This World and Me

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...

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. ...