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In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person’s becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American…There can be no divided allegiance here....

My ideal government would be decentralized. The national government would be tiny, maintaining a national military and acting as a mediator between smaller governments. Local governments would hold a great deal of power and local citizens would control the means of production. There would be many powerful small governments, but no centralized big government. No big corporations. The people would be taxed using a flat sales tax for necessary government services, but extra projects would be funded by inflation-indexed rate-capped government bonds....

Whenever we start drawing parallels between men and computing machines we are bound to notice a particular incongruence rather quickly. Namely, men are apparently more indivisible than machines. That is to say, whereas we can talk of a computer requiring some hardware and some software to function, a man cannot be so easily disunited. A man has a brain that we may be tempted to associate with a processor and even memory (hardware), but it is not clear what part of a man we would want to label software....

This is a way of thinking that comes up occasionally in support of the existence of god. Really, I have more issues with the reasoning than I do with the conclusion. Believe what you will, but please don’t offer up chimeras as cornerstones of that belief. I’m not saying all ideas must be grounded in science, I don’t think that at all, but there mustn’t be all this slight of hand to make an explanation convincing....

Partly as a note to self and partly as an effort to help someone else, go here: http://vikram.eggwall.com/computers/nxt.html for tips about getting bluetooth, usb, and nxc to work the NXT under Ubuntu 9.10. It all worked well for me. I’ll likely be doing some of my own write-ups on Linux and the NXT robot, so if you’ve got questions… leave them.

Every year that I’ve been at the UofC we get these lame letters asking us to relate our life and experience at the University to donors or prospective students. I don’t ever participate, as I’m sure that my statements would be heavily censored. Institutionalized education is a big racket; that’s true everywhere – its just more miserable here. If life is misery, then they do well to prepare you at the UofC....

I’m not sure that it is very reassuring as an indication of career prospects, but that depends greatly on perspective. What I am sure of is that it raises some very important questions. Read: http://magazine.uchicago.edu/0910/arts_sciences/philosopher.shtml it’s worth the time, in my opinion. Specifically, I think that the Subject hits a few ideas right on the head. Most importantly, to me: “Too often,” he declares, “the defenders of free markets forget that what we really want is free men....

It’s very handy to be able to spell-check your Spanish homework, and OpenOffice lets you do just that. To get it working, first you need to install the Spanish lanaguae dictionaries by running: sudo apt-get install myspell-es Then, in your document, just go to Tools > Language and pick Spanish for the line, paragraph, or all text – if you don’t see Spanish as an option, then click “more” and change the default language for the document....

…or, alternatively, Why I Don’t Buy Cheap Bread. For whatever reason, you’re on a mission to be frugal. You can’t NOT buy food, so you head on over to your local discount grocer. You proceed to buy grits, powdered milk, cheap hotdogs and then you reach for the cheap bread… Ah, but should you? Well, you inspect the little tag with the price and then you probably notice two things 1) the squishy white enriched bread is cheaper and 2) the price per ounce is closer than you might have thought – possibly even in favor of the more expensive loaf....

So, I’m back in Chicago. Back in classes. Spanish is going well and Logic is quite fun. I was just sitting around thinking about the strange interpretation of if… then statements. In logic, they’re only ever false if the “if” part is true and the “then” part is false. For instance – imagine taking a business to court because they won’t refund your money despite the fact that they sold you inferior products and have the slogan :...