Hi Greg,
Silliness, of two sorts:
Re: Suppose you're on a game show
I'm amazed I actually got back this far in the file, thanks LV, I think..... <gg>
Once door 3 is opened, there is a 50% probability the other goat will be behind door 1 or door 2. The wise contestant will stall the game show host, knowing that the goat will eventually bleet. Then she can enjoy the cabrito and not worry about how she's going to come up with the extra income tax money for that pile of sheet metal and glass.
Do I win a Hershey's Bar?
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Silly story #2:
nytimes.com
December 04, 2000
THE SCENE
For the Gore Team, a Moment of High Drama
By DAVID BARSTOW and DEXTER FILKINS
TALLAHASSEE, Fla., Dec. 3 — The Gore legal team, downcast after a day and a half of rough sledding before Judge N. Sanders Sauls, jubilantly called it the "Perry Mason moment" — that delicious, inevitable turning point when Mr. Mason's faithful secretary, Della Street, slips into the courtroom with newly discovered evidence that lets him spring a coup de grâce that reduces the witness to tears and confession.
As lawyers everywhere like to remind prospective jurors, such moments are unheard of in real trials. But this morning, in the middle of the legal Olympics that may decide the winner of the White House, a junior Gore lawyer rushed into the courtroom with freshly unearthed documents that Vice President Al Gore's lawyers now proclaim as a gift from heaven.
The dramatic moment came during testimony by John Ahmann, an expert produced by Gov. George W. Bush's lawyers to vouch for the reliability of the Votomatic, the voting device used in Miami-Dade and Palm Beach Counties. Mr. Ahmann calmly recited his background as the man who helped develop the Votomatic for IBM, along the way making dozens of improvements that earned him 11 patents.
With the help of computer graphics, Mr. Ahmann methodically set about knocking down theories advanced by the Gore team to explain how the Votomatic could have produced thousands of paper ballots unreadable to counting machines.
Mr. Gore's lawyers have argued, for example, that the Votomatics failed because they were choked by mounds of chads, the tiny pieces of paper that are punched out of the ballots.
Nonsense, said Mr. Ahmann, noting that each Votomatic can hold 1.5 million chads and function fine.
It was then, however, that Stephen Zack, the Gore lawyer who was preparing to cross-examine Mr. Ahmann, read the document that had been rushed to him: a patent application Mr. Ahmann had submitted two decades ago for an improved version of the Votomatic.
The application listed an array of problems with the existing Votomatic, many of them similar to the flaws being argued by the Gore lawyers. Mr. Ahmann's application said the Votomatics regularly experienced malfunctions that could trip up counting machines.
[Sidebar: From Patent Application
Following are excerpts from an application for a patent for improvements to the Votomatic voting device submitted by John Ahmann in 1980:
If chips are permitted to accumulate between the resilient strips, this can interfere with the punching operations, and occasionally it has been observed that a partially punched chip has been left clinging to a card after the punch was withdrawn, because the card-supporting surface of the punch board had become so clogged with chips as to prevent a clean punching operation. Incompletely punched cards can cause serious errors to occur in data processing operations utilizing such cards.
In punch-card voting devices, a template has been used to guide the voter's punch or stylus onto the selected punch position. If, however, the voter does not hold the voting punch straight up and down when punching, it is possible under certain temperature and humidity conditions to pull the template toward the voter a few thousandths of an inch, sufficient to prevent complete removal of the chad when the stylus is inserted. This can produce what is called a "hanging chad.". . . The presence of even one incompletely punched chip in a run of several thousand tabulating cards is in most cases too great a defect to be tolerated. End Sidebar.]
"The surface of the punchboard has become so clogged with chips as to prevent a clean punching operation," Mr. Ahmann wrote in his application. "Incompletely punched cards can cause serious errors to occur in data-processing operations utilizing such cards."
Confronted with his old application, Mr. Ahmann before long was agreeing that in close elections, a manual recount is not a bad idea. The effect of his testimony was written plain in the strained facial expressions of the Bush legal team and in what Mr. Zack did when Mr. Ahmann left the stand.
He shook Mr. Ahmann's hand.
Doug Hattaway, Mr. Gore's principal spokesman here, rushed Mr. Zack in front of reporters to gloat about their victory. Mr. Zack, a Perry Mason fan, quickly paid homage to the spirit of Ms. Street. Soon after, Mr. Gore's aides were distributing transcripts of Mr. Ahmann's testimony under the headline "Ahmann admits hand recount would be necessary."
"This was huge," said Kendall Coffey, a member of Mr. Gore's legal team. "A witness called by the Republicans conceded that in close races, ballots ought to be hand-counted. That's exactly what we've been asking for."
Whether it produces a new count of ballots that will eliminate Mr. Bush's 537-vote lead remains to be seen. Judge Sauls is expected to rule on the question of recounts on Monday. But the story of how the document made it into court today is itself worthy of a good "Perry Mason" episode.
It began on Friday when Mr. Ahmann mentioned during a pretrial deposition that he had applied for a patent on the stylus used to puncture the ballot cards used in the Votomatic. Jennifer Altman, a member of Mr. Gore's legal team in Miami Beach, had been assigned to research the Votomatic, so she broadened her search to patents. About 7 a.m. today, she found Mr. Ahmann's patent application on the Web site for the United States Patents and Trademark Office.
At first, Ms. Altman did not realize the importance of the document, she said in an interview. But as she sat at home this morning, watching Mr. Ahmann's testimony on television, she said she began to believe that much of what he was saying was contradicted by his patent application. With one eye on the television set and the other on her computer screen, Ms. Altman said she realized she was running out of time.
"Everything is moving so quickly," Ms. Altman said.
Getting it to the courthouse was no simple task. Ms Altman has no fax machine, so she e-mailed the document to a fellow Gore supporter, who printed it and faxed it to the Tallahassee offices of Mitchell Berger, another Gore lawyer.
"I called the lawyers in Tallahassee and said, `Get this over to the courthouse right away,' " she recalled.
A clerk scrawled "Urgent" across the top and handed it to an office assistant, who ran it four blocks to the Leon County Courthouse, where she was met in the lobby by a Gore lawyer, Andrew Shapiro, who ran it up to the third-floor courtroom and dropped it in front of Mr. Zack.
Mr. Zack, listening to Mr. Ahmann's testimony, had only minutes left before he was to begin his cross- examination. "I usually don't even read those messages," Mr. Zack said in an interview. "I thought I better give this one a look."
The moment marked a high point in what had otherwise been a difficult few days for the Gore lawyers, who have watched their two expert witnesses take a beating on the stand.
David Boies may well be, as his fans in the legal world proclaim and as Mr. Gore must fervently hope, the finest lawyer money can buy. But on Saturday and again today there were signs aplenty that his charms may have been lost on Mr. Sauls, the drawling, balding judge from tiny Wakulla, Fla., whose good humor seems to vanish each time Mr. Boies opens his mouth.
Mr. Boies has sat facing Judge Sauls in a small courtroom on the third floor of the Leon County Circuit Courthouse. This is the turf from which Mr. Boies is leading Mr. Gore's effort to overturn the certified results of Florida's election. And while Mr. Boies remains a favorite of reporters, who practically swarm him each time he sets foot in the hallway, it appears that at least for now he and Judge Sauls are just not clicking.
For his part, Mr. Boies registered his displeasure with the judge early on by, in essence, asking the Florida Supreme Court to make him hurry. Judge Sauls, a man said to be content to move through the world at his own steady pace, has not said whether he took any offense to this unusual maneuver. Even so, his courtroom treatment of Mr. Boies could never be described as fawning or deferential.
On Saturday, after Mr. Boies finished his testy cross-examination of Judge Charles Burton, the chairman of the Palm Beach County canvassing board, Judge Sauls praised Judge Burton as "a great American."
Today, Mr. Boies ran into a chilly reception from Judge Sauls during his cross-examination of Laurentius Marais, a Stanford-educated statistician for the Bush team who delivered withering expert conclusions — "The vice president was wrong about that" — with the crisp finality of a guillotine.
Mr. Boies seemed hungry to shake Mr. Marais, but Judge Sauls brusquely denied him the rhythm that is the hallmark of many effective cross-examinations. Several times Judge Sauls impatiently instructed Mr. Boies to rephrase his questions, as if Mr. Boies were some fumbling rookie prosecutor trying his first shoplifting case.
Mr. Boies wanted to ask Mr. Marais about his past expert testimony against victims of lead paint poisoning. A Bush lawyer quickly jumped up and accused Mr. Boies of grandstanding, and Judge Sauls, as he has repeatedly done, quickly yanked Mr. Boies away from his preferred line of questioning.
By contrast, Judge Sauls has given wide latitude to Phil Beck, a Chicago lawyer for the Bush team who wanders the courtroom as if it were his own living room and who somehow makes his every mention of "the Gore legal team" sound as if he were referring to the Washington, D.C., chapter of the Hells Angels.
But today, when Mr. Boies stubbornly persisted with questions about the lead poisoning case, the judge shut him down. "I'm not going to go off into other cases," he told Mr. Boies. And with that, Mr. Boies retreated.
"I'll abandon that line of questioning," he said, just as Perry Mason might have, moments before Della Street slipped him a note.
Best, Ray |
