Five Point Update - February 7, 2016

1. Track in heavy rotation - Run into the Sun by Joachim Svare, Julia Michaels. I am trying to invoke some sympathetic magic for some earnest spring weather. 

2. What I'm watching - Foundations of Modern Social Theory with Iván Szelényi, a series of Yale lectures made available on YouTube:

The subject can be dry at times (especially when he starts covering Weber), but the guy's enthusiasm for ideas is infectious. Plus: lots of juicy gossip on the personal lives of philosophers.

3.  Purchase I'm excited about -  The uni-ball KuruToga mechanical pencil. It's got a sophisticated internal mechanism to prevent breakage and ensure the point stays sharp. Plus, diamond-infused lead - which gives you an idea how worthless crystallized carbon really is. 

4. Article I'm reading -  You're Wrong About Voicemail  by Leslie Horn. The Philippines was overtaken by text and email before it had a chance to develop communications practices around voicemail. Which is a shame.

5. Podcast I'm listening to - Note to Self, which explores all the good and maddening ways we relate to our phones and our tech. 

Susan Kare (Layers 2015)

From Wired:

Here, Kare, icon of icons, talks about the creative decisions behind some of the best-loved symbols of the past four decades.

Susan discusses her history with Apple and icon design, and sits down with John Gruber to talk design.

Jankufūdo

Getting nutritious, wholesome food isn't a problem here in Japan. Good vegetables and meat (forget Kobe beef - the professors swear by Nagasaki and Sasebo - and I'm inclined to agree). And the seafood! I'd like to imagine that there is a ministry bureaucrat out there who cares deeply, maniacally about the catch, and would weep and be anguished by shame if the freshness in the shelves go below a very fine threshold.

What I haven't had luck with is finding good junk food. And by that I mean bad junk food. Because hey, what good is existence without some little self-destructive tendencies? I buy a bag of local potato chips, and they have low sodium, and the spuds are from some organic farm in Hokkaido. It says right there in the package - and there are pictures of the honest, noble farmers that grew them. I go for the rice crackers, and they have no MSG and they have all sorts of nuts and vegetables baked in. 

So imagine my happiness when I got a "care package" full of my favorite junk food from the Philippines (Thanks, Remir and Farrah!). Salty, oily, high-carbohydrate snacks made in a factory. For now, things are as they should be. 

Kara

Not enough to tide me over until the next movie comes out. But I will take what I can. 

Blood Laws

SolGen invokes Harry Potter house Slytherin in David v. Poe comment :

"One must therefore be similarly mindful of the almost-comical scale with which we are scrutinizing the purity of [Poe's] blood, as if purity of blood were a standard for capacity to govern—as if our nation belonged to House Slytherin; and this scrutiny assumes an ironic twist when considered against the backdrop of our aggressive attempts to justify the Filipino citizenship of others just so we may, as a nation, improve our athletic or cultural profile," chided the OSG in point 69 of its response.

It's not about whether or not an office (or a court) supports a particular candidate. Rulings on constitutional law are not just about apportioning the rights of parties. They reach into values that define us as a people. A genetic standard for citizenship will take us into a place far, far darker than House Slytherin:

Chart explaining the "Nuremberg Blood Laws", a chillingly detailed accounting of rights based on descent.

I Moved to Linux and It’s Even Better Than I Expected

From Medium:

Copyright is key to what my friend Cory Doctorow has called the “coming civil war war over general purpose computing,” a campaign, sometimes overt, to prevent the people who buy gear — you and me, individually and in our schools, businesses, and other organizations — from actually owning it. Copyright law is the control freaks’ leverage, because it allows them to legally prevent us from tinkering (they’d say tampering) with what they sell.

Of course, unless you know how to fork, code, and compile your own applications, you are to a certain extent surrendering your freedom to a different sort of control freak - the stewards of the codebase. 

Review: The History of Rome

I was stuck in the dorm for most of the Winter Break. One of the few good things amidst all that cold, and gout, and boredom is that I was finally able to 1) get some thesis writing done and 2) finish The History of Rome podcast. 

Mike Duncan's award winning podcast is an ambitious and entertaining journey through a thousand years - from the legendary founding of Rome to the fall of the Western Empire. It covers a very, very long arc of history. School courses tend to cover only the comparatively brief rise of current nation-states. Everything is condensed into a story of "great men" (and it is mostly men, unfortunately). It ignores the slow but massive socio-economic undercurrents that  build through time. 

It is dangerous to make instant parallels between Roman history and the troubles of a young struggling democracy, like my country. But I've just listened through the times of Julius Caesar to Aurelius to Constantine and beyond, so I feel somewhat cocky. What makes Roman history, and Roman law, still relevant is the universality of the human condition. "All of this has happened before, and will happen again."

So. Some lessons:

1. Hereditary succession is almost always a bad idea.  

2. There is nothing more essential, and more fragile, than a rule of law.

3. Nobody really ever wins wars.

4. Naked populism without discourse is asking for tyranny.

5. Empires fall.