(Which) People Kill People

The Texas state legislature is moving to legalize handguns on college campuses. The theory goes that this would make everyone safer, because law-abiding gun shooters would be able to take out rampage shooters before they do too much damage. But it didn't work out that way in Arizona, did it? In fact, there is a high correlation between permissive gun laws and shooting deaths. And the famously permissive Arizonans now poll ahead of national averages in favor of stricter gun control.

There is also a deeper problem here. We may buy our Second Amendment rights at the price of our Fourth Amendment rights.

It sounds reasonable that those without a history of violence should be unfettered in their exercise of the Second Amendment. But such a regime can only ever stop the second attack, never the first. (Jared Loughner had no history of violence and was under no court order restricting his access to a weapon.) In order to allow the "good guys" to buy guns and not the "bad guys", the state must be able to predict who will become violent in the future -- for example, based on mental health records. That means that they must have those records, must be allowed to share them across agencies, and must be allowed to restrict your actions based on hypotheses about future crimes you may commit -- despite doubts about the predictive usefulness of such records.

This is not just about health records. This is about a culture of surveillance. In an Information Age, we must protect our digital selves as we protect our physical selves. We have a choice to make: expose the personal information necessary to distinguish us from one another, and risk its misuse, or accept principled limitations on everyone's behavior while maintaining our privacy.

Y1969

Y2000 Problem: Software failures due to two-digit years rolling over to zero. Fixed by increasing the range of numbers used to store dates.

Y2038 Problem: Software failures due to the UNIX clock -- measuring seconds since January 1, 1970 -- erroneously rolling over into negative territory. Fixed by increasing the range of numbers used to store dates.

...and came up in conversation today; could be a big issue in the future and in the past but never in the present:

Y1969 Problem: Software failures due to the UNIX clock correctly rolling over into negative territory while the subjective time of the affected systems remains monotonically increasing. Only observed when traveling backwards in time. No known fix.

Cultural Misunderstanding

Me, in a restaurant in Texas: "That half-rack of ribs -- are those spare ribs or baby back ribs?"
Waitress: "They're pork ribs."
Me: briefest of pauses "Sounds good -- I'll go with that."

Reminiscent of this classic:

Lloyd: "What's the soup du jour?"
Waitress: "It's the soup of the day."
Lloyd: "Mmm, that sounds good. I'll have that."