Check out what people are saying (and here) about an interesting new patent application filed by Google:

A system includes a floating platform-mounted computer data center comprising a plurality of computing units, a sea-based electrical generator in electrical connection with the plurality of computing units, and one or more sea-water cooling units for providing cooling to the plurality of computing units.

The “sea-based electrical generator” would be something like this:

In general, computing centers are located on a ship or ships, which are then anchored in a water body from which energy from natural motion of the water may be captured, and turned into electricity and/or pumping power for cooling pumps to carry heat away from computers in the data center. In particular examples, the water-powered devices for generating electricity are depicted as so-called Pelamis machines.

In case you’re wondering, a “Pelamis machine” works like this:

The Pelamis is a semi-submerged, articulated structure composed of cylindrical sections linked by hinged joints. The wave-induced motion of these joints is resisted by hydraulic rams, which pump high-pressure oil through hydraulic motors via smoothing accumulators. The hydraulic motors drive electrical generators to produce electricity. Power from all the joints is fed down a single umbilical cable to a junction on the sea bed. Several devices can be connected together and linked to shore through a single seabed cable.

Sounds pretty sweet. Not long before this all starts looking like SkyNet or the Matrix, right? Slap some navigational capability on a floating data center and put an artificial intelligence at the tiller. Get a bunch of them, program them to “swarm,” and Bam! you have a computer network that not only serves data, but responds with physical movement.

Or, you know, maybe I just watch too many sci-fi movies.

The New York times has up an interesting essay by Professor Noah Feldman on the Supreme Court, international law, and foreign policy. Give it a read, if you can.

Unlike all the pundits, I have the definitive answer.

Obviously, __________ won the debate because he showed that he will be a __________ leader. __________ spent the whole time __________ing __________ and __________ing the questions. __________ showed that he __________ what we need for America in these __________ times. If you are looking for someone who is __________ and __________, with the ability to __________ when __________, then clearly, based on last night’s debate, __________ is your man.

If you, like me, are trying to wrap your head around the causes of the current financial crisis, you might find this presentation helpful. It’s a Google Docs slideshow with humorous stick figures talking to each other. But you know how sometimes you laugh at Dilbert strips and think, “Ha-ha! I know jerks like that”? You may feel the same way about this one. Except these jerks brought our economy to its knees.

For the last eight years, former football player and actor Alan Autry has been the mayor of Fresno. (Which, for him, seems to mean spending a lot of time at Starbucks.) Some people here love the guy. Others, well, not so much.

Remember that lawsuit between the homeless people and the City of Fresno? Remember when it settled and the mayor decided not just to make public comments contradicting the settlement, but to waltz into a federal courthouse and make snide remarks at Judge Oliver Wanger?

Now Mayor Autry and Judge Wanger are going to have a debate. In public. On “the proper role of courts in society.” And here is the best part: They’re selling tickets. Yes, for a mere fifteen dollars you can get lunch and a debate between a former actor and a federal judge.

Should be pretty interesting. Almost sounds like the mayor was informally sentenced to a little community service. I know I’ll be there. Reserved my ticket yesterday.

Recent events in Grand Island, Nebraska, should illustrate for many Christians exactly why many of us object to official accommodation of their religious beliefs. First, Muslim employees at a meat packing plant there complained that workplace policies prevented them from participating correctly in Ramadan. Here is what happened next:

The Grand Island plant and United Food and Commercial Workers Union Local 22 announced a compromise that would allow Muslims to take breaks to pray and eat shortly after sunset.

Then an estimated 1,000 non-Muslim workers, including Hispanics, whites and Christian Sudanese refugees—walked off the job on Wednesday. They were protesting what they viewed as unfair treatment favoring the Muslims.

The compromise was withdrawn.

(Boldface added.) Christians often demand accommodation for their own practices and then employ angry rhetorical histrionics when they are denied that accommodation. Here is an example:

August 18, 2008 will be remembered as a day of infamy because of a California Supreme Court ruling that “physicians’ constitutional right to the free exercise of religion does not exempt businesses that serve the public from following state law that prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.” I’m seriously disturbed about it, and think it’s time for concerned citizens, whatever your political or religious stripe, to band together and protest the latest California Supreme Court nonsense before a right of conscience is no longer allowed.

(Boldface added.) Why should Christian physicians be accommodated for their beliefs, but not Muslim meat packers? The Christians at the Grand Island plant object to special allowances for Muslim meat packers who wish to observe Ramadan, but how is it fair to let Christian physicians, who hold in their hands the health, even the lives, of their fellow humans to then deny those people health care services?

What is the solution? Accommodate everyone? Not likely. Christians don’t want to accommodate anyone but themselves. Muslims would rather muzzle free speech than let anyone “defame” their beliefs. No one with any power wants to accommodate non-believers by removing “In God We Trust” from our currency or “Under God” from our Pledge of Allegiance.

Americans need to recognize that, no matter what may have come before, no matter that the biggest historical tributary into our cultural river flows from the Christian West, we are a diverse society, with people of many different beliefs, and protecting or accommodating some of them—or even all of them—is a dangerous proposition. The things that draw us together are notably non-religious in nature, but distinctly human. We all need food, shelter, water, employment, participation, and other people.

The crisis on Wall Street and in the world economy affects us all, no matter our religious beliefs. When hurricanes and other natural disasters rip through cities, they don’t carve out disparate effects based on the differing beliefs of the people who live there. Everybody pays taxes and receives government services. Pretending that religious differences have a place in our governance and political system denies the fundamental reality that modern governments and political units are comprised of people who are drawn together for purely economic and geographic reasons and not because they share any religious beliefs.

While the events in Grand Island are frustrating, while many Christians are no doubt upset that California physicians cannot discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, while religious tensions cause great anguish for many people, we need these events to draw out hypocrisy and awaken people to the fact that demands for accommodation for religious freedom are fine until the shoe is on the other foot.

(Credit: I discovered the Grand Island story through Professor Friedman’s blog Religion Clause.)

The Fresno Bee printed the letter I wrote the other day, with minor editing that improved it. Here is an image of how it appears in the paper:

My brother has posted quite a collection of troubling comments from discussions on the Fresno Bee Opinion Talk blog. Here are some excerpts from his excerpts:

1. If you promote homosexuality and are in favor of abortion won’t you render society to extinction. Now that’s regressive. You’ll have to count on the social conservatives to further civilization and that is ironic. You need us or there can be no you.
2. [C]onservative values on social issues promote reproduction (necessary to sustain a society) while the lefts do not.
3. If it were not for modern medicine, the AIDS epidemic may have well put homosexuals close to extinction. What is the message here: Homosexuality is against nature! Homosexuality is an unhealthy lifestyle.
4. [T]he degrading of our Judeo-Christian culture affects us all. It makes us no better than a beast!
5. While the Judeo-Christian culture may not be your culture, it is the collective culture of America courtesy of our Founders. It is deserving of your respect even if it offends your “delicate sensibilities.”
6. Sexual perversion is not something I want our country to embrace, which is what homosexuality is. I consider it no different than other sexual perversions, which are self-destructive physically, mentally, and spiritually to the offender, and the offended. The evidence is irrefutable that this is true with homosexuals.
7. [T]he American culture . . . is based on Judeo-Christian values, written by men who were Christians (their writings are proof of this—check it out for yourself). Throwing this all away will put our country in peril.

No matter how well I convince myself that I live in a modern and inclusive society, people like these continually present themselves and batter my confidence in American ideals. Who are these people?

Fresno criminal defense lawyer Rick Horowitz wrote earlier this week on his blog about some of the disturbing but common abuses of authority committed by police officers. He lays a large part of the blame at the feet of judges, who too often defer to the police in their decisions. Here is an excerpt:

In one recent and quite shocking case, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit held that electrocuting a distraught homeless man because he had lost all hope was perfectly acceptable.  The man’s sin?  He was so distraught — in the video posted to youtube you can hear him crying relentlessly and speaking of how he would be better off dead — he did not stand when ordered to do so by the arresting officer.  The officer decided that he would encourage Mr. Buckley to stand by repeatedly electrocuting him.

As has become increasingly common, the court found torturing Mr. Buckley for his lack of compliance to be perfectly acceptable.

Although, as the district court observed, the underlying offense of refusing to sign a traffic citation was relatively minor, we nevertheless credit the government with a significant interest in enforcing the law on its own terms, rather than on terms set by the arrestee. The government has an interest in arrests being completed efficiently and without waste of limited resources: police time and energy that may be needed elsewhere at any moment. Even though Plaintiff was handcuffed, he still refused repeatedly to comply with the most minimal of police instructions — that is, to stand up and to walk to the patrol car. That Plaintiff was resisting arrest weighs in the deputy’s favor.

The court stated in a footnote that the fact Mr. Buckley did not attackor menace the deputy “does not shield him from the use of force, even if it might result in pain.”

When I read cases in law school about police misconduct, I had roughly the same perception. The weekly preparation for my Criminal Procedure class often left me feeling outraged. The lengths to which courts will allow officers to go in pursuit of this “governmental interest” in maintaining order is often shocking. Physical violence, psychological manipulation, outright lying—all these methods are on the table, depending on the judge, perhaps, with minor limitations that often seem like mere lip-service to constitutional and human rights.

Certainly, we need some laws and we need some police; real crimes are committed by people who pose a threat to society every day. But while I agree that some blame must be laid with the courts, and of course with the officers themselves, the deeper problem is systemic and touches nearly every citizen. It is our belief that laws and enforcers are the best way or the only way to maintain civil society.

But before you can have a law-abiding society, you need people who believe in laws—people who believe that standard rules, equally applicable to everyone, are the best way to maintain a healthy society. People also need to believe that those rules are fair in themselves and that they really are applied equally to everyone.

Our society has done a bang-up job of making laws. We have loads of them. But we are failing to promote the underlying values that support a society ruled by law.

People at the bottom of the economic heap experience the current financial crisis and see the people at the top—the politicians and the bankers and traders on Wall Street—as living by different rules. They see people with more money getting away with enormous crimes while poor people are punished, often violently, for relatively minor crimes—like the example Horowitz gave, quoted above.

People feel that many of our laws are fundamentally unfair, that they are overly oppressive or unduly burdensome, that they invade privacy or serve only the interests of powerful individuals.

Whether those perceptions are accurate is irrelevant. If people do not believe in the rule of law, if they feel for whatever reason that they have no stake, then why should they conform to the law?

In that situation, if we simply make more laws and push for stronger enforcement, what do we accomplish? We only reinforce the perception that some people with power use it to push around others who are powerless. Even if the makers and enforcers of law have good intentions, the people who suffer the consequences will only feel, rightly or wrongly, that they have no stake in our society.

In that sense, a lot of crime may be a non-legal problem, better solved by non-legal methods. Instead of being a society of enforcers, we need to be a society of participants and stakeholders. I am convinced that the vast majority of crimes are committed by people who simply fail to assess the consequences of their actions. You can take a cynical perspective and assume that a certain percentage of people are not capable of assessing consequences and that they will always be criminals, but what does that accomplish? What possible good can that view do for society? Nevertheless, law enforcement seems to be highly favored in our society, instead non-legal approaches like developing moral reasoning and social participation.

What good are law enforcers deployed against people who do not believe in laws? After enough pounding, people may be persuaded to play along, but instead of making good citizens, we create a mass of infantilized individuals whose prime reason for following the rules is not a sense of participation or stakeholdership, but punishment avoidance. That is a society deeply psychologically damaged, robbed of its ability to give meaningful consent to its own governance, and ripe for plucking by dictatorial oppressors.

Horowitz is right that judges have stood by while police abuse citizens, often even putting the imprimatur of law and order on their heinous acts. But the problem is deeper, coming from each of us, whenever we advocate punishment over understanding, especially when we take the next step and assert that punishment is necessitated by our fellow citizens’ inability to understand or exercise sophisticated ethical reasoning. Every time someone opts for enforcement rather than communication, we weaken our society and harm all of our prospects. I have been guilty of it, too.

This post by Sherry Colb over at Dorf on Law has to be one of the most interesting blog posts I have read in a good long time. No excerpts here. Just go read the whole thing. The title is “Who Wants to be Vice President?“