North Korea Hackers Tried to Take $1.1 Billion in Bank Attacks;
Tesla looking for a baby-sitter for Elon Musk;
Prog. Roubini’s testimony before Congress: Crypto, blockchain, the mother and father of scams;
Work on innovation, climate win the Nobel Prize for Economics;
I, for one, welcome our parkour-capable ROBOT OVERLORDS:
Classic Japanese wave and ripple designs.
The history of So I Married An Axe Murderer.
Famed mathematician claims proof of 160-year-old Riemann hypothesis.
Nintendo wins court battle over Mario go-karting.
The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies.
Delete your Facebook. And your WhatsApp too.
Why the hell would you give a tree-climbing robot a chainsaw.
AI in the running to be mayor of a Tokyo ward.
Pet foxes. Of course I want one right now:
Deactivated Facebook, been off the platform for a couple of weeks now and so far not regretting it. And I’m also off Twitter and never been happier. Facebook has to ask why I was leaving so I had to be honest - “Because Facebook poisoned political discourse in my country and helped propel an incompetent, homicidal maniac into office. Fuck Facebook.
I still have that one Instagram account - perhaps the requirement of posting a picture is sufficient proof-of-work to deter the worst trolls. Still, the plan is to get back out into the open web.
New software helps uncover Mafia crime masked as ordinary business
What Does It Mean for Venezuela to Peg Its New Currency to a Cryptocurrency?
Sony's new Aibo's are pretty cool, but my standard for robotic dogs has been set by Megaman's Rush.
A Spectre is Haunting Unicode - fascinating article about "ghost kanji" in the Japanese character set of Unicode. Was just talking to class about how we build cities and legal systems through accretion, and how some provisions we may take for granted may still be there, lurking in the background.
Some Friendly Advice To New Law Students - " Law school culture often wants you to hate, resent, and fear your fellow students and see them as competitors. Resist. Make friends with, and be friendly with, different people. You'll learn from them. And you'll hate law school if you buy into the cutthroat narrative."
Television and the frequency of sex - So it's actually Netflix or Chill. Marginally.
Hello from Sapporo. I am writing this from what looks like a Showa-era hotel, trying to have a real vacation while everything falls apart around me.
Haven't been here in a while. Since my last update, I’ve been working on:
1. A paper on Philippine` Copyright law for a comparative law conference that will be held in the Philippines soon - DONE;
2. A paper on the pork barrel cases of the Supreme Court, to be presented before the IACL in Fukuoka - DONE;
3. A paper for the 2018 ASLI Conference in Korea, where I try to model the statutory definition of quasi-depicts using LKIF and Protégé. - DONE
4. Another paper for on ethical algorithms - and I don't even know where to begin, I mean what was I thinking when I submitted the abstract for this one. - DONE (sort of)
5. A paper on cryptocurrency regulations in the Philippines, hopefully to be published by the Law Center - DONE
6. Workshops and exercises for public health workers dealing with legal risks of implementing the RH law - DONE
7. A courseware package for Data Protection Officers - A package of lectures, exams, and exercises. - Still Pending
8. Chapters for an annotation of the draft federal constition, which we're supposed to pull out of the hat without transcripts of the consultative committee's deliberations - Status: 🤐
The new school year is opening and I have 6 classes full of bewildered, bewildering freshmen. I have a research load, possibly a new administrative post, a part time job as in-house lawyer, and who knows how many writing and coding projects. I try to cope with new gear: like a mechanical keyboard and smart speakers. It will be the dungeon for me, but at least the chains and the whip will be top notch.
We went to Tokyo for the holidays to avoid the Christmas crush of traffic and mall crowds. Sure, Christmas is a thing in Japan, but it's somehow more subdued. The workweek goes on as usual. The lights are bright but the colors are understated. Christmas here is more like Valentine's Day there - a big date night but none of the enforced merriment for Children and family. There's also this weird thing about KFC - but that's just one of those Japan things.
Tokyo was an opportunity to act within a different context, to determine what survives outside our normal background.
In many ways, cities are meta-organisms, the exoskeleton complex societies develop to protect their ways of living. That's the baseline, but divergent historical experiences mean some cities have evolved other functions. Tokyo is a place to get things done. It is the sea of black cloaks where everyone moves so fast. Tokyo is a place to get distracted, with its museums and its shops. It is there to instruct on the outer limits of reason and modernity.
Manila, on the other hand, looks like a gray tumor from the sky and up close. It is always rising, always growing with gleaming new condos and office buildings. But its feet has always been in the shadows and the sewage. Never forget that it is a place to test you, and every so often, kill you. It is there to remind you that the beast is still within.
I check in to these things every now and then to get a temperature reading, see where things are. I remember the days when we would hold these things in parking lots, and the tables would be filled with the same rough, black-and-white treatments: Please please check out my Muscle-Bound Filipino Super Hero. He is just like Muscle Bound American Super Hero except he was bitten by a radioactive kapre or something so that makes him unique and local.
But really, I think its getting better though. There is diversity on both sides of the table (more girls, so things become more sensible). But I'm still looking for good, write-led materials. Heck, I'd settle for a good writer-artist team. The lineup is still heavy with graphic artists who think that they're geniuses who can handle both the art and the narrative.
See you again in a couple of years, maybe.
Hello from hot, humid Manila. Which is just like Singapore, except with all the murders.
For a couple of months, I was on leave, and wondering about whether I would have a place under the office's new management. (I did not).
So after a couple of weeks with nothing but books and Netflix, things are ramping up again. I'm diving deep into data privacy - writing content for a website, editing a casebook, and developing an online training course.
I'm teaching again in the UP College of Law's shiny new BGC campus (so God help the young ones). I'm also consulting for several Law Center projects, helping out with the ASLI conference this May. Looks like things will be very busy very fast.
So. A couple of weeks into the new year. I have a new job, new patterns to establish. Things have not yet coalesced into a workable routine that I can schedule around from, so no crazy trips and projects for now.
My brain is still stuck in former patterns. For three years, the task has been the composition and decomposition of arguments. I was in the argument business, peddling premises and conclusions that would justify my governments acts. It's always been a tough job. Every government is monstrous in its own way. But man, I miss the sweet deceptive pretense to the rule of law. So good luck to the new kids.
Then for one year, my pattern was to write this exhilarating and exhausting bit of thesis about transaction security, and read books and attend classes in between. So now I take odd legal jobs that will require me to write long form text, and I take online classes because we are what we do often enough.
