David Weinberger (JOHO) reports on the Technology Entertainment & Design conference.
Here’s something personally interesting:

Steven Petranik, editor of Discover magazine, ticked off his Top Ten list of ways the world could end suddenly:

10. Failure to address the worldwide epidemic of depression . . .

Hm. Epidemic, eh? That implies that, for a change, I’m part of a significant market demographic or whatever the appropriate buzzwords are. Maybe there’s hope after all.

Speaking of depression, is the Youth Suicide by Firearms Task Force respectable? It cites that slob Kellerman[n] a couple of times, and the group’s name makes me suspicious (why not youth suicide in general?); on the other hand, they seem to emphasize safe storage and the like rather than abolition.

Er, but enough about me. Go read that TED report instead.

Greg Egan’s moving story “Border Guards” mentions the game of Quantum Soccer, which he demonstrates with an applet. See also Ruth Chabay‘s game Electric Field Hockey.

French Criminal Court to Try Yahoo Over Nazi Sites — an unfortunate headline, as it seems to hand over to the prosecution the premise that if you sell Nazi relics you must be a Nazi.

(I collect foreign coins that show coats of arms. Some of my coins were minted by Communist regimes. Does that mean I condone Communism?)

I wonder whether the French courts have gone after churches that proudly display relics of persecution of Christians, such as reputed fragments of history’s most famous instrument of torture.

I’ll bet your mother asked you, when you were about eight years old: “If all the other blogs posted their philosopher scores, would you?” (Warning: popups.)

• 1.00 Mill
• .82 Bentham (?!)
• .76 Epicureans
• .65 Kant
• .63 Sartre
• .55 Aquinas
• .51 Aristotle
• .44 Prescriptivism / Rand / Noddings
• .41 Spinoza
• .34 Hobbes
• .31 Augustine
• .30 Cynics
• .26 Ockham
• .25 Hume
• .22 Nietzsche / Stoics
• .16 Plato

Heh. [This blog was originally titled Sightseeing in Plato’s Cave.] Yes, I disagree with most of what I know of Plato, but I still like the metaphor of the Cave. (Beats calling my blog Fat Loser or something.)

Bill Quick comments:

I wonder if these people have heard of the 14th Amendment? It extended the provisions in the Constitution and Bill of Rights to the people of the individual states. Of course, that only happened in 1868, so maybe word hasn’t filtered out to Chicago yet.

It doesn’t matter here what provision of the Bill of Rights he’s talking about, because I’m only using this item as a hook to gripe about the goofy doctrine of ‘incorporation’.

Apparently, each provision of the BoR applies to the several States only if the Supreme Court gets around to saying it does, i.e. ‘incorporating’ each clause under the Fourteenth. There is obviously no textual support for this in the Fourteenth itself.

One may respond that there is no explicit Constitutional ground for the judicial veto at all (and I won’t touch that one just now); but by 1866, when they wrote the Fourteenth, Congress was acquainted with the practice and might have provided for a special procedure if that was their intent. Congress did not.

To put it another way: with its Fourteenth Amendment practice the Court went beyond its earlier practice of judging the validity of legislation, to insert itself as an active participant in making legislation valid or invalid.

Can someone explain this to me?

Ask Dave about Tic-Tac-Toe and keep your game sharp and exciting! (by way of the muted horn)

Everybody’s mourning Spike Milligan today. Strangely, I don’t know that I’ve ever heard any of his work.