The Natural Linguist

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 ...

So we have another shooting, this time in a theater in Louisiana. I can't stand it. I have to say this. Sorry it's long. Guns don't kill people -- not unless you bash them over the head with one. It's the bullets that do the actual tissue disruption, both epidermal and otherwise. Seriously, though, I see the same old arguments repeated every time multiple (usually) white people get shot by non-police and its predictableness somehow manages to be both sad and hilarious at the the same time. When you get right down to it, the common factor in all these occurrences is not mental illness, it is not drugs, it is not the lack of gruntlement. It is guns. That fact cannot be avoided or ignored by even the most evidence-denying partisan. Mental illness has been with us since the dawn of civilization. And many murderous attacks have been committed by both the cold, calculating sociopath and the berserk frenzy of one completely off the rails. These crimes have been greatly a...

I have seen some very disturbing trends in the last few weeks that prompted some vague misgivings at the time. It is only recently that the issue has become very clear in my mind. A question from my daughter has prompted me to answer in this public fashion. We are seeing the beginnings of a new and terrible form of discrimination and I would consider it an act of cowardice if I did not speak out in the strongest terms possible. Certain churches have theological tenets that prevent them from extending to gay people the full benefits of participation in their organization. This is perfectly within their rights since people are free to associate with those churches or not. But now those churches would like the government to create laws that allow them, based on the principle of free exercise of religion, to extend the reach of their theological tenets outside the walls of their church buildings and to impose them on other people. This is wrong. It is antithetical to the very foundation o...

What is Freedom? I always thought I knew: my right to swing my fist stops at the end of your nose. While it is difficult to know who originally formulated this thought, it is nevertheless a pithy expression of the concept of boundaries. The problem with this statement is that it only easily applies to things whose ownership is clear and unambiguous: property, persons, patents, etc. When the boundaries between meum and tuum are less clear, that's when things get interesting. Let us take the case of vaccination as an example. Much has been written on this topic and so I will not attempt a detailed excursus of the various schools of thought. Indeed, for the purposes of this discussion, it doesn't matter so much who is right or wrong. The question exercising me is how individual liberty relates to the public weal. The mathematician John Nash showed how our self interest depends not only on our own choices, but also in interesting ways on the choices of other people. The question ...

What is evil? What is the nature of evil? My first impulse was to say "I may not be able to define it, but I know it when I see it." But I realized that's a cop out. So let's say Lawrence Krause is right and the universe is a spontaneous creation from nothing. Before consciousness evolves, can evil even exist? I don't think so. If an asteroid crashes into a planet, it's just following its trajectory. If there was no life on the planet, the needle on the Evil-O-Meter(TM) doesn't even twitch. If there was life, and the asteroid's impact killed it all, still no evil. After all, the asteroid was a rock whose trajectory had been determined eons before. It was just a chance meeting in space. So clearly evil requires life, consciousness, and intent. Let us stipulate for the purposes of argument that God doesn't exist. Because then we avoid The Big Cop Out. I think a good place to start from here is the intentional infliction of suffering on another....

Many people are concerned about the long-term societal effects of altering the definition of marriage, so I thought it would be useful to put my two cents out there with this little discussion. Marriage has been used for many purposes at various times and places: to get money and land, to consolidate political power, to control behavior, to ensure good breeding. What we are defending as "traditional marriage" is neither very old nor very widely practiced in the world. If it is God's definition, then he either has changed his mind a lot over time or he has just recently started to care about enforcing it. In any case, the main motivations for same sex couples wanting marriage equality are not religious, but legal, financial, and social. We are willing that homosexual people should put themselves in harm's way defending our country in the military, serving in law enforcement, or protecting people as fire fighters or EMTs. We accept their tax dollars. We require they ...

The recent Supreme Court decision involving the Hobby Lobby company has sparked a lot of commentary. With lots of friends and acquaintances all over the political spectrum, it has been interesting to read everyone's varying reactions. This has got me thinking about freedom on this day where we celebrate our freedom. The famous quote by the less-famous judicial philosopher Zechariah Chafee is a common refrain: "The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins." Some days it seems like everybody is worried about freedom. In the Hobby Lobby case, for example, those with a conservative viewpoint consider it a victory for religious freedom. Many people who identify with the liberal perspective see it as an ominous precedent, ultimately detrimental to personal liberty. To name another perennial hot-button topic, the debate about gun control is often phrased in terms of rights and freedom. On one side, people want to be free to carry a gun while others are...