This World and Me

I remember watching Robert Zemeckis' The Polar Express for the first time as a kid in elementary school. One snowy winter just after Christmas, my family booked a room at an indoor waterpark resort in southern Ohio called the Great Wolf Lodge. While watching the TV in that room in the evening, we stumbled across a channel broadcasting The Polar Express . Theatrically released in 2004, the computer-animated film is based off of a picture book with the same name written by Chris Van Allsburg. I had been familiar with the picture book from school, so at the time, it was a little surprising to me the extent to which the film deviates from the source material. However, understandably, the picture book was only a handful of pages long and surely doesn't contain enough material to fill a feature-length film. It has grown to be my favorite Christmas-themed film (to be honest, there are not many Christmas-themed films that I have enjoyed), and I frequently look back on it with a sens...

On the night of Tuesday, November 8, 2016, I published a brief post onto this blog called " Dead-Killing News " that contained only a 24-word quote from William Shakespeare's play Richard III . At the time, I was taking an Intro to Shakespeare class while dual-enrolled as a high-school senior at The Ohio State University. The quote contains the remarks of Elizabeth Woodville , who was the queen consort of England from 1464 to 1470, reacting to the news that the morally corrupt Duke of Gloucester would be crowned the next king of England. The post was my reaction to the election of Donald J. Trump as the 45th President of the United States. On Saturday, November 7, 2020, five days after the 2020 U.S. presidential election, major news networks projected that Joseph R. Biden, Jr., will be the 46th President of the United States. Accordingly, on that day I considered submitting a post to this blog that would simply quote the last four lines of Shakespeare's Richard III a...

One chilly morning when I was in fifth grade, I found two of my best friends—let's call them G and W for the first letters of their first names—arguing with each other. The dispute concerned laptops—two laptops to be precise. My elementary school was fortunate enough to have a laptop cart with about twenty MacBooks, which teachers could book for their class to use, kind of like a mobile computer lab. Apparently, that day, two of the MacBooks in the cart stopped working, and either G or W was to blame. The question was who. The relevant facts are as follows. G and W's teacher had booked the laptop cart for her class that day, and G and W, along with one of their friends, a guy we'll call T, sat together for the class. Evidently, G, W, and T were not really paying attention to their class assignment that day and were instead just playing around on their laptops. At some point, G warned W and T that there is a keyboard shortcut in Mac OS X that you should never ever do: ...

Google Lively was a virtual world that existed for about half a year in 2008. At the time it was active, I was 10 years old. Anyone with a Google account could log in from a web broswer, create an avatar, then join public rooms. I distinctly remember there was a coffee shop and an underwater lounge, and you could design your own personal apartment, complete with your own furniture, decorations, and layout. You could then invite your friends to your virtual apartment and hang out. When you joined a room, your avatar would be placed in the center, and you could move it around and type messages that would appear as speech bubbles over your character. I remember you could make your character do certain actions that convey emotions, from positive actions like shaking hands, laughing, and clapping, to negative actions like crying. For some reason, I seem to recall it was possible to punch objects or perhaps even other avatars, if you so desired. Screenshot of the Google Lively interface It...

Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1933–2020) The evening of Friday, September 18, 2020, began normally. I attended my virtual class on the history of German literature and had just finished dinner when my phone vibrated, indicating a new message from a friend. It was one of my roommates, who had just sent the following message to a group chat: "Wtf". For a moment, there was an air of confusion; my roommate wasn't sure if what he had just read on the Internet was accurate, and none of us were sure what he was talking about. Then, a few seconds later, the fog of doubt cleared away as my roommate sent three small yet devastating words: "RBG passed away". In her eulogy of a late colleague , Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg recounted how Justice Antonin Scalia was once asked how he and Ginsburg could be friends, given their nearly diametrical opposite opinions on the law. Scalia had answered: "I attack ideas. I don’t attack people." Her remarkable friendships with even those...

Just a few days ago, I finished a rewatch of Avatar: The Last Airbender with my sister. It is really quite a special show; countless observers have described it as one of the greatest American animated television series ever made. The first time I watched this series was not as a kid, but rather just last year in college with my roommate. Although I was aware of the series' existence as a kid growing up, I think the primary reason why it wasn't a direct part of my childhood was because of the arc-style structure of the story. The show would air episodes on Nickelodeon, but it's not really the kind of show that you can pick up in the middle, so if Nickelodeon aired a mid-season episode, I wouldn't have enough context of the broader story arc to appreciate what is going on. The shows I watched as a kid were ones whose premise was clear enough that I could still understand what was going on even if I watched an episode in the middle of the season without broader context,...

If there is anything that the COVID-19 pandemic has made clear, it is that we depend on reliable, high-speed access to the Internet as an essential utility to our lives, not unlike electricity and water. But even as millions of Americans have been forced to work from home or study from home, there are still millions of Americans who lack reliable access to the Internet, particularly in rural areas. The problem has been difficult to quantify because different studies have employed different measurement tactics, some of which are rather questionable. According to Ars Technica , a study conducted by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) indicated that "21.3 million Americans live in areas without access to fixed broadband with 25Mbps download and 3Mbps upload speeds". However, this is widely considered to be a gross underestimation because the FCC "counts an entire census block as served even if only one home in the census block can get service". Ars Technica re...

If this is where the monarchy is headed, count me out! Out of service, out of Africa—I wouldn't hang about! My favorite character in The Lion King is Zazu. This is the red-billed hornbill that describes himself as the King's majordomo . At the beginning of the film, Zazu delivers a morning report to Mufasa and accompanies young Simba and Nala on their way to the water hole. In what has to be a contender for the most iconic musical sequence in the entire Disney repertoire, the cubs manage successfully to ditch Zazu and go instead to an elephant graveyard. As a kid, I think there is a natural inclination to dislike Zazu. He is the annoying adult character who—much like an overbearing teacher or parent—tries to stop the children from doing the exciting thing they want to do. As I've gotten older, however, I have grown much more sympathetic towards his character. Despite being a bird less than half the size of a lion cub, he is trusted unconditionally by Simba's parent...

Several hundred years ago, writing was rare. Given the high cost of printing, as well as the cost of even learning how to read and write, only privileged members of society were literate. This gave rise to an interesting cultural difference: when a person issues an authoritative order, it meant a great deal more when the order was delivered in writing , as opposed to being delivered through speech. Mere speech was transient, and in any case, the recipient of the order could deny that it was ever delivered. On the other hand, a written order—also known as a writ —was much more difficult to deny, as it carried with it a permanence and air of high authority. In the old Kingdom of England, there was a special class of writs reserved to high authorities (usually one of the King's courts), and some of these writs have continued to be promulgated today in countries beyond England, including the United States. In fact, you may have heard of at least some of them. They are the six prerogat...

Back in August 2018, I wrote a post called " Secret messages ". In that post, I discussed how in elementary school my friends and I devised a rudimentary "secret language" to send coded messages to each other without our enemies knowing what we were writing. I then discussed a little bit of modern cryptography (which I described as "the scientific study of sending secret messages"), specifically the RSA encryption scheme . This post is a bit of a follow-up to that post. With today's technology, it is quite easy to send someone a secret message that not only can be read only by the intended recipient, but also allows the intended recipient to verify that the message was not modified by an eavesdropper or "man-in-the-middle". It happens everyday on the Internet: see the part of this blog's URL that says " https ". That 's' there is extremely important. It means that you can trust that this blog post was delivered to you by...