The D.C. Metro rail system has a station called "Suitland" (in Maryland).
I didn't actually get off there, but I did enjoy my time in that land of
suits that is the national capitol area. This time my leisure activities
included visiting the new World War II memorial (immediately after it
opened) and the Lincoln Memorial, where I read the Second Inaugural
Address. (I also visited the Lincoln Memorial when I was about eight,
but I hadn't been back since.)
Lincoln had an amazing sort of eloquence and was also (like Shakespeare)
responsible for many phrases I hadn't thought to associate with him --
for example, "to care for him who shall have borne the battle". The
Second Inaugural Address also has a great deal of (rhetorically effective,
moving) religious language, to which critics of Michael Newdow and
church-state separation have recently been pointing. To me this suggests
that politicians in America have always used as much religious rhetoric
as they do now, but their choice of words hardly bears obviously on
what Congressional policies courts will uphold. (Many people feel that,
as the D.C. District Court unfortunately quoted Justice Holmes this week,
"a page of history is worth a volume of logic" -- so that religious
rhetoric in the American political tradition comes to serve as a
justification for religious agendas in Congressional enactments. But
there's so much conservative politics in that approach. A different
sort of politically motivated reasoning would suggest that our
understanding improves with time so that we can leave behind traditions
that contemporary logic has undermined. Or it might say that Lincoln
was as tolerant and pluralist as he could be in his time and that "it
is rather for us, the living" to be even more so as we see the
opportunities.)
Sarah let me look at Loewen's Lies Across America, an
important book, and I immediately looked up the Lincoln Memorial.
I was surprised to see that it was one of the few memorials Loewen
finds almost totally accurate and appropriate. My mother says it
was always her favorite monument in D.C.
What did Lincoln say that was so religious?
Both [Union and Confederacy]
read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid
against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask
a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of
other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The
prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been
answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world
because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe
to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that
American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of
God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His
appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both
North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the
offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine
attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?
Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of
war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until
all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of
unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn
with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was
said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments
of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."
One of the many remarkable things about this passage is that Lincoln
mentions that both sides "invoke [God's] aid", so that "the prayers
of both could not be answered". Did other, later war presidents
admit, when invoking God's aid, that their enemies were doing the same?
I still haven't had time to get Newsbruiser set up, so I'm still posting
here for the time being.
I like Derek
Slater's recent DMCA article pretty well, and
Matthew Skala's
"Colour" essay, and had a great time with
Cory Doctorow's entertaining
Microsoft DRM speech. If you follow copyright law, or even if you don't,
I think it will reward you to read all three.
Skala's "What Colour are your bits?" is particularly interesting for its
partial theory of a cultural misunderstanding between lawyers and computer
scientists. I would like to see it further elaborated. I've already
heard one lawyer praise it strongly for its attempt at showing why you
can't "hack the law"; one of the key concepts in legal reasoning is
intent, something computer people have practically made taboo
after the conspicuous failures of artificial intelligence. But it's
true -- it's just one way in which lawyers and judges reason about mental
states and not merely properties of communication channels.
A lot of computer people have wished that the law worked more like a
computer program (in Skala's metaphor, that it would try to dispense
with Colour). Thus we have
Smart Contracts,
for example, and various ideas about formalizing legal requirements
in some sort of formal language (like XML or Scheme). In some sense
this is closely akin to the famous ideal of Leibniz:
In other words, it must be brought about that every fallacy becomes
nothing other than a calculating error, and every sophism expressed in
this new type of notation becomes in fact nothing other than a
grammatical or linguistic error, easily proved to be such by the very
laws of this philosophical grammar.
Once this has been achieved, when controversies arise, there will be
no more need for a disputation between two philosophers than there
would be between two accountants. It would be enough for
them to pick up their pens and sit at their abacuses, and say to each
other (perhaps having summoned a mutual friend): "Let us calculate."
(G. M. Ross translation)
Formalizing contracts may actually achieve this -- within the limits of
those pre-existing agreements that can be put into the form of formal
contracts, but not with regard to other kinds of "controversies" (whether
legal or philosophical or factual). However, one lawyer points out that
Smart Contracts and a more general family of formalized agreements work
without human intervention only where there is no subject of the contract
that requires human judgment: for example, a contract for services almost
always necessarily involves some sort of human judgment about whether the
services were properly performed. And lawyers shock technologists by
actually liking some areas of ambiguity in the law -- for example, almost
all the lawyers I know think that the ambiguity of the concept of "fair
use" in 17 USC 107, leading to a subjective fact-based case-by-case
analysis and evolving caselaw, is actually preferable to a legislative
enumeration of user rights in copyright (which some other countries,
like Australia and parts of Europe, have adopted). It's probably easy
to find other examples and raging arguments over whether the ambiguity
has actually led to something desirable: but lawyers believe it does
and don't see anything unusual about that.
And Cory's speech is a good time: colorful (not Colourful), sparkling.
Martin Gardner quoted a physicist named Robert Coveyou to the effect
that "the generation of random numbers is too important to be left
to chance". I was sorry to find by searching Google that Coveyou had
died in 1996 (not many years after I first read his quotation).
Robert Coveyou was right: random numbers are serious business, and
they have only become more so with time.
On a trip to Massachusetts, I discovered that my childhood barber
Ernest Paul had also died last year, at the age of 84. Mr.
Paul cut my hair from when I was about 5 until I was about 15, and
I think I went back for a last haircut with him at the age of 18. Mr.
Paul, as his obituary says, cut hair for 66 years, and he had already
been doing it for nearly half an century when I first began to visit
his shop. Everyone was astonished that he hadn't retired as he kept
on working through his seventies. The local newspapers would just
keep on interviewing him and profiling him and he would just keep
on doing his job.
I hadn't planned to write a lament stanza, but here it happened:
Wendy and I and Kevin and Annalee will be speaking at
DEF CON 12 in Las Vegas, Nevada,
at the end of July. I'm looking forward to this and hope you can
attend!
