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 Perhaps there is something in the laws of those States, enacted before 1868 and never repealed.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.

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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?

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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?

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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.

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oblique pedals

Pedaling a bicycle is painful for me, because a crooked hip makes the knee transmit force at an unnatural angle. But perhaps I could mitigate that (if I had any relevant skills) by making the pedals’ axis oblique, connected to the main gear by bevel gears.

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toon trek

A few years ago I decided, having got behind and lost the thread of my favorite webcomics, to start them over; and then developed a more quixotic ambition: to sample as many webcomics as I can find and, more daunting, to catch up (eventually) on the good ones.

I sort the bookmarks by date, and read the oldest first. (I conceived that practice in the early days when crossovers were common.) At the moment I’m twenty years behind; if I can maintain a pace of three days per day, I’ll catch up in ten years.

Posted in cartoons | 4 Comments