prior probability

Above is the notification we received from WordPress. For the record, here is our first blog post, a picture titled Summer in Amsterdam from 5 July 2013. Here is our most visited one, an image titled Chess piece survival rates from 22 October 2014.

The venerable New Republic recently published an anti-gun diatribe by Phoebe Maltz Bovy, a young writer living in Toronto. Her essay is provocatively titled “It’s time to ban guns. Yes, all of them.” Not satisfied with just banning guns, we decided to rewrite the opening paragraph of her essay, substituting “airplanes” for guns, “Germanwings Flight 9525” for San Bernardino, and “pilots” for population. Here is our revised paragraph:

Ban airplanes. All airplanes. Get rid of airplanes in airports, and in the air, and, as much as possible, in the air force. Not just because of Germanwings Flight 9525, or whichever air disaster may occur next, but also not not because of those. Don’t sort pilots into those who might do something evil or foolish or self-destructive with an airplane and those who surely will not. As if this could be known—as if it could be assessed without massively violating civil liberties and stigmatizing the mentally ill. Ban airplanes! Not just aviation disasters. Not just certain airplanes. Not just already-technically-illegal drones. All of them.

The logic of our parallel version of Maltz Bovy’s argument  is just as impeccable as hers; our conclusion, however, is just as stupid! (P.S.: This is our 1000th blog post since we started blogging in July 2013.)

We’ve just finished reading Robert Heinlein’s 1958 science fiction novel Methuselah’s Children. Why wasn’t this book made into a movie? Among other things, Heinlein explores the possibility of extended human lifespans as well as the possibility of intergalactic travel faster than the speed of light. Here is a brief synopsis of Heinlein’s novel (via Wikipedia), and here is one of our favorite sentences from part two of the novel (Baen Books edition, pictured below (middle image), p. 252): “Knowledge alone did not win wars. The ignorant fanatics of Europe’s Middle Ages had defeated the incomparably higher Islamic culture; Archimedes had been struck down by a common soldier; barbarians had sacked Rome.”  Next up on our Christmas season reading list: Tom Landry: An Autobiography.)

Not long ago we published a formal paper titled Gödel’s Loophole in which we identify and distinguish between Gödelian and non-Gödelian design defects in the U.S. Constitution, loopholes that could potentially lead to the creation of a constitutional dictatorship within the existing rules of the Constitution. Today, with the rise of dangerous demagogues like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, our paper has become more relevant than ever. But presidential elections in the U.S. are still a year away … In the meantime, Venezuela may soon serve as a field study or live laboratory for scholars of constitutional defects, for how a president might find a way of “lawfully” assuming dictatorial powers (i.e. within the existing set of constitutional rules under Venezuela’s current Bolivarian Constitution) even in the face of popular opposition. In brief, the opposition party in Venezuela recently won a major legislative victory on 6 Dec. 2015, winning 107 out of 167 seats in Venezuela’s legislature, the National Assembly. There is some speculation, however, that President Nicolás Maduro might request the outgoing National Assembly, which is still dominated by his political party and which does not leave office until January 2016, to pass an enabling law (Ley Habilitante) that would allow the president to rule by decree for the rest of his term (2019). We will be following this brewing constitutional conflict closely and will keep you posted …

Buyer beware …

We are grading our fall term final projects for Law & Ethics. In brief, we asked our students to choose a company they would want to be the CEO of and to explore various legal and ethical issues facing their company, e.g. Intellectual Property, Contracts, Litigation Risks, etc. One of these companies, Boricua Beer, really caught our attention. Before coming to UCF, we lived in Puerto Rico (Borinquen) from 1993 until 2009, so we can’t wait to try this beer.

Marc Andresseen shares his quirky ideas for becoming a hyper-productive machine here. (We stumbled upon these guidelines via Tyler Cowen, the most hyper-productive blogger, reader, scholar bar none.) Some of Andresseen’s ideas make sense and are easy to implement–like “do email twice a day”–others, however, are paradoxical and counter-intuitive, like this one:

… don’t keep a schedule …

I’m totally serious. If you pull it off — and in many structured jobs, you simply can’t — this simple tip alone can make a huge difference in productivity.

By not keeping a schedule, I mean: refuse to commit to meetings, appointments, or activities at any set time in any future day.

As a result, you can always work on whatever is most important or most interesting, at any time.

But don’t you have to keep a schedule (of sorts) in order to not keep a schedule?