Archive

Law & Order, or Game of Thrones? The Legal Landscape of Space Exploration

I per­son­al­ly am not wor­ried about set­tle­ments. I think they’re so far in the future that we can’t pre­dict what they’ll look like. We can’t even keep human beings, par­tic­u­lar­ly a lot of human beings, alive in space or have real set­tle­ments, the way we envi­sion a colony or a set­tle­ment. I don’t think the lack of sov­er­eign­ty is going to hurt any of this.

Decentralize, Democratize, or Die

You might be more com­fort­able think­ing about deploy­ing math and code as your tac­tic, but I want to talk to you about the full suite of tac­tics that we use to effect change in the world. And this is a frame­work that we owe to this guy Lawrence Lessig.

The Conversation #64 — Peter Gleick

We have even in the United States seri­ous and grow­ing water scarci­ty chal­lenges. We have con­t­a­m­i­na­tion prob­lems with chem­i­cals that we have not ade­quate­ly reg­u­lat­ed here in the United States. We have con­flicts between states in the United States about who gets to use what water to do what. We have evi­dence that cli­mate change is already influ­enc­ing water demand, affect­ing water avail­abil­i­ty, chang­ing extreme events. There are a whole suite of water-related prob­lems, here, unre­lat­ed to these basic human need chal­lenges that’re press­ing in oth­er parts of the world.

The Monkey Selfie” Case: Can Non-Humans Hold Copyrights?

Naruto, then 3 years old, came up and picked up one of his cam­eras and start­ed look­ing at it. And he made the con­nec­tion… By Mr. Slater’s own admis­sion he made the con­nec­tion between push­ing the shut­ter release but­ton and the change to his reflec­tion in the lens when the aper­ture opened and closed.

Inflection Point on Truthiness

Well I believe there is a truth we share. I think it’s our sense of jus­tice. I think of the great Paul Newman depic­tion in The Verdict, his clos­ing argu­ment when he speaks to the jury and says, You are the law. I believe there is jus­tice in our hearts.” So the truth, the ver­dict. Vera dic­tos, speak the truth. That’s what juries are told to do.

1,862 Fewer Years in Prison

We make the fam­i­ly an essen­tial and effec­tive part of the defense team, so they could change the out­come of cas­es and trans­form the land­scape of pow­er in the court system.

Data & Society Databite #41: Ifeoma Ajunwa on Genetic Coercion

The mythol­o­gy of genet­ic coer­cion is thoughts that genet­ic data, espe­cial­ly large-scale genet­ic data­bas­es, have the abil­i­ty to pin­point cer­tain risk of dis­ease. They pro­vide agency to act to pre­vent such dis­ease, and it can be used to cre­ate accu­rate per­son­al­ized treat­ment for dis­ease, and it should also be entrust­ed with the author­i­ty to dic­tate the mod­i­fi­ca­tion of the genome for future generations. 

Nobody Knows a Damn Thing

I’ve always been real­ly inter­est­ed in this idea of whether or not we can pre­dict hits. You speak to any­one who works in the enter­tain­ment indus­try, and every­one has their was sto­ries of that film they were sure was going to become a hit which some­how became a miss. There are niche films which appeal to every­one, and per­haps more like­ly, films that are designed to appeal to every­one which some­how appeal to no one.

The Essence of Sandwichness,” Including the Official New York Definition of a Sandwich

I love read­ing gov­ern­ment mem­os because the world is an unclas­si­fi­able place, but the peo­ple that write these mem­os have to try to clas­si­fy it any­way, and the results get weird. You get these clas­si­fi­ca­tion odd­i­ties, these reg­u­la­to­ry platypuses.