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Random musings from a Midwesterner in Beantown.

Wednesday, May 26, 2004

Revolution Part II: Preventing Judicial Activism 

An open letter from a resident of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts...

An interesting ploy in the evolution of our democratic experiment is about to take place. A lot of people are nervous about the "Don't Let Massachusetts Gay Marriage Happen to the Rest of the U.S. Act"... One moment... Oh, I'm sorry, I'm told it's actually the "Accountability for Judicial Activism Act."

Basically, it states that Congress can overturn a Supreme Court ruling with a 2/3rds majority vote, if the ruling itself involves a constitutional interpretation of any legislation. And it goes into effect immediately--thus affecting any judicial interpretation of the act itself.

Will this lead to another revolution? I doubt it. Assuming it's enacted--and given our current president and legislature, that's somewhat likely--let's play out the possibilities:

1. BECOMES LAW, RULED UNCONSTITUTIONAL, 2/3RDS VOTE FAILS. Thanks for playing. Try again next term.

2. BECOMES LAW, RULED UNCONSTITUTIONAL, 2/3RDS VOTE PASSES. Highly unlikely, but creates a constitutional crisis. There are so many variables here--including the makeup of the court, the sitting president, changes in congressional makeup, etc.--that it's hard to predict the result here, but it's not pretty. Fortunately it's unlikely.

So how do we avoid this mess? First, VOTE! I expressed in earlier columns just a few reasons why voter turnout is so low. But here is a great issue (gay marriage that is) that should have liberals and conservatives alike out pounding the streets and voting their consciences.

Second, write your congressman expressing your concern over the potential constitutional crisis this creates. Congress is treading into dangerous waters here. What's to stop them from trying the same thing all over again, but this time only requiring a simple majority? How do we get out of that crisis? If I were a betting man, I'd pick Congress over the Supreme Court in a fight for control of the military any day!

I'm sure Representative Lewis listened to his conscience when he authored this act. He was responding to what he sincerely felt was a gross misuse of judicial power. But if that is the case, the he has responded in kind--an eye for an eye. It is a gross misuse of legislative power that effectively instills into Congress the power to override the constitutional interpretations of our Supreme Justices. It is in my lay-interpretation a gross injustice.

If a signal must be sent to overreaching justices, it should be done through the existing checks we have in place on the judiciary. Appoint new judges, vote them out of office when possible, or initiate impeachment processes against the judges when possible. If these aren't effective means of checking the judiciary, then begin the constitutional amendment process to adjust the checks and balances accordingly.

Mr Lewis, shame on you for initiating this sharade. If you truly are following your conscience, then you should have picked a more appropriate means of correcting the balance of our constitutional system. If not, well, I can confidently state that the conservative political base of Kentucky is now comfortably assured of your stance against gay marriage.

Tuesday, May 25, 2004

White Castle 

While nowhere near as good as Bate's Burgers, White Castle still has its appeal, apparently.

Friday, May 21, 2004

E-Voting for the Revolution 

You (probably won't have) heard it here first: if we don't clean up and standardize electronic voting, we put our entire democractic system at risk. The contention over key swing states like Florida is still fresh in our minds. Now combine that with reported vote irregularities in other hotspots. Transfer of power was very orderly in the last election because our fundamental belief in the overall order of things was not shaken--sure, Floridians don't seem to understand the butterfly ballot, but hey, that's Florida for you. They don't drive that well either, I'm told. But I live in Boston... And I digress as well...

This time around, things are different. Suddenly, the old semi-reliable punch cards have been replaced with new-fangled computers, and your vote is recorded not by a card reader or myopic (or soon to be) election official, but by a black box, the workings of which are unknown and which have been called into question.

Sure, video can be faked, but nobody called into question the images we saw of the close scrutiny so many questionable votes received. We were annoyed but relieved that our government's future is in the hands of, well, a human being we can see.

Now what happens if we have a repeat of 2000, but with computers instead of chads and dimples? Who or what is to blame now if exit polls don't match actual counts or enough people feel that their district's voting numbers don't quite seem right? How do you initiate a recount of digital votes? Does the elections commissioner press a "recount" button on the screen? When the computer finishes its tallies several seconds later, exactly how relieved will he--and the rest of his district--be when the count is, inevitably, exactly the same as before (quantum computing aside, a bit is either on or off, a vote either yes or no).

No pictures of hard-working clerks will be available to reassure the public that their best interests are at heart, and, just to be safe, being recorded for posterity's sake ("dammit, look closely, that was a BUSH vote she threw in the Gore pile!"). No, only a computer, possibly made by a large contributer to the candidate you oppose, reassuring you in a couple lines of output on a computer screen (and maybe a few checksums) that its millions of lines of proprietary code are not flawed.

No. Just a black box. Or rather, thousands of black boxes connected together somehow. How does such a machine reassure the public that it is accurately reflecting their desires?

It stikes me that someone was probably writing something very similar to this when the first voting machines were built. Is there that much of a difference between the "man behind the curtain" behind the curtain [sic. - get it?] of the early mechanical voting booth and the wizard that is the code controlling the new electronic voting machine? Maybe not. But I imagine the machines made a very reassuring noise when your vote was recorded (this can be programmed in of course).

It seems naive to extrapolate that, because we've finally become comfortable entering credit card information online, we're not the least bit concerned with entering our vote similarly. The credit card company says we're only liable for 50 bucks if someone steals our card. What assurances does the U.S. government give? Can we initiate a California-style recall because we've become unhappy with our purchase? "I'm sorry, I know I had four year to try him out, but he seemed pretty harmless until he started prying into MY life..."

I would hate to be living in what some future historian will call the Fall of the American Empire or some other broad generalization, all because people lost faith in the most fundamental duty of a democratic society, voting.

So what can be done? Hey, what do I look like, Ask Jeeves? But I do have a few thoughts...

1. OPEN UP THE BOX. It works for Linux, why not voting? I can guarantee you that people fear power-hungry corporate executives much more than any well-organized, politically-active geeks (isn't that pretty much an oxymoron anyway?) that might somehow find a way of undermining the principles of open computing without somebody else figuring it out.

2. GIVE US A RECEIPT. I get a receipt for the pack of gum I buy at the store. Give me one for my presidential vote too, while you're at it. Don't put my name on it, just my vote and perhaps some kind of code I can enter on a secure website to privately check my vote a few hours later. My anonymity is preserved, and my trust in the system instantly reaffirmed.

Friday, May 14, 2004

Great Astronomy Book 

Although my Armchair Astronomer pages have lapsed, my interest hasn't flagged. There's a great book that was first published in 1952 and is still in print today: H.A. Rey's The Stars: A New Way to See Them. It's a really good introductory text on the night sky. Strongly recommended.

Tuesday, May 11, 2004

I Love Fark 

Ripped from the headlines at Fark.com:

Detroit man named governor of Najaf. Najaf is kind of like Detroit, only with a smaller Arab population and less gunplay.

Friday, May 07, 2004

Michigan WW II Hero Fought Alongside Americans, Russians 

Muskegon Veteran recounts tale that brought him from Michigan to the UK to Normandy to Russia to Germany. Some Michigan History while we're at it.

Tuesday, May 04, 2004

Quincy Quincy Quincy 

Quincy, Massachusetts, our first home in Massachusetts, is not only the birthplace of Dunkin' Donuts and Howard Johnson's (our very first apartment on Southern Avenue near Quincy Point was not too far from the first Dunkin' D's, and our apartment in Wollaston sat right across from the MBTA parking lot that was the original home of HoJo's). It was also the home of three (yes, that's right, *three*) American presidents: John Adams, John Quincy Adams, and John Hanckock of the signature fame. Wait, you might say, I might not still be able to remember all the state capitals, and please don't ask me who came first, Grover Cleveland or Benjamin Harrison, but I'm pretty sure John Hancock wasn't president of the U.S. You'd be right. But he was president of the Continental Congress which pretty much ran the place before Washington came around. There's a great history of Quincy online.

When we first moved to Massachusetts, we began getting someone else's mail. Despite the stark difference in Zip Codes (02169 versus 49082), for a short amount of time Mr. and Mrs. Van Hoosear of Quincy, Michigan and Mr. and Mrs. Van Hoosear of Quincy, Massachusetts struck up a correspondence to compensate. We are distantly related, and we able to trace our common ancestry fairly accurately thanks to some great research done at the turn of the 20th century by a David Van Hoosear, as I recall (and additional research that my "Grandma Van" did).

Quincy, Michigan was indeed named for Quincy, Mass. A Dr. Hiram Allen suggested the name Quincy, after his home town in Massachusetts, when settlers in the areas broke away from the surrounding Coldwater Township.

But there's another Quincy of import in Michigan: The Quincy Mining Company was founded in 1846 to dig for native copper deposits on property near Hancock, Michigan. History is unclear as to where the name came from (there's a lake in the area that goes by that name).

Monday, May 03, 2004

John Quincy Adams Supported Michigan's Claim to Toledo 

Yet another useless factoid associating Michigan and Massachusetts, just to keep the title of this blog somewhat relevant. Most Michiganders or Ohioans have heard of the Toledo War but may not know all the facts about it. The only bloodshed in this war, for instance, was a tavern fight in which a sheriff from Michigan was stabbed. And did you know that Massachusetts Representative and former president John Quincy Adams supported Michigan saying, "Never in the course of my life have I known a controversy of which all the right so clearly on one side and all the power so overwhelmingly on the other?" Well now you do.

Next story: the difference between Quincy, Michigan and Quincy, Massachusetts.

Saturday, May 01, 2004

Digital Beings in an Analog World 

A couple days ago I walked by someone wearing a t-shirt only a mathematician, logician or philosopher could truly appreciate. The front of the shirt read "The statement on the back of this shirt is true." So what did the back of the shirt read? "The statement on the front of this shirt is false," of course. It was very ironic, as the chapter of The Universe and the Teacup by K.C. Cole I was reading that day was dealing with that very same issue: paradoxes.

Gödel was probably the first person to really recognize the limitations of mathematics to describe reality. To illustrate his insight, Cole gave us the sentence "This sentence is false" as an example. If it's true that it's false, then isn't it really true? And if it's false that it's false, isn't it in fact then true? (Whoa, hold on, gotta take another toke on the bong...) Gödel suggested that the sentence is only paradoxical if we focus on its internal validity and try to describe in mathematical terms the logical consistency of its self-references. If we can break out of the feedback loop, so to speak, we can judge the sentence's validity from another perspective.

Truth, the reader begins to realize, depends on your perspective. Your context. She then turns to computer logic, and specifically, language recognition. Take these two sentences:

"Time flies like an arrow."
"Fruit flies like a banana."

Although you and I might have to think twice about these sentences when we hear them together like this, taken in the context of a conversation, we have no trouble understanding their meaning. Computers don't have such an easy time. How easy is it to determine the subject, verb, object, etc., without access to a complex set of rules and some amount of contextual information (e.g., prior discussion of either bugs or the aerodynamics of fruit)?

Paradoxes come about because we apply (usually binary) logic to situations and expect them to be neatly categorized. I think one of her points is that this is not always necessary or true. What we think is the truth may in fact be limited by our perspective. We try to impose a schema on the world that aligns with how we perceive the world. But looks can be deceiving. A line isn't always a line, for example. A two-dimensional plane looks like a line to someone looking on edgewise. A three-dimensional sphere looks like a circle to someone unable to perceive depth.

Our brains have been designed to perceive things in a certain manner. Two extremely important functions that our brain must perform are filtering and categorizing. "Pay attention to this," "ignore that." "Friend, foe." "Food, preditor." I would argue that the binary numbering system that anyone familiar with computers takes as so fundamental arises from our built-in preference for such very simple but critical (at least for our initial survival and development) logic. But could our perspective be wrong? Are we looking at the problem edgewise?

My next science/philosophy excursions will explore some other interesting points she makes on how numbers can be deceiving and the nature of time and symmetry. Then I might go off on my own tangent on how our basic survival skills and mental coping mechanisms have skewed our perspective. And perhaps I'll find some more silliness to focus on too, lest we take ourselves too seriously.

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