[PHOTO] "Street crossing at evening"

People start to walk across the intersection, under the streetcar wires, as the light on the cross-street turns green.

If only I remembered where I took this one!

[BRIEF NOTE] On the Onion's article about bullied gay teenagers at school as satire

Both Joe Jervis at Joe. My. God. and Andy Towle at Towleroad reacted strongly to one of The Onion's latest brilliant articles, "Best Part Of Gay 12-Year-Old’s Day Half Hour Spent Eating Lunch Alone On Staircase". The two bloggers found that the article's theme was too close to home to be funny.

According to Franklin Middle School seventh-grader and closeted homosexual Ben McElroy, the highlight of his day is the 30 minutes between third and fourth period when he eats lunch on a staircase by himself.

"It's nice to eat alone while other people are in class or in the cafeteria," McElroy told reporters Wednesday as he finished the peanut-butter-and-honey sandwich his mother had prepared and packed neatly into a brown paper bag for him that morning. "No one bothers me, it's safe and quiet, and I get to enjoy my lunch."

"It's not so bad," a smiling McElroy added.

McElroy, who has revealed his sexual orientation to no one but is unceasingly ridiculed by his peers for perceived feminine qualities in his voice, dress, and gait, confirmed that he enjoys his solitary meal on the staircase far more than the bus ride to school, the walk from the bus to homeroom, finding an unobtrusive seat in the back of every class and hoping he doesn't get called on, receiving anonymous text messages from classmates telling him to kill himself, and every other moment of his day.

In addition, McElroy said that as his lunch period approaches, he enjoys staring at the clock on the wall and eagerly counting down the minutes until he can finally sit and eat alone on the seldom-traversed staircase in the school's South Hall.

"Sometimes when I'm in third period, I get this excited feeling inside knowing lunch is coming up," said McElroy, adding that the solitude offered by his staircase location allows him plenty of time and space to perform his usual ritual of carefully laying out his lunch on the step in front of him and moving through it piece by piece. "It's probably the most excited I get all day. I'd come here on weekends if they'd let me."

Speaking as someone who never spent a single lunch period in the cafeteria in high school, but instead spent all his time in the school library, I agree: this hits close to home. (It also reminds me of the fact that some places need to be nuked from orbit since it's the only way to be sure, but that should go without saying.)

The subtler humour of the article is compactly and quietly satirical almost in the vein of Swift's A Modest Proposal, where Swift enumerates the main things that are wrong with his Ireland but dismisses them as quotidian. It's left to the reader to react, to explicitly identify what's wrong. It works superbly here.

[BRIEF NOTE] On the legal mechanics of granting smart animals personhood

Gerry Canavan linked to the Scientific American blog The Primate Diaries, where Eric Michael Johnson described the sorts of legal mechanics necessary to grant smart animals basic rights. Dolphins and whales were the subject of a recent declaration by scientists, Johnson notes.

Such a declaration is a minefield ripe for misunderstanding, as the BBC quickly demonstrated with their headline, “Dolphins deserve same rights as humans, say scientists.” However, according to Thomas I. White, Conrad N. Hilton Chair of Business Ethics at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, the idea of granting personhood rights to nonhumans would not make them equal to humans under law. They would not vote, sit on a jury, or attend public school. However, by legally making whales and dolphins “nonhuman persons,” with individual rights under law, it would obligate governments to protect cetaceans from slaughter or abuse.

“The evidence for cognitive and affective sophistication—currently most strongly documented in dolphins—supports the claim that these cetaceans are ‘non-human persons,’” said White. As a result, cetaceans should be seen as “beyond use” by humans and have “moral standing” as individuals. “It is, therefore, ethically indefensible to kill, injure or keep these beings captive for human purposes,” he said.

This is not as radical an idea as it may sound. The law is fully capable of making and unmaking “persons” in the strictly legal sense. For example, one Supreme Court case in 1894 (Lockwood, Ex Parte 154 U.S. 116) decided that it was up to the states “to determine whether the word ‘person’ as therein used [in the statute] is confined to males, and whether women are admitted to practice law in that commonwealth.” As atrocious as this ruling sounds, such a precedent continued well into the twentieth century and, in 1931, a Massachusetts judge ruled that women could be denied eligibility to jury status because the word “person” was a term that could be interpreted by the court.

[. . . P]rior to 1886, dating back to the 1600s, corporations were viewed as “artificial persons,” a legal turn of phrase that offered certain rights to the companies but without the full rights of citizens. By using the wording of the 14th Amendment (intended to protect former slaves from a state government seeking to “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”) it was ruled that corporations should enjoy the same status. As a result, between 1890 and 1920, out of all the 14th Amendment cases that came before the Supreme Court, 19 dealt with African-Americans while 288 dealt with corporations. With the legal stroke of a pen, artificial persons were granted all the protections of citizens.

But that would be unlikely to happen with whales, dolphins, or even great apes. A “nonhuman person” would have a definition similar to this earlier tradition of “artificial person,” one that grants limited rights that a government is obligated to protect. Furthermore, according to White, the term would only apply under specific cases for nonhumans that had self-awareness, complex social as well as emotional lives, and met certain criteria under the definition of consciousness (so, for example, ants would never be considered persons under law). According to White, these criteria have been met in the case of dolphins and whales and our legal institutions should incorporate this evidence into American jurisprudence.

Similar legal precedents regarding the concept of personhood exist elsewhere, for instance in Canada in the famous Persons Case put before the Supreme Court. In the Canadian case, the Persons Case established Canadian constitutional law as a corpus in constant evolution in keeping with changing times.

Thoughts, legal-type people?

[BRIEF NOTE] On what could have been Arthur C. Clarke's fourth law

"Clarke's fourth law" is the name of Gerry Canavan's post linking to the blog Next Nature's post "Any Sufficiently Advanced Civilization is Indistinguishable from Nature". In the titles of their posts, the two blogs are referring to Clarke's three laws.

1.When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Next Nature suggests--briefly--that as human technology advances it will stop being a force distinguishable from and opposed to nature, but will instead make use of nature's techniques and environments in more harmonious ways.

Western cultures, nature is a cosmological, primal ordering force and a terrestrial condition that exists in the absence of human beings. Both meanings are freely implied in everyday conversation. We distinguish ourselves from the natural world by manipulating our environment through technology. In What Technology Wants, Kevin Kelly proposes that technology behaves as a form of meta-nature, which has greater potential for cultural change than the evolutionary powers of the organic world alone.

With the advent of ‘living technologies’, which possess some of the properties of living systems but are not ‘truly’ alive, a new understanding of our relationship to the natural and designed world is imminent. This change in perspective is encapsulated in Koert Van Mensvoort’s term ‘next nature’, which implies thinking ‘ecologically’, rather than ‘mechanically’. The implications of next nature are profound, and will shape our appreciation of humanity and influence the world around us.

The Universe of Things, by the British science fiction writer Gwyneth Jones (2010) takes the idea of an ecological existence to its logical extreme. She examines an alien civilization whose technology is intrinsically alive. Tools are extrusions of the alien’s own biology and extend into their surroundings through a wet, chemical network.

The idea of existing in a vibrant, organic habitat is an increasingly realistic prospect as living technologies are now being designed to counter the ravages of global industrialization. These can even be implemented at a citywide scale. For example, Arup’s Songdo International Business District, in South Korea, is being built on 1,500 acres of land reclaimed from the Yellow Sea. Incorporating rainwater irrigation and a seawater canal, this design suggests that the building industry is aspiring to use living technologies to revitalize urban environments via geoengineering. The Korean artist Do Ho Suh had proposed to build a bridge that connects his homes in Seoul and New York by harnessing natural forces and using synthetic biologies to literally ‘grow’ a trans-Pacific bridge.

The apparent science fictional nature of ecological-scale projects has prompted science fiction author Karl Schroeder to observe that the large-scale harnessing of ecologies might explain our current lack of success in encountering advanced alien civilizations. Schroeder explains the Fermi Paradox – the apparent contradiction between the likelihood that extraterrestrial civilizations exist and the lack of evidence for them – by speculating that we have not yet encountered our cosmic neighbors because they are indistinguishable from their native ecology.

This imagining of a technology that surpasses our crude mechanisms to make use of the dynamics of life itself is common, for which see the organic technologytof Babylon 5's Vorlons and Shadows, or of 2300AD's Pentapods.

My quibbling with the paradigm of superior organic technology is, firstly, that ecologies are dynamic systems which can be shaped profoundly by the actions of component species and the nature of their changing environments, and secondly, that the organic/technological distinction is increasingly arbitrary. Do living cells already make use of nanotechnology, for instance, with their chemical solvents and autonomous mechanisms? Isn't nanotechnology being shaped by models from the living world? Also, are we at all justified in making any claims about the nature of galactic ecologies, inasmuch as we're only beginning to detect planets and their environments and developing informed speculations about non-Earth environments and ecologies? Why wouldn't disequilibria of some scale be present in any ecology, inasmuch as even virgin ecosystems see shifting imbalances of predator and prey? Et cetera.

What say you?