C*A*L*T*E*C*H

In the movie M*A*S*H, Robert Altman employed a very innovative device -- he had a stream of public system announcements throughout the movie. The technique worked quite effectively; not only did it serve as an excellent court jester but also it said much more of the conditions of the army surgeons in North Korea than Mr. Altman could ever hope to have expressed through his actors. Caltech has something very similar to the PA system -- its Caltech Directory e-mails. All the various student organisations and staff clubs send in notifications about what month the United States sees fit to observe, what week we are in the middle of and what day we live through. February was Black History Month, March is Women's History Month, April is National Poetry Month and National Sexual Assault Awareness Month, May is Latino History Month -- twelve is too small a number to celebrate and reminisce all the world's issues. So, we come into weeks -- Body Image Awareness Week, International Week, Semana Latina, International Education Week; and then when the weeks start to burst at the seams we console ourselves with mere days of importance -- International Women's Day, Earth Day, National Coming Out Day, V-Day, National Girls and Women in Sports Day, Take Our Children to Work Day and Denim Day the last two of which were observed as recently as yesterday.

The history behind Denim Day was particularly intriguing -- six years ago, the Italian Supreme Court overturned a rape conviction reasoning that the victim was wearing jeans and "it was impossible to remove a pair of jeans 'without the collaboration of the person wearing them', and that the young woman must therefore have consented to sex". Understandably, most women's rights groups were offended and outraged by what Sir Humphrey Appleby would doubtless have referred to as the Court's refreshing logic and the Denim Day was born. As the Caltech Directory e-mail impresses upon us, "to protest this ruling, women all over the world wear denim on April 27".

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From a period to a comma

Amongst the many culs-de-sac of incoherent data that I manage to collect through a day's work of browsing the Internet, there are some that often stand out rather conspicuously for their appeal. On one of the weblogs titled The Volokh Conspiracy, Eugene Volokh one of the maintainers of the group weblog made the following simplistic characterisation of 'punctuation styles' when quotation is necessary. Mr Volokh argues that

This is an example of what the Court has called "the chilling effect."

is American while

This is an example of what the Court has called "the chilling effect".

is British. He further goes on to substantiate on the origins of the former usage, citing that most revered and prolific of authorities, alt.english.usage:

...in the days when printing used raised bits of metal, "." and "," were the most delicate, and were in danger of damage (the face of the piece of type might break off from the body, or be bent or dented from above) if they had a '"' on one side and a blank space on the other. Hence the convention arose of always using '."' and ',"' rather than '".' and '",', regardless of logic.

It never occurred to me that this manner of punctuation also has a wedge driven into on account of varying trans-Atlantic diktats. I have been, I discover much to my relief, a fervent "logical placement" believer. In fact, I have on many an occasion gone so far as even to choose to omit punctuation accounted for in the original source when the matter within quotation marks finishes out the rest of the sentence body. It is repulsive and hideous to have either

This is an example of what the Court has called "the chilling effect."

This is an example of what the Court has called "the chilling effect.".

Without a period to complete the sentence, the former is left high and dry and with too many to complete the sentence, the latter looks more like Morse code, thereby leaving