The meme “why not regulate guns like cars?” was much blogged last week. Anthony Swenson wrote:

The real reason we should dislike the driver’s license model: Driving is not in the Bill of Rights. The right to keep and bear arms is.

I wrote to him:

Are you sure that driving is not in there?

Freedom to travel is as fundamental as self-defense; it’s near the top of the Articles of Confederation (“the people of each state shall have free ingress and regress to and from any other state”, Art.IV); and therefore is covered in the Ninth Amendment if anything is. Just as the RKBA does not go away with new technology, neither does a 9A right to exercise the normal means of travel.

In my humble opinion.

Swen wrote back:

I guess my short response would be: Fine, you defend your vision of rights and I’ll defend mine. The long answer would have something to do with the ‘Commerce Clause’. But this is thought provoking.. would you mind if I blog this?

Better yet, set up a blog – it is an awful lot of fun..

So I did.

Later: See also.

Peeve: Redundantly numbered lists, such as this list of 134 worst movies, numbered in alphabetical order from 1 to 102.

The median date of the champion turkeys, by the way, is 1988. Amazing.

Update (December 2003): They took the numbers off!

I’ve begun to learn to use Ken Brakke’s Surface Evolver. Haven’t yet found whether it has the one feature that would make it ideal for my exploration of nonspherical ‘dome’ forms: ability to constrain the edges to equal length.

The documentation says non-orientable surfaces are allowed, but so far Evolver has not allowed me to make a Klein bottle.

Sinfest borrows a riff from Whose Line Is It Anyway?.

Today I bought Devil’s Legacy, a reprint of my then favorite of Matt Wagner’s Grendel stories. The new color job and slick paper make the Pander Bros artwork even more hard-edged and vivid, unless my memory (of 1986) is what’s soft at the edges.

This article (found at SciTech Daily) tells about tiny autonomous fliers proposed for Mars.

Bees may also provide a solution for navigating on Mars, where there is no GPS network or magnetic field to tell one pole from another. Bees use a combination of polarization patterns in the sky, landmarks, and distance traveled to navigate.

Is satellite-assisted navigation unlikely for Mars? How many birds does it take? If the flier gets even one fix a day, it can correct gross errors in dead-reckoning.

Everybody’s doing it.
Well, what shall I talk about first?
How about the last book I read? Yeah.

I learned roughly three things from It’s the Little Things: Everyday Interactions That Anger, Annoy, and Divide the Races by Lena Williams (Harcourt, 2000):

• Long un-kinky blond hair is a status symbol forever out of Blacks’ reach, and some resent seeing a White gratuitously flip such hair about.
• Because of the ‘boy’ thing, Blacks don’t take first-naming as a friendly gesture.
• You can write for the New York Times for 25 years without learning to use the parenthetical comma properly.