RDCB

A generation ago, it was reported that Readers Digest Condensed Books planned an edition of The Bible, provoking obvious jokes that it would cut three Commandments and four Apostles.

Now that I’m reading the thing, though, I do see where it could be shortened with little risk of offense.

  • Genesis and Exodus contain several repeated genealogies.
  • Exodus 36–39 could be summarized: “The tabernacle and its furnishings were made according to the detailed plans dictated to Moses by The LORD in chapters 25–27.” (I mostly skimmed over these chapters.)
  • Leviticus 1–7, prescribing rituals of sacrifice for all occasions, could be put more concisely in table format, as could various parts of Numbers.
  • Leviticus 13–14, concerning skin infections, may be obsolete.
  • Leviticus 18:6–18 details varieties of incest, all equally forbidden, and could be collapsed with “or”.
  • Joshua 13–21 mostly details the boundaries of the lands allotted to each of the tribes.

I will likely add to this later.

In some places the repetition makes me think the tale was relayed orally for some generations before being written.

Posted in prose, religion | 1 Comment

qualified peeve

Not a week goes by when I don’t read that some trial court has “granted qualified immunity” to some criminal with a badge. That’s inaccurate. The aggressor was granted qualified immunity by the Supreme Court when it invented that doctrine in 1982.

In the popular mind, I guess that word “qualified” is taken to mean that the officer qualifies for immunity as a consequence of his office. But here it is a legal term of art meaning “conditional”, contrasting with the absolute immunity enjoyed by judges and prosecutors in their abuses of discretion.

When a trial court says to a plaintiff, “No recourse for you, because you haven’t cited a published precedent finding liability with exactly similar facts,” it applies the QI rule; but there is nothing qualified about the dismissal. (The q-word would apply if the judge were to dismiss the case without prejudice, allowing the possibility of a new trial if new facts come to light. Does that ever happen in police cases?)

When the pig is so unlucky as to violate “clearly established law”, he still has qualified immunity, which happens not to protect him for this incident.

Posted in language, law | Leave a comment

my citizenship(s)

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.

Posted in law, me!me!me! | 1 Comment

adventures in language borrowing

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.

Posted in language | Leave a comment

concepts that are not quite writing

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?

Posted in language, technology | Leave a comment

a question of aspect

The refrain of P. F. Sloan’s song “Let Me Be” (recorded by the Turtles) concludes,

I am what I am and that’s all I ever can be.

Defiance or fatalism?

Posted in music+verse | Leave a comment

upload/resurrection fantasy, again

Previous version.

If your thousands of instances are linked in a line, the youngest and eldest are affected only very slowly by blending (if the middle is not to be hugely overrepresented); that is why I came up with daily sex-switching. The deletion of one avatar each night is also implied by the merging.

But if you start with two copies of the chain, linked at matching ends to make a loop, then no deletion is necessary and the degree of blending can be the same all around; each-you imports yesterday’s memory from your clockwise and counterclockwise neighbors alternately, with a weight of 1/3 or less. A permanent body has social advantages, so I drop the automatic switching.

If a body dies, voluntarily or otherwise, an irregularity in the blending flows out, becoming smaller at each step. Why would you kill one of your bodies voluntarily? For one thing, I mean to keep the idea of alternating sexes around the loop, and you might find living as the wrong sex, even half the (subjective) time, intolerable. (I believe I am otherwise; else would I have the idea?)

If the friendly(?) aliens’ goal is to merge all of humanity into one meta-mind (think Childhood’s End), your two strands are joined only at the elder end; your baby ends are linked instead to other strands, typically of very distant cultures.

What if your private worldlet has no adults because you died as a minor? Some of everyone’s instances – would every third be enough? – ought to live in a shared world, each in a different town (though all near each other).

2022 Nov 04: I made a more stable page collecting my thoughts from this thread.

Posted in fantasies | 1 Comment