Artificial Intelligence peril for attorneys

Warning to attorneys: 

Don't trust artificial intelligence -- or a client -- to write your legal briefs.

I post an example of what can go wrong.

Magistrate Judge Mark Clarke assesses sanctions, awards attorney fees, and dismisses a plaintiff's case with prejudice. 

The subject matter of the case isn't the point of this post, but for context, this case arises from a dispute over the family winery between the adult children of an aging mother. The winery in question is Valley View Vineyards in the Applegate Valley, a pioneer vineyard and winery in Southern Oregon. The plaintiff in the case is the older sister of the two brothers who operate the winery, Mark Wisnovsky and Mike Wisnovsky. 

The lawsuit is a long and tangled mess. After a multi-year period of briefs, hearings, motions, moves for summary judgments, and continuances Magistrate Judge Mark Clarke made a decision that may resolve the cases. He determined that the lawyers for the plaintiff submitted to the court briefs that included multiple instances of inaccurate precedents and citations that were invented or hallucinated by artificial intelligence.

Judge Clarke decided to sanction the attorneys with monetary penalties, but noted that these fines may not be sufficient to discourage attorneys from submitting inadequately-checked briefs. He told opposing counsel for the defense that they should submit a claim for attorneys fees for the time spent responding to the plaintiff's erroneous citations. Most consequential, Judge Clarke determined that the plaintiff herself, even though represented by attorneys, was sufficiently involved in the preparation of the briefs as an experienced pro se (i.e. do it yourself) litigant that her lawsuit should be dismissed with prejudice. "With prejudice" means that she cannot refile them. 

The judge's order made reference to evidence that the plaintiff's strategy involved doing the cases with little or no legal cost, while the defense would need to hire expensive attorneys to respond, thereby pressuring the other side to a favorable settlement. Judge Clarke cited a voicemail message by the plaintiff's non-party brother, Robert Wisnovsky, sent to the phone of one of the two defendants, which claims that he and his sister are winning in court using unpaid attorneys, presumably with the real legal work done by the plaintiff.

When I meant that we don't have an attorney, I really meant we're not paying for an attorney. . . . [Our attorney  is] representing us for nothing. So, if you want to continue on, we're not spending a dollar compared to what you're spending. I filed a motion today to delay this other trial of this May 2nd thing, which they're going to grant. And you're just going to continue hemorrhaging money. Like I told you, when I saw him at the hearing, I saw you there. I ripped fucking Dole's heart out right there. I didn't even go to law school. And your boy, Jim. Oh, my God. What a failure that guy is. What about Brooks? 7 hour deposition. Took him out too, so I'm fully engaged now with this. Walk away. Make money and quit losing money. So if you're interested in
that, call me.

Dole and Brooks are the names of two attorneys employed by the defense that Robert asserted that they were defeating in court, while avoiding the cost of legal representation.

Apparently the briefs were filed without careful review by the attorneys of record.

I normally find legal documents difficult and tedious to read. This one is different,even for a non-lawyer. Attorneys among this blog's readers may find this a powerful warning on the financial and career risks of artificial intelligence and of signing off on material submitted by third parties. They are also warned that judges take seriously local court rules, especially when the judge repeatedly warned the plaintiff that court rules were being ignored. 

Non-lawyers are reminded that AI is an extraordinary tool in multiple contexts, but it is not trustworthy. It appears to be programed to be agreeable -- to give you want you want -- rather than programed to be accurate. As President Ronald Reagan famously advised, one needs to "trust but verify."

Click the link below to read a PDF of the judge's order.

https://acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc:VA6C2:1ef60353-4735-4f65-a035-0b3e6631df9c 

[Note: Tomorrow another response to President Trump's Oval Office speech by Tony Farrell, a frequent and well-received guest post expert on brands and marketing. Farrell, readers may remember, had managed the Trump Steaks account.]

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Trump's speech: My takeaway is that he is flailing.

 Fight! Fight! Fight!

A salesman senses when he is losing a regular customer.

Customers lean back. They ask questions. They wonder about alternatives. Meetings get postponed. Instead of just refilling their regular order, they cut back a little but don't say why. It's little things, but they tell a story.

I will quote from Charlie's graveside speech near the end of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. Willie Loman was a salesman, Charlie said:

He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back—that’s an earthquake. And then you get yourself a couple of spots on your hat, and you’re finished.

Trump knows he has a spot on his hat. He doesn't need pundits or polls or staffers to tell him. He sees and feels the signs: questions about his age and dozing off; inquiries about the spot on his hand; people openly questioning his mental fitness; Marjorie Taylor Greene's betrayal, the Epstein discharge petition in the House; Democratic wins in recent elections; GOP congressmen defecting on the ACA subsidies -- the list goes on.

He planned a power play, and it began with a ruse. With an armada stationed off Venezuela, Trump scheduled a prime-time Oval Office address to the nation.  All broadcast networks interrupted regular programming for the big presidential announcement. 

Trump gave a partisan rally speech. That was the power play. The pundits and media got punked. Ha! Fooled you!! He said he inherited carnage and his predecessors are corrupt, foolish traitors. But he fixed immigration, taxes, the economy, public safety, everything. America is now safe, secure, envied and respected.  

There was an underlying message, and his real intent. He is as young and formidable as ever. His voice was loud and strong, voiced from the diaphragm. He is unbowed, confident in his own greatness, ferocious in attacking enemies, and no one can sell harder and better than he can.

I expect Trump's supporters to be re-assured. Trump still has the magic with them. Facts don't matter. What matters is his swagger and his sticking to the story of national redemption, thanks to him. 

There is music for this, 1977, Carly Simon:

Nobody does it better
Makes me feel sad for the rest
Nobody does it half as good as you
Baby, you're the best

It works better when it's said about you, not by you. 

I have been a salesman all my life -- fundraising in Boston, politics and investments here -- and I, too, have a feel for the telltale signs of peril for a salesman. I saw a giant "tell" last night. I saw desperation in his pressured speech and grandiosity.

When a salesman starts talking loudly and quickly, it is a tell. The salesman is trying to fill the potential void when objections might be voiced. Overselling is a tell. Superlatives and black-white absolutes can project confidence, but there is a tipping point where puffery backfires. Customers hear the overselling. Confident salespeople know it's a tell, and avoid it even when they know something is wrong. They project reliability. They communicate that they have no fear of the simple truth. They don't raise their voices.

Whether in a brokerage office, a car dealership, or at one's front door hearing a pitch from a pest-control company, we know when the salesman has moved into the "Hail, Mary" zone. The salesman starts talking about discounts, two-for-one,  and money-back guarantees.  Infomercials do this, because they have one brief time to make a sale or it is gone forever. Trump sounded like an infomercial on Home Shopping Network or a local ad for a business doing a close-out sale. 

I am reminded of a 30-second ad from the 1980s, an ad for Dry Idea underarm deodorant:

"Never let them see you sweat."

The woman in the ad says:

"There are three nevers in comedy. Never follow a better comedian. Never let hecklers have the last word.  And no matter how bad a joke bombs -- although that has never happened to me -- never let them see you sweat."

Trump is watching his mandate disappear. He needs it back. He wants to be adored and feared, and it isn't quite working now. He was trying so hard not to let people see him sweat that people saw him sweat last night. He has a huge base of supporters, and they won't see it. Trump is being Trump, angry and confident as ever. I think the speech worked for them.

But on the margin, persuadable voters noticed that Trump is flailing.

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Cheap oil: Should you be happy or sad?

"Did you ever have to make up your mind?
You pick up on one and leave the other behind
It's not often easy and not often kind
Did you ever have to make up your mind?"
          John Sebastian, performed by The Lovin' Spoonful, "Did you ever have to make up your mind," 1965

West Texas Intermediate crude oil is priced at about $56/barrel. This is a five year low.

I have mixed feelings. 

Cheap oil means lower prices at the pump. The average price nationally for gasoline at the pump is now under $3. It is about $3.50 in Oregon, because the West Coast has a shortage of refineries, and new ones are hard to site, and we are at the far end of oil and gasoline pipelines. Prices are a dollar/gallon higher in California.

West Texas oil rig

Cheap oil is anti-inflationary. The nestegg I created for my retirement lost some 15 percent of its buying power during Biden's presidency. During this year of Trump's presidency, Americans lost another four percent of purchasing power in dollars, plus another 10 percent of the dollar's purchasing power in the context of the world economy. Trump's disruption to trade and the world order caused the dollar to depreciate against a basket of other currencies. A dollar was worth .95 Euros when Trump was inaugurated; now it is .85 Euros, with the big reset happening coincident with Trump's Liberation Day announcement of tariffs.

Value of the dollar, in Euros.

I prefer American energy independence, rather than dependence on oil from the Middle East, which was our condition prior to the shale oil revolution. The dependence distorted our foreign policy and caused inflation that could only be stopped only with 15-percent interest rates and a deep recession. In the 1970s I remember planning trips from New Haven to Boston and from Medford to Portland around where I might be able to buy gasoline.

The U.S. is energy-independent today, and the world's largest producer of oil, because oil companies learned how to find oil trapped between layers of shale. At $75/ barrel, it is profitable to pump that oil. At $56/barrel shale oil is only marginally profitable. Existing wells with sunk costs of development can continue to be pumped because the extraction cost is about $25/barrel, but new wells are not drilled. The full-cycle cost of shale oil is more than current prices for all but the most efficient drillers in the very best locations.

The world economy is slowing down. Trade disruptions are having an effect. That means oil demand is down. Jobs have stopped growing and unemployment is rising. OPEC is pumping more oil to reduce the profitability of the U.S. oil shale competition. We are moving into a bust cycle in the oil fields. Oil country is bright red politically. Democrats might not care if drillers go broke. Indeed, they may see an upside to the bust. Fracking is controversial. It uses water; it causes earthquakes; it leaks methane. Landowners who get paid a royalty like fracking, but neighbors who don't get royalties often do not. The oil shale technology breakthrough means that America perpetuates the fossil fuel era, which green-oriented Democrats oppose. Many Democrats say good riddance to fracking.

Is ending fracked oil good for the environment? The answer is complicated.

Cheap oil doesn't mean oil doesn't get used. Cheap oil means more oil is used -- after all, it's cheap! -- just less of it will be sourced in the USA. Cheap oil re-establishes our dependence on places with cheap oil. It also means that alternative energy sources favored by green voters are less competitive, so wind and solar projects get cancelled for price reasons, not because Trump defunded them. American car buyers see lower prices of gasoline. They buy a car with an internal combustion engine instead of an electric vehicle, a decision with long consequences. It will be on the road for 20 years. General Motors and Ford saw the writing on the wall and cut back on electric vehicle production. Ford took a $15 billion write-off, saying it had over-estimated the EV market. 

What should a conscientious America cheer for? Do we want cheap oil and lower inflation, or expensive oil because it is good for the environment, if it is, given that it makes fracking profitable? Is the world's environment better off if oil gets drilled by state oil companies in Nigeria, Venezuela, Russia, and the Middle East?

Many Democrats consider oil companies intrinsically bad, and urge college endowments and state treasurers to divest from them. That, too, is complicated. American-based oil companies can lose money and even go broke, but it doesn't mean the world stops using oil, not if oil is cheap, and cheap oil is what would damage their profitability. Someone supplies oil; just not us. There is demand.

Nothing I do personally affects oil prices very much. I heat part of my home with natural gas, but I converted part of the house to electricity when a furnace broke. I drive an electric car. As voters and consumers, we mostly are bystanders.

Arlington, Oregon wind turbines

I support alternative energy projects, but realize than one of the great impediments to building them is that neighbors of potential solar and wind projects oppose them. Anything that creates energy creates opposition. I am mostly a "Yes" person. I see NIMBY opposition as a generally negative force, but I am probably in a minority and maybe I am wrong. People want abundant cheap energy, but not the ways to get it. Everything has a pros and cons.

If I had my wishes, oil prices would rise back to $75/barrel, even though it is inflationary. Oil in that range means the U.S. can produce oil now, but the incentives for wind and solar stay in place. I don't want to be dependent on the Middle East for our energy.

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Am I too hard on Trump-supporting White Christians?

The Jesus described in the Bible warned us about men like Donald Trump. 

I have been critical of American Christians who treat Trump as the God-provided leader.

Jesus said don't be cruel. Don't be selfish. Don't hate. Don't hit. Don't seek gold and other riches. Help the poor. Heal the sick. Pay workmen what they've earned. Turn the other cheek. Be like the Good Samaritan.

Trump is a popular political figure. He won two elections. He is nothing like the Good Samaritan.

I have depicted images of those American Christians who follow what I consider to be a false idol. They are people apparently comfortable with their privilege. Prosperous, powerful, victorious, and usually White.

I have published images like these:

A reader raises a fair question: Am I being fair? Am I pointing out religious hypocrisy only among the comfortable White Christians -- an easy target? What about Trump-supporting Christians among groups coded left? Would I feel free to criticize them, too?

I got this letter from Thad Guyer. Guyer is an attorney with an international reputation as an advocate and litigator on behalf of whistleblower clients. 

"Hi Peter.  I regularly read your blog. When you write your anti-Christian posts, I have always assumed that you're talking about White Christians who voted for Trump thinking that in some way God is working through him. And then it occurred to me in church today, maybe I am wrong, maybe Peter has the same political perspective for LGBTQ Christians, Hispanic Christians, Asian Christians, even Jews who voted for Trump.  You have the same opinion of all of them too, right? We aren't supposed to just imagine White men in MAGA hats when we read your disparaging words on this; Christians in marginalized groups are included, am I correct? I would just like to know that the basket of deplorables you have put me in is multi ethnic, Judeo-Christian, and diverse."

Guyer is correct in his reading of this blog. I have focused on comfortable White Christians. I don't think I have ever pointed out regligious hypocrisy among LGBTQ Christians, Hispanic Christians, Asian Christians, or Jewish supporters of Trump. Guyer is right to question me on this.

But the truth is, I am unaware of any organized or individually prominent LGBTQ, Hispanic, or Asian supporters of Trump who tie their support of Trump to their membership in that identity.  "Lesbian Christians for Trump"? I haven't seen or heard of such a group, nor seen one in White House photos, although I am sure that there are, in fact, lesbian Christians who voted for Trump. I have seen thousands of political T-shirts and photographed hundreds of them. I have never seen anything remotely like "I am gay and Jesus is my savior. Trump is my president." So, no, I have not addressed LGBTQ Christian support for Trump.

The Methodist church I attended as a youth considers itself a "welcoming" church, which signifies that it considers nontraditional gender and sexual orientation as fully consistent with Christian beliefs. If there were organized support for Trump by pastors or representatives of those churches, I would happily point out the apparent contradiction. I have not seen it.

I have addressed Hispanic support for Trump. My sense is that most Hispanics are cultural Roman Catholics. I don't consider it self-contradictory for them to support Trump because of two issues, and I have been critical of Democrats for being blind to this. People who come here legally and become citizens go through a complicated, time-consuming maze. Democrats were foolish to think that Hispanics would vote in solidarity with an ethnicity of people from multiple cultures, instead of solidarity with law-abiding citizens. Lawbreaking Hispanics injure the reputation and safety of Hispanic citizens.

Moreover, many Catholics are single-issue anti-abortion voters. Trump's position on abortion is inconsistent, but Trump is the better anti-abortion choice than would be any Democrat. It makes sense for anti-abortion voters to vote for Trump. So, no, I have not criticized Hispanic Christians for supporting Trump.

Asians who came here legally and became citizens have every reason to protest scofflaw immigrants from Asian countries. It raises the risk that citizens of Asian heritage will be treated with suspicion by ICE. I have not pointed out the difference between Jesus and Trump in an Asian-American context because I subsumed Asian Christians generally along with White Christians.

I have not addressed "Jews for Trump," but I will do so in a future post. I will simply say here that a right-populist leader who picks out minority ethnicities and calls them subhuman, Low-IQ, garbage, sneaky, and treasonous has a very bad history for Jews. There remains in America a reservoir of anti semitic feeling, exacerbated by the success of people perceived as elites who are identifiably Jewish in the visible fields of finance, law, entertainment, and government. Trump roused up a constituency that accepts demonization of the "other." Yesterday's post on chimpanzee xenophobia described the danger of human instincts here. Jews are visible targets. Jews who support Trump are playing with fire.

I was brought up Christian but am no longer one. I am not hostile to Christianity. I bemoan the fact that Christians have abandoned the Jesus I learned about in my youth. I think our current Pope generally reflects Jesus' beliefs, as bureaucratized into an institution designed to perpetuate the faith. I think that Trump is a frank, overt contradiction of everything Jesus preached.

But the self-contradiction of seeing Trump as a God-sent leader is not the sole province of White Americans. Guyer is correct in pointing out the narrow focus of my observations. It must appear to some that I am only criticizing comfortable White Christians. Trump contradicts Jesus, regardless of who carries the Trump-Christian flag. Hereafter, when I see Asians, Hispanics, and LGBTQ Americans joining in the celebration of Trump as God's chosen leader, I will be certain to include them.

If readers send me examples of organized support for Trump from those groups, I will happily include them in comments or a future post.

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Humans are Apes

Insults from the White House
Warships moving into position in the Caribbean
A mass murder incident in Australia

What is wrong with humans?

Answer: We are acting like the apes that we are. 

Donald Trump succeeded politically in the past decade while expressing words that were shocking when he came down the escalator in 2015 and first uttered them. He insulted Mexicans. Some people found that disgustingly racist; others found his words refreshing and honest. Finally someone said frankly what they were thinking, that foreigners are dangerous. They are different from us and don't belong here. 

Xenophobia works as a political device. Xenophobia is a primate characteristic. Apes are territorial social animals. We are apes. Hogan Sherrow studied apes.

He received his Ph.D. from Yale in anthropology. He studied chimpanzee politics in their natural habitat in East Africa. He advises political campaigns as the principal consultant for You Evolving, LLC (www.you-evolving.com).

Sherrow

Guest Post by Hogan Sherrow

"We could go one way or the other and we're going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country. Ilhan Omar is garbage, she's garbage. Her friends are garbage.”

This is what Donald Trump said about Congresswoman Omar and every other person of Somali descent two hours and sixteen minutes into the December 2nd Cabinet meeting at the White House. Once again showing us that he operates at a very basic, primitive level and sees “others” through a xenophobic, aggressive lens.

I’ve studied primates in captivity and the wild for over thirty years. Nearly half that time has been spent studying one of our closest living relatives, chimpanzees, and using their behavior to understand our own. Over decades of research, I like to think I have gained a somewhat unique perspective on primate behavior, both non-human and human. After all, we are primates and nothing about primates is irrelevant to us. Everything we observe in our non-human cousins has some bearing on what it means to be human.

One aspect of chimpanzee behavior that is particularly prescient for observations of humans is their xenophobic and aggressive nature. Chimpanzee society is intensely territorial, xenophobic, and aggressive. Groups of related, bonded males actively patrol and maintain territorial boundaries through aggressive interactions with members of neighboring communities. Interactions between communities range from vocalizations and displays, to attacks on individuals or small parties, to battles, where multiple males simultaneously fight. When it comes to chimpanzees, males from outside the community are always enemies and are always potential targets for elimination. There are no exceptions. There is no nuance.

Humans are, obviously, not chimpanzees, but we do share a natural tendency to form in-groups and out-groups and see the “other” as dangerous. As the anthropologist Richard Wrangham has shown in his work, humans, like chimpanzees, are territorial, xenophobic, and aggressive by nature. Donald Trump has built his political career on tapping into these primal behaviors and exploiting them. While he is not the first to do this, his consistent behavior, actions, and policies towards specific groups is simplistic, targeted, and insidious. Unfortunately, it also very effective. Trump and his team repeatedly go after groups that are different, strange, or mysterious to his supporters and they eat it up.

Trump targets non-whites, the LGBTQ community, liberals, and intellectuals as criminals, perverts, snowflakes, and corrupt nerds. Whether he is attacking American citizens, who happen to come from an African nation, illegally killing citizens from other countries on boats in international waters, or suggesting that the free press be charged with sedition and treason for criticizing him, his attacks are chimpanzee-like, tapping into the chimpanzee-like instincts to protect against outsiders. It succeeds politically, because it has the inertia of our deep instincts as territorial apes. And it is far worse than anything we see in chimpanzees.

Chimpanzees simply do what chimpanzees do and the only calculations they make are whether the risks of aggression are low enough to make them worth it. Trump has added the x-factor that humans have perfected: He groups and targets people based on easily distinguishable ethnic and cultural traits that amplify our natural xenophobic tendencies. His attacks contribute to the dehumanization of entire groups, a phenomenon that, as philosopher David Livingstone Smith observes, has historically precipitated some of humanity’s gravest atrocities.

This weekend the world experienced yet another example of extreme, xenophobic behavior. At Bondi Beach in Australia, a mass shooting targeting Jewish individuals at a Hanukkah celebration took the lives of at least 15 individuals. It was intra-species killing, with the victims targeted because of cultural traits that marked them as “other.” It was the result of the dehumanization that occurs when xenophobic, aggressive tendencies are amplified and distorted by blind allegiance to an in-group.

We are not doomed to chimpanzee-like aggression and violence. Humans can, and do rise above our basal, primate instincts. The anthropologist Chris Boehm pointed out thirty years ago that humans have evolved empathy and developed multi-level cooperation, which keep our xenophobic, aggressive tendencies in check. Societies criminalize the chimpanzee-like behavior of killing others on sight or when there is easy opportunity. People learn to cooperate at multiple levels. These mechanisms are so powerful it takes the dehumanization of others and extreme psychological manipulation to turn humans into killing machines.

The question is, can we learn from our primate relatives and our own human history fast enough to rise above our xenophobic, aggressive instincts and continue our technological progress with weapons of mass destruction without blowing ourselves up?

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Easy Sunday: A funny take on a serious topic

If you liked our war in Iraq, you will love what is coming in Venezuela.

Jon Stewart looks at what we are getting ourselves into.

Click here

Jon Stewart is funny. He is disturbing. He is presenting high-quality political commentary inside an amusing package exposing folly, hypocrisy, dishonesty, and over-confidence.

But we have aircraft carriers and tanks and soldiers. We are big and they are small. We are right and they are wrong. We can do what we want. Besides, Venezuela is in the Americas, adjacent to the “Gulf of America.” What could be easier?

And there is oil. We aren’t doing this for the oil. Of course not. The fact that Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves, and that they are selling oil to China, is irrelevant. We are doing it for humanity. The oil is just a bonus reward for doing a good deed.

Stewart compares the lead-up to our war with Iraq and our present actions against Venezuela. Same language. Same conviction that the foreign leaders, Saddam Hussein and Nicolas Maduro, are uniquely bad people and that they have weapons of mass destruction to use against us.

The same American political leaders are saying the same things about Venezuela that they said about Iraq.

The war has already begun. Congress is sitting back; the president is acting. This is an Easy Sunday post. Watch. Laugh. This is the easy part of the war, the start.

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Skip this post. It isn't about politics. It is about the tilt of Earth.

"Here comes the sun, doo doo doo doo
Here comes the sun
And I say, "It's all right"
Sun, sun, sun, here it comes
Sun, sun, sun, here it comes
Sun, sun, sun, here it comes. . . ."
     The Beatles, "Here Comes the Sun," Abbey Road, 1969

Today's post is not about politics. 

If you are noticing that it has been getting dark early for a long time, it is not your imagination. This is really happening. Early gloom isn't a literary device, nor a metaphor for the era of Trump, nor a commentary on our democracy. It is the reality of a tilted Earth.

Today's post is about the length of daylight for Medford, Oregon and for people who live near the 42nd parallel. Go to this site and enter your own location: Click.

First of all, let's ignore daylight savings time. That is the sharp break in time in March and November on this sun graph.

We all recognize that sunsets come early now: 4:42 p.m. on December 21, at the winter solstice. At the summer solstice sunsets occur at 7:51 p.m. standard time or 8:51 p.m. daylight time. It doesn't get dark for another half hour in the summer because of the long twilights, which exaggerates our perception of late nightfall. Twilights are short in the winter, which exaggerates our perception of early darkness. 

Days at the winter solstice are nine hours and five minutes long. Days at the summer solstice are 15 hours and 17 minutes long, a difference of six hours and 12 minutes -- 372 minutes -- over the 183 days between the two dates. That is two minutes and three seconds per day, on average. Sunsets come earlier or later by exactly half that amount.

Day lengths don't change on average. There are big changes in the length of daylight around the equinoxes and then, at either solstice, the changes are tiny. By November 15 the sun is setting at 4:48 p.m. December 8 has the year's earliest sunset: 4:38. On New Year's Day it sets at 4:48. There is a six week period of early darkness and a change of only a few seconds a day.  We aren't just imagining this. It is real.

The six hour difference in day length between summer and winter takes place in the middle months. By January 5 daylight begins lengthening by a minute a day and by January's end it is two minutes a day. In March days lengthen by almost three minutes daily. That pace of lengthening daylight slows only a little until May, when we re-enter the stable six-week period of near-constant late sunsets around the summer solstice.

I think the websites charting daylight hours are fascinating. The different lengths of day through the seasons aren't intuitive so it is fun to look at data. Google your location and a keyword like "sunset" or "length of day." Some religions want to know an exact time of sunsets to be observant, so there are lots of places to go.

Good news for people who like the holiday season but dislike the dark: Sunsets are already getting later. Because Earth's orbit is elliptical, the earliest sunset isn't on the shortest day. 

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