How Johannes Kepler Discovered Sex
San Francisco Chronicle cartoonist Mark Fiore won the Pulitzer Prize yesterday for his animated political cartoons. His work appears exclusively online, so it's the first time a non-print cartoonist has won the Pulitzer in its history.
One of his submitted cartoons was Science-Gate, which mocks the scandal over the ClimateGate emails in the style of an overheated political ad.
All of the quotes scribbled by the scientists in this cartoon are real, including a jaw-dropping one by the 16th century German astronomer Johannes Kepler about how he had sex with a virgin:
I suffered continually from skin ailments, often severe sores, often from the scabs of chronic putrid wounds in my feet which healed badly and kept breaking out again. On the middle finger of my right hand I had a worm, on the left a huge sore. ... At Cupinga's I was offered union with a virgin; on New Year's Eve I achieved this with the greatest possible difficulty, experiencing the most acute pains of the bladder.
This Kepler quote comes from an essay by Evan S. Connell printed in his book The Aztec Treasure House.
Kepler was 21 when he started the New Year off with a bang. He suffered from "boils, mange, smallpox, hemorrhoids, constant stomach trouble, and such bad eyesight that he often saw his world doubled or quadrupled," Connell writes. "He seems to have been impatient, sarcastic, cowardly and stingy, and he almost never bathed."
Candidate Fakes Air Force One Photo
Jonathan Bourne discovered something funny on the web site of David Benning, the Republican running for Congress against Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.).
Take a look at this photo of Benning, his wife and an unidentified couple in front of the famous door of Air Force One:
The photo is displayed on Benning's about page, where it has the filename airforceone.jpg. But as Bourne reveals, Benning wasn't actually rubbing elbows with the president and other high fliers:
Turns out the photo is of SAM 27000, the decommissioned Air Force One that has been an attraction at the Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley since 2005.
Anyone willing to pay the $12 admission fee can get his photo taken in front of the former Air Force One (copies of the photos are extra). How do I know this? Well, I had my photo taken with the Presidential prop last January.
Not only did Benning spend time on Air Force One, he was also SportsToday magazine's athlete of the year.
Thousands of Consumers Sue Debt Collectors
The web site Credit Reporting & Debt Collection News claims that Chrystal A. Snow's $8.1 million debt collector judgment is a function of Texas law that would not be possible under the federal Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA):
The FDCPA does NOT allow for PUNITIVE damages unless it is a CLASS ACTION.
The lack of punitive damages is a MAJOR flaw in the FDCPA. Debt collectors and debt buyers have NOTHING to worry about in MOST states, with California and Texas being notable exceptions.
The "up to" $1,000 in statutory damages in the FDCPA leaves collectors laughing all the way to their offshore bank accounts.
There's an amazing amount of litigation being pursued in debt collection, both by collectors pursuing unpaid debt and consumers claiming legal violations in how they've been treated.
In January, the Dallas Observer profiled Craig Cunningham, a Dallas man heavily in debt who has made thousands of dollars suing debt collectors:
While most Americans with unpaid bills dread the collector's call, Cunningham sees them as lucrative opportunities. Many collection and credit card companies, intentionally or not, violate little-known consumer rights laws, and Cunningham's favorite pastime is catching them doing so and then suing them. ...
While the FTC gets the bulk of consumer complaints, today more consumers are fighting back with their own lawsuits than ever before. In 2009, nearly 10,000 cases under FDCPA, FCRA or TCPA statutes were filed around the country, mostly in federal courts. That's a 50 percent increase from 2008, and an 83 percent growth from 2007.
A cottage industry has sprung up to counter the flood of cases. Two new companies now offer the credit and collection industries databases of repeat plaintiffs filing under the FDCPA.
Cunningham represents himself in the suits. He's suing one collector for $200,000 over how it pursued a $79.84 Time Warner bill.
Blogger Suggests Debt Collection Story is Bogus
Lambert Strether, the founder of the liberal blog Corrente Wire, has suggested that my story on the woman who sued the debt collector might be a hoax:
The story (cross-posted here) is sourced to a phone interview with the woman's lawyer, Ross Teter. The best I can find in a quick search is this court docket item. I would want to make very, very certain that this story isn't really a way of propagating links to the "credit repair" services and forums, whose links appear further down in the article.
The name of the plaintiff, "Chrystal A. Snow", appears only here in Google news.
I tried to post a comment there but new accounts require administrative approval.
I confirmed the existence of the lawsuit by calling Dallas County Court-at-Law No. 4 and got the details of the judgment in a phone interview with Chrystal A. Snow's attorney Ross Teter. The case number is 08-05810-D for anyone who'd like to track it down.
The reason Strether could not find independent corroboration of the story by searching Google News is because the case has not received any media attention. There's only one blog that found it before I did: The law offices of Dean Malone in Dallas covered the suit last November and published a scan of 16 pages from the jury findings.
I do not have any relationship with the credit repair expert quoted in the article. I found her through the large number of messages on her online forum about lawsuits filed by Midland Funding LLC.
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the iPad
Like Cory Doctorow and some other longtime computer hackers, I've been thinking of the Apple iPad as a dire milestone on the road to a restricted computing future where giant corporations control everything we do on our devices -- and the only decent job that former programmers can get is to hunt and kill replicants.
Believing this has helped me resist the urge to buy an iPad.
Unfortunately, Greg Knauss has written a blog post that completely demolishes this sentiment:
Simplicity has a purpose, and complexity -- "hackability" is just a form of complexity -- has costs. The story of technology over the course of the past 20 years is the expansion of one at the expense of another. It's been more than a fair trade, despite detours and disasters and greed and stupidity. ...
I have no doubt that the computing device that my kids will use is going to look more like the iPad than my beloved Atari 400, and that they won't care one damned bit about how they can't solder a keyboard into it.
I recently broke up with Microsoft Windows after 15 years and moved to Ubuntu Linux, so my main desktop environment is gloriously free, open source and hackable all the way down. But Ubuntu 9 runs so well and meets so many of my working needs already that I almost never hack anything. I just like knowing that I can.
Looking at a picture of MetaFilter's next generation doodling on her iPad, it's ridiculous to deny the creative potential of a device that makes so many new interactions possible.
Credit: The photo of the Apple iPad doodler was taken by Matt Haughey and is available under a Creative Commons license.
Woman Sues Debt Collector, Wins $8.1 Million
At courthouses across the United States, it has become increasingly common during the economic downturn for lawsuits to be filed against consumers to collect old debts. Lawyers who specialize in the practice are filing thousands of suits on behalf of large firms that have acquired debts from other companies. Although most people don't fight the suits and lose them by default, a Dallas woman bucked the trend last October.
Chrystal A. Snow challenged the validity of a $9,000 debt in a Dallas County Court-at-Law and countersued the debt collector for making improper phone calls, her attorney Ross Teter said. In a case that has received no media attention, Snow won her suit against Midland Funding LLC and the jury hearing the case awarded her $8.1 million -- $250 for actual damages, $100,000 for mental anguish and $8 million in punitive damages, he said.
"The jury made a finding she did not owe the debt," Teter said in a phone interview. "We argued that they violated the Texas Fair Debt Collection Act by making harassing phone calls and the jury agreed."
Midland Funding is a subsidiary of Encore Capital Group, a company whose primary business is the acquisition and collection of "charged-off consumer receivable portfolios," according to its 2009 annual report filed with the Securites and Exchange Commission.
"We acquire receivable portfolios at deep discounts from their face values," the annual report states. "[W]e have invested approximately $1.4 billion to acquire 28.8 million consumer accounts with a face value of approximately $43.8 billion."
As the owner of millions of long-overdue accounts from credit card, auto, health care and phone companies, Encore has three call centers in the U.S. and one in India to make collection calls. When these efforts are unsuccessful, Encore has a nationwide network of attorneys to pursue legal action for the full amount of the debt. If a creditor wins a lawsuit, it can get a court order to seize bank accounts, garnish paychecks and claim other assets. Consumers can find themselves on the hook for the debt plus interest, penalties and legal fees.
"We generally refer accounts for legal action where it appears the debtor is able, but unwilling, to pay their obligations," the annual report states. "We pay the law firms a contingency fee based on amounts they collect on our behalf."
An April 1 New York Times story on the rising number of court-ordered garnishments told the story of Sidney Jones, a maintenance worker who took out a $4,097 personal loan in 2001 from the subprime lender Beneficial Virginia:
He fell behind, and Beneficial sued. Mr. Jones did not appear in court. "I just thought they were going to take what I owed," he said.
By default, Beneficial won a judgment of $4,750, plus $900 in lawyers' fees, with the debt accruing interest at 27.55 percent until paid in full. The bank started garnishing his wages in March 2003.
Over the next six years, the bank deducted more than $10,000 from Mr. Jones's paychecks, but he made little headway on his debt. According to a court order secured by Beneficial's lawyers last spring, he still owed the company $3,965, a sum nearly equal to the original loan amount.
Allen West, a Republican candidate running for Congress in Florida to unseat Rep. Ron Klein (D-Boca Raton), lost a $2,832 judgment to Midland in 2009 for credit card debt, the Palm Beach Post reported in March. He's "more than half way" to paying it off, he told the paper.
Kristy Welsh, the editor of the do-it-yourself credit repair site Credit Info Center, said the worst thing a person can do is ignore a lawsuit filed to collect one of these "zombie" debts. File a answer to the original suit, Welsh advised in a phone interview. "If you don't answer you lose automatically. You don't want a judgment against you. You have zero to lose [by fighting]."
She wrote a blog post Friday on the six steps to take if you've been sued to collect a debt, even if you can't afford an attorney and must defend yourself:
... by filing an answer, you greatly increase the chance the creditor will dismiss the lawsuit. In other cases the collection agency rent-a-lawyer won't bother to show up themselves -- giving you the automatic win. Some lawyers who work for big collection agencies file as many as 50 lawsuits a day. Why spend time on a consumer who fights back when there are plenty who won't resist?
In Snow's case, the attorney representing Midland Funding did not appear and the one-day trial was conducted without him, Teter said.
Welsh said that a creditor is required to prove in court that a debt is valid, a difficult task for debt-acquisition firms like Midland because they receive a limited amount of information on the debts they acquire -- sometimes as little as the debtor's name, Social Security Number, amount owed and original creditor. "They weren't around watching the original creditor. They weren't around to witness the processing of payment," she said. "The older a debt is, the less chance it has of having any kind of paperwork."
The debts pursued by these firms often are inaccurate or have passed the statute of limitations in a consumer's state and are no longer legally required to be paid, she said.
Welsh runs an online forum where members share information with each other about their legal battles with debt collectors they call JDBs -- "junk debt buyers."
In the section of the annual report where Encore discloses the risks of running its business, the fact that consumers are banding together on the web is cited as a problem:
Consumers are exposed to information from a number of sources that may cause them to be more reluctant to pay their debts or to pursue legal actions against us. ... Various Internet sites are maintained where consumers can list their concerns about the activities of debt collectors and seek guidance from other website posters on how to handle the situation. And advertisements by debt relief attorneys and credit counseling centers are becoming more common, adding to the negative attention given to our industry. As a result of this negative publicity, debtors may be more reluctant to pay their debts or could pursue legal action against us regardless of whether those actions are warranted.
Snow, who did not return requests for comment, has reached a confidential settlement with Midland, her attorney Teter said.
Teter said that it's rare to achieve a result like hers in a debt collection lawsuit, but "I think it's not going to be so rare in the future. A lot of these debt collectors are making lots and lots of phone calls for no reason. The jurors are beginning to understand."
How to Stop Debt Collection Calls
I recently changed phone numbers when I got a Google Android phone. The last owner of my number was a guy with several bill collectors on his ass. I just got an intimidating robocall from one of his debt collectors, which left the following message:
This message is for [name removed]. You've been named as a person of interest in an important matter. You need to contact this office immediately or decisions will be made without your knowledge. Press 1 or call 888-772-4172, extension 1.
I hate it when decisions are made without my knowledge.
The call came from CCF Inc., according to 800 Notes, a site where users discuss harassing calls they've received from unknown numbers.
If you're being hassled by a debt collector, there are steps you can take to limit their calls. Under the Fair Debt Collection Act, if you notify them in writing never to contact you they are legally required to stop. They also cannot call you from 9 p.m. to 8 a.m. and cannot call you at work after you inform them this is not allowed.
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