I've been involved with a few initiatives seeking to promote wide access to scholarly articles, but have not spent as much time thinking about what open access means when applied to the raw materials of law: judicial briefs, caselaw, statutes, Congressional reports and hearings, executive regulations, grants, audits, and so on. This all changed on Wednesday, when Carl Malamud and Tom Bruce came up to the Yale Information Society Project during the afternoon to discuss the law.gov movement, and I joined Carl and Helen Nissenbaum of NYU for a panel on law.gov that same evening at New York Law School.

Today, March 14, is one of the days that is sometimes celebrated as "Pi Day", in honor of the best-known irrational and transcendental number, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, usually written as the Greek letter pi.

Editor's Note: The following column by former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura was removed by Huffington Post after it was published March 9 and replaced with a note that states the site "prohibits the promotion and promulgation of conspiracy theories -- including those about 9/11."

I've always liked the kind of manliness that Esquire tries to evoke. The Esquire man wants to read advice about cufflinks, politeness, and how to order fancy drinks. Yet video games are now well established as a common domain of men -- not boys -- and it still isn't clear how an Esquire man would play them, or comment on them.

Lately I have been doing some research on online video distribution. Every day this topic is getting more mainstream, but I still avoid describing myself as a "YouTube researcher." If I did, I'm sure the first image to come to mind would probably be me closely studying a laughing baby (below; 98 million views on YouTube to date) or maybe the Evolution of Dance (131 million views). It's not that Media Studies has ever been held in particularly high regard as an important subject (though the cinema people keep trying), but when writing about online video there's an even greater presumption of frivolousness.

The newest system update for the XBox 360 now includes a number of social networking and Internet applications, including Facebook, twitter, last.fm, and Zune (Microsoft's attempt to compete with the iTunes store). For me, the integration of these services feels like a kind of weird collision of different neighborhoods and cultures.

As a coach and teacher I am asked several times a week, "How do I get from here to where I want to be?" My answer is always the same. First answer this, how did you get where you are now? Your thoughts, beliefs, feelings and actions got you exactly where you are and those will get you anywhere else you want to be.

Alice Walker writes in her collection We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For about keeping her mind empty and uncluttered with the ideas of others so that her own thoughts, her own words have space to grow. A nice concept, particularly for one given to meditation, yoga, and other woowoo pursuits. But that ain't how I roll.

The Howling tells the story of newswoman Karen White who is sent to a rehabilitation center known as The Colony after a bizarre and near fatal encounter with a serial killer. But the other inhabitants of this rehabilitation center may not be who they seem.

Finding intermittent bugs in a large code base is notoriously difficult. The Los Angeles Times is now running an Op-Ed article by David M. Cummings, which makes much the same point. Mr. Cummings worked for nine years as a consultant to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and worked on developing the software for the Mars Pathfinder spacecraft, and he has a total of more than three decades of experience in developing systems to be used in other complex devices: "As anyone with experience in embedded systems will tell you, there are nasty software bugs that can be extremely difficult to reproduce in a laboratory test environment."

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