Purchase of the day.

From the February 16, 2013 Amazon Associates Earnings Report:

Mario Kart Racing Wheel for Wii (2pcs Bundle) (Bulk Packaging) by Ebest (Earnings to the Althouse blog = $0.97)

85704 Campus.org Poly Color Jackets - 6 Pack, Assorted Colors by Smead (Earnings to the Althouse blog = $0.45)

LifeStraw Personal Water Filterby Vestergaard-Frandsen (Earnings to the Althouse blog = $1.84)

ch ching:

T-fal Actifry Low-Fat Multi-Cooker (Earnings to the Althouse blog = $16.72 )

Microsoft Office Home and Business 2013 (1PC/1User) [Download] (Earnings to the Althouse blog = $17.60)

Hoover Linx Cordless Stick Vacuum Cleaner (Earnings to the Althouse blog = $11.92 )

... and 28 other items purchased — at no additional cost to the buyers. Or as Barack might say, "Nothing about using the Althouse Amazon portal tonight should increase your family budget deficit by a single dime."

Only I'm not even lying.

So suck it up, load it down, fry it deep, sip it slow. If you like it, you better put a jacket on it. And WEEE!!! Thank you.

"Stack ranking" — the management technique that ruined Microsoft.

Stack ranking "forces every unit to declare a certain percentage of employees as top performers, good performers, average, and poor."

"Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees,” Eichenwald writes. “If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, 2 people were going to get a great review, 7 were going to get mediocre reviews, and 1 was going to get a terrible review,” says a former software developer. “It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.”

ADDED: Stack ranking seems designed to overcome the standard problem in group projects, that people take advantage of each other. If we're all going to get the same credit, what do you do? Work really hard or let others do the work? What can you do to prevent that dysfunction? Apparently, the answer is to create a different dysfunction.

"Microsoft has been granted a patent for its 'avoid ghetto' feature for GPS devices."

"A GPS device is used to find shortcuts and avoid traffic, but Microsoft’s patent states that a route can be plotted for pedestrians to avoid an 'unsafe neighborhood or being in an open area that is subject to harsh temperatures.'"

The way things look from a computer screen in Madison, Wisconsin.

Click image to enlarge.

Do you want to replace the existing Normal?

"What will the web do to content, in terms of high-cost, expensive, time-consuming content?"

Charlie Rose descends into an existential void...



ADDED: Judging from most of the comments to this post the answer to the question above is that time-consuming content will be ignored or assumed to be whatever it appears to be at first glance. In case you're using a device that won't play embedded video: here's the link to the YouTube page. Now, please. Take the time to watch.

I have a laptop (MacBook Pro) and an iPhone, so what am I doing with an iPad?

Though I bought an iPad as soon as I could, 2 days ago, I'm not going to mindlessly boost the thing, and I'm not going to fool myself about whether it's useful to me. It needs to earn its place in between the fabulously useful laptop and iPhone. Obviously, it's medium size and medium weight. I'm more likely to carry it with me than the laptop, but unlike the iPhone, it's not always going to come along. I can't put it in a pocket or my smallest handbag. And I'm not going to pick it up from my bedside to check the time and a couple websites when I wake up. I'm not going to read it from a completely supine position, as I often do with the iPhone, when I'm in bed and not ready to sit up.



I might use it in bed if I am sitting up, because it turns on instantly and if I'm ready to read but not yet inclined to write. It's very nice for checking email because of the relatively big, bright screen and the way, in landscape mode, I can see the list of email to the left and display any given item on the right. I appreciate that I can lock it into landscape or portrait mode and read while lying on my side. That's something the iPhone won't do. Of course, the iPhone, unlike the iPad, is a phone, and that makes it the one thing I want to have near me all the time.

But most of the time, I'm on the laptop. If I have a table in front of me, I prefer the laptop. Even without a table, I prefer the laptop if I'm going to write. Even though it heats up, I'll have it on my lap while I'm sprawled, half-sitting, on the sofa or in bed. The hinge holding the screen upright and the solid keyboard make it far superior to the iPad for what I want to do.

Maybe I could replace the laptop with a desktop for home use. (I have a desktop in my office, but my home desktop died about a year ago.) The desktop would be better than the laptop for serious writing and working with photographs and video, and then maybe the iPad would insinuate its way into my life as I do things in places in the house away from the desk: at the dining table, in bed, near the TV, on the deck, etc. But I think not. If I'm going to write, and I always feel like I'm about to write, I prefer the laptop.

The iPad might be nice for the simple consumption of movies and books. Or looking through photographs, if you do that. This is especially important if you're away from home, since it's easy to carry and the screen is great. (Note: I was an early adopter of the Kindle, but I haven't used it much — and not at all in the past year. I just hate the way the screen looks, with its low-contrast gray-on-gray.) But I'm the restless type. I don't passively consume media for very long. I need to go back and forth between reading and writing, and though it's far easier to write on the iPad than on the iPhone, I'm not going to write on the iPad unless I'm out somewhere and I've left the laptop behind.

Now, I have a special use for the iPad that I'm going to test out today. I have notes for my classes that I keep on iDisk, so that they are saved in one place on line whether I work on them from my laptop or from my desktop. In the past, I have printed out the relevant pages for class. Occasionally, I've just worked from the laptop in class, which is a bit awkward. My primary motivation for buying the iPad was that I pictured myself displaying the relevant pages of notes on a screen that I could lay flat, next to my textbook, during class. I thought this would be extremely convenient.

There's an iDisk app that lets me get to my documents, but the screen image is terrible. It's readable, but not at all crisp. I paid $9.99 for Apple's word processing program Pages, but I can't find a way to work directly with a document saved to iDisk, the way I do on my laptop and desktop. [ADDED: Apple confirms that it can't be done.] I've cut and pasted to get text from one place to another, and I can see that the text would be displayed in high resolution. But that's an extra, annoying step, and it means that if I do any editing, it will not be saved to the iDisk document. Also, I lose important formatting, notably the extra space between paragraphs.

And why am I even using Pages? I prefer Microsoft Word, which I have used on a Mac since 1985. I had version 1.5 of Word, back in the day when you had the program and your documents on a single floppy disk. But Microsoft won't make a Word app for iPad. This is all very annoying. The #1 thing I wanted to do with iPad is not (yet) doable.

IN SHORT: It's a medium size, medium weight device that has some use, but it's a distant third in usefulness after the laptop and the iPhone.

Seinfeld sacked.

Those Microsoft ads were just too advanced for us.

UPDATE: Seinfeld not sacked.

"Give me a signal: Adjust your shorts."

It's the commercial that is mystifying and horrifying everyone.

IN THE COMMENTS: Scrutineer says:

One doesn't dissect a Vorshtein.

How to make Site Meter and Internet Explorer play nice.

Do what I did, explained here where it talks about editing the template to move the Site Meter javascript out of any tables (causing the meter to appear at the bottom of the page). This worked for me. I also put an ordinary link to my Site Meter page in the sidebar so it will still be easy to check the statistics (which I like to do).

If a reader came to my blog and Site Meter didn't record it, would it still make a sound?

Take down Site Meter? Noooooo. Site Meter means too much to me. You need to take down Internet Explorer.

Microsoft sucks.

IN THE COMMENTS: alank has a fix.... [FIX DELETED].

UPDATE: I followed the advice here and got my meter out of all the tables. It's at the bottom of the blog, in case you want to read it. Hope this works!

The original 6 degrees of separation research was pretty shaky.

But new research bears it out. Except it's more like 7.

"To me, it was pretty shocking. What we're seeing suggests there may be a social connectivity constant for humanity," said Eric Horvitz, a Microsoft researcher who conducted the study with colleague Jure Leskovec. "People have had this suspicion that we are really close. But we are showing on a very large scale that this idea goes beyond folklore."

Cool!

Funny, I was just listening to this NPR Science Friday podcast about what a sham it was:

One researcher, Judith Kleinfeld, a professor of psychology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, looked at Milgram's original experiment in the hopes of updating it for the digital world. "Milgram's startling conclusion turns out to rest on scanty evidence," she says. "The idea of 'six degrees of separation' may, in fact, be plain wrong-the academic equivalent of an urban myth."

Leopard.

Ah! I'm so happy with Leopard, which I've just installed in my MacBook, and I can boil my reason for happiness down to one word: Buttons!

Since January 2004, when I started blogging, I have had to keep Mozilla/Firefox open on my computer along with my preferred browser, Apple's Safari, because, in Blogger, Safari wouldn't display a "compose window" with a set of button-icons for adding links, putting text in italics, blocking and indenting quotes, and that sort of thing. Getting buttons in Blogger was something that meant far more to me than any cool innovations like "Time Machine" or "Cover Flow."

All these years I have been keeping 2 browsers open when I used my computer. To use only Safari, I'd have had to type in HTML code whenever I wrote a post. You might think I'd have just used Firefox alone, since it had such an important advantage, but there has always been something different about the way web pages look in Safari that made the other browser insufferable. I can't pinpoint what it was — it was subtle —but I couldn't force myself to switch. 

And the Safari that came with Leopard is even cleaner and crisper looking — a big aesthetic improvement over the old Safari I loved.

I also get pleasure from removing a program that isn't Apple. I enjoy the ideological purity, I have to admit. I deeply believe that everything will work out better if I stay within the tender confines of what Apple has decided is good for me (though I do make exceptions, for example, to get those buttons).

Now that I'm purging the invader Foxfire from my MacBook, I'm also going to oust my oldest invader species, Microsoft Word. I'm going to switch to Apple's word processor Pages. This will end a relationship that began in 1985, when I got my first computer, a Mac 512. (I never had the first Mac, the 128, and I distinctly remember the exact tinge of my jealousy when a colleague acquired a Mac Plus. I replaced the 512 with a Mac Classic, which I still have, and which I enjoy firing up now and then, just to reminisce about what life was like with that tiny black and white screen. It's still the best place to play Tetris.) 

With that first Mac, I had the Apple program MacWrite, which seemed wonderful compared to a typewriter, but it lacked one thing that I absolutely needed as a legal scholar: footnotes. Microsoft Word for Mac came out in 1985, so I was there for version 1. That was back before people started hating Microsoft. I loved it, because it did those footnotes for me. There was no option to stay with an Apple product back then, and I got so accustomed to Word that I never wanted to look at anything else. Actually, I never much liked the bulky improvements that were added, but it was like being married to it. Word got old and ugly, but I had committed. 

But now that I'm getting Firefox out of here, I'm kicking out Microsoft too. For months, maybe years, Word has been suddenly shutting down without warning, which is a really irritating flaw when you write a lot and often have deadlines, as I do.

So, I'm reveling in purification this morning. 

That said, I did just order a Kindle, which — just look at it — is so not Apple.

UPDATE: Safari crashes constantly!

"We are not building a GPhone."

"We are enabling 1,000 people to build a GPhone."

ADDED: William Saletan explains:

Old cell business model: Charge monthly fees. Microsoft model: Sell the software. Apple model: Sell the phone. Google model: Give away the software; sell ads. Google's promises: 1) Better Web browsing and other software. 2) Lower fees and cheaper phones, because the ads provide the revenue. 3) More innovation and customization. Critiques: 1) The announcement is all hype, no product. 2) It'll take forever to be produced, become commercially available, and penetrate the market. 3) Yes, we are all individual … Google pawns. Upside: Your phone will work just like a PC! Downside: Your phone will be buried in ads, just like a PC.

The new Supreme Court cases, especially the new negative Commerce Clause case.

SCOTUSblog gives us a first glimpse:

The Supreme Court, in a major victory for Microsoft Corp.... Microsoft Corp. v. AT&T...

In a second ruling on patent law, the Court decided unanimously that the Federal Circuit Court had been wrong in taking a narrow view of when an invention is "obvious" and thus cannot be patented.... KSR International v. Teleflex....

... [P]olice do not act unconstitutionally when they try to stop a suspect fleeing at high speed by ramming the suspect's car from the rear, forcing it to crash..... Scott v. Harris....

[I]f a taxpayer could have sued to challenge an erroneous federal tax levy, but fails to do so on time, may not later sue for a refund... EC Terms of Trust v. U.S....

... [L]ocal government does not violate the Constitution when it [requires] all solid waste generated in the community to be processed at a publicly owned facility, so long as the ordinance treats private businesses the same whether they are local or out-of-state.... United Haulers Association v. Oneida-Herkimer Solid Waste Management...

The last one, a negative (dormant) Commerce Clause case, is especially interesting to me. Here it is, with four separate opinions, written by, oddly enough, Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito. Roberts announces the decision:

We hold that the Counties’ flow control ordinances, which treat in-state private business interests exactly the same as out-of-state ones, do not “discriminate against interstate commerce” for purposes of the dormant Commerce Clause.

Because he finds no discrimination, he goes on to the balancing test (the "Pike test"):

Under the Pike test, we will uphold a nondiscriminatory statute like this one “unless the burden imposed on [interstate] commerce is clearly excessive in relation to the putative local benefits.”...

We find it unnecessary to decide whether the ordinances impose any incidental burden on interstate commerce because any arguable burden does not exceed the public benefits of the ordinances.

The ordinances give the Counties a convenient and effective way to finance their integrated package of waste-disposal services....

At the same time, the ordinances are more than financing tools. They increase recycling in at least two ways, conferring significant health and environmental benefits upon the citizens of the Counties....

The Counties’ ordinances are exercises of the police power in an effort to address waste disposal, a typical and traditional concern of local government.

Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer join the opinion in full. Scalia joins up to the point where Roberts applies the balancing test:

I have been willing to enforce on stare decisis grounds a “negative” self-executing Commerce Clause in two situations: “(1) against a state law that facially discriminates against interstate commerce, and (2) against a state law that is indistinguishable from a type of law previously held unconstitutional by the Court.”... As today’s opinion makes clear, the flow-control law at issue in this case meets neither condition. It benefits a public entity performing a traditional local-government function and treats all private entities precisely the same way....

I am unable to join Part II–D of the principal opinion, in which the plurality performs so-called “Pike balancing.” Generally speaking, the balancing of various values is left to Congress—which is precisely what the Commerce Clause (the real Commerce Clause) envisions.

Thomas concurs. He would get rid of negative Commerce Clause enforcement altogether:

The negative Commerce Clause has no basis in the Constitution and has proved unworkable in practice.... As the debate between the majority and dissent shows, application of the negative Commerce Clause turns solely on policy considerations, not on the Constitution. Because this Court has no policy role in regulating interstate commerce, I would discard the Court’s negative Commerce Clause jurisprudence.

Alito dissents, joined by Stephens and Kennedy. He perceives discrimination:

[T]hese laws discriminate against interstate commerce (generally favoring local interests over nonlocal interests), but are defended on the ground that they serve legitimate goals unrelated to protectionism (e.g., health, safety, and protection of the environment). And while I do not question that the laws at issue in this case serve legitimate goals, the laws offend the dormant Commerce Clause because those goals could be attained effectively through nondiscriminatory means....

The key, based on past precedent, is that the processing plant was not privately owned, as Roberts emphasizes:

“Flow control” ordinances require trash haulers to deliver solid waste to a particular waste processing facility. In C & A Carbone, Inc. v. Clarkstown, this Court struck down under the Commerce Clause a flow control ordinance that forced haulers to deliver waste to a particular private processing facility. In this case, we face flow control ordinances quite similar to the one invalidated in Carbone. The only salient difference is that the laws at issue here require haulers to bring waste to facilities owned and operated by a state-created public benefit corporation. We find this difference constitutionally significant. Disposing of trash has been a traditional government activity for years, and laws that favor the government in such areas—but treat every private business, whether in-state or out-of-state, exactly the same—do not discriminate against interstate commerce for purposes of the Commerce Clause.

I would have been very surprised if the case had come out the other way. It's true Roberts doesn't have a majority, but that is only because Scalia and Thomas are even less willing to strike things down on a negative Commerce Clause theory. It's interesting to see Alito break away from Roberts, Scalia, and Thomas, especially since he perked up at the invocation of "traditional government activity":

[T]his Court has previously recognized that any standard “that turns on a judicial appraisal of whether a particular governmental function is ‘integral’ or ‘traditional’ ” is “ ‘unsound in principle and unworkable in practice.’ ” Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority (1985) . Indeed, the Court has twice experimented with such standards—first in the context of intergovernmental tax immunity, see South Carolina v. United States (1905) , and more recently in the context of state regulatory immunity under the Commerce Clause, see National League of Cities v. Usery (1976) —only to abandon them later as analytically unsound. See Garcia, supra, at 547 (overruling National League of Cities); New York v. United States (1946) (overruling South Carolina v. United States). Thus, to the extent today’s holding rests on a distinction between “traditional” governmental functions and their nontraditional counterparts, it cannot be reconciled with prior precedent.

This unnecessary invocation of Garcia is not what you'd expect from a Justice dedicated to federalism.

ADDED: The case about the high-speed chase includes the video.

MORE: Justice Scalia discusses the video in Scott v. Harris:

[R]eading the lower court’s opinion, one gets the impression that respondent, rather than fleeing from police, was attempting to pass his driving test:

“[T]aking the facts from the non-movant’s viewpoint, [respondent] remained in control of his vehicle, slowed for turns and intersections, and typically used his indicators for turns. He did not run any motorists off the road. Nor was he a threat to pedestrians in the shopping center parking lot, which was free from pedestrian and vehicular traffic as the center was closed. Significantly, by the time the parties were back on the highway and Scott rammed [respondent], the motorway had been cleared of motorists and pedestrians allegedly because of police blockades of the nearby intersections.” Id., at 815–816 (citations omitted).

The videotape tells quite a different story. There we see respondent’s vehicle racing down narrow, two-lane roads in the dead of night at speeds that are shockingly fast. We see it swerve around more than a dozen other cars, cross the double-yellow line, and force cars traveling in both directions to their respective shoulders to avoid being hit. We see it run multiple red lights and travel for considerable periods of time in the occasional center left-turn-only lane, chased by numerous police cars forced to engage in the same hazardous maneuvers just to keep up. Far from being the cautious and controlled driver the lower court depicts, what we see on the video more closely resembles a Hollywood-style car chase of the most frightening sort, placing police officers and innocent bystanders alike at great risk of serious injury....

Respondent’s version of events is so utterly discredited by the record that no reasonable jury could have believed him. The Court of Appeals should not have relied on such visible fiction; it should have viewed the facts in the light depicted by the videotape.

"Visible fiction"? Is that a typo for "risible fiction"?

Anyway, I watched the video, and I understand why you'd want to reject the plaintiff's characterization of the facts. But this is a case about when to grant summary judgment, avoiding trial. Justice Stevens dissented:

[T]he Court has usurped the jury’s factfinding function and, in doing so, implicitly labeled the four other judges to review the case unreasonable.....

If two groups of judges can disagree so vehemently about the nature of the pursuit and the circumstances surrounding that pursuit, it seems eminently likely that a reasonable juror could disagree with this Court’s characterization of events....

The Court today sets forth a per se rule that presumes its own version of the facts: “A police officer’s attempt to terminate a dangerous high-speed car chase that threatens the lives of innocent bystanders does not violate the Fourth Amendment, even when it places the fleeing motorist at risk of serious injury or death.” Not only does that rule fly in the face of the flexible and case-by-case “reasonableness” approach applied in Garner and Graham v. Connor, 490 U. S. 386 (1989) , but it is also arguably inapplicable to the case at hand, given that it is not clear that this chase threatened the life of any “innocent bystande[r].” In my view, the risks inherent in justifying unwarranted police conduct on the basis of unfounded assumptions are unacceptable, particularly when less drastic measures—in this case, the use of stop sticks9 or a simple warning issued from a loudspeaker—could have avoided such a tragic result. In my judgment, jurors in Georgia should be allowed to evaluate the reasonableness of the decision to ram respondent’s speeding vehicle in a manner that created an obvious risk of death and has in fact made him a quadriplegic at the age of 19.

But even Justices Ginsburg and Breyer agreed with the outcome.

"Once personal wealth exceeds about $12,000 a year..."

"... more money produces virtually no increase in life satisfaction." That's what the happiness experts tell us.

Wow. Let's pause a moment to let all priests, nuns and anarchists take a bow and say, "I told you so!"

"People grossly exaggerate the impact that higher incomes would have on their subjective well-being," said Alan Krueger, a professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University and an author of the study.

Who presumably makes a salary more than ten times that $12,000.

"If you want to know why I think poor people are not that miserable, it is because they are able to enjoy things that Bill Gates has not been able to enjoy, given his schedule at Microsoft," Krueger surmised....

"One of the mistakes people make is they focus on the salary and not the non-salary aspects of work," Krueger said. "People do not put enough weight on the quality of work. That is why work looks like, for most people, the worst moments of the day."

A professor has an interesting perspective on this sort of thing. You have a good salary, so you don't know the pains of really struggling to get by. You have nice working conditions, and you're inclined to take note of that when you compare yourself to people in jobs that pay even more than yours. Oh, those people are so busy and harried that they can't really enjoy life. Of course, this kind of thinking demonstrates exactly that human capacity to rationalize and come to terms with your situation that enables us to find a way to enjoy life under all sorts of conditions. Like only making $12,000.

Noticing "the saggy" and the eye-rolling.

That was a rather good episode of "The Apprentice" tonight. I really appreciated the judgment of the guys from WalMart and Microsoft. Sean and Lee had an unfinished exhibit. It was missing its "roof" and that made the walls sag embarrassingly. But they had a more commercial idea for the presentation. The women's team created a more finished-looking display, but it was really a tacky living room sort of place, where kids would park themselves in the comfy chairs and keep fast-moving money-spenders from entering at all. It's easy to imagine how Sean and Lee could have been excoriated for their messy hut, but the women's team lost. The big issue for the women was the eye-rolling. It's not eye-rolling, it's eye-raising. Allie and Roxanne went into high-school mode, disrespecting Tammy at every turn of the shopping cart. And since Roxanne also made the the lame signage, it looked for sure as if Roxanne would go down. Maybe even both Roxanne and Allie. But, no, it was Tammy who got fired. She just didn't lead. Now get out of here. Go.

At the Bloggership conference.

Well, here I am at the Cambridge Hyatt, where, from your room, you hear some guy playing schmaltzy music on a grand piano that is located somewhere in the grand atrium. You know, there was a time when Hyatt atria were seen as quite wonderful. It was decades ago.

So we bloggers had a nice dinner at the Harvard Faculty Club, courtesy of Microsoft. Microsoft provided some excellent food for us humble bloggers. I met a bunch of famous bloggers, some of whom defied my mental image, like Orin Kerr -- because I always just pictured him looking like the only other person I've ever met in my life named Orin (who was an old man with a big head of white hair). Silly, but that's how the mind works, isn't it?

And now it's time to meet the public, in the Zephyr Lounge.

"They're pursuing freedom, but it results in less freedom."

The WaPo has a long piece on blogging in China, where the government bans discussing politics and where Microsoft has shown its willingness to delete blogs that violate this ban, lest the government block MSN Spaces altogether:

When Zhao Jing moved his blog to Microsoft's popular MSN Spaces site last summer, some users worried the Chinese government would block the entire service. The censors had blacklisted the last site where the young journalist had posted his spirited political essays, and he seemed unwilling to tone down his writing at the new address.

But Zhao, better known by the pen name Anti, told fellow bloggers not to worry. If the government objected to his blog, he predicted, Microsoft would "sell me out" and delete it rather than risk being blocked from computer screens across China....

[Fang Xingdong, the author of a book that attacked Microsoft's market dominance as a threat to national security and chairman of Bokee, China's largest blog service provider] expressed concern about Zhao. "I understand his views, but I don't agree with his methods," he said. "If you use blogging as a political tool, you could destroy the development of blogging in China. When people like Anti come out, there's a lot of pressure on us. They're pursuing freedom, but it results in less freedom."

This is a complex problem, interweaving government power, individual expression, and business competition. Blogging is open to everyone, so it will inevitably produce speakers like Zhao, who push beyond the edges of the speech that is permitted. Business-oriented persons like Fang want to make the whole enterprise work, but they may also have a wise perspective on the development of free speech. Nevertheless, they cannot hope to control all the Zhaos of the world. And what about Microsoft? Would it be better to be excluded altogether, like Blogger? Even if it deletes whichever blogs the government identifies as offending its repressive standards, there will always be many new blogs springing up within the service. It is inherent in blogging that there will be a very large number of voices. Isn't it better to find a way to create the place where blogging can happen? Or is Microsoft's unfair competition with the Chinese blogging services the greater concern?

Suddenly class is a lame reality show.

And the richest man in the world plays substitute teacher for your little seminar:

The class burst out in laughter as the founder of Microsoft and the richest man in the United States dropped by the University of Wisconsin-Madison class unannounced as part of his tour of college campuses.

The 13 students were five minutes into a review for their exam next week when [Bill] Gates walked in.

Jaws dropped as cameras for mtvU, a 24-hour college TV network, filmed the surprise as a part of a series that features celebrity drop-ins on campuses.

Yet another Piano Man update.

From The Independent:

He was, in fact, 20-year-old Andreas Grassl, a farmer's son from a small village on the German-Czech border. His family lawyer has categorically denied that he faked his illness. It is thought that his problems may stem from his fear of being the only gay in his village. German newspapers, who had given the myth of Piano Man the same attention that he had received the world over, appeared positively disgusted to discover that the mystery patient was from Bavaria. "It's all over," sighed the Frankfurter Rundschau. "The truth is often so awfully banal." One left-wing newspaper remarked that it was better to be "half-dead and playing the piano in a British psychiatric hospital than living as a homosexual in a Bavarian village".

Interesting, this loathing of Bavaria. Is there a state in the U.S. that Americans would react to this negatively?

There's also this from The Australian:

Andreas Grassl, 20, had bombarded German television stations with requests to appear on their shows. He also wrote to Microsoft chairman Bill Gates and singer Robbie Williams asking them to help him launch a career in the media.

Grassl eventually got a column in a local newspaper in which he dwelt scornfully on the instant fame of pop stars and reality TV contestants and said he would "so love to be a millionaire". He achieved a different kind of fame during four months of psychiatric treatment in Britain. He refused to speak, expressing himself only by drawing and playing pianos. The mystery prompted a hunt across Europe to identify him.

A selection of Grassl's writing, including articles and letters in his school magazine and his columns for the Bayerwald Echo in the Bavarian town of Cham, reveals his preoccupation with celebrity....

From the age of 10, Grassl begged regional and national television and radio for the chance to take part in shows. He reported every triumph, no matter how small. "On December 6 my voice was heard for approximately 20 seconds on the Czech radio station Cesky Rozhlas 7," he boasted in one edition of the school magazine.

Grassl's first break came at the end of 2000 when the Bayerwald Echo agreed to let him write a column entitled Cult aimed at teenagers.

His subjects ranged from Britney Spears to a US election campaign. A former Echo journalist described him as scatter-brained. "He'd suddenly get hyperactive, pouring out one idea after another so you couldn't get him away from your desk," he said. "But he obviously had creative talent."

In one column he criticised the effortless fame acquired by others through programs such as Big Brother. "It's suddenly the fashion to shove people inside a container, pull them out one after the other and then turn them into pop stars for a week," he wrote....

Carey Cooper, a psychologist at Lancaster University, said Grassl may have been suffering from "Hollywood syndrome".

"It's a real problem among all the failed actors in Hollywood when they get to the point where they can no longer accept that they've failed," Professor Cooper said. "They begin to act as if they are famous or find means unconsciously or consciously to attract attention."

Seems a little like Rupert Pupkin, doesn't it? Well, I hope he's enjoying his fame.