Blood Laws

SolGen invokes Harry Potter house Slytherin in David v. Poe comment :

"One must therefore be similarly mindful of the almost-comical scale with which we are scrutinizing the purity of [Poe's] blood, as if purity of blood were a standard for capacity to govern—as if our nation belonged to House Slytherin; and this scrutiny assumes an ironic twist when considered against the backdrop of our aggressive attempts to justify the Filipino citizenship of others just so we may, as a nation, improve our athletic or cultural profile," chided the OSG in point 69 of its response.

It's not about whether or not an office (or a court) supports a particular candidate. Rulings on constitutional law are not just about apportioning the rights of parties. They reach into values that define us as a people. A genetic standard for citizenship will take us into a place far, far darker than House Slytherin:

Chart explaining the "Nuremberg Blood Laws", a chillingly detailed accounting of rights based on descent.

I Moved to Linux and It’s Even Better Than I Expected

From Medium:

Copyright is key to what my friend Cory Doctorow has called the “coming civil war war over general purpose computing,” a campaign, sometimes overt, to prevent the people who buy gear — you and me, individually and in our schools, businesses, and other organizations — from actually owning it. Copyright law is the control freaks’ leverage, because it allows them to legally prevent us from tinkering (they’d say tampering) with what they sell.

Of course, unless you know how to fork, code, and compile your own applications, you are to a certain extent surrendering your freedom to a different sort of control freak - the stewards of the codebase. 

Review: The History of Rome

I was stuck in the dorm for most of the Winter Break. One of the few good things amidst all that cold, and gout, and boredom is that I was finally able to 1) get some thesis writing done and 2) finish The History of Rome podcast. 

Mike Duncan's award winning podcast is an ambitious and entertaining journey through a thousand years - from the legendary founding of Rome to the fall of the Western Empire. It covers a very, very long arc of history. School courses tend to cover only the comparatively brief rise of current nation-states. Everything is condensed into a story of "great men" (and it is mostly men, unfortunately). It ignores the slow but massive socio-economic undercurrents that  build through time. 

It is dangerous to make instant parallels between Roman history and the troubles of a young struggling democracy, like my country. But I've just listened through the times of Julius Caesar to Aurelius to Constantine and beyond, so I feel somewhat cocky. What makes Roman history, and Roman law, still relevant is the universality of the human condition. "All of this has happened before, and will happen again."

So. Some lessons:

1. Hereditary succession is almost always a bad idea.  

2. There is nothing more essential, and more fragile, than a rule of law.

3. Nobody really ever wins wars.

4. Naked populism without discourse is asking for tyranny.

5. Empires fall.

Auctoritas Maiorem

"As long as this tradition was uninterrupted, authority was inviolate; and to act without authority and tradition, without accepted, time-honored standards and models, without the help of the wisdom of the founding fathers, was inconceivable." 

- Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future

Fermat's Last Theorem

Number theory has important applications for cryptography - which is important for secure commercial transactions online. The point of the documentary however is that sometimes engaging in maths (even without the applications) is in itself a worthwhile intellectual journey. Just because *you* never appreciated maths, or never found a way to make it relevant to your everyday life, doesn't justify an educational policy of dumbing down everyone else. 

Empire Defeated by Bad Cybersecurity

I've always found it ridiculous how easy it is for R2D2 to find open data ports in military installations, interface with systems, and then pwn critical components. 

Does Modern Physics Count as Science? →

From The Atlantic:

Whether the fault lies with theorists for getting carried away, or with nature, for burying its best secrets, the conclusion is the same: Theory has detached itself from experiment. The objects of theoretical speculation are now too far away, too small, too energetic or too far in the past to reach or rule out with our earthly instruments. So, what is to be done? As Ellis and Silk wrote, “Physicists, philosophers and other scientists should hammer out a new narrative for the scientific method that can deal with the scope of modern physics.”

So it's down to the philosophers now. I didn't know that the crisis was that bad. 

Untangling the Tale of Ada Lovelace

From Stephen Wolfram's Blog (yes, the Mathematica/Wolfram Alpha guy):

It’s charming to read Ada’s letter as she works on debugging her computation of Bernoulli numbers: “My Dear Babbage. I am in much dismay at having got into so amazing a quagmire & botheration with these Numbers, that I cannot possibly get the thing done today. …. I am now going out on horseback. Tant mieux.” Later she told Babbage: “I have worked incessantly, & most successfully, all day. You will admire the Table & Diagram extremely. They have been made out with extreme care, & all the indices most minutely & scrupulously attended to.” Then she added that William (or “Lord L.” as she referred to him) “is at this moment kindly inking it all over for me. I had to do it in pencil…”

More than an interesting peek at the life of Computer Science's historical figures, it's a testament to the nobility of all mathematics (not just "business" or "practical" mathematics). 

"Zuckerberg has not donated anything..."

From jwz:

When a multi-billionaire puts out a press release saying that eventually they will transfer all-but-a-billion-or-so into a "charitable foundation" that they also completely control, that is not a donation, that is just moving your money from one bank account to another! And it's not even that, it's claiming that he's fixin' to get ready to do that some day.

Airbnb’s worst problems are confirmed by its own data

From The Verge, a flipside to this networked, algorithmic future:

The company wanted to counter the portrait painted last year by the New York state attorney general, which accused Airbnb of enabling illegal hotels, allowing a small number of hosts to earn millions while cutting down on the amount of affordable housing available to the average citizen.