Author: admin

Yesterday’s post was written with a certain amount of anger. I hate it when people, no matter what their political affiliation, decide that they have the right to become tyrants and start to dictate and micro-manage the lives of others, especially when they do so in a cruel and careless way.

It’s all well and good to vent anger, but ultimately anger alone is not going to help anything. The real goal is to channel that anger, to take back the freedom to simply live our own lives that scary fanatics are trying to take away from us. This principle applies whether those fanatics are on the Left or the Right.

If you think someone in political office is trying to take away your right simply to live your life in peace, you need to vote them out of office this coming November. But that’s not enough. You also need to pro-actively discuss that need with others, and give either time or money, or both, to help make that happen.

Your vote still matters in this country, even though there are bad actors spreading a conspiracy that all election outcomes they don’t like have been rigged. Don’t let them get away with it.

It’s hard to think of July 4 as a day to celebrate when I’m seeing the ideals of our nation being rapidly and systematically dismantled. The Supreme Court’s so-called “originalist” interpretation of our Constitution makes no sense.

Of course they know that. Even worse, they want us all to be aware that they know that.

The Court’s pretense of not knowing that the Constitution was meant to be a living document, adaptable to an ever-changing society, is a form of totalitarianism. According to their interpretation, I have no right to use this computer, because the right to use a computer is not explicitly enshrined in law.

Even worse, I am plugging in this computer, as an appliance, into a wall outlet and drawing electrical power to run it. Nowhere in the Constitution does it say that I have the right to do that for any electrical appliance, nor is there an amendment which affirms such a right.

In the particular case of abortion, the “originalists” would have us believe that we still live in Colonial times, before women had the vote, and before our entire economy was structured around two income households. Out here in the real world, millions of Americans depend on those two incomes to feed their families, so applying “originalist” thinking is completely absurd, and pointedly cruel.

Of course the Court knows that its recent rulings are absurd. These rulings are purely political, and in reality they have nothing to do with Constitutional law.

But that won’t help the ten year old girl who has been violently raped by her abusive uncle. According to our Supreme Court, she now has two choices: Either become a breeding cow for her rapist, or become a murderer (with her mother becoming an accessory to murder).

Do I sound angry? That’s because I’m angry. Welcome to America in 2022.

I can see why the Theater survived
Even after the Movies arrived
It’s so low tech, I know
But the reason we go
Is because we are seeing it live

I just finished an ambitious programming project that I wasn’t sure I would be able to pull off successfully. It was a bit of a nail biter for a while, but now it’s done, and the working code is safely uploaded to the software repository.

There is a part of me that wants to jump right into something else, but another part of me wants to pause and take stock. Emerge from the jungle, blink at the sunlight, drink in my surroundings.

I think I will go and take a nice walk.

Sometimes you look back at a project that you’ve been steadily working on, and you realize you’ve made a lot of progress. It’s a wonderful feeling, and the best part is that it sneaks up on you.

Most of the time when I’m working on things, I keep my head down and just focus on the next task at hand. On building things, brick by brick.

But every once in a while, I look around, and realize that all those bricks have added up to an entire room. Sometimes an entire house.

OK, enough of that. Time to get back to work.

I found myself explaining today to one of my grad students that he needs to separate his “vision for the future” from his “how I will implement things.” If you get those two things confused, it becomes very difficult to do effective research.

This is a concept that we understand very well in other contexts. For example, you might say “I’m taking my new girlfriend to Niagara Falls next week.” And that statement can be packed with all sorts of emotional meaning.

But you wouldn’t usually then add, “And I think it’s going to work out, because my car has a GP Sorensen Fuel Injector 800.” Unless, that is, you and your new girlfriend are both very unusual.

Similarly, we should describe our long term research goals in a relatively pure way, unburdened by technical details. The engineering steps that we need to take to move toward those goals are important, but they should not be confused with the vision itself.

For this week’s Widget Wednesday, I decided to iterate on last week’s. First I made them different colors.

Then, rather than just make a jumble of particles that are trying to stay away from each other in a confined space, I started to turn them into more of a swarm. In this iteration, each particle has its own set of likes and dislikes.

In particular, the red particles want to swarm toward wherever your cursor is, as though it’s a source of food, whereas the other particles are indifferent. To get nearer to their food source, the red particles need to navigate through all the other particles in the swarm.

You can check it out here.

Ketchup dripping down the wall. That may be the image I remember most.

Maybe because the alternative is to think of a grown man lunging at someone’s throat in a feral rage. I don’t think even SNL would have thought of portraying such an infantile creature, even as parody.

I guess we can all be thankful. Thanks to some honorable people doing the right thing in a very difficult situation, the only red liquid dripping down the walls was ketchup.

Why do we celebrate birthdays? Not that there’s anything wrong with celebrating birthdays.

But why a day, specifically? Why don’t we usually celebrate a birth week, or birth month, or a birth hour, or birth minute?

There is clearly something particular about the conjunction between, on the one hand, the time of year that a person was born, and, on the other hand, a day.

Both are shout-outs to periodic events. A year is the time it takes the Earth to rotate once about the Sun. A day is the time it takes the Earth to rotate once about its own axis.

But why not the time it takes the Moon to circle once about the Earth? What is it about days and years that makes us fit them together hand and glove, without really giving the matter much thought?

The Pride Parade is happening today in Greenwich Village in NYC. It consists mostly of young people, expressing their joy at being able to be their true selves, without needing to hide or to be afraid of our government just because of who they are.

The parade has been going on for many years now, and over time, like any institution, it has gradually shifted in tone. Where it used to be a cry of defiance, the parade has become more of a party.

Young people are now comfortable in their identities, in a way that their elders were never allowed to be. They have rights that they take for granted, rights that those elders once fought for. My worry is that comfort will lead to complacency.

We learned earlier this week that nobody is safe. Whether you are black or gay or Jewish or asian, or — as we saw a few days ago — whether you are simply guilty of the terrible crime of having been born female — sooner or later you can be stripped of rights that you have always taken for granted.

This is true even if those rights have been around since you were born. This is true even if those rights have been around since your mother was born.

I look at all of these happy people in their twenties celebrating in this parade, and I wonder whether they realize what might be coming. And I hope that they remember to vote.