Month: May 2025

Today is the 70th anniversary of the landmark decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, in the wake of its Brown v. Board of Education ruling, to order district courts and school districts to enforce educational desegregation “at all deliberate speed.” That was one of the high points in our nation’s checkered history.

When we look for positive things to say about America, that event is surely near the top of the list. It was a day when our nation showed itself to be capable of kindness, caring, and able to rise above prejudice.

How different from the order of the day today. If our glorious experiment in democracy is indeed destroyed in the next few years, as seems increasingly likely, at least we will be able to point proudly to a moment in time when our nation achieved a measure of grace.

A computer software system is like a house. You need to keep it in good repair.

From time to time, surfaces should be dusted and polished, and you have to put stuff away after you use it. You’d better know the difference between the kitchen room and the garage, and you need to remember to take out the trash.

If you don’t keep your software project in good shape, eventually stuff starts piling up in the corners, and you find yourself stepping over things without quite remembering what they are. Eventually, you might find it easier to just move out.

But with a little bit of tidying up and software maintenance, it never needs to come to that.

There are many interesting questions around the (still theoretical) concept of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). To me, one of those questions concerns what happens after you die.

Suppose, using some future technology, we were able to create a replica of some individual human’s mind that passed every possible test for sentience. Then the person in question dies.

From a legal and philosophical perspective, are they still alive? Does the A.I. retain any of the rights of the biological original?

For example, do they have the right not to be switched off or erased? Do they have the right not to be replicated?

And then will people be granted an inherent right, under the law, to have an A.I. back-up made of their mind? Or will that become a service you need to pay for — so that it might be available only to the wealthy and privileged?

Suppose it does turn out that a post-life A.I. can attain legal personhood. Does that mean we will have entered the age of human immortality?

As long as I am quoting my favorite quotes, here’s another:

“Ideology is like breath. You never smell your own.”
– Joan Robinson

“It’s not that you have a failure. It’s what you do with it.”

Michael Roemer
January 1, 1928 – May 20, 2025

I know that we live in a time of great divisiveness. Half of our nation thinks that the other half is crazy. And that feeling goes both ways.

So as terribly sad a day as this is, at least Memorial Day is a time when we can all agree on something. The brave men and women who have been willing to give their lives for their country and for their fellow citizens deserve our respect, and our eternal gratitude.

I’ve been wanting to go back and read the Harry Potter books in order. I remember reading the first one soon after it came out.

I was in a book store in the late 1990s, looking for a good book to read. The proprietor said “This recent book is quickly becoming very popular.” Which is how I came to buy the first one.

The title was “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.” It was a great read, but the title puzzled me. It soon became obvious that the book was about the philosopher’s stone.

So if I was reading a book that was obviously about the philosopher’s stone, why did everybody in the story keep calling it the sorcerer’s stone? I eventually learned the answer from a British friend.

The original UK title was indeed “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone”, but the U.S. publisher thought that was too sophisticated for American readers, so they changed it. Basically, it was because they thought that we Americans are stupid.

Given where our nation’s current political choices have led us, it’s kind of hard to argue.

This week was notable for the list of invited commencement speakers at college graduations. To pick only two among many, one of those speakers was Kermit the Frog, and another was the president of the United States.

It’s wonderful to see such diversity on display. Consider the range spanned just by those two examples.

One of those two speakers is a talking puppet controlled by an unseen hand. The other is a frog.

I started writing Java applets on the Web in 1995 as soon as that became possible, but stopped cold turkey in August 2013, after Oracle (which had acquired it as part of Sun Microsystems) stopped allowing the general public to access unsigned Java applets. That summer I completely switched over to Javascript and WebGL for both my research and teaching, and have never looked back.

But until then, Java was revolutionary in its effect on scientific communication. For the first time ever, anybody anywhere could access interactive computer graphics from a Web browser.

This was a radical reframing that had a profound and lasting effect on the way we think about interacting with computers. Oracle may have effectively killed the Java applet, but it couldn’t stop the revolution that James Gosling’s Web-friendly language had started.

We now take for granted that from any Web browser you can interact with your computer or phone in all sorts of rich and powerful ways, but that was not always so. Today being the 30th anniversary of the first public introduction of the Java programming language, let’s take a moment to appreciate its profound influence.

Yesterday the President of the United States hosted the President of South Africa and his entourage to the White House. Once the guests had arrived, our president spent much of the time, while the cameras rolled, expounding an idiotic “theory” that thousands of white South Africans were being killed en masse by black South Africans.

I am sure our president isn’t actually stupid enough to believe this thoroughly debunked conspiracy theory. In fact, if history is any guide, the very stupidity of the accusation is its greatest strength.

He was essentially enacting a modern equivalent of the “Blood Libel” — the accusation dating from the Middle Ages, and running up to the 20th century, that Jews used the blood of Christian children to make their Passover matzoh. Of course that accusation was false, and in fact absurd, but that didn’t diminish its underlying power.

The first rule of successful authoritarian take-over is to remove actual truth from the conversation. And the optimal strategy is to replace facts by blind stupid hate. In fact, the stupider the better.

I wouldn’t be surprised if our president were to invite the Prime Minister of Israel to the White House next week. Just so he can explain to Mr. Netanyahu, while the cameras roll, how terrible it was that the Jews persecuted all those poor Germans about 80 years ago.