Douglas Whaley

Alan Turing In writing a blog post about Alan Turing, it’s difficult to know where to start.   His accomplishments were great enough that Time Magazine listed him as one of the 100 most important people of the 20 th century, a nationwide BBC poll in 2002 ranked him 21st of the “100 Greatest Britains,” he is widely considered the father of the modern computer (the computer world’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize is aptly called the “Turing Award”), and his personal story is tragic in the extreme.    His musings about computers began in 1935 when he took a break from his usual run (he was a long distance runner through much of his life) to take a rest in an orchard under an apple tree (shades of Isaac Newton!).   He began musing about whether a mechanical process could be created to think logically, mimicking intelligence.   This thought guided his life. Turing’s activities during World War II resulted in breaking the German’s "unbreakable" code an...

 Justice Ginsberg A few months ago liberal Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg was asked what the Court was going to do this year about lower federal court cases striking down gay marriage bans enacted by many states throughout the country.   She gave the cryptic reply that observers should pay attention to what happens in the 6 th Circuit Court of Appeals.   Court watchers knew what she meant: what would Judge Jeffrey Sutton do? Judge Sutton [pictured in the first photo above] is one of the most respected jurists in the country.   Appointed by the last President Bush to the 6 th Circuit he has rapidly become a bellwether for how conservative causes will fare in major cases.   One example was his surprising opinion upholding the key elements of Obamacare (which disappointed his conservative fans), a stance subsequently echoed by the Supreme Court itself [see http://douglaswhaley.blogspot.com/2012/07/obamacare-john-roberts-and-suprem...

  After any life-altering experience (in my case a heart transplant) it’s required by law that one start a blog.   My transplant was five years ago this Thanksgiving, and this December the blog will also be five.   But today the 300,000 th hit occurred, and I’m very pleased by that. My blog has not been either the usual “What I Did Today” nor a steady commentary on one particular subject.   Instead I’ve tended to write mini-essays on many different topics: gay rights, atheism, law, family stories, cats, etc.   I’ve published a lot of works in my life: numerous law review articles, seven textbooks used nationwide to teach various aspects of commercial law, three student guides that paid enough to be a major factor in getting my son through college, two novels, and even columns in minor publications, but nothing turns out to have been as important to me as this blog.   It contains my entire life: my history, my philosophy, my advice on many topics fr...

  1.   I Had a Heart Transplant. Of course, this is the obvious sentence to start with.   Only about 3,500 heart transplants are performed annually throughout the world, so there aren’t a lot of people who can say that they are walking around with someone else’s heart beating inside them. I had had a failing heart since 1999 when I developed atrial fibrillation and from that an enlarged heart. For the next ten years I was treated by a cardiologist at Ohio State University’s Ross Heart Hospital, and it was clear that my heart was failing. In January of 2009 I qualified for the heart transplant list, but because I was still able to get out and about, I was not high on that list. As recently as October of that year I was told that the transplant would likely take place in 2010, probably in the spring. It’s one thing intellectually to think you’re getting a heart transplant in 2010, and quite another months before that to receive a morning phone call (I was wor...