The fourteenth amendment to the Constitution of the United States begins:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

I was born overseas to US citizen parents, and am thus a citizen by the Nationality Act of 1952 rather than by the literal language of the Constitution. So I have always wondered: as that clause does not apply to me, am I a citizen of any State? and if so which – one or more of those where I have resided, and/or the one where my parents resided before getting on the boat? Perhaps there is something in the laws of those States, enacted before 1868 and never repealed. (The constitution of California, where I dwelt longest, makes no mention of state citizenship.)

Now it occurs to me that the authority for the Nationality Acts must come from the power

To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization

(Article I section 8); so I was naturalized in advance.

In this episode of College Roomies from Hell!, there appears in otherwise Spanish dialogue (the author is Mexican, I believe) the word Sepa, which would be pronounced like French sais pas (“dunno”), which fits the context.

I was thinking about the notion of a brain interface that delivers text to a layer after vision: the user “sees” the letters at their most abstract, but not their graphic details. What would that experience be like? Could it include meta-linguistic features analogous to indentation?

And then I thought: what if the first form of “writing” were something like Morse or ASCII?

Sequoyah, though illiterate himself, saw the power of representing sounds on paper, and thus was motivated to design the Cherokee syllabary (borrowing forms from roman type). Imagine a martian Sequoyah who is somehow aware of humans’ use of digital transmission; what would ghlo create?

How much is known about quipu?