Month: July 2024

I learned this morning of the death of Robert Towne at 89. I had never seen his face before. From the picture in the New York Times, looking at his eyes, I could tell at once that he was Jewish.

How odd, I thought to myself. “Towne” is not a Jewish name. Then I read the obituary, and learned that he was born Robert Schwartz.

It all made more sense to me then, the undercurrent of incredible sadness that runs through his best screenwriting. The line “Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown.” is a metaphor for infinitely larger tragedies.

We need our poets. We need them to speak to what is unspeakable, yet must be spoken.

To my astonishment, the U.S. Supreme Court just declared Joe Biden to be King. Well, not exactly King, because there is no right of succession. Hunter Biden doesn’t get to inherit the monarchy.

But in effect, the majority opinion of the court yesterday was that anything a sitting president does in his official capacity is legal. Which means Joe Biden can do whatever he wants between now and January 20.

Should he decide to round up all of the Republican senators and put them into holding camps for the next six months, that would be legal. Should he order a military hit on the Republican candidate for president, or on any particular members of the Supreme Court, that would also be legal.

In each case, he could simply say he is acting in the interest of national security. The Court made it very clear that we are not allowed to even question the motives of a sitting president.

According to SCOTUS, you cannot question POTUS. As long as King Joe is operating in his official capacity as president, whatever he does is by definition legal.

I wonder why the Supreme Court decided to give Joe Biden such absolute power.

When I teach computer graphics, some concepts seem to confuse students more than others. One of those is has to do with matrix multiplication.

When you multiply two numbers together, the order of the numbers doesn’t matter. For example, 5×7 is the same as 7×5. We say that multiplication of numbers is commutative.

But multiplication of matrices is not commutative. If A and B are matrices, then AxB is generally not the same as BxA.

Just last week a student was asking me about this. So yesterday I created a little Web app to help make it easier to understand.

This was only my first attempt. I’m sure I will keep tweaking this until I get it just right.

But meanwhile, you can check it out HERE.