Gay marriage: the database engineering perspective

Gay marriage: the database engineering perspective is a rather old article on how gay marriage (and other types of marriages) can affect technology, but somehow I missed it for all these years.

It’s interesting from a variety of perspectives – technical, social, and cultural.  It’s also somewhat tongue in cheek, yet insightful and thought-provoking.  Irrelevant of your views on the subject, I recommend this read.  Where else will you find 14 database schema designs trying to solve the same problem.

The legal ramifications of what I’m about to describe are unguessable. I have no idea what rights a civil union like the ones which would be possible below would have, nor do I have any idea what kind of transhuman universe would require so complex a system. This is the marriage database schema to take us up to the thirty-first century, people.

If databases are that difficult to adjust, I can’t even imagine the effort needed for humans…

One way to make sense of the change in the way we …

One way to make sense of the change in the way we live online is to consider how the language we use to talk about our digital selves has evolved. Take terms like cybercitizen and netizen, which each play on the metaphor that the Internet is a structured city or community. According to Google Ngrams, these words found their greatest use in the heydey of Geocities and have been in decline ever since. This happened as we began clicking friend buttons instead of writing in the guestbooks of neighborly strangers. It happened as we traded in our HTML editors for the sleek blue layouts and pre-set photo sizes of Facebook. In other words, we stopped being frontiersmen and started being consumers, conceding the role of maker in our Wild West to corporations. And build they did.

In short, we gave up our netizenship.

The death and life of great Internet cities

3D Printed Guns (Documentary)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DconsfGsXyA

This one actually sent me into a lot of thinking (which is still not complete).  On one hand, I am very anti-gun.  On the other, I am very pro-Open Source.  I do agree with the point Cody raises about there being no more politics or politicians, just a pseudo-selection between the candidates who protect the same class of people.  Also, Nick’s saying that 3D printing technology is getting better and cheaper fast, and that law has always been way behind technology – this all makes 3D gun printing a complicated issue.

Thoughts?