The issue of Obama's eligibility to be US President is unlikely to end with the recent release of his long form birth certificate.   Already suggestions of forgery abound on the net.  Or a problem shift:  doesn't matter where he was born because his dad wasn't American.

So, I thought, how would I prove that I am a 'natural born' citizen?  

Turns out, if I have no proof of how I became a citizen, but I am a citizen, then I must be natural born.  It's the fact that I have no documentation of becoming a citizen that proves I'm a natural born citizen.  OK, bear with me a minute.  Here's some back story.

This whole issue only comes up if you want to know if you are eligible to be US President.  Sadly, most infants today really aren't thinking this through.  All the Constitution says is Article II, Section I:

"No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty-five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States."

So far as I can see, that's all the constitution actually requires.  You gotta be at least 35.  And you gotta be a natural born citizen, or over 224 years old.

The sticking point  is that term 'natural born'.  Which seems to mean you are a citizen by virtue of your birth, as opposed to becoming a citizen some other way.   The constitution doesn't provide a more precise definition of "natural born," but US Code does:

I'm Irish on me mother's side
And English on me father's
I wear the green one day a year
And repress meself the others

A Protestant was me Da
And divorced to boot was he
But once he deigned to marry Ma
No protest came from she

Yet childless were me parents now
For seven years they wondered
When they'd bring unto this world
Me sisters and me brother 

When once they got the rhythm down
We came along like clockwork
Every other year we were
A blessing to our mother

Friends inquired  "Why'd it take so long
'fore children came to thee"
"I was only pokin' 'round in fun
but she took me seriously!"

Some D6 modules were not yet available to D7 including:

Subscriptions

Webfm

The tables are still carried in the database

NPR had a piece yesterday on the idea that machines may one day be so intelligent as to become capable of designing and building even more intellingent machines, triggering a exponential growth of intelligence, an intelligence sigularity, such that human intelligence becomes negligible by comparison.  Some consider this intelligence sigularity a existential threat.  

Here is a link to the NPR Story:  

The Singularity: Humanity's Last Invention?

In this story we learn of The Singularity Institute, dedicated to "Ensuring humanity's future in a world with advanced artificial intelligence." 

I'm writing this short note simply because the man who introduced the idea in 1965, Dr. I. J. Good, was a friend of mine.  Here is a citation to his seminal paper on the idea:

Good, I. J. 1965. Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine. In Advances in Computers, vol. 6, ed. F. Alt and M. Rubinoff, pp. 31-88. Academic Press.

This article is available online.

Dr. Good was a remarkable fellow.  I knew him as a statistics professor at Virginia Tech in the mid 1970s.  I only vaugely understood his very human intelligence, except to percieve it as much greater than my own.

When someone yells 'fire!'
In a crowded theater
And people react
And people get hurt
The person who yelled
Should
At least
Feel sorry about yelling

The founder of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, in an interview with BBC while out on bail pending possible extradition to Sweden concerning sexual assault without a condom charges, had this to say concerning his persumably unrelated mission with Wikileaks:

"Every person who has some ability to do something about it, if they are a person of good character, has the duty to try and fix the problems in the environment in which they're in."

This is, of course, is equivalent to the first half of the 1875 Marxist slogan:

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."

Marx's version is to be preferred because Assange allows that persons of less than "good character" are relieved from said duty.

The whole idea is somewhat mystifyihg, and in some conflict with the American idea of a right to pursue happiness.

The trouble is that there are always and always will problems.  To say individuals have an actual duty to solve problems not of their making hands Society a sweeping, blunt, oppressive and easily corrupted tooland liable to wax repressive.  Further, said duty is bound to conflict with the individual's pursuit of their own self interests, their own happiness.

A big part of the genious of the American Experiment is the attempt to construct a society in which people's individual self interests are cultivated in ways intended to benefit Society as a whole.

Funicular, funicular
A euphonious word
One of the finest
I ever heard

Funicular, funicular
I don't even know
If one of those comes
Or if one of those goes

Funicular, funicular
What the hell does it mean?
And where can I get one?
Where can one be seen?

Funicular, funicular
I tell you what
I'll look it down
While you look it up

Funicular, funicular
So that's what one is!
Take note everyone
It's on the next quiz!

NPR.org has a piece with Adrian Goldsworthy, who recently published his latest book Antony and Cleopatra, in which he relates the following fish story:

From Plutarch's "life of Antony"

One instance will suffice. He was fishing once, and had bad luck, and was vexed at it because Cleopatra was there to see. He therefore ordered his fishermen to dive down and secretly fasten to his hook some fish that had been previously caught, and pulled up two or three of them. But the Egyptian saw through the trick, and pretending to admire her lover's skill, told her friends about it, and invited them to be spectators of it the following day.  So great numbers of them got into the fishing boats, and when Antony had let down his line, she ordered one of her own attendants to get the start of him by swimming onto his hook and fastening on it a salted Pontic (which is to say, from the Black Sea) herring. Antony thought he had caught something, and pulled it up, whereupon there was great laughter, as was natural, and Cleopatra said: "Imperator, hand over thy fishing-rod to the fishermen of Pharos and Canopus; thy sport is the hunting of cities, realms, and continents."

Oliver Stone mentioned this conversation on a recent episode of Bill Maher.  The main speaker is former Argentine President Néstor Kirchner.  Yes, the Bush era is over.  Still, this is pretty amazing:

I said that a solution for the problems right now, I told Bush, is a Marshall Plan.  And he got angry.

He said the Marshall Plan is a crazy idea of the Democrats.

He said the best way to revitalize the economy is war.  And that the United States has grown stronger with war.

... He said that.  Those were his exact words.

To paraphrase Gordon Gecko "War is Good."