How to Have Hope: Musings on How to Achieve Cooperation and Peace Using Law, Math, and Physics

The country appears to be melting down in real time. Today, James Comey (who I'm not an especially huge fan of and blame for HRC's loss in 2016) was indicted for essentially nothing , meanwhile Trump proclaims Comey threatens the rule of law . This is a new low for American democracy, especially because the prosecution appears to be politically motivated, meaning even if there were truth to the allegations, Comey is clearly being singled out because he represents a threat to Donald Trump as an outspoken critic with legitimacy because the FBI is still an institution many Americans respect , and the FBI as opposed to local police carries a lot of weight and legitimacy with the American people. And that alone is reason enough to drop the investigation, not that Trump will do so because Trump shows every day he doesn't care about the rule of law, and that law is imaginary.  So on the one hand, today's news cycle might make people like me cry and I admit I did cry, and shed ...

Political violence is undoubtedly a reality in this country, and is more obvious every day. The assassination of Charlie Kirk is just one small example, and should be condemned in the strongest possible terms, and efforts to celebrate his death should also be condemned in the strongest possible terms.  (Whether individuals who spoke out against him like Jimmy Kimmel should be silenced by their employers is a question that is an open question legally depending on the type of employer, given the speech in many cases has nothing to do with an individual's duties on the job, and thus is  the type of speech that an employer arguably should not care about under well respected First Amendment caselaw governing employer ability's to curb employee speech out of the workplace that turns on the type of the speech and whether it is relevant to an employees duties on the job, as opposed to their personal viewpoints, and may be protected under the Supreme Court's decision in Pickering ...

Today, t he New York Times has an article about parenting and parents taking photographs of their minor children, and whether such photos can be considered the equivalent of a #MeToo issue . I have expertise related to this question, as well as the #MeToo movement, based on my career as a former litigator, as well  as an early article I wrote about involving a U.S. Supreme Court decision involving computer generated images of child pornograp hy, which the Court said were protected in an opinion by Justice Kennedy , who discussed the fact that there should be no such thing as "thought crime."  Thought crime, which Justice Kennedy cared deeply about given his Russian heritage and views on totalitarianism and book burning (which also occurred in Nazi Germany), should not be a crime. If someone thinks something in law, but doesn't act on it, unlike in certain religious venues where thoughts can be "sinful" even if they are never acted upon, does not exist and there...

 I love chemistry, and was one of the top students in my introductory chemistry class in college. It's been years since I've done chemistry, and I was terrible in the lab because I had poor fine motor skills, though I did invent a protocol for understanding adult neurogenesis in rats, which is the ability of traumatized rats to rewire their synapses to overcome PTSD. That was at the Veteran's Hospital in White River Junction, Vermont. At any rate, today I discovered that my chemistry abilities have been revived from nowhere, and that I could read a famous article on chemistry by Alan Turing . Chemistry may be very important to an experiment I want to conduct using liquid helium to test forces that in my belief compel pure cooperation (which means quasi-particles or particles act in a certain way) under a phase transition. What this heck does this have to do with law? Actually, physicists should get the first "shot" of answering this one. There's an entire bran...

Today, I resume posting from a hiatus because I was moving across the country and relocating to my new job at the University of Tulsa College of Law. I announced yesterday on LinkedIn that I have a new pre-print that is close to done of an article that I plan to submit to Nature . But I'm looking for readers to vet this, and for a senior co-author because I don't have a PhD, though I'd characterize myself as a "savant" in math. I'm reading a wonderful new book by Oxford mathematician Marcus du Sautoy, and my strong recommendation is "buy it, immediately!" Du Sautoy's book has relevance to law and economics because mathematics is relevant to so many disciplines, including architecture. I'm also looking into this topic right now for a law review version of the pre-print I'm writing. But one fact that du Sautoy relates is that brutalist buildings designed in a minimalist style, often premised on efficiency (think John Nash) instead of belong...

There is a common phrase:  "Never meet your heroes."   I don't know the exact etymology of this phrase, but presumably this means they will disappoint whoever meets them and they turn out to be highly imperfect and flawed humans who present an amazing public image but if a person really gets to know them, or puts them under a microscope, a person will discover profound flaws.  This happened to me yesterday - though metaphorically, not literally. I adore and love the book  Calculus: Early Transcendentals   by James Stewart. And I even recommended it on LinkedIn yesterday in response to a post about true mathematicians who can't read a math textbook without yelling at it. I guess that means I'm officially a mathematician. I was working through a problem on ordinary differential equations.  This is like the  mistake I caught at MIT.  Forgive the tech issues, blogger refused to load my equations so I had to take a screenshot from Word. And Blogge...

I want to recount an anecdote from my Fourth of July that should indicate the turmoil this country is facing. I live in Oakland, California, one of the most diverse places in all of California. I walked out the door this afternoon before I went to spend the Fourth of July with family, and I noticed one of my neighbors in Rockridge where I live - a peaceful neighborhood that has families and renters of all races - flying an upside U.S. flag. I became instantly distressed, and when the person who picked me up saw me, she immediately noticed. I want to call attention to the origins of the upside down flag, which I didn't know about until the scandal with Justice Alito flying the upside down flag around Trump's election.  This is technically illegal under the U.S. Code, though it's also free speech protected by Cohen v. California , if that case is even still good law. My understanding of the upside down American flag is that it is used as a symbol of white Christian nationali...

Today's DRLR post is a lengthy ode to Euler, the Bridges problem, and women in math and physics. I am a fan of the science magazine  Quanta Magazine , and recently I heard  a podcast  with an amazing woman mathematician named  Maria Chudnovsky  of Princeton (I mention her gender because women are really underrepresented in math and in STEM, and  women are discouraged from doing math  and pushed out) whose career is dedicated to the study of  “graph theory.”  Graph theory emerged from a Russian town located on an island where the townspeople would take weekend strolls to see if they could cross seven bridges and not cross any bridge twice.        Now, when I first answered, I knew nothing about the layout of the town, or where the bridges are located, but apparently the math supergenius Euler thought (initially) this problem was silly. So did I. In fact, the solution came to me in about two seconds: the numbe...

              I had a lovely conservation two days ago with an interlocutor who caused me to think more deeply about “what does it mean to be an altruist?” I’ve discussed altruism in a post where I showed the psychological literature indicates that   most adult humans risk their lives to save a child who is drowning instinctively . I hypothesize these individuals don’t even think at all, but if they failed to act, and the child died, they’d be stuck with an incredibly guilty conscience. And ignoring someone who is in pain should strike those   Catholic pangs of guilt , and I know every time I walk by a homeless person and am unable to give money or food. I do volunteer when I have time for the homeless, or I have in the past.             But is altruism so straightforward? Take my career for example. Although neither one of my parents is a lawyer, my Dad was an enrolled actuary and r...

I just posted an ode to Bill Gates , noting the similarities I share with him, and particularly his love of games and math. But I equally love Melinda French Gates – who is an incredible badass feminist icon and who knows how to code (I haven’t learned yet and I still need to learn Python, which I fully intend to do). Melinda French Gates’ book  is about life “transitions” and letting go of persons or situations that are no longer right, even if this means a messy divorce. Melinda French Gates discusses in her autobiography how she heard an “inner whisper” – in the sense of  Rumi’s inner whisper  or maybe  Oprah  – and it just started gnawing at her to leave Bill Gates and getting progressively louder, and louder, and louder until she could no longer contain or deny it. I myself have also been guided by an “inner voice” during my spiritual awaking and I have not always obeyed it, and that sometimes saved me from giving into impulses that would have shattered my ...

              Cats or dogs? This is an obvious question with an equally obvious answer: Clearly cats. I’ve explained why cats are better   from the perspective of physics   but now let me explain to explain from the perspective of economics. (This blog is partly humorous and an outlet for some of my zany ideas that probably could never be published in a mainstream journal.) But the “cats versus dogs” debate has existed since, well actually I don’t know how long, but presumably since ancient Egypt, where   pharaohs almost literally worshipped cats  and idolized them and turned them into statues. Whereas  some societies have killed dogs and eaten them . I’m unaware of anyone eating cats, but readers alert me if I’m wrong or leave a comment. My intuition says cats wouldn’t taste very good, but I’m a quasi-vegan animal lover and would never eat either a cat or a dog. Occasionally, once in a  “blue moon”  I have sushi, but...

                I have told the story of when I knew I was going to commit my life to social justice – as a   kindergartener when my teacher collectively punished the entire class   and I recognized in my heart and soul that this was wrong. But it was not always my idea to be a lawyer, in fact it was an accident because in middle school, I was deeply into the arts. I was the lead in my 8th grade play, and sung in   a professional children’s choir , and I had intended to try out for the performing arts program at my high school. But I never even made it to the try outs. The school distributed a form about extracurricular activities, and it listed debate. I checked the box, and the rest was history. I went on to finish third in the country at the   Tournament of Champions in high school , and was recruited by multiple colleges, but picked Dartmouth for both debate and academics. (Also, why did my high sch...