, 2003 strip search of a 13-year-old girl for ibuprofen was unconstitutional. Good to see they got that right, even if it wasn't quite unanimous.¹

Unfortunately, if you read down to the final paragraph of that article, they got the secondary decision in the case wrong:

Where is the accountability if the search is not found to have been conducted "under district policy"?

I rather unexpectedly received a short letter from Annika's parents today:

For historical reasons that I've never seen explained, Swedish calendars list names for each day and "David" is today's, so they sent me four lottery tickets to celebrate my name day, just like they do for Annika on hers.

Wowza... It seems like just yesterday that astronomers were first finding earth-sized planets around other stars. Now they've detected one six times the size of Jupiter - in the Andromeda galaxy.

Kind of makes me wonder how long it will be before they can read license plates or newspaper headlines on other planets.

Yesterday's NPR Science Friday podcast included a video of Dr. David Hu's research on how slithering works to move snakes. Aside from being interesting science, it's even better for the schadenfreude of watching snakes trying to move on completely smooth surfaces or while wearing sweaters.

On June 6, 1984, one of the most widely-addictive video games ever was released upon the world: Tetris.

It was a while before I tried the original arcade version and it didn't particularly impress me until I got a copy of the home game, which brings us to today's story.

Sweden will be holding its elections for the EU parliament on Sunday and it appears that the major established political parties here are softening their stances on intellectual property enforcement as the election approaches. Although it may actually be unrelated, one obvious explanation would be that polls are currently showing that the Swedish Pirate Party ("piratpartiet") can be expected to win one seat in the election, possibly two, out of 19 total for Sweden.

The FishTwits and I met up this afternoon with a web designer, who sounded like a pretty good guy. He just moved to Sweden about a month ago from Indiana and the topic came up of what you say to someone when they sneeze here. ("Prosit.") I commented that I never seem to be able to get the stress onto quite the right syllable of Swedish words, at which point he asked where I was from.

Apparently, my Minnesota accent was just enough that he wasn't quite sure whether I was an American or a Swede who spoke really good English.

Since moving to Sweden, work has been a bit of a pain to come by (which is a story for another post), but I have managed to join up with a pair of students in the University of Lund's Masters of Entrepreneurship program to build a startup together. Their final presentation was this morning, so I was up (relatively) early to attend that as their third partner and CTO.

What can we expect to see next if gay marriage is legalized?

OK, this is a minor detail I hadn't thought of on the Pirate Bay's attempts to find a neutral judge to take their case before (from Pirate Bay: In search of an unbiased judge):

I am a little surprised, though, that copyright association memberships would be so pervasive in Sweden. I wonder how that came about... And I guess I should be glad the case is being tried in Sweden rather than, say, Iceland.