This World and Me

I have a pet peeve that comes up when I talk with someone about a song, a film, a TV show, or perhaps a book. Occasionally, one of my friends will describe such a work as objectively good or objectively bad . These phrases will always cause me to raise an eyebrow. What exactly are the objective factors that determine the quality of a creative work? I can think of a few ideas, but each seem problematic. My first thought is numbers. We could sample from a group of people who have experienced a particular work and ask them whether they think the work is "good". If a supermajority says yes, then the work is objectively good ; if a supermajority says no, then the work is objectively bad ; if there is no clear answer, then the work is objectively neither good nor bad . This method is questionable because it seems to rely heavily on mere popularity. To use an adage that one of my high school English teachers had on her little podium: "What is popular is not always right, and ...

Members of Congress, I have the high privilege and the distinct honor of presenting to you the President of the United States. This is the customary introduction said by the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives at the beginning of the president's annual State of the Union message to Congress. The tradition goes back several presidencies and has occurred regardless of party alignment. In the 2007 State of the Union address (skip to 12:25 in the linked video), Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat (who is the current speaker as of February 2020), introduced President George W. Bush, a Republican, with these words, and Bush famously responded by saying (and followed with unanimous standing ovation), "Tonight, I have the high privilege and distinct honor of my own, as the first president to begin the State of the Union message with these words: Madame Speaker." Traditionally, the applause and standing ovation that follows this introduction is performed out of respect ...

Although I am a computer science major in my undergraduate studies here at UC Berkeley, I have had it in the back of my mind since middle school that someday I might attend law school. In the past, I have discussed various decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States on this blog. You can find a few of them if you go through the posts I've tagged with the label "law" . The majority of Supreme Court cases are actually quite boring; most are decided unanimously and concern areas of the law that will rarely interfere with one's everyday activities. In this series of posts I would like to visit a few miscellaneous Supreme Court cases that I have stumbled across that I have found quite captivating. The first one I'll do is McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission (1995). As I'll explain later, although the case does not concern technology law, its relevance today extends to technology. I became curious about McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission when I rea...

On the first day of my freshman orientation for undergrad, my orientation leader gave us icebreaker questions to answer. One of them was "what is your favorite animal?". I thought for a second. Since elementary school, I had a particular fondness for grizzly bears because there's something incredibly charming about the intersection of fluffiness and clumsiness. It would also be a particularly relevant choice, since my university's sports team is called the California Golden Bears. However, as I thought about how to respond to this question, I realized that one animal has since overtaken the grizzly bear as my favorite animal. It was one that I had read about, wrote about, and actively admired. After all, the creature is the  fastest animal on the Earth , and its continued existence today is among the greatest triumphs in the history of environmental protection. Confident in my decision, I smiled and scribbled down my answer and returned it to my orientation leader. ...

From sixth grade through my freshman year of high school, I played the alto saxophone. My school district required its students to participate in some form of performing art during this time. Some students chose choir, some chose orchestra, I chose band. For me, it was a toss-up between the alto sax and going to orchestra and playing the cello (I love the sound of the cello, and it was also my middle school orchestra director's instrument – he claimed the cello's range best represents the vocal pitch range of the human voice). The primary reason I chose band was because my dad had claimed the sax was a "cool" instrument. I trusted his judgment. I liked playing the sax. There were a few pieces our middle school concert band played that had saxophone solos, and I had the honor of playing one or two of them. I'll actually never forget the moment when I was finished with the concert, and the string orchestra director, who was also my cross country coach, came up to ...

In this post, I will provide an illustration for why humans are said to have fundamental rights, especially in a democratic society. I came up with this thought experiment when I was at fencing practice one day in my junior year of high school. At the time, I had been taking AP US Government and Politics. In order to understand the illustration, I have to explain a little bit of how fencing works. In fencing, there are three different weapons you can choose to fence: foil, epee, and saber. Although many fencing rules are shared among all three weapons, each weapon has specific rules that differentiate it from other weapons. At the time, my fencing club primarily consisted of foil and saber; our epee program was still quite young and did not have as many fencers at the time. In fencing, the field of play is called a "strip" (or a "piste"), since it is long compared to its width (14 meters by about 2 meters). Our club at the time had eight strips, and our foil and s...

A few years ago, I stumbled across  Sonic Colors , a 2010 video game produced by Sega for the Nintendo Wii and Nintendo DS. The game features Sega's mascot Sonic the Hedgehog and his best friend Tails on an adventure in outer space against their nemesis Doctor Eggman, who has captured and enslaved the planets of an alien life form called Wisps. The Wisps have an energy inside them which Eggman uses to power a mind control weapon, with which he plans to take over the world. Sonic and Tails team up with the Wisps to defeat Doctor Eggman and restore freedom to the planets of the Wisps. It has been called one of the best Sonic  games. This post is not going to be about Sonic (though I could write a whole post about Sonic – in middle school I secretly watched all 74 episodes of the  Sonic X  anime ). I mentioned  Sonic Colors  because it introduced me to a band called Cash Cash, whose lead vocalist, Jean Paul Makhlouf, performed in the opening and closing t...