Handface is some of the most amazing and strange music I've listened to in a while.#

Handface is 8-bit geek rock, born out of nearly simultaneous acquisitions of a free old school drum set and tube bass amp, and sequencing software designed for a Nintendo Gameboy. Jon writes the music on a Gameboy, and Alberto and Yann flesh out the melodies with cool-ass rhythms and beats. It's music that you've definitely never heard before. Brian Eno says we're cool. And so would John Lennon if he were alive. and maybe those guys from Herman's Hermits. or something.

Christopher Lydon posts an interview with Will Hutton, a British journalist, about the relationship between the United States and the rest of the world.#

Hutton is no Yankee hater--far from it. He's cosmopolitan Brit who says: "our job in the rest of the world is to do as much as we can to support American progressives winning the battle at home. That's where the battle is going to have to be fought. A new language has to be invented," he said, in an echo of George Lakoff. "One of the tasks for progressive America is to develop a story, a language, a rhetoric which challenges the way the Right has captured the whole discourse." The shame of Tony Blair and England in the Iraq War, Hutton said, is that: "we've helped legitimize George Bush and undermined people in America who were critical of this adventure."

Hutton makes some very interesting points about the importance that the United States' policies have on the rest of the world. He says that...

What I think American progressives often don't realize is how fundamentally important it is for the rest of the world that America is progressive. Once it moves to the right, it pulls the whole world to the right.

And orthogonal to this is the importance of the United States to embrace the ideals that it believes in at home - law, freedom, and responsibility - in it's dealings abroad. When Chris asks Will what he thinks we be required to create a "One World" of ideals, honour, and freedom, Will answers simply that 'Constructing a one world, requires the world's leading power to believe in that vision of the world.' And that is why it is so critical for the United States to think more of its actions.

Great stuff.

Lisa Williams replies to the meme about Internet money funding Television ads.#

I want to talk to those people who watch the Bachelor and think Saddam was funding al Qaida and think that Republican tax cuts made their life better, and to do so I need a TV ad. They do not live in my neighborhood and they do not read my blog and they are not going to anytime soon. But they are citizens just like me, and I want to have a conversation with them about something we both care about: what's happening to our country. And I want to have a conversation with them that isn't bought and paid for by special interest groups. I want the message to come from me, not from Exxon or a trial lawyers' PAC.

So I think raising money on the Internet does matter and does make a positive difference because it changes the balance of power between large organized givers and ordinary citizens. The internet makes it possible and cost-effective to raise a lot of small-dollar contributions in a short time and reduce a candidate's dependency on special interest groups and corporations, and that does matter.

We can lament the fact that so much of our national conversation happens on television, and that as a result it's so expensive to produce, but to dump TV is to dump millions of voters, primarily older Americans and poorer Americans who get their news and views from television, newspapers, and AM talk radio. We can ignore them, but we do so entirely at our own peril, because, especially those older Americans, do they ever vote.

That's all good stuff Lisa. My main problem is this: If we assume that the world as it is now is the way it always must be, then we are cutting ourselves short and not dreaming a more perfect Union. When we give up the dream of the good life, all hope has been lost and we accept the betrayal of the system.

Also, to take a page from Stirling Newberry, television ads are a way of talking at people, not too them. In that regard, they are detrimental to a true conversation. A campaign could encourage a real conversation by promoting forums and... real conversation. That could be through town meetings, forums, blogs, meetups, anything. A television ad I would like would be one that announced how to get in contact with other people and talk.

Martin Berger posts an interview with Robin Milner, one of the people behind ML and pi-calculus.#

At the time the internet was developed in southern California you were in Stanford. And what about the work on object-orientation? They were thinking about sending messages between objects. Did that influence you?

I don't know. Maybe. I did know simulation languages. I'd done some work, not published work, but I did understand simulation languages back in '63, '65 because Simula was invented in '63 or '64 or something like that. We had a lot of simulation languages then. Simulation intrigued me because it was about how you represent the real world inside a computer. I remember being puzzled by how to define the agents in a simulated process. For example if you have humans passing buckets down the chain, then you simulate the humans, but shouldn't you simulate the buckets in exactly the same way? From the bucket's point of view, the humans are moving past the bucket, from the human's point of view, the buckets are moving past the humans. So there was some extraordinary looseness about what could be meant by representing a real-world process.

If you approach things from the simulation angle, then many models of computation must be inadequate: Turing-Machines, Lambda-Calculus, Shannon's theorem ... They all are extremely informal about what it means to get information from one entity to another.

You are probably right, but knowing about simulation languages must have been one of the reasons that I though automata ought to interact with one another. Of course I didn't know about Petri's work, which again began in '63. I didn't know that at all. But what struck me later was that the great thing about Petri was that he had actually worried about automata theory and what interaction between automata might mean. Here is one transition diagram and here is another transition diagram, but this transition in the left diagram must coincide with that transition in the right diagram. And that sharing-of-a-transition is how Petri represented communication.

The intriguing thing about Petri's work is that he was talking about how two automata could interact, and he then put the whole into one Petri-net and he didn't do it in a modular way. But the fact that he used this to represent office systems and real-world information systems showed that he had set his sights really quite high.

I just read an article by Carl Zimmer about Junk DNA and how it is not entirely clear that it is junk after all.#

What it boils down to is that there seem to be genetic parasites that live in our DNA, except it is very unclear how they operate and what they do; how they initially began, and the like. It's very fascinating.

R. Lisch sounded downright Zen. "Who are we and who are they, who is host, and who is parasite can be seen as a function of how selection is operating at any given time," they wrote, adding that in specific cases "these distinctions can become meaningless."

I highly recommend mulling over riddles like that one while you gaze at the map of the human genome. The self can be found everywhere and nowhere on that chart. Your genome is an ancient ecosystem, a jungle, a tangled bank of a river, in which hundreds of thousands of mysterious life-forms compete, cooperate, co-opt one another, and coevolve. In the words of the immortal Pogo, "We have met the enemy and he is us."

Jonathan comments on the ability to play God.#

One of the pleasures of being a philosopher is the construction of thought experiments. It's a powerful feeling, to be able to dictate every detail of every situation and participant. I've never written fiction, but my suspicion is that this particular thrill is greater for the philosopher -- a thought experiment is goal-driven, and I get to tweak each detail however I want, until my thought experiment is complete, and successful. In my less mature days, I was a champion smart-ass of what-if's. Today, I can turn that power against my own experiments and build in safeguards.

Faré writes about the supposed necessity of the State and Theory vs. Practice.#

À vrai dire, les faits sont têtus, et les hommes politiques au pouvoir (de "droite" comme de "gauche") ont beau chanter les bienfaits du socialisme et de l'action de l'état, ils se voient forcés de concéder que le capitalisme est "nécessaire", et que si le socialisme doit régner en théorie, il ne peut en pratique qu'espérer "corriger" le capitalisme. Ah oui? en quoi l'intervention de la coercition par l'état corrige-t-elle plutôt qu'elle ne corrompt? Mais voyons, c'est évident et se passe de toute discussion! Les grandioses bonnes intentions affichées par les étatistes justifient tout, excusent tout. Et pavent l'enfer. Mais les étatistes n'ont pas le monopole du coeur, seulement celui de la violence criminelle, qui n'est pas plus excusable quand elle est irraisonnée voire carrément fanatique, que quand elle est calculée et crapuleuse.

À vrai dire, la dichotomie entre "théorie" et "pratique", comme celle entre "raisonnement" et "sentiment" ou entre "juste" et "utile" est le symptôme sûr de l'erreur, de la bêtise, et de la schizophrénie.

Politicians often sing of the benefits of socialism and of the actions of the statue, but these songs are in vain because they seem forced t concede that capitalism is "necessary." And that if it is necessary and socialism is the ideal in theory, then in practice it may only hope to be a means to "correct" capitalism, where it fails. Oh really? What interventions by State, in the form of coercion, are corrective rather than corruptive? This is obvious and goes with out questions! When the State imposes the good intentions that justify all action, excuse all action, and pave the way to hell. But, the State does not have a monopoly of the heart, only a monopoly of criminal violence (public force,) that is not any more excusable when it is unsupported or straight out fanatical, than when it is calculated and villainous.

The bottom line is that the distinction between "theory" and "practice" are as absurd as the distinctions between "reasoning" and "feeling," or between "Justice" and "Utility." And these things are the silly results and symptoms of a great error akin to schizophrenia.

 

Very interesting, just because you don't feel that the world as it is terrible, does not mean that organizations and mindsets that you think are better in theory would not make it if they were actually applied. This is sort, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it"-mentality but applied to a situation that is in fact broke, just people don't seem to know it.

In this book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, Lawrence Lessig writes about regulation of the cyberspace and what that will mean for our cyber-selves and real selves. Although this book was written in 1999, and we're living at "Internet Speed," it is still very current and interesting.#

Anticipating the reactions of this at the very beginning, he sets the stages for how the material will be presented,#

I can already hear the reactions: "Can't you tell the difference between the power of the sheriff and the power of Walt Disney?" "Do you really think we need a government agency regulating software code?" And from the other side: "How can you argue for an architecture of cyberspace (open source software) that disables government's ability to do good?"

But I am also a teacher. If my writing produces angry reactions, then it might also effect a more balanced reflection. These are hard times to get it right, but the easy answers to yesterday's debate won't get it right. [pg. xi]

The essential concern of the book is to suggest that just because the Internet is "free" now, does not mean that being free is it's nature. That is, that it must always be free and nothing can change that.#

Identifiying this initial assumption, Lessig writes:

As in post-Communist Europe, first thoughts about cyberspace tied freedom to the disappearance of the state. But here the bond was even stronger than in post-Communist EUrope. The claim now was that government could not regulate cyberspace, that cyberspace was essentially, and unavoidably, free. Governments could threaten, but behavior could not be controlled; laws could be passed, but they would be meaningless. There was no choice about which government to install-none could reign. Cyberspace would be a society of a very different sort. There would be definition and direction, but built from the bottom up, and never through the direction of a state. The society of this space would be a fully self-ordering entity, cleansed of governors and free from political hacks. [pg. 4]

Lessig supposes that the invisible hand of commerce will lead the Internet to a place that is perfectly regulable, because there are incentives in commerce to be able to certify and identify users. And that certification of facts and traveling identity will also make it easier to control that actions of users.

Life will be easier for those who carry ID than for those who do not. Servers will make exchanges cheaper, or simpler, if data can be authenticated. Just as it is easier to accept cookies automatically, so too will it be easier to authenticate facts about yourself. Life in an authenticating world will be simpler for those who authenticate.

If the system spreads with incentives, then we can see why commerce is so good at spreading the system. Commerce has an incentive itself to increase the authentication and certification of transactions in cyberspace. [pg. 42]

But, he says, even if you do not believe that commerce would do this - the government itself has the motivation and ability to bring about a regulable Internet.

You do not have to believe in the invisible hand to be convinced that this infrastructure of trust is coming. Even if you doubt that private interests alone could achieve this coordination, another factor suggests that the character of the Net is about to flip. If commerce alone cannot succeed in establishing these architectures, government is in a strong position to bring about just the changes that commerce needs. [pg. 42]

The problem then becomes, how can - or will - the government regulate the Internet?#

At this point, Lessig recommends a closer look at how things are regulated in general. There is not one sole regulator of life - there are four:

Four constraints regulate this pathetic [person]--the law, social norms, the market, and architecture--and the "regulation" of this [person] is the sum of these four constraints. Changes in any one will affect regulation of the whole. Some constraints will support others; some may undermine others. A complete view, however, should consider them together. [pg. 87]

Briefly, the law regulates by threatening punishment if broken; social norms threaten banishment from a community and discrimination; the market makes things that it does not want you to do more expensive and thus harder to do; and, the architecture of a space prevents what is possible.

Lessig's key point is that while in meatspace architecture - the way the world works - is near impossible to change, it is completely controllable in cyberspace by the underlying code. But the mutability of the architecture of cyberspace can be controlled indirectly.

Law functions in two very different ways. When its operation is direct, it tells individuals how to behave and threatens punishment if they deviate from that behavior. When its operation is indirect, it aims at modifying one of the other structures of constraint. [...]

When we see regulation in this more general way, we can see more clearly how the unregulability of cyberspace is contingent. We get a stronger sense of how the state could intervene to make regulation work. And we should also get a sense of the increased dangers presented by this more expansive sense of regulation. In particular, we should have a stronger sense of the danger it presents to constitutional values. [pg. 95]

As we can see, if it is possible for governments and the law to regulate cyberspace - indirectly - then it we have to think about how we want to control our government to prevent it from turning the future into one we would not want. This where Lessig soars, being a lawyer and constitutionalist.

Not only must we discuss how the Constitution will constrain the government with regards to the Internet, it must be considered what the Constitution really means and how it has been changed and interpreted historically.#

Part of this central concern, is whether or not freedoms that are given by the Constitution are a protection of rights, an expression of values, or the controlling of government's ability to influence the lives of their citizens.

When discussing the laws surrounding Trespass, Lessig wonders if the Constitution is a protection from the burden of search or of the immortal right to privacy - whatever that means.

Is there any constitutional problem with [building a worm that searches without notice or burden that is perfectly honest]? [...] This efficiency is made possible by technology, which permits searches that before would have been far too burdensome and far too invasive. In both case, then, the question comes to this: When the ability to search without burden increases, does the government's power to search increase as well? Or more darkly, as James Boyle puts it: "Is freedom inversely related to the efficiency of the available means of surveillance? if so, we have much to fear." [pg. 18]

This idea about questioning are base assumptions about what freedoms we have and how they are granted to us is continually raised. Do we really have the right to free speech as we commonly think of it - or is it just to costly for the government to enforce proposed restrictions?

This trade-off--between cost and the willingness to regulate--is one we have seen before. It is a theme that recurs in many contexts. Cost for the government is liberty for us. The higher the cost of a regulation, the less likely it will be pursued as a regulation. Liberty depends on the regulation remaining expensive. [pg. 56]

 

The second piece of this is how the protections that the Constitution offers, whatever their form, can change with the attitude of the populace and what technology makes possible.

Imagine then that in 1791 protecting against physical trespass protect 90 percent of personal privacy. The government could still stand on the street and listen through open windows, but the invasion presented by that threat was small, all things considered. [...] When telephones came along, however, this protection change. A lot of private information was put out across the phone lines. Now, if tapping was not trespass, much less of private life was protected by government snooping. Rather than 90 percent being protected by the amendment, only 50 percent was protected.

Brandeis wanted to read the amendment so that it protected what it originally protected--the 90 percent, even though doing so required that it protect against more than simple trespass. He wanted to read it differently, we could say, so that it protected the same. [pg. 116]

How we will apply the rights of real-space to cyberspace will be a Constitutional question and we much leverage the knowledge of our constitutional history in deciding how this should happen. The reoccurring theme of Code is that cyberspace will change and if we don't pay attention to that change and influence it, then it may go ways we would not prefer.

The values at stake [...] are at the core of who we are and who we understand ourselves to be, both as a people and as individuals. If we believe that the regulations of cyberspace will displace these values, then the efficiency of these regulations in gaining some ends may be inefficient in gaining the ends we collectively want. The decision then its not about choosing between efficiency and something else, but about which values should be efficiently pursued. My claim [...] is that to preserve the values we want, we must act against what cyberspace otherwise will become. The invisible hand, in other words, will produce a different world. And we should choose whether this world is one we want. [pg. 209]

Privacy concerns come up again and again in Code, because one of the largest powers of cyberspace is it's ability to share and distribute information, the "stuff" of privacy.#

Privacy, as Ethan Katsh defines it, is the power to control what others can come to know about you. People gain knowledge about you in only two ways--through monitoring and searching (or by reports relying on the results of monitoring and searching). One can do little about gossip, and the law can do little about reporting. So to understand the real privacy that you have, we must understand something about these two ideas of monitoring and searching. What are the constraints in real space on others' ability to monitor and search, and how do these constraints change as we move to cyberspace? [pg. 143-144]

Lessig discusses three different ways of thinking about privacy and what its purposes are. Privacy as protection from the government to the minimize burden it can inflict from different searches. Privacy as dignity from invasion. And, privacy as "substantive."

These two conceptions of privacy, however, are distinct from a third, which is about neither preserving dignity nor minimizing intrusion but instead is substantive--privacy as a way to constrain the power of the state to regulate. Here the work of William Struntz is a guide. Stunt argues that the real purpose of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments is to make some types of regulation too difficult to effect by making the evidence needed to prosecute violations unavailable.

This is a hard idea for us to imagine, for in our world the sources of evidence are many--credit card records, telephone records, video cameras at 7-Elevens, and so on. But put yourself back two hundred years, when the only real evidence was testimony and things. Imagine that in that time the state wanted to punish you for "sedition." The only good evidence of sedition would be your writings or your own testimony about your thoughts. If those two sources were eliminated, the it would be practically impossible to prosecute sedition successfully. [pg. 148]

The question becomes, How do we successfully protect privacy in cyberspace? Lessig suggests a chance of attitude about the nature of privacy.

A property regime is fundamentally different from what we have now. Privacy now is protected through liability rules--if you invade someone's privacy, they can sue you and you must then pay. There are two important differences between liability rules and property rules.

The first difference is that a property regime requires negotiation before taking; a liability regime allows a taking, and payment later. The key to a property regime is to give control, and power, to the person holding the property right; the key in a liability regime is to protect the right but facilitate the transfer of some asset from one person to another. There can be holdouts (people who will not agree to transfer) with a property regime; there can be no holdouts in a liability regime. There is individual control or autonomy with a property regime, but not with a liability regime. Property protects choice; liability protects transfer. [pg. 160-161]

Another key right that the Constitution protects in real-space that cyberspace severely changes the rules of is Free Speech and access to the speech of others.#

Lessig writes much about Ginsberg speech - speech that is harmful to minors - and how the Internet changes the rules about how that can be accessed. He describes two models of how to enforce the current regulation surrounding Ginsberg speech: filtering, allowing people to identify content and remove it from their information streams; and zoning, enforcing boundaries around some speech that are tied to attributes of a person. One of these models is fundamentally different from the other.

The difference, then, is in the generalizability of the regimes. The filtering regime would establish an architecture that could be used to filter any kind of speech, and the desires for filtering then could be expected to reach beyond a constitutional minimum; the zoning regime would establish an architecture for blocking that would not have this more general purpose.

Which regime should we prefer?

Notice the values implicit in each regime. Both are general solutions to particular problems. The filtering regime does not limit itself to Ginsberg speech; it can be used to rate, and filter, any Internet content. And the zoning regime is not limit to facilitating zoning only for Ginsberg speech. [...]

Here we being to see an important difference between the two regimes. When your access is blocked because of a certificate you are holding, you want to know why. When you are told you cannot enter a site, the claim to exclude is check at least by the person being excluded. Sometimes the exclusion is justified, but when it is not, it can be challenged. [...]

Filtering is different. If you cannot see the content, you cannot know what is being blocked. In principle at least, content could be filtered by a PICS filter somewhere upstream and you would not necessarily know this was happening. [pg. 179]

The problem is that perfect filtering is too perfect a form of censorship. It is potentially transparent to the would-be viewer and inflicts no burden, and because of this is virtually untraceable. This like Papa Stalin replacing every book with a Stalinist friendly book, rather than blacking out all the anti-Stalin parts of other books. The ability to know when we are wronged is essential to our freedom.

Lessig also notes that while it is unjust for organizations to censor what we see, it is equally unjust to have the means to perfectly filter that which we see.

In real space we do not have to worry about this problem too much because filtering is usually imperfect. However much I'd like to ignore homelessness, I cannot go to my bank without confronting homeless people on the street; however much I'd like to ignore inequality, I cannot drive to the airport without passing through neighborhoods that remind me of how unequal a nation the United States is. [...]

We must confront the problems of others and think about problems that affect our society. This exposure makes us better citizens. We can better deliberate and vote on issues that affect others if we have sense of the problems they face. [pg. 180]

After opening so many questions, Lessig asks a final one: Are we capable of making the choices we need to make about our values as a people - and when we do can we make sure those values are protected?#

Lessig has a thought on this of his own, that should encourage us to prove him wrong:

My argument is that we're not. We have so completely passed off questions of principle to the judicial branch, and so completely corrupted our legislative process with the backhand of handouts, that we confront this moment of extraordinary importance incapable of making any useful decisions. We have been caught off-guard, drunk on the political indulgence of an era, and the most we may be able to do is stay on our feet until we have time to sober up. [pg. 212]

One of the problems we face, Lessig points out, is that we have given the judicial branch incredible power under the assumption that it will always remain true to the Constitution and that will protect us, but:

Courts operate within a political context. They are the weakest branch of resistance within that political context. For a time they may be able to insist on a principle greater than the moment. But time will pass. If the world returns to its racist ways, even a strong statement of principle enacted within our Constitution's text permits a court only so much freedom to resist. Courts are subject to the constraints of what "everyone" believes is right, even if what "everyone" believes is inconsistent with basic constitutional texts.

[...] These are the realities of courts in a democratic system. We lawyers like to romanticize the courts, to imagine them as above influence. But they have never been so, completely, or forever. They are subject to a political constraint that matters. They are an institution within a democracy. No institution within a democracy can be the enemy of the people for long. [pg. 214]

In discussing other failings of democracy, Lessig makes the following odd, yet astute, comment:

There is a second, oddly counterintuitive reason for this increasing failure of democracy. This is not that government listens too little to the views of the public. It is that government listens too much. Every fancy of the population gets echoed in polls, and these polls in turn pulse the democracy. Yet the message the polls transmit is not the message of democracy; the frequency and influence is not the product of increased significance. [pg. 227]

Lessig's closing thoughts about how the future will turn out for us are rather upsetting, but again, the make me want to make sure he's wrong.#

We will treat code-based environmental disasters--like Y2k, like the loss of privacy, like the censorship of filters, like the disappearance of an intellectual commons--as if they were produced by gods, not by Man. We will watch as important aspects of privacy and free speech are erased by the emerging architecture of the panopticon, and we will speak, like modern Jeffersons, about nature making it so--forgetting that here, we are nature. We will in many domains of our social life come to see the Net as the product of something alien--something we cannot direct because we cannot direct anything. Something instead that we must simply accept, as it invades and transforms our lives.

Some say this is an exciting time. But it is the excitement of a teenager playing chicken, his car barreling down the highway, hands held far from the steering wheel. There are choices we could make, but we pretend that there is nothing we can do. We choose to pretend; we shut our eyes. We build this nature, then are constrained by this nature we have built.

It is the age of the ostrich. We are excited by what we cannot know. We are proud to leave things to the invisible hand. We make the hand invisible by looking the other way. [pg. 233-234]

Tony S. writes about humans and "confidence limits."#

For us to be in the acceptable norm our population should be around 6 million people. This number seems a bit small to me. I would admit that we are overpopulated, but 1000 times overpopulated, pleeaasseeee! But on the other hand, how many other land species have a total population of 6 million? How many species come close to numbers in population? If our number are that far out of whack, what would it take to correct this situation?

"It is probably not unrealistic to say that nothing less than a full paradigm shift is required to get there from here," Fowler explained. "It requires changes in our thinking, belief systems and understanding of ourselves."

[...]

Rees explained that humanity has been inordinately successful. Unlike other species, humans can eat almost anything, adapt to any environment and develop technologies based on knowledge shared through written and spoken language.

[...]

It is obvious that with our population and our ability to consume, something will give out at some point. Either we will run out of resources to fed everyone - not that everyone eats now - or we will run out of space for us to live. Don't worry folks, I don't foresee this happening in the next 100 years. Our lifetime, isn't that all that really matters?

In The Third Chimpanzee, Jared Diamond writes about this:#

On reflection, it is clear that the entire human species has been equally successful in recently escaping from the former controls on our numbers. We eliminated predation on us long ago; twentieth-century medicine has greatly reduced our mortality from infectious disease; and some of our leading behavioral techniques of population control, such as infanticide, chronic war, and sexual abstinence, have become socially unacceptable. Out population is now doubling about every thirty-five years. [...] the qualitative conclusion remains the same: no population can grow indefinitly.

Thus, our present ecological predicament has familiar animal precursors. Like many switching predators, we exterminate some prey species when we colonize a new environment or acquire new destructive power. Like some animal populations that suddenly escaped their former limits on growth, we risk destroying ourselves by destroying our resource base. [pg. 314]

Sarcasmo writes about the Preamble to the Constitution of the Uniter States and The Federal Marriage Amendement.#

So, with that in mind, please tell me how The Federal Marraige Amendement applies to the [Preamble]?

You can't?

What a surprise. It doesn't.

I took a gander at the previous amendments, and it seems to me the only other time in history the Constitution has been used to take something away from the citizen of this country was the 18th Amendment, which abolished the manufacture and sale of liquor. (An amendment, incidentally, which was later repealed by the 21st Amendment.) And even the 18th Amendment, which we laugh about now, applied to all citizens of the United States...it didn't seek to define/remove rights for specific members of the citizenry.

Allen at The Right Christians writes about what the people expect from their leaders with regards to religious beliefs.#

Most Americans are very wary of anyone who seems inclined to use government to impose or even advance a particular religious point of view. Amen to that. At the same time, we are looking for a leader whose positions on the issues are based on something deeper than the latest polling data. That could be anything from John Rawls' Social Justice to the Torah, Qur'an or Sermon on the Mount. (Oh well, I guess we could include John Galt's speech in Atlas Shrugged.) To accomplish both will require evincing respect for other points of view including atheist and agnostic ones.

Mark Kleiman at Open Source Politics writes about whether "Preventive War" is always bad and if Iraq was a preventive war.#

But even putting aside the special circumstances of this war, a blanket prohibition against preventive war seems hard to justify. As Wesley Clark has pointed out, the right of national self-defense in an age of terror weapons can't always mean waiting for the other side to land the first punch.

When a regime with a history of aggressive activity starts to acquire weapons of mass destruction (a category in which, contrary to current convention, I would include nuclear and biological but not chemical weapons), the likely victims of those weapons are well within what ought to be their rights to terminate that program, using as much force as necessary. [...]

Maybe invading Iraq was the wrong thing to do. (Surely invading Iraq without any coherent idea of what to do next was the wrong thing to do.) But that has to be because there were better ways of handling the situation, not because the invasion fits into a neat category called "preventive war" that we somehow automatically know never includes the least bad option.

Jake Ortman reports that A local teen broke the "Dance Dance Revolution" world endurance record".#

Man, people are obsessive about this video game. They even have big sites dedicated to it. Anyway, after over 37 hours of dancing on the video game "Dance Dance Revolution Extreme" at a local arcade, Drew Gamble called it quits this morning, breaking the unofficial world record by 90 minutes. There would've been two kids that broke it, but the 2nd one mis-stepped and was disqualified after playing the faster tunes. The teens used the event to raise money for a local charity.

Chrystal wonders about dating in college.#

For casual dating, however, I guess that they could go a few days or so without calling. But in college the other is always online. So, when you are online at the same time and you are interested in the other person it is odd not to want to IM them. You have to stop yourself and then wonder why they are not IMing you and a vicious pattern ensues. It is not pretty. Dating in college is bad enough. Actually I don't think people really date here. Guys more so want to 'watch a movie' or 'hang out' or 'go to a party' together than anything. There is also the occasional 'lunch date' and so forth.

I don't really like it. I guess in a normal situation though a guy may call like a week later or so and say, hey you wanna hang out? or whatever in the beginning and then if you have a good time, he may call a couple days later or so. And gradually you may talk more and more.

From witnessing my guy friends experiences with girls they are interested in, actions range. Some will wait a couple days or a week and some will be a little more aggressive. I guess there are similar feelings on their side too... "Am I calling too much?" "How come she hasn't IMed me yet?" And so forth...

Hmmmm... I don't know. I am just wondering what is customary for relationships in college. What do guys do when they are interested in girls and so forth?

I'm incredibly confused by this as well. How do I get myself to not worry that I'm not being IM'd or that they don't feel like doing homework together every day? Do you just stop making the first steps because you assume that they're not really interested - but then what if they don't call? Horror.

Sometimes I just want to take a vow of abstinence and celibacy and be done with it all.

Stirling Newberry write about the changing tune of politics and life over at The Blogging of the President.#

This change in our society has changed our politics, and with it, how we conduct politics. This new politics is not merely a wired version of the old, it is no longer the modern world without some of the problems of the modern world - but is, instead, a new world, one that will have its own problems and its own advantages. We are here, because we cannot be anyplace else.

One of the changes is the loss of control - "push" demands control, because on failure, even of the smallest kind, can spell death for a push based advertising campaign. Where as pull is far more friendly to mistakes, because the community corrects them. As one advice columnist like to say about churches - they aren't havens for the saintly, they are hospitals for the sick - the same is true of internet communities, they forgive certain kinds of flaws easily, because the people there are joined by their common understanding of a lack that they feel. That craving need draws them in, drew them in, and keeps them searching for a way to fill the void.

Living in China continues the Tibet Roundtable.#

In a comment Eric discusses the strange portrayal of Tibet in the American Media.

The history of Tibet is not that black and white. Lama=Good, Commie=Bad is not a fair assesment of the situation. Prior to the communist take over, Tibet was a theocracy ruled by the Tibetan Buddhist monastaries. The first Grand Lama was given rule over Tibet by Kublai Khan in the 13th century. True not 5000 years but 700 years is no drop in the bucket.

The succession of the Grand Lama for a long time caused great problems. Starting with Emperor Kangxi and ending with Emperor Qianlong, the Qing dynasty sought to regularize the succession, stop the constant feuding and strengthen Tibet against Mongol incursions. This was the time when the lottery system was developed by which latter Dalai Lama were chosen. Definitely by this time, before the United States even existed, Tibet was a part of China.

The feudal theocracy in Tibet remained in place right up until the time of the communist take over. The majority of the peasants served the monastaries and were kept in bondage through outright force and debt peonage. The problem of Buddhist monastaries is not just located in Tibet. Buddhism is a religion just like any other with good and bad episodes in its history.

Carl Zimmer writes about Junk DNA and Genetic Engineering.#

None of this is meant to dispute the fact that much of junk DNA acts selfishly on evolutionary time-scales. There's plenty of astonishingly selfish behavior among these stretches of genetic material, like the mobile elements that have to get other mobile elements to make copies of them. It's just that we have to recognize that evolution works on different levels--on the levels of genes, genomes, cells, organisms, groups, and maybe even species and related groups of species. And something that's selfish at one level can become selfless at another level. Recently, for example, scientists found evidence that many mobile elements include sequences that can shut down their own spread. This is a feature of many successful parasites--they can thrive in their host without killing them too quickly.

It's on this evolutionary scale where purging junk DNA makes the least sense. The pasting and copying of junk DNA is a major source of new genetic variation. Instead of changing a nucleotide here or there, mobile elements can shuffle big stretches of DNA into new arrangements, taking regulatory switches and other genetic components and attaching them to different genes. While some of this variation may lead to diseases, it also prepares our species to adapt to new environmental challenges.

I know nothing about this. That said, it seems like Junk DNA may be a good method of minimizing the amount of DNA changes that are possible once you find a solution that works. If 98% of our DNA is junk, and let's say 1% of that will change within sometime span through mutation - if you had less DNA you'd be more likely to 'mess something up' that you wanted to keep around. But, you still have the chance of mutating the "not Junk DNA" to get some sort of benefit for the species. So Junk DNA may be a way to make sure that DNA doesn't change too rapidly?

I'll have to read more about it.

Jim Moore links to, and comments on, Danny Hakim writing in the New York Times about Traffic Safety in the United States.#

Jim:

No comment needed. We believe that we are the world's leading nation, but we fall behind in all sorts of things that really matter. As the article says, "..last year in the United States, 42,815 people died in traffic accidents.." A lot more Americans die in car crashes than in firefights in Iraq. And the American dead in the auto accidents are mostly "civilians."

Danny:

Dr. Jeffrey W. Runge, administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, said: "If everybody buckles up, we can save between 7,000 and 9,000 lives a year. That would drop our fatality rate off the table. The only way you get to 1.0 is to deal with these very important human factors." Most traffic safety experts agree that the seat belt remains the world's most effective safety device. The nation's usage rate has risen considerably over the past couple of decades, to nearly 80 percent today. But top safety regulators in Canada and Australia say their use of seat belts is about 10 percentage points higher.

One reason more Canadians and Australians buckle up is so-called primary seat-belt laws that allow the police to stop motorists simply for not wearing a seat belt. Less than half of the states in this country have such laws.

Grant Henninger writes about Autistic savants and dyslexia.#

The director of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge University, Simon Baron-Cohen, makes the case in his new book The Essential Difference that autism represents an extreme manifestation of the "male brain." In his view, male brains are hardwired for "extracting the underlying rules that govern a system." (He carefully adds, "Your sex does not determine your brain type.") While the jury is still out on testosterone, a set of clinical studies in the UK confirm that both male and female savants are better at extracting the rules that govern systems than normal people.

This article also says that autism and dyslexia are related in some way, which is really what got me thinking about my own brain, since I'm dyslexic. I find it interesting that I have this intense need to order the world in my own brain. I generally don't accept things unless they fit with the other puzzle pieces in my mind. But at the same time I don't know why anything fits together. I can know that A and B are related in some way, or that B makes sense because of A, but I can't figure out why. My brain takes random inputs and comes up with output that hardly seems relevant to its inputs. And I can't figure out the process in the middle, which means I can't really explain where I'm coming from when arguing for things.

Alex Halavais writes about the dying libraries of Academia.#

Academic libraries are the walking dead. I just got booted out of ours at six, and it won't be open tomorrow. They close early on Saturdays, too. Our library seems closed, of course, whenever I seem to need it. They even seem to turn off their servers many nights, for reasons that are entirely beyond me.

This is in contrast to my undergraduate days, when the library was often open 24 hours. You could (and I and others did) count on the library as a place of last resort if you couldn't find a place to stay. And when, at 3 am, you needed to find a book, you could find your way to the brightly lit building on campus, trudge in wearing your sweats, and become enlightened.

Warren Ellis reports an 80-year-old woman used a ceremonial sword to fight off two six-foot raiders who burst into her home.#

Angina sufferer Jean Freke grabbed the sword from the wall in her drawing-room after she was pushed to the ground.

The widow wrestled with one of the burglars and brandished the weapon at the other.

Her actions forced the pair of teenagers to flee empty-handed from her home in Broadstone, Poole, Dorset on Sunday.

I just bought Lance Arthur's new book, oh yes.#

Just in time for your holiday orgy of gift-giving and -getting, I am proud to present my first (and only) book, filled with retreaded material you've probably already read, but can now enjoy in the comfort of your own bathroom! Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it's Fucking Brilliant, a collection of my writing now bound together into an easy carry-along version, professionally priced at the ridiculously low, low cost of US$17.50, not including applicable taxes and delivery! Wow, how can you sit there on your credit card and not buy buy buy? At that price, you're practically stealing from me!

Green Hat Journal writes about programming language religious wars.#

There is a remarkable ability to sidestep, diminish and ignore the few relevant facts out there. The fact that most systems today - satellites, cell phones, the Internet, car engines - use C might lead a rational person to conclude that C isn't all that bad. It ain't perfect, but show me another language that can claim to be even 1/100th as successful. Can't think of one? How about Cobol and Visual Basic. And is it really true that advanced languages allow one to develop better code faster? If you look at the full results for the past ICFP programming contests (here's 2002), you'll see a motley collection of languages represented (C++ won this year). The abundance of functional languages is due, of course, to the sponsoring conference. Lastly, it is strange that academics who've never held a real job should offer solutions without first analyzing what exactly is the problem in commercial software development. Though that probably explains why people in industry rarely listen to them.

Of course, now you want me to lead you from the darkness to the one, bright burning truth: programming languages don't really matter. A PL is how you describe a solution to a problem. The hard part, obviously, is devising the solution. Many people are still unclear on this simple truth: smart people are better at finding solutions to complex problems. Once a solution is found, programming is merely a tedious translation job. A PL might ease or impede how you code your particular solution to a particular problem, which leads to the final truth: use the right language for your task.

This is why programming languages should try to be incredibly expressive and stay out of the way of the programmer, in my opinion.

Lisa Williams on why Gluttony is a sin.#

Which brings us back to the original topic: why is something like overeating a moral issue at all? Doesn't God want us to enjoy life? Well, sure he does. But he also calls us to be a good steward of all of his creation. The human body -- so beautiful and intricate and perfect and adaptable -- is surely one of the greatest of his creations. We should no more be happy and content to treat our bodies like trash dumpsters, stuffing junk into ourselves, than we would approve of someone clogging a beautiful natural stream with Hefty bags of trash. yesterday Even if you don't believe in God, your body is what you've got to carry yourself around with until you rejoin the Earth, and you should treat your own body -- your own piece of Nature -- as least as well as you would a forest trail or a wild bird.

In our society, this notion is often confused and lumped in with a kind of no-fun neo-Puritanism that would have you constantly on the treadmill and eating soy products. It's not: it's about some concepts that are very hard to grasp in American society: moderation, stewardship of scarce resources (we only get one body), and a recognition of the impact our actions have on others.

Don Park wonders where the syndication is in RSS.#

Where is the syndication in RSS when majority of RSS feeds are directly consumed? With a good RSS news aggregator, it's just too easy to subscribe and forget. Are you as vigilant in unsubscribing from uninteresting feeds as you are in subscribing to interesting feeds? I don't think so. Scale it up and you can see the problem.

Each of us as readers don't fully appreciate how much RSS data each of us are downloading everyday or every hour. Me? I am pulling down tens of megabytes every morning. Am I reading tens of megabyes of information every morning? Not even close. I'll read maybe half a megabyes at the most and I'll be scanning most of that even which leaves only a hundred kilobytes of information which I do actually 'read' every morning.

I don't even want to try and figure out how much I'm downloading everyday.