An Assault Gets Worse

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The Stanford University sexual assault story became uglier yesterday when the Santa Clara County Superior Court released 471 pages of documents that appear to prove that almost every defense claim made by the defendant, Brock Turner, under oath, was untrue.

The story, horrible as it is on the face of it, attracted international attention this week when, after a jury convicted Turner of three counts of sexual assault, the judge in the trial gave the sexual assaulter a lighter sentence than the one requested by prosecutors. The judge, Aaron Persky, told the court that he “took [Turner] at his word” when he decided to send Turner to county jail for six months instead of state prison for several years, as prosecutors had requested. He will have to register as a sex offender with every landlord and with whomever may employ him for the rest of his life.

It is understood that he will get out of jail after three months. Vice reports, “According to the website of California’s Santa Clara County Department of Corrections, he is to be released on Sept. 2, 12 weeks before his planned release, because ‘it was assessed that he was unlikely to misbehave behind bars.'” Whatever the opposite of Philip K. Dick’s “pre-crime” is, this sounds like it.
Read More

Today in History: June 11

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The inventor Edwin Howard Armstrong gave a demonstration of FM radio to an audience of engineers and everyday listeners 80 years ago today.

Anyone who has listened to an AM broadcast for more than a few hours has encountered its drawbacks: crackles, hisses, static-y noises, pops. Armstrong, building on 15 years of research into high frequency signals, had devices that could send and receive high frequency signals. Armstrong played a jazz record through AM equipment and then through FM. A reporter who was there wrote, “If the audience of 500 engineers had shut their eyes they would have believed the jazz band was in the same room. There were no extraneous sounds.” It worked, yet the FM radio era lay decades off in the future.
Read More

Mountains out of Steps

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

My least favorite cases are staircases. My least favorite ways are stairways. My least favorite air is a stair.

The photo above (not at all) accurately depicts (for reasons of comic exaggeration) what every staircase resembles in my mind’s eye. Including the one in my home. It is life with mobility impairment. Once upon a pair of teenage legs ago, I took stairs two at a time.

In 2012 my first neurologist, Dr. M, diagnosed me with late-onset Friedreich’s ataxia, or at least he reported that he felt I have a form of spinocerebellar ataxia (SCA), a disease that has dozens of forms and is genetic in origin.
Read More