What's Mine is Mine

In "The Man Who Sold the Moon", author Robert Heinlein talks about property law. In the book, he talks about how a plot of land you own extends down to a dot near the center of the earth and extends up forever. He used this idea as a plot device to allow his protagonist to claim ownership of the moon by buying up great tracts of land around the equator.

But I was much struck by the idea. Just think of all the things that are briefly yours as the swath of sky you own sweeps the heavens out to infinity. Just think of the complex path that swath takes when you consider the rotation of the earth on its axis, its orbital path around the sun, the movement of our solar system around the center of our galaxy, and our stately dance with the other systems in our galactic supercluster! And all the things that pass through your airspace (many at considerably faster than the speed of light, I might add) are your property for that briefest of instants.

Your sovereignty over the extent of your property out to infinity was recognized by most Western legal systems from medieval times until the era of commercial air travel began, when it was capped off at 500 feet to allow for the free passage of air travel. Humph! Another romantic dream shattered. The law giveth and the law taketh away.

So, keep your drones out of my 500 feet of airspace, or else ;)

Posted with Blogsy

Comments

Comments on Paradox: On Ownership

It's funny, but not not surprising, that we seem to have had some similar life experiences. The notion of ownership has been very transformative in my life, too. I can clearly recall several instances of what some might call an epiphany, where I experienced an overwhelming realization of ownership. These instances were all similar -- a sudden certainty, like a light turning on, that I was in the right place at the right time doing the right thing for the right reasons; and the not-unpleasant sensation of a new weight of responsibility settling on my shoulders, a weight I was comfortably able to bear. For the longest time, I had no word to describe these experiences, but I have come to view them as taking ownership. These experiences, and the habit of ownership that arose from them, have been very instrumental in any successes I have experienced in my life. Every religion on the planet is probably eager to offer an interpretation of these experiences -- to frame them in the phraseol...

The North-going Zax and the South-going Zax

Yesterday, I was on my lunch time walk and had an interesting experience. It lasted perhaps less than 2 seconds and yet I've been thinking about it on and off ever since. I was trundling along at my usual brisk pace, on the right-hand side of the path. A few yards off, I spied a man walking toward me on my side of the sidewalk, two trains heading toward each other on the same track. As we grew closer, I instinctively hugged the right-hand margin a little closer and he did the same. When it became clear that we were on a collision course, the image of the old Dr. Seuss story about the North-going Zax and the South-going Zax popped into my head. In the story, the two Zaxes meet and stand there for years, each too stubborn to give way to the other, while a city grows up around them. For about a quarter of a second, I contemplated such a pissing contest and realized that such a course of action did not advance my goal of getting back to work in time for my 2:00 meeting. So I swerve...

To Boldly Split Infinitives

This is somewhat a manifesto. English is not Latin. We can put prepositions at the end of a sentence if we want to. And we can start sentences with a conjunction! If we want to boldly split infinitives, then we're perfectly welcome to do so. Why? Because these are all syntactically correct constructs in English; they parse. And even more, they convey meaning to other speakers of the language, which is the real test of whether something is permitted in a language. My seventh grade English teacher, Mrs. Doane, a throwback to the 19th century prescriptivist grammarians, would no doubt sniff disapprovingly and peer with narrowed eyes over her Far Side-style glasses at such goings on. However, now I have the M.A. in Linguistics and can scowl back with gravitas. And so I will echo those marvelous Churchillian words: " This is the type of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put. " But in the end, I must confess that it was Guy Deutscher who freed me from the pointless tyran...

The Natural Linguist

Search This Blog