Tulsa Family Lawyer and Mediator
It’s Penguin Awareness Day! OK, on the count of three, everyone be aware of penguins. One…two…three! Boom. Done.
If you want to be extra aware of penguins today, here are some suggestions:
Image credit: Pexels
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Author: Joe Kissell
Every day it seems medical researchers come out with a new study about coffee, how it is extremely unhealthy for you and/or full of amazing benefits. The focus of most of these studies is more particularly about the effects of caffeine on human health, caffeine being coffee’s most potent element. As caffeine is a stimulant, it can produce both positive and negative effects. It can wake you up in the morning, but it can also lead to sleeplessness, a racing heartbeat, and anxiety.
It is therefore no surprise that many people have decided to cut caffeine out of their diets. What I sometimes find surprising is how many people still opt to drink coffee, just without the caffeine. I have grown to like the taste of coffee, but to me the main purpose of drinking it is to get an extra jolt of energy.
I’ll admit to a certain prejudice against decaf, perhaps prompted by bad experiences in the past with weak and tasteless brews. It is true that the actual process of removing caffeine from coffee can degrade the taste beyond repair, but new methods of decaffeination have been developed to help the coffee retain more of its flavor in the process. In addition, researchers continue to look for and cultivate new strains of coffee plants that produce beans with a naturally low level of caffeine. This may all spell good news for those who still crave coffee without its kick.
Early decaffeination attempts involved soaking the green beans in water and then using various solvents to separate out the caffeine in the resulting water solution. The beans were then re-introduced to the caffeine-free solution in order to absorb some of the flavor they had lost. Solvents used included benzene, chloroform, and trichloroethylene, all of which were later found to have toxic effects. In the 1970s, dichloromethane came into use to replace the earlier solvents before it too was deemed possibly carcinogenic.
In response to these concerns about solvents, some coffee companies began to run the water solution through charcoal filters as a means of removing the caffeine. The so-called Swiss Water Process, developed in Switzerland in the 1930s, goes one step further. After a batch of coffee beans has been steeped in hot water, that water is filtered (the resulting solution is referred to as “flavor-charged”), and then is used to soak the next batch of beans to be processed. In this way, the beans lose caffeine as they soak, but lose less of their flavor. Currently there is only one official Swiss Water Process plant in operation in the world, located near Vancouver, British Columbia.
Yet another method that aims to safely remove caffeine from coffee beans involves a fascinating chemical process. The solvent used in this method is neither water nor one of the earlier toxic solvents. Instead, caffeine in the coffee beans is dissolved by means of carbon dioxide. In order to accomplish this, the carbon dioxide must become a supercritical fluid, created when it is compressed and heated to the point that it has the same density in liquid and gaseous forms. As this supercritical CO2 is passed through the beans, it can penetrate them because of its gaseous properties, and yet is able to dissolve the caffeine they contain because of its liquid properties.
All these decaffeination methods are useful in extracting the caffeine from beans that already contain it, but how much more efficient would it be if the beans themselves contained less caffeine in their natural state? In 2004, news reports came out that Brazilian scientists had identified three coffee plants from Ethiopia that contain almost no caffeine; these plants seemingly lack an enzyme necessary to caffeine production. Since then, owing to various difficulties cultivating commercially viable versions of these plants, it seems no substantial progress has been made in bringing this coffee to market. Complications have included very low yields from the caffeine-free plants, the problem of pests (since caffeine seems to be the plant’s way of protecting itself from predators), and the inability to prevent cross-pollination with other caffeine-laden plants.
Although researchers around the world continue to search for the perfect way to cultivate caffeine-free coffee plants, for now the current methods of decaffeination will have to suffice for decaf junkies seeking their fix of coffee that not only tastes great, but won’t keep them up half the night. As for me, I do want to stay up half the night, so I’ll stick to my full-strength brew.
Note: This is an updated version of an article that originally appeared on Interesting Thing of the Day on June 15, 2007.
Image credit: Pixabay
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Author: Morgen Jahnke
I liked popcorn as a kid, and then—for reasons I am at a loss to explain—I went through a multi-decade period of not liking it. But now I’m back to liking it again. As long as it’s buttered and seasoned, that is. Or covered with caramel or chocolate or whatever. (Plain, unsalted popcorn is pretty disgusting.) I don’t know why today was designated National Popcorn Day but I do know that movies go really well with popcorn. So head on down to your local popcorn dealership today, and pick up some movies while you’re at it.
Image credit: Logicaldisaster~commonswiki [GFDL or CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons
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Author: Joe Kissell
It’s been a strangely quiet week for family law news. Perhaps there has been some other big news story happening, I don’t know. Still, I did come up with the following:
The NSPCC has said that the law must recognise children as victims of domestic abuse between parents. They point out that Department for Education figures for 2017/18 show domestic abuse was a factor in 246,720 child protection assessments across England – more than half of all child protection assessments, where factors were identified, during that period. The government are yet to publish the outcomes of last year’s consultation on domestic abuse, but their proposed new definition of domestic abuse only refers to the effects of abuse on those aged 16 and over, leaving younger children unrecognised by the justice system. The charity says that legal recognition would give children greater protection through domestic abuse protection orders, help professionals take action to protect children at risk, and help authorities ensure there are specific support services for children and young people.
Almudena Lara, Head of Policy at the NSPCC, said:
“It is quite astonishing that the government is dragging its feet when deciding whether to recognise young people as victims when almost a quarter of a million children that we know of are living with domestic abuse in England alone. As well as the day-to-day distress that living with domestic abuse creates, it can cause long-term problems into adulthood that can only be addressed through targeted services that understand the complex trauma children living with domestic abuse experience. For this to be done effectively we need government to open their eyes to the harm domestic abuse has on children and give them victim status in the upcoming White Paper to ensure they receive the services they need.”
All of which appears very sensible.
A consultation has been launched by the Department for Work and Pensions seeking views on changes to the powers that the Child Maintenance Service (‘CMS’) use to calculate child maintenance and enforce payments. The proposals in the consultation seek to strengthen the current, 2012, child maintenance scheme. The CMS has a range of powers to obtain information necessary to ensure child maintenance liabilities can be accurately calculated and, where necessary, enforced. The consultation seeks views on changes to two particular aspects of these powers: qualifying a CMS inspector’s ability to enter private property and widening of the current list of organisations with a legal obligation to provide information following a request by the CMS. The consultation period ends on the 11th of February. I haven’t really given these changes much thought, but in general anything that makes it more likely that children will benefit from child maintenance must surely be a good thing.
The tide really does seem to have turned at last when it comes to the number of care order applications being made. The latest figures for care applications and private law demand, for December 2018, have been published by Cafcass. In that month the service received a total of 975 new care applications, the first time the number has dipped below the 1000 mark in more than three years. The figure is 4.6% (47 applications) lower than December 2017. As to private law demand, the picture is not so good: Cafcass received a total of 3,105 new cases during December 2018. This is 13.1% (360 cases) higher than December 2017, and the second highest December figure on record.
And finally, The Guardian has reported that a mother involved in long-running care proceedings concerning her teenaged son has been spared jail for accepting an invitation to attend a parents’ evening at his school. I’ve not seen a report of this judgment (you can find one of Mr Justice Hayden’s previous judgments in relation to the case here), but apparently the court’s order that the mother should not contact the boy included an exemption to the effect that she could “attend parents’ evening at the request of the school”, and the mother claimed that this included the “generic invite” that she had received. The local authority applied to have her committed to prison for breaching the order, but Mr Justice Hayden declined to make a committal order, saying that the invite had been sent in error. He did, however, order that the clause that allowed the mother to accept invitations from the school be removed.
Have a good weekend.
The post A week in family law: Child maintenance changes, Cafcass figures, and more appeared first on Stowe Family Law.
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Author: John Bolch
Picture of a part of the world covered with enormous sand dunes. You may be thinking of a desert in Africa, Asia, or the southwestern United States. But there’s another place, above the 49th parallel, where you can find such sand dunes—Saskatchewan, Canada. Many people associate Saskatchewan with its prairie landscape, but although the southern half of the province—where you’ll find major cities such as Regina and Saskatoon—is mostly prairie grasslands, the northern half is a wild expanse of rivers, lakes, and coniferous forests. In its south-central region it even has a salt lake with a salinity that is half that of the Dead Sea, Little Manitou Lake (Cree for “Lake of Good Spirit”). And Cypress Hills, in the southeastern corner of the province, is the highest point in Canada between Labrador and the Rockies. This diversity is not so surprising when you consider that Saskatchewan is twice the size of Italy and almost as big as Texas.
Located in the far northwest corner of Saskatchewan, almost at the border with the Northwest Territories, the province’s largest lake, Lake Athabasca, is accessible only by floatplane, there being no roads that go that far north. On the south side of the lake is a natural geological formation that is unique and surprising to find at this northern latitude—the Athabasca Sand Dunes. In places 30 meters (98 feet) high, and stretching 100 km (62 miles) along the shore of Lake Athabasca, the Athabasca Sand Dunes are the world’s largest area of active sand dunes north of 58 degrees latitude.
Although we often associate sand dunes with deserts, in the case of the Athabasca Sand Dunes, this doesn’t hold true. For one thing, deserts are identified by their lack of water, and not only do these dunes border 7,850 square kilometers (3,030 square miles) of water, they also contain significant patches of water in places, percolating up from the shallow water table below. Another feature of deserts—limited plant and animal life—does not hold true for these sand dunes either. In fact, of the 300 plant species that grow in the dunes, there are 10 species that are endemic (found nowhere else in the world), and another 42 species that are considered rare in the province. Not that the dunes are entirely welcoming to the local flora. Because the dunes are active, shifted by wind and eroded by water, they are constantly on the move. Visitors to the region tell of seeing entire stands of skeletal trees emerging from the sand—once above ground and flourishing, these trees were slowly buried by the shifting sand, and now are revealed by further dune movements.
So, if these sand dunes are not a desert ecosystem, created by extreme drought and aridity, how were they formed? The short answer is: the glaciers did it. The sand dunes are the product of the Athabasca sandstone formation, originally a delta in a freshwater lake created out of materials eroded from ancient mountain ranges by glaciers and rivers one billion years ago. These materials were eventually compressed into sandstone, and later still, eroded by wind, water, and glaciers to create the sand dunes that exist today. Of course, I also find the native Dene legend about the dunes’ creation interesting—that a giant man speared a giant beaver, which thrashed and ground the earth with its tail, making soil into sand.
The dunes are now protected as part of the Athabasca Sand Dunes Provincial Park, but there is little infrastructure to welcome visitors. Aside from lack of accessibility (via floatplane only), there are no services available at the site. You need to be well versed in outdoor survival skills, or sign up for a guided tour. For the armchair traveler, you can see stunning photographs of the dunes on the Photo Journeys blog of photographers Robin and Arlene Karpan.
Note: This is an updated version of an article that originally appeared on Interesting Thing of the Day on July 3, 2004.
Image credit: Tim Beckett [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons
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Author: Morgen Jahnke
If you’re looking for a synonym for the word “thesaurus,” forget about consulting the Merriam-Webster online thesaurus: it says there isn’t one. But of course Thesaurus Day honors Peter Mark Roget, eponym of Roget’s Thesaurus, who was born on this date in 1779. The Roget’s online thesaurus also lists no single-word synonyms for “thesaurus,” though it does suggest “storehouse of words” and “treasury of words.” To celebrate Thesaurus Day, go learn some new words! (You can start with eponym if you don’t already know what it means.)
Image credit: Ray MacLean [CC BY 2.0], via Flickr
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Author: Joe Kissell
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It is a common scenario that one of the main assets of a marriage is a business that was acquired or established by one of the parties prior to the marriage. When the marriage breaks down the court will often order that the value of the business that accumulated during the marriage should be shared between the parties. Accordingly, the court must decide two matters in relation to the business: how much is it worth, and what proportion of that sum accumulated prior to the marriage?
These were the central questions in the recent Court of Appeal case Martin v Martin.
Now, there is an awful lot going on in Martin v Martin (as is often the case in big money financial remedy cases, especially when they are concerned with business assets), and I am just going to scratch the surface here. If you want all the detail, you can read the full judgment, all 147 paragraphs of it, at the link below. I’m just going to concentrate on those two central questions, dealing with them as simply (and hopefully understandably!) as I can. I have also taken some small liberties with the case, for the sake of clarity.
Extremely briefly, the relevant facts in the case were that the husband started the business in 1978, the parties began living together in 1986, were married in 1989, separated in 2015, and divorce proceedings ensued. (I told you it would be brief!)
In 2017 the wife’s financial remedies application was determined by Mr Justice Mostyn. He awarded the wife a half share of the marital wealth, which included the value of the husband’s company (and other assets), less its value as at the date the parties started living together.
To value the company, Mr Justice Mostyn used its net value, which he considered was equivalent to cash, as “the only difference between it (i.e. the company) and its cash proceeds is … the sound of the auctioneer’s hammer”. In other words, the value of the company was “the estimate of what it will sell for now”.
To determine the value of the company as at the date that the parties began cohabiting Mr Justice Mostyn applied a ‘straight line apportionment’ to the present value of the company, from the date that it was first incorporated in 1978 to the date of the hearing. To understand this, I refer the reader to paragraph 19 of Mr Justice Mostyn’s judgment (which you can find here), which sets out the method in graphical form.
The wife appealed against the decision, to the Court of Appeal, and the husband cross-appealed. Both appeals were in relation to how Mr Justice Mostyn had approached those two central questions in relation to the company. The wife argued that he was wrong to use a straight line apportionment, and the husband argued that he had wrongly treated the value he ascribed to the company as equivalent to cash and, as a result, had awarded the wife an unfair proportion of the ‘non-risk’ assets.
The leading judgment of the Court of Appeal was given by Lord Justice Moylan.
As to the question of the valuation of the company, he found that the husband had not shown that Mr Justice Mostyn’s factual determination of the value of the company was wrong. However, Mr Justice Mostyn was wrong when he said that the “only difference between [the company] and its cash proceeds is … the sound of the auctioneer’s hammer”. As a result of this conclusion Mr Justice Mostyn failed to consider whether his proposed award achieved “a fair division of both the copper-bottomed assets and the illiquid and risk laden assets”. There was no evidence that the sum awarded to the wife could be extracted from the company within the timescale that Mr Justice Mostyn envisaged. Lord Justice Moylan therefore increased the period for the payment of that sum, from one year to four years.
As to the question of the value of the company as at the date that the parties began to cohabit, Lord Justice Moylan found that Mr Justice Mostyn was entitled to adopt the straight line apportionment approach. That approach may be ‘broad brush’, but it saved the time and expense of getting an accountancy valuation. He also found that it “resonates with fairness”, because it “takes an overarching view of the weight to be attributed to the husband’s contributions to the business throughout its existence.”
Accordingly, Lord Justice Moylan dismissed the wife’s appeal, and only allowed the husband’s appeal to the extent set out above.
Lords Justices Coulson and Simon gave concurring judgments.
If you wish to, you can read the full Court of Appeal judgment here.
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Author: John Bolch
San Francisco’s Exploratorium is an immense (and immensely popular) hands-on science museum. Exhibits cover the usual range of subjects—electricity, physics, optics, biology, and so on—but with a degree of interactive friendliness that’s rare even in the best science museums (and I’ve seen quite a few). Almost everything is designed to be touched, played with, and experimented on—even by young children, whose destructive impulses know no bounds.
Although I visited the Exploratorium a number of times during the years I lived in San Francisco, there was one exhibit I’d never experienced but always been curious about: something called the Tactile Dome. This is an exhibit for which you must make an advance reservation (and pay extra), and I had never had the foresight to call ahead before visiting the museum to see if there was an open slot. But on one visit when a same-day opening came up, I immediately signed up—after listening to a short speech on all the medical and psychological conditions that would preclude a safe visit and consenting to the non-refundability of the ticket.
The Tactile Dome is a smallish geodesic dome within the museum whose stated purpose is to explore the sense of touch—taking the “hands-on” principle to its logical extreme. Inside the dome is a series of oddly shaped chambers lined with a variety of materials. The chambers are completely dark, so visitors must navigate through them—climbing, crawling, sliding, and squeezing—using only the sense of touch for guidance. In an anteroom the eight or so people who have reservations at a given time remove their shoes and any objects that might fall out of pockets and get lost. (They are quite strict about their “no-extraneous-stuff” policy; I wasn’t even allowed to take a ballpoint pen in with me, even though it was capped and sealed in a zippered pocket behind a Velcro flap. I thought that prohibition was a bit silly, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.) Then, in smaller groups (in my case, a group of one), you proceed into the dark chambers.
A complete trip through the dome takes anywhere from five to ten minutes, and guests are spaced far enough apart that they won’t run into each other. The inside of the dome is not a maze; every chamber has just one entrance and one exit. An attendant in the anteroom monitors your progress by listening to the sounds picked up by microphones positioned throughout the dome. If a visitor gets stuck or panicked, a verbal request for help is all that’s needed; every spot in the dome is immediately reachable by hidden access doors. The intercom (which the other visitors waiting in the anteroom can also hear) serves another purpose, too: to discourage, shall we say, extracurricular activities that the dark and solitary environment might suggest. Each group gets to go through the dome several times during their visit.
As I made my way through the dome, I found that even though sight was not available, it was not a purely tactile experience. Each time I entered a new chamber, I could tell something about its size and shape from the sounds I heard, along with the combination of temperature and airflow I could feel. Even smell played a part—the characteristic scents of carpet, wood, plastics, and the smelly socks of the person who crawled through the dome before me all contributed to a mental image. And that effect was a bit eerie—even though I couldn’t see anything, I had the distinct sensation of visual images of the rooms constructed from the other sensory data I was gathering. That impression alone made the experience worthwhile for me.
The Tactile Dome was designed by Dr. August F. Coppola (brother of director Francis Ford Coppola) in 1971 and has been in use ever since. Not only in the choices of materials in the dome, but in its overall design and marketing, it’s definitely showing its age—or perhaps I should say, “revealing” its age. (Note that the photo above is from the early 2000s; the dome is now a more stylish black and has better signs, though the basic design is still the same.) By an interesting coincidence, the Tactile Dome is not the only dome-shaped, building-within-a-building attraction in San Francisco that was constructed in the 1970s and designed to be experienced in total darkness. Audium, located across town, shares all these attributes but was designed to explore the sense of hearing rather than touch. If there’s also a Smell-O-Dome lurking somewhere in the city, I’d just as soon not know.
Note: This is an updated version of an article that originally appeared on Interesting Thing of the Day on June 1, 2003, and again in a slightly revised form on July 5, 2004.
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Author: Joe Kissell
