Quotes: Great Minds, Efficient Government, and a Good Deal of Rubbish

"Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people." Eleanor Roosevelt via Costa

"Whenever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship." Harry S Truman

"The price of freedom of religion, or of speech, or of the press, is that we must put up with a good deal of rubbish." Robert Jackson

C-3PO on Your Phone in Ten Years

Today I've got another prediction for this decade: your cell phone will have real-time language translation in the next ten years.

Both Google and Microsoft are working on technologies that will take the words you speak into your cell phone, translate them into another language, and speak those translated words in a synthesized human voice to the person you're calling—doing all of this so fast that there will be no discernible delay in the conversation. Set your phone to translate into German, call your German friend, and have a normal conversation—her in German and you in English. Incredible.

Google has already created software to translate text from one language to another, and it's currently prowling the web, honing its skills by taking in massive amounts of information about language. With an increase processing power and the accuracy of speech-to-text technology, we are going to see a usable, spoken version of this technology come to fruition very soon. Ten years is an overestimate. Some people say it could be as few as two.

Having this technology on your cell phone will pretty much be like having your own C-3PO! All you'll need to do is buy your phone a gold cover and program it to say "we're doomed" in an anxious voice once in a while. Oh—and make sure it's a Droid.

Sources:
Download Squad: Microsoft reveals translating phone
Times Online: Google leaps language barrier with translator phone

Do Yourself a Favor and Buy a Laser Printer

As unlikely as it may seem, one of the best computer tips I ever got came from my mom—who is a wonderful woman, but not the most tech-savvy. After owning several inkjet printers and paying through the nose for years, my mom figured out she could save a ton of money and frustration by buying a laser printer instead.

The ink for inkjet printers is so expensive that they are now being sold like razor blades—manufacturers will sell you an under-priced printer just to get you hooked on ink. Sometimes you can even buy a whole new printer for less money than you can replace the ink cartridges for. Inkjets are also a hellacious pain to use, as this comic hilariously illustrates.

Enter the laser printer. For $100 you can pick up the Brother HL-2140. It's small, reliable, easy to setup and use, and it can churn out 23 pages per minute. Ink costs $30 for a cartridge that will print you 1,500 pages.

Compare that to a pain-in-the-ass, 16 page-per-minute HP Deskjet D1660: the printer is only $30, but the ink is $30 for 600 pages. You'll have made up the price difference after 2,000 pages on the Brother. Oh, and with the Deskjet you'll get 500Mb of HP software attached to the driver to slow down your computer and try to convince you to buy more HP stuff to make up for that $30 price tag.

Now what I haven't told you yet is that color laser printers and ink are pretty expensive. If you go the laser route, you're going to want one that just does black. But here's the thing—you don't need color! You really don't! Let's be real, the pictures you print out of an inkjet printer don't look that great, especially after you've printed a few. If you're like me, you started taking the stuff you really want to look good to a print shop or drugstore years ago. Most of the time you just use color to print everything in dark blue once your black cartridge runs out.

So cut yourself loose! Put your inkjet printer up on Craigslist and go get yourself a fast, money-saving laser printer. Or if you're like most young folks in this world of ubiquitous information access, dump your printer altogether and use your cell phone, email, and the internet to get information where it needs to go. You'll be happy you did.

Top 5 Facts that Should Change the World

I finished Jessica William's 50 Facts that Should Change the World 2.0 last weekend. On the whole I wouldn't recommend the book. It's incredibly depressing and the essays Williams writes about each fact are more lamentations and calls to action than actual analysis of the issues. However, I would recommend going to Amazon.com and reading the table of contents; I think you'll get 99% of what I did out of reading the whole thing. The facts are well-researched and documented, not to mention thought-provoking, and they're really what make the book worth it.

Here are the top five facts which enlightened me the most (in no particular order). I have written or will write blog posts on some of these and other facts from the book.

1. Ninety-four percent of the world's executions in 2005 took place in just four countries: China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the USA.

2. Black men born in the US today stand a one in three chance of going to jail.

3. A third of the world's population is at war.

4. There are 27 million slaves in the world today (more than at any other time in human history).

5. More people die each year from suicide than in all the world's armed conflicts.

(Dis)Honorable Mentions:

Every cow in the European Union is subsidized by $2.50 a day. That's more than what 75% of Africans have to live on.

In Kenya, bribery payments make up a third of the average household budget.

Two million girls and women are subjected to female genital mutilation each year.

Some 120,000 women and girls are trafficked into Western Europe every year.

Every day, one in five of the world's population -- some 800 million people -- go hungry.

April Smith and the Great Picture Show - "Colors"

I've been listening to this song non-stop for a week now. Enjoy!

April Smith and the Great Picture Show - "Colors"

Photos from the Beautiful Blog that Could Be

So as you probably know if you read this blog regularly, my wife Erin has a blog that is infinitely funnier and better than this one. However, she only posts about twice a year, perhaps just to periodically let me know that she can kick my ass whenever she wants to, but simply chooses not to.

As important as this is for me to understand, it sometimes bothers me that the public is missing things that could be on her blog: such as her wonderful photography. So I decided to post a few photos of hers that I found while exploring our hard drive. Enjoy!

(If I do say so myself.)

ErinScottPhotography.com

Does the Constitution Protect Non-Citizens?

In the last few years, we have all heard critics of the government claim that the right of Habeas Corpus has been suspended for the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay in direct violation of the U.S. Constitution. I have always viewed this claim with some skepticism, because it has been my understanding that the Constitution only protects American citizens ("we the people"), and not to terrorists or prisoners of war. Last week, this argument came crumbling down when I read a Salon article about this very topic.

Now let me say here that I'm not a big fan of Salon. The publication leans far too left for me, and tends to do so with such arrogance that I often have a hard time separating the facts from the patronizing outrage. This is particularly true of Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald's writing, and the article in question (which he authored) is no exception. The underlying tone of the article is "only an ignorant idiot could possibly disagree with me," and that kind of thing just isn't helpful. But his points are excellent, so I thought I'd quickly summarize them here as objectively as I could:

1. The U.S. Supreme Court, in 2008, issued a highly publicized opinion, in Boumediene v. Bush, which makes clear the Constitution does not only apply to Americans. The Boumediene Court held that it was unconstitutional for the Military Commissions Act to deny habeas corpus rights to Guantanamo detainees, none of whom was an American citizen (indeed, the detainees were all foreign nationals outside of the U.S.).  If the Constitution applied only to U.S. citizens, that decision would obviously be impossible.  What's more, although the decision was 5-4, none of the 9 Justices—and, indeed, not even the Bush administration—argued that the Constitution applies only to American citizens.

2. There are millions of foreign nationals inside the U.S. at all times—not only illegally but also legally: as tourists, students, workers, Green Card holders, etc. Doesn't the Bill of Rights apply to them? If a foreign national is arrested and accused by the U.S. Government of committing a crime, can they be sentenced to prison without a jury trial, denied the right to face their accusers, have their property seized without due process, be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment, and be denied access to counsel? Anyone who claims that the Constitution only protects American citizens, but not foreigners, would necessarily have to claim that the U.S. Government could do all of that to foreign nationals. Would it be Constitutionally permissible to own foreigners as slaves on the ground that the protections of the Constitution—including the Thirteenth Amendment—apply only to Americans, not foreigners? Obviously not.

3. The Bill of Rights says nothing about "citizens." To the contrary, many of the provisions are simply restrictions on what the Government is permitted to do ("Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion...or abridging the freedom of speech"; "No soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the owner").  And where rights are expressly vested, they are pointedly not vested in "citizens," but rather in "persons" or "the accused" ("No person shall...be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law"; "In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed...and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense").

There are, of course, certain Constitutional rights that are clearly reserved only for citizens—such as the right to vote or to hold elective office—but when that is the case, the Constitution explicitly states that to be so ("The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States...").  Indeed, the Fourteenth Amendment, in the very same clause, demonstrates the distinction between "citizens" (which only includes "Americans") and "persons" (which includes everyone), and proves that the former is merely a subset of the latter.

Summarized from "Susan Collins spreads central myth about the Constitution," Glenn Greenwald, Salon.com, 2/1/2010

Lastly I should note that this argument only addresses the question of whether or not the Constitution applies to non-citizens—it does not close the case on the Constitutionality of Guantanamo. There are many other factors at play, such as whether U.S. federal courts have jurisdiction over areas that are not on U.S. soil, the prisoner's status as POWs, terrorists, or "enemy combatants," and the Geneva Conventions. However, so far the Supreme Court has ruled in favor of Guantanamo detainees on more than one occasion, and after hearing Greenwald's argument I think I understand why.

The Union of Two Forgivers

"A happy marriage is the union of two forgivers."
Ruth Bell Graham

This quote came up at my wife Erin's and my small group meeting Tuesday night, while we were discussing 1 Peter 4:8-11, which is (to me) one of the most beautiful passages in the Bible about love. Our group spoke about how the line "love covers over a multitude of sins" is a perfect picture of marriage, because every marriage is the union of two hopeless sinners, and the ability to forgive your partner is probably the most crucial skill a spouse could have.

I have certainly found this to be true in my own marriage -- I am daily awed by my bride's ability to forgive. Our culture loves to tout communication as the number-one key to a happy marriage, but give me forgiveness any day. It's no coincidence to me that men are called to love their wives as Christ loves the church, and the quintessential Christlike quality (the reason Christ came to this earth) is forgiveness.

This idea was wonderfully expressed in a book Erin and I read in the months before our wedding called As for Me and My House by Walter Wangerin Jr. If you're looking for a thoughtful book on marriage, one that features an old, wise, eloquent, compassionate, honest, humble, married pastor telling his story rather than "25 easy steps to a successful marriage," this is the book for you. I would recommend it to anyone.

Top 5 Things Which Have Recently Blown My Mind

1. Stray dogs in Russia ride the subway by themselves, getting on and off at the appropriate stops and even riding in the first or last car because they're the least crowded.

2. Three crazy facts about placebos:

1. The placebo effect is getting stronger, and researchers don't know why.
2. Taking a placebo can not only convince you you're being helped by a real drug, it can also convince you you're experiencing that drug's side-effects.
3. As I've long suspected, walk signal buttons, elevator close-door buttons, and office thermostats are effective placebos.

3. The Bush Administration flagrantly faked news reports praising its prescription drug benefit legislation in 2004. Why oh why didn't I read the news in college?

4. America's best-selling car? The Cozy Coupe.

5. Ostriches don't stick their heads in the sand, bees don't violate laws of science, and lemmings don't commit suicide.

Feminism Isn't Dead

I have to admit I get a little annoyed when I read articles claiming that feminism isn't relevant anymore, that we live in a post-feminist world. For example, here's a blog post on "equal rights for men." Here's another blog post arguing that the salary gap, glass ceiling, and (get this) sexual harassment aren't issues for women any more, the problems now are that men have more fun and more fun sex than women. Finally, here's a woefully sexist syllabus from a course taught by a popular economics professor in which he teaches why "the standard history of gender"—Throughout human history, males arbitrarily forced women into a subordinate role.  At long last, feminist thinkers began 'raising awareness' of the plight of women. Through great struggle women are at last, like men, able to pursue their dreams and ambitions, though of course full equality is still a long way off.—is wrong.

I'm sorry, but I think this is just a bunch of bull. Yes, I will concede that women have made great strides in the West, and continue to do so here and to some degree all over the world. But in our increasingly global society, women's rights and the righteous ambitions of feminism still have much ground to cover. Women do two-thirds of the world's work for 5% of the income. One third of women in the U.S. military have been raped (8% of those charged with sexual assault in the military have been prosecuted, compared to 40% in civil courts). Last year a journalist in Sudan was sentenced to forty lashes for wearing pants and a blouse. A British woman in Dubai reported being raped last month and was thrown in jail for illegal drinking and having sex outside of marriage with her fiancé. In the West, women in positions of power in organizations are set up to fail by their bosses. A fifteen-year-old girl was gang-raped at a high school in California last October while twenty students looked on and did nothing. I could go on.

Here is a hopeful lecture by author and activist Isabel Allende about the plight of women in our society today. Her thoughtful, often humorous words about the importance of women and women's rights in our world are full of passion and truth.

TED: Isabel Allende tells tales of passion

The idea that women have achieved even relatively equal social status with men in our world is simply untrue. Yes, we have come very far, but we have very far to go. When I think about this lecture and the stories I mentioned above, I can't help but feel that post-feminism needs to die.